(shimmering corporate music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi Vantara. Lisa Martin here with Russell Skingsley, the CTO and Global VP of Technical Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Russell, welcome to the program. >> Hiya, Lisa! Nice to be here! >> Yeah, great to have you. So, here we are, at the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers' priorities for 2023? >> Yeah, good one. Just to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission-critical IT environments and this has been been in our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So, just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from and so, that's what you're going to hear about here. Now, in terms of 2023, one of the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate, is power consumption and closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and de-carbonization and all of that sort of thing, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say, it is a priority for us and we are very active in that area. So, aside from that one, that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020 and I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So, just the act of managing that amount of data is a challenge in itself and I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas is another one of those big challenges. In that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call, the Post-Facebook Awakening Era, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's, yeah, the minutiae of people's lives, and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data. >> Right. >> Yeah, right, and I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, this whole idea of all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to power it and I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data. Right. >> Yeah, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, it's got to be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value, new opportunities for the business, at record speed. >> Yes, that's exactly right, and so, being able to wield that data somehow, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data or a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the Cloud to be able to build out their capabilities and the reason why the Cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card and now, all of a sudden, they could start to build a business from that and I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now, how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages? How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this is why, really, Hybrid Cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >> So, when it comes to Hybrid Cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then, I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Vantara and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those Hybrid Cloud challenges? >> Yeah, it's a great question and, you know, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from one vendor. Hybrid by, sort of, its, you know, by definition, is going to involve multiple pieces and so, there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at a one-stop shop like you used to, but even if you think about the biggest public Cloud provider on the planet, AWS, even it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on Public Cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace comes in. Now, for us, you know, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage, and, you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So, partners are absolutely essential, and so now, we kind of have a partner-first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in Hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our own solutions and so, you know, when it comes to those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace and, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter, but, you know, that's kind of what you say when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable. You know, of course they matter and for us, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible Hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >> Can you peel the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions? Give me a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that. >> Yeah, let me do that with a few examples here and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So, for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important Hybrid Cloud partners and in fact, it's my belief they have one of the strongest Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with our customers as well, but, you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. We combine that with what VMware's doing and then, when you look at our converged, or hyper-converged, solutions with them, it's a 'better together' story where you now have what is one of the best Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry with VMware, but now, for the on-premise part especially, you've now added 100% data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level, a level underneath, where VMware are, and so, that's VMware, and I've got a couple more examples just to sort of fill that out a bit. >> Sure. >> Cisco is another part, a very strong partner of ours, a key partner, and, I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a $50,000,000,000 IT provider, and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own, so they're going to partner with someone. From our perspective, we look at Cisco's customers and we look at them and think, they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality and we think we match with them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converged platforms in the industry from Cisco, so it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best arrays, best storage arrays, they can get, and so, we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be UCS customers. Final one for you, Lisa, by way of example. We have a relationship with Equinix and, you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading Colo provider and the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. They're connected to all of the significant Cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the Cloud. Compute from the Cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over. You, like, you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long-lived. Storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time and so, the cost model around Public Cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute, and so, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a data anchor point, where they put our arrays into an Equinix location and then they utilize Equinix as high-speeding, interconnects to the Cloud providers to take the compute from them. So, they take the compute from the Cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way, they feel like, we've now got the best of all worlds. >> Right. >> What I hope that illustrates Lisa is, with those three examples, is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partner's advantages. >> Right. What are, when you're in customer conversations, in our final few minutes here I want to get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi Vantara as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as-a-service business so we can round out with that. >> Okay, let's just start with the differentiators. You know, firstly, and hopefully, I've kind of, I've hit this point hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that and so, they're looking for, okay, you've got that. Now, how can you make my Hybrid Cloud aspirations better? So, we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly, I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and into the areas of data management. >> Okay. >> You know, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. So, you know, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that and we think that that's a competitive advantage for us. >> Right. >> One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time, where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again, but you only really get that perspective if you are long-lived in the industry and so, we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >> Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as-a-service business? >> They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know? We ourselves don't own data centers, right? So, we don't provide our own Cloud services out. So, we are 100% partner-focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their Cloud services with our solutions and then on-sell them to their customers as a service. You know, and by quick way of example, VMware, for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware Cloud services. 5,000 blows me away and many of them are our partners too. So, we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware, and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as-a-service business. >> Got it. So, as you said, the partner ecosystem, it's absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things Hybrid Cloud challenges and how Hitachi Vantara is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa! >> Thanks, Russell. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage!

(corporate electronic xylophone jingle intro) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to our very last segment of Tuesday's live broadcast here on theCUBE from AWS re:Invent in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am joined here by the brilliant Paul Gillin. Paul, end of our first day. You holding up, are you still feeling overwhelmed with fire hose... >> Savannah, yet my feet are killing me. (savannah laughs) >> Yeah, we've done so much walking in these chairs. >> 14,000 steps already today. It's not even dinner time. >> Hey, well, at least you've earned your dinner, Paul. I love that. I love that. I'm very excited about our next guests. We have Krishna and Sowmya joining us from Tata Consultancy Services. Now, I was impressed when I was doing my background research on you all. The Tata Group has locations in 150 different spots, 46 different countries. You have over 600,000 employees on the team. We are talking about absolutely massive scale here but, today we're going to be focused specifically on the Tata Consultancy Services. Sowmya, can you tell me what you all do? What is that team specifically in charge of? >> Yeah, TCS, first of all, thank you very much for inviting us. >> Savannah: Our pleasure. >> Maybe the last session but, we'll make it very lively. >> Savannah: It's going to be the best session. That's the best part of the day. >> Yes, that's the attitude. From a company standpoint, we are a 50 plus year old company. Part of the Tata group. We focus on IT services. We are categorized as industry verticals and we have horizontal services where AWS is one of the horizontal services that we have. And, when I talk about TCS, we focus a lot more on growth and transformation of our customers. That is one of the key objectives of the current company's growth, I would say. So, that is TCS in a nutshell. >> Extraordinarily important topic to be focused on right now. Growth, transformation, pretty much the core topics of the show. I know you're on the hospitality and transportation side of the business, which is very exciting. And, we're going to dig into that a little bit more. Krishna, you're overseeing the world. Tell us a little bit more about your role within the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Great meeting all of you. It's been awesome experience here. re:Invent is coming back, catching up, right? 50,000 people compared to 25,000 last year. So, great to see and meet all of you. Coming to my role, I am responsible for AWS Business Unit within TCS. That means I am responsible for anything that happens on cloud, on AWS. It's a Full Stack unit. I have the global responsibility. That's whether it's a applications, data, infrastructure, transformation that happens, as well as OT at the edge. So, that's my responsibility. >> Savannah: Well, I love talking about the edge. One of my favorite. >> Transformation is a theme of what you do. We heard that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives at many companies. How did you see the pandemic affecting your business, affecting the customers you were working with? >> Pandemic definitely kind of accelerated a lot of cloud adoption, right? A lot of companies initially focused on resiliency, coming back to handling the pandemic, the situation. But, it also drove a lot of innovation in the business models. They had to think on their feet, re-look at their business models, change the channels and that continued. Pandemic is thankfully gone by but, the transformation actually continued. The way that we actually see on cloud, especially transformation, it has evolved. What we call as Cloud 2.0. Now, cloud is actually more focused on future-proofing the businesses. And, the initial days it was more about future-proofing the technology and technology architecture. But, it has evolved to future-proofing businesses. That means implementing new business models, bringing in agility, measuring the business value. And, that's where we see a significant traction. >> So, it's not about technology then. It's not about infrastructure. >> It is about technology but, really delivering business value. It's about, how can I improve the customer experience? >> Well, can you give us a couple of examples of companies you work with that embody this idea? >> I can imagine in the travel and hospitality zone. Probably few communities more sensitive than when someone's having a disruption or frustration within that process. And, perhaps few time periods less chaotic than the last few years. Tell us about your experience and what you've seen. >> Absolutely. To answer your question, first of all, coming out of pandemic, right? Many customers in the travel and hospitality industry where legacy, did not modernize for the last decade or so because, there have been many ups and downs in the industry. So, during pandemic, post-pandemic, one of the the way they wanted to rebound was, can we do the transformation? First of all, cloud as a technology adoption, but, beyond that, how do customers derive value, business value? That is one of the key aspects of the old transformation. And, if you take, I can give a couple of examples. Avis Car Rental, they had monolith mainframe applications and, that was there for almost couple of decades, right? But, over a period of time, they were not able to have the availability of those applications. There were many outages. As a result, businesses could not do the bookings. Like OTAs, customers could not do the bookings, the application was not available most of the time. And, it's all legacy, right? So, that is where we all came in, TCS. How do we first of all, simplify the complexity of the landscape? That is one. Then, second is, modernize the legacy application. That's the second thing. Third is, how do you scale it? Because, everyone wants to go faster, right? How do you scale it? That is where we partnered with AWS as well, to bring in some specific solutions. One example for Avis', their Rent Shop. Because, of the lack of availability, because, it's monolith application and legacy application. It was not available. So, as a result, we partnered and we brought in our contextual knowledge of the car rental industry to kind of transform, move it to cloud. And, today, as a result of it, Avis was able to save millions of dollars from a MIB standpoint. Second, in terms of availability, that was 99.9% availability. As a result, they had a pick in their business revenue as well. So, this is one of the ways that its helped. The second example I want to quote is, United Airlines. Here again, we've been present for a long time. We have a deep industry knowledge of the airline industry. So, we brought in our airline contextual knowledge and the United landscape to bring in a TCS's solution that we developed. It's called the Aviana. It's an intelligent operations solution for the airline industry, which we have developed. It's on AWS as well, that is being implemented in United. As a result, the ground staff, they have to take decisions on the moment when there is a irregular operation. That could be flight delays, as a result, customers connections will be lost. >> Savannah: Baggage. >> Baggage, right? Baggage delays. >> So many variables. The complexity... >> exactly >> in this matrix is wild. >> So, leveraging the Aviana solution, the ground staff were able to take decisions based on exceptions. They were able to take decisions quickly so that, they improved the customer experience. I think that was one of the key successes for United in the recent times. So, those two are the examples that I would call where customers have the right business value. So, cloud was not just for technology. They all are deriving a lot of business value as well. I would say. >> How important do you think it is for companies facing these unique challenges and scaling to work with partners like TCS? And, I'm sure you would say very important, but, tell me a little bit more why it's so important and those core benefits that they're going to get. Krishna, let's start off with you. Yeah, let me take again the AWS cloud transformation, right? TCS has formed AWS Business Unit two years back. So, we are a covid baby in a way. We have been working with the AWS for more than a decade but, we formed a dedicated Full-Stack Unit to drive cloud transformation on AWS. In these last two years, we've grown three X and customers we have added 400 new customers we have added. >> Nicely done. Just want to see you there. That's huge. Especially during these times. Congratulations. >> So, it's basically about the scale that we bring in. What we have done as a differentiation is, if you look at the entire cloud journey, right from taking a decision which cloud is, right, all the way to the cloud migration modernization and running operations. So, we have built complete platform. AML based platforms, where we have taken our delivery wisdom and codified it onto these platforms. So, we support around thousand plus customers on AWS in varying capacity. All of that knowledge is codified and, that is what we bring to the table, to the customers. And, so, customers obviously appreciate that value that best practices that are coming. And, coupled with that, the industry knowledge that we have on banking, life sciences, healthcare, automotive. So, it's partly the IT, it is the industry transformation as well. Because, we are working on connected cars, for example, in automotive. We are working on accelerated drug development platforms. We're working on complete banks as a platform that we have. TCS has built on AWS. So, 400 customers are there. It's the complete banking and insurance platform. So, this is the combination of the technical expertize that is digitized using platforms, as well as the industry knowledge, is the reason why customers work with us on the cloud transformation. >> So, we're seeing you talk about the vertical industry knowledge. AWS also has its own vertical industry plays. How do you, I guess, coordinate with them or, do you compete with them or, do you stay out of each other's way? >> No, we actually collaborate aggressively. >> Savannah: I like that (laughs) >> Right, so, it's not.. >> Savannah: With vigor. >> With vigor. TCS supports approximately 14 verticals. With AWS, we went with the focused industry play. We said we look at financial services, travel, transportation, hospitality, healthcare, life sciences and automotive, to start with. And, we have Go Big plans with AWS. very focused. The collaboration is actually at the industry solutions because, AWS is a great platform, ever evolving, keeps you on on your toes to really adapt it. But, that is always going on, the collaboration. But, the industry, I'm actually glad AWS last year took a pivot on focusing on industries. Now, we talk the same language when we go in front of a board or a CEO or COO. Present it. We are talking about the future of the industry not just the future of the technology. So, it's a win-win. >> You are also developing products on top of AWS that are not industry verticals, that build on the platform. What kinds of products are those? >> For cloud transformation, for example, consulting. We have a product called Cloud Counsell. We have a decision engine on the data side. We have something called Cloud Foundation, Mason. CloudMason. It's just the foundation, right? And, entire migration and modernization factory. And, the last one on cloud operations is actually Cloud Exponence. So, these are time tested. You have Fortune 500 customers using this regularly actively leveraging that. And, these are all AWS in a well architecture framework certified. So, they work well and they're designed to work on cloud, not only in the native environment, but, also legacy environment. Because, enterprises is not just only native, cloud-native. There is a lot of legacy. Sowmya spoke about the mainframe model... >> So much legacy, we were talking about it. >> So, you have to have a combination of solutions. So, the platforms that we're building, the products we're building, work in both the environments. >> Yeah, and that agility and ability to help customers navigate that prioritization. I mean, there's so many options. We talk about how many new companies there are every year. New solutions. Our adoption of technology is accelerating. As, McKinsey said, we went through 10 years of technological evolution and workplace evolution over the first six months of the pandemic. So, really everything's moving at unprecedented velocity unlike ever before. We have a new game here on theCUBE specifically for this show. And, we are challenging our guests, prompting our guests, to give us a 30 second sizzly sound bite with your hot take on the most important themes of this year's show. Think of it as a thought leadership moment. Opportunity to plug if you really want it. Krishna, you've just given me the nod. I'm going to start with you first and then we'll then we'll pass it along, yeah >> Sure. I think on thought leadership, the way that on cloud, business value is the focus, not the technology. Technology is important, but business value is the focus. And, the way that I see it evolving is with quantum computing coming out more and more, becoming relevant, and Edge is actually becoming quite active as well. All this while on cloud, we focused on business value at the centralized place at the corporate. But, I think the real value of cloud is when you deliver the results, business results, where the customers consume it, that is at the edge. I think that's basically the combination of centralized and the edge is where the real value of cloud is, right. And, I also loud, I know you said 30 seconds but, give me 30 more seconds. >> I like your answer right now. So, I'm going to give you a little more time. Yeah, thank you. >> You've earned more time. (laughs) >> So, I like the way Adam said in the keynote, if you look at it broadly, I categorizes two things. There are a lot of offerings that are becoming comprehensive, like AWS Connect, bringing in workforce management into it, making it a complete end to end product. Similarly, Security Lake, all bringing in the entire security and compliance under one, similarly data. So, there are lot of things that he announced where it is an end to end comprehensiveness of the thing. But, what I love about is, what Amazon is known for, supply chain. So, they rolled out AWS Supply Chain offering. Walk Out technology. So, the Amazon proposition is actually being brought to AWS as a core proposition. I think that's very futuristic and I think we can see more and more customers, enterprise customers, adopting AWS more to drive transformation >> Badly needed right now. Supply chain resiliency. >> Supply chain really having its moment the last two years. File under two words. No one knew, many of us did who worked in it before this. And, here we are, soon as we lost our toilet paper, everyone's freaked out. I love that you talked about business value and also that the end customer is on the edge and, everyone kind of forgets we are essentially the edge device. This is the edge device, it's all around us. And, all the technology that we're all using that you're even talking about is built right inside here from my airlines app to my car rentals to all of it. All right Sowmya, give us your 30 second hot take, roughly. >> Taking the cue from Krishna, right? Today, things are available on AWS Marketplace. So, tomorrow, somebody wants to start an airline, they just have to come and plug and play the apps that are available in the marketplace. Especially your supply chain. The Amazon is known for that. And, a small and medium business they want to start something, right, a .com. It's very easy. So, that's something that we are all looking for. The future is going to be very, very bright and great for the businesses, is what I would say because, most of it could be plug and play with all the solutions. >> Paul: It's already been built. >> On the cloud, so, we are looking forward to it. The second thing I would talk about is, we have to take it to scale. How more and more people can leverage AWS, right? The talent is very important and, that is where partners like us focus on re-scaling our talent. We have 600,000 people, right? We are not just... >> 600,000 people! That's basically as many people live in the San Francisco Bay area for contexts for our listeners. It's how many people work for Walmart? >> It's 1.2 million in Walmart? >> Is it really? >> It is, yes, yes. That's work for Walmart, sidebar. >> So from that standpoint, as the company, we are focusing on re-skilling, up-skilling our talent in order to work AWS cloud and so on, so, that they can go and support our customers. That is something that is very important and that's going to be the future as well. Bring it to scale, go faster. >> I love that you just touched on the fact that you essentially have to practice what you preach because, you've got to think about those 600,000 people in a 100 locations across 40 plus different countries. I love it. Sowmya, I'm going to close on that note. The future is bright, just like your fabulous blazer. >> Thank you so much. Krishna, Sowmya, thank you so much for being here with us. We can't wait to see what happens next, who you help next, and how Tata continues to transform. Thank all of you for tuning in today. A full jam packed day of coverage live here from Las Vegas, Nevada. We are at AWS re:Invent with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. (corporate electronic xylophone jingle outro)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padre and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with the high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it is really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multi-cloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >>What does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vhi to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? It performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery, you specific news that you have there. >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We can talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis and all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right? Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We have the trusted market leader, no, if and or buts, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc and we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Travis. Good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, what are they telling you? >> Sure. As you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning understanding their use cases their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot, to no surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible it's secure, and it's recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you know you have data sprawl, which is the big one which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service, attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay. So it's nuanced cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about, we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I've often said the CISO, now they have this shared responsibility model they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >> You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient, you know? Are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things one's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know the multi-cloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me the global data protection index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus! >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> Well what does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay. So you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional, subscription, or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, well, that's going to going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in immuneability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI parred recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Correct. >> Yeah. All right. In a minute we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break, keep it right there. (calming piano music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cyber crime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreaux is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padro and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And and by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What, what are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're a lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this is, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution in needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach, >>But what does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud in any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So how, what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cyber security, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vehill to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? Performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have at this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. You, you have specific news that you have there? >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so Mike, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right. Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber re attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We are the trusted market leader, no if and or bots, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc. And we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Dave. Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologists has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the world's of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly, we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public cloud is certainly world class, the result of multicloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. And at the end of the day, more, not less, . But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today, there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but is becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection people, technologies and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello, and welcome to "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the President and General Manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the Senior Vice-President of Product Management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (upbeat music) We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Alright, let's start off Jeff, with the high level. You know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing? You're talking to customers all the time. What are they telling you? >> Sure, as you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. No surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So, they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure and its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay, so maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multicloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that surface as attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity, you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay, so it's nuanced 'cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multicloud complexity and we talk about multicloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this multicloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So, we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lacking consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So, how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the Cisco, now they have this shared responsibility model. They have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So, maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency and specifically, they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. You know, it's funny. I said this in my open. I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency, and now they're like, "Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient." You know, are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things. One's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Global Data Protected, excuse me, the Global Data Protection Index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus. >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually, that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges. But also it highlights at an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, I've done this many, many years in a row. I'd like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell, from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So, we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multicloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> What does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture. Right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So, we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1,700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge. And that's from deployment to consumption, to management and support. So, our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So, traditional subscription or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, "Well, that's going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk." So, what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So, we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secure by design. And we have some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in immutability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI part recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have, our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity. It's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Jeff: Correct. Yeah. >> All right. In a minute, we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat adventurous music) Okay, we're back with Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah. Thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern, simple PowerProtect Data Manager Software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, 1,700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions. They want us to help them modernize. And they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So, that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX Data Storage Services. >> Okay, so three pieces. Let's dig to that. It's interesting, appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works." >> Travis: (laughs) Right. >> It performs great. So, what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >> So, the premise that I've been putting forth for months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So, I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. Your specific news that you have there. >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So, what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running on-premises, in Acolo, at the Edge, in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always invoke my favorite Matt Baker here. "It's not a zero sum game", but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service. It's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so, what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you-go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is specify their base capacity. They specify their performance tier. They tell us do they want a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX Console. >> Okay, so it's, you're keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small. You know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this. Jeff, maybe you can start. >> Sure, I'll start and then- >> Pitch me. >> You know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here. >> Awesome. >> So, first I'd say we offer innovative multicloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis said, all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> Dave: 80%? >> 80% >> Hey, that's a big number. All right, Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We are that one stop shop that I talked about, whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the Edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software. We have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX Solution as well. So really, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives. Edge, Core to Cloud. The other thing that we hear as a big differentiator for Dell, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our Intelligent Cyber Resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks. It can help customers speed time to recovery. And really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And if you look at customer adoption of that solution, specifically in the cloud, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So, I think it's fair to say that your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator. Whenever I talk to your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end-to-end capability, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting the client's burden to your R&D. now they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax. But that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So, we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio. We're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale. We have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we are the trusted market leader. No if, ands or buts. We're number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC and we were just named for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So, bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years. It's really becoming an adjacency and really, a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, sir. >> Dave. >> Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Right back. >> Advertiser: In our data-driven world, protecting data has never been more critical. To guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages, you need a cyber resilient multicloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >> Advertiser: PowerProtect Data Manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >> We chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> I'd installed it by myself, learn it by myself. It was very intuitive. >> While restoring your machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast, we can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Instructor: Data Manager offers innovation such as transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups, and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights into protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now, we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Advertiser: Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect's Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now, in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. And there were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall, earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX Backup Services and then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now, I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance and I asked Dell off camera, "Really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition?" Because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So, I heard a number of items. Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So, I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So, we're talking minutes to deploy, and of course that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now, this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the Data Protection Page at dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multicloud Protection" made possible by Dell, in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> theCUBE Presents UiPath FORWARD 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> We're back in Las Vegas live. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of FORWARD 5 UiPath's customer event. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. Our third Dave Espinoza is here, Director of Transformation at Cushman & Wakefield. And Marshall Sied is also here. He's the co-founder of Ashling Partners. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> We know Cushman & Wakefield, huge real estate firm. We'll come back to that, wanted to dig into some of the industry trends. But Marshall, what is Ashling Partners all about? >> Great question, Dave. So Ashling Partners was founded with modern automation and continuous improvement in mind. So a lot of us used to implement large ERP systems, accounting transaction systems. We viewed RPA and broader intelligent automation as kind of the wave of the future. So everything we do has continuous process improvement and automation in mind together. So we don't want to decouple, we want bring those together in an agile way. >> It's interesting, Rob Enslin this morning on the stage was talking about the waves of industry tech that used ERP was where he started and you know, et cetera, internet and now automation. He's sort of drawing that analogy. It's interesting that you're seeing the same pattern. >> David: Were were you fist bumping in the back of the room? >> Marshall: Absolutely. >> Well, I mean there's a lot of opportunity there. A lot of money to be made on both ends. Dave, talk about your firm. What's going on in the industry specifically? You joined sort of as we're exiting the isolation economy. Right? So what's happening in the industry now? I mean, real estate has been up and down and, you know, wild ride, you know, with COVID. What are the big trends in the industry that are informing your automation strategy. >> And actually I joined probably like right in the middle of the isolation economy. So it was a really interesting time to like to, I'm sure for most people also onboarding into groups. But coming on Cushman, you know, Cushman itself is an organization that formed predominantly through acquisition and through merger, right? So three large companies came together. And so a lot of the times the sort of headaches and the opportunities that we find are probably no different than other legacy organizations have when they're merging three companies together, right? So lots of disparate process, lots of paper, lots of process that isn't really very standardized. And so really it's a lot about us trying to make sure that we're continuing to double down on really that continuous process improvement but also bringing technology, lots of different types of technologies to bear to solve different problems throughout the organization. >> Well is the pandemic a catalyst for the automation initiative? Or actually you guys started before that I think, Marshall started about 2018. But was it like a rocket booster during the pandemic or was it more sort of steady state? >> I think it was actually a little bit of both Dave. 'Cause the reality is there was already top down executive support at Cushman pre-pandemic. So Cushman was already moving on this in a big way and they had executive sponsorship across the C-suite. Pandemic came, never a good time for a pandemic, but it came at a decent time for Cushman because they were prepared. They had the foundation of governance, everything you need in a large enterprise to run a program. They had that in place so they were able to kind of just put kerosene on the fire when the pandemic hit with certain automation candidates. >> Because I often said that pre-pandemic, you know, digital transformation was kind of this buzzword. A lot of firms were sort of giving it lip service. But it sounds like Cushman actually had started down the digital transformation path and then obviously everybody was accelerated. If you weren't digital business, you were out of business. But but how tightly aligned, 'cause we heard this in the keynotes today, I'd like to test it. How tightly aligned is automation and digital transformation at Cushman. >> They're pretty synonymous really for us, right? So like it is really about bringing different types of technologies, whether it's like NLP. The other really interesting thing that we were talking about the keynote, right? There's just so much that is going into the UiPath platform that is enabling us and enabling the things that we want to do across the organization, right? So like natural language processing, document understanding, you know, cloud based items. Like there's just so much that we can leverage and it's really about that continuous process improvement. It's trying to make sure that we're aligning ourselves to the strategy that the organization is absolutely pushing, but making sure that we're doing it in smart ways, right? And that we're empowering our employees as we do it, right? So it's not just very top down from a COE, it's also very bottoms up, very citizen-led throughout the organization. >> So I think of this as a strategic initiative that happens over time. But how does Ashling, and Marshall, how do you engage with Cushman? Do you engage on a project by project basis? Do you have sort of a long term strategic arc that you're working to? >> Absolutely. >> How does that work? >> No, that's a great question. So we started project based, so we were a part of the co-establishment of the intelligent automation COE. So very outcome driven, top down approach as Dave mentioned. But we also had a wider aperture than just RPA. It was broader end to end automation experiences that was project based. We had so much kind of quantifiable evidence at that point that we wanted to go bigger with the program. Over time we matured into more of an agile DevOps methodology with the Cushman team. And Dave should certainly speak about the size of the Cushman team and how that's evolved over time, but- >> Because the two of you are in a partnership in terms of proving out the ROI of what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Right? >> Marshall: Every day, every day. We all have numbers we got to hit, right? And that's just the reality of it. But in order to do that, you know, agile DevOps approach where you're, you know, releasing every two weeks into production, you need a dedicated team that has like a longer term roadmap that is coinciding with the Cushman objective. So that's what we have in place today, something we call build as a service and mROC. So kind of think of that as as plan, build, and then run. We're infused. You have to be infused with your clients if you're going to run an agile DevOps program. >> Is automation more self-funding? Marshall, I want to draw on your experience with ERP. Is automation more self-funding than other technology initiatives? And if so, why or if not, why not? >> It is, and it's a double edged sword actually. We talk about this all the time at Ashling. We've never worked in an enterprise technology space where there's more accountability to value delivered because it's so quantifiable and measurable. So every time a transaction runs you can measure- >> Dave: How are we doing? >> Exactly, I mean the ERP days, nobody questioned. They just, they thought we just have to move to S/4HANA, we just have to move to Oracle. >> We'll let you know in a couple years. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean the stuff that we just saw earlier from Javier Castellanos, right, from Orange. It is very much like each transaction has a value associated to it. Each part of that transaction has a value associated to it. We're constantly monitoring the numbers of looking at our performance, right? There's very real value associated to maintaining business as usual for the 50 plus automations that we have in production, right? So like the business is really counting on us to maintain and to make sure that we're continuing to perform. But also that we're continuing to work with them to find additional value and additional opportunities, right? To make sure that we are saving money and finding dollars- >> But it's dropping hard dollars to the bottom line, right, that are quantifiable to your point. But what's the governor, what's the barrier to your ability to absorb whether it's new automation? Is it just expertise, talent, or you bandwidth? Is it the prioritization exercise and thinking intelligently about, you know not- >> Dave: All of that. >> So how do you, I guess you guys work together, but take us through that a little bit. >> I mean, we're constantly refining our approach. So we were just talking about our DevOps approach. You know, we started with I think maybe five or six different teams based on specific service lines. We modulated that recently to go to two teams, right? One specific to build and one specific to enhance. So we're constantly looking for and building new automations throughout the organization. And then also looking for incremental value to enhance the automations that we've got out there, right? So making them better, faster, making them more resilient so resolving technical debt, doing a lot of different things to make sure that we're as stable as we possibly can be. But it's not only that, it's really like making sure like we're just as pinched by everybody else in terms of like the great resignation and looking for talent. I think everybody here is basically looking for the exact same talent. And so it's really making sure that we have interesting work, we're doing interesting work, we're making people feel valued, and we're bringing value throughout the business. >> So I remember Bobby Patrick called me when he joined UiPath. He goes, "You're not going to believe what I'm doing now. You got to get on this train." And so I started looking to it and we actually downloaded, you know, the package and started playing with it. And we tried to do it with the competitors, we, you know, we couldn't. It was like call for pricing kind of thing. We're like, well that's interesting. But what we saw was my perspective, this bottoms up adoption. And I know there was top down as well. But then, I remember I was in the meeting when they announced the sort of process gold acquisition and then started, I said, "Okay, they're going for platform now." And then Microsoft came into the market like, okay, they got to differentiate there. Now you're seeing everybody, all the software companies think they should own every dollar that's ever spent on software. So SAP's doing it and ServiceNow. And so Marshall, from your perspective, how has this platform evolved? And then Dave, to the extent you can talk about it, how is that platform adoption taking shape within the organization? I mean, platforms are much more complicated than products and they require integration. How is UiPath doing there? >> I think they're doing fantastic in that category. If you think about, and it's been a natural evolution. They're not fighting inertia, they're following challenges of their clients, right? So RPA obviously came onto the scene hot, everybody understands the business rule driven automation value. Easy to, you know, make a quantifiable, tangible evidence with RPA. But exceptions happen in a business and upstream processes break that, you know, cause challenges with downstream automations. So what do you do? You have to go upstream. You have to have more automations, you have to have process discovery, process mining with process gold. You need to have the ability to have a better user experience interface, which we've definitely incorporated into Cushman when we didn't get adoption with certain automations that we like. You build low-code apps. People want that consumerization of technology in the enterprise and that allows them to adopt more of the automation which triggers the robots and then you report analytics on it. So that expansion's been pretty natural with UiPath and I think the next acquisition they just made with Re:infer's really interesting, 'cause now you're going even more upstream with communication mining, turning that into structure data that you potentially could automate or analyze so it's been natural. It's truly the only platform that we've encountered that can do all of this at this point. >> So a couple things there. You know, one is the nuance of adoptions, not just the function of the potential savings or, you know, revenue production or productivity. It's, you know, the experience because you got to have a great UI. And then what are you going to do with Re:infer? I don't know if you guys are adopting Re:infer but what do you see as the potential. Marshall and Dave, if you guys have visibility on it? >> I know we've talked about it Dave so I mean the potential's huge. I think it's going to be more of a question of change management for each organization just to feel comfortable with that. But I mean, think about all of the communication and the semi and unstructured data in an organization that comes, you know, via Slacks, Teams, emails. It's huge and it's significant if you can figure out the right identifiers that you want to trigger for your business. And then figure out is that something downstream we can automate or can we just analyze and make our business more effective, more efficient, or provide a better experience. So I think it's huge. We don't know how big this is yet, but we know that it's something that, I mean, think about Cushman, get brokers all day long that are communicating with clients and third parties. So it could be extremely significant. >> Sounds like a potential to eliminate email hell, but. >> Marshall: Heard those promises before. >> Maybe that's like the paperless office eventually. >> Well in our organizations, like 50, 40 to 50,000 people, you know, globally, right? And there are definitely service lines within our organization where probably it doesn't make sense for us to leverage UiPath and provide them the, you know, studio and low code, no code automation tools. But a lot of this NLP stuff and a lot of the content mining and the communication mining stuff, really has the ability for us to be able to sort of pinpoint opportunities at levels that we couldn't possibly do it before. So it was really very exciting to see the stuff that we were in there. I think when you start your organization, a lot of times you're a hammer looking for a nail, right? And you need to quickly move away from that. And so I think a lot of the stuff that UiPath is introducing, a lot of the stuff that they're bringing into their platform, really helps us to be moving away from that sort of orientation. >> Well when you think of this in terms of CI/CD, you know, people maybe have a better understanding of sort of the life cycles and, you know, the iteration calendar. Can you give us an example of something that went from an idea, something like, "Hey, I think we might be able to automate this process" through "Okay, yeah, let's do it." You try it, at some point there's sort of quality testing involved to make sure that it's achieving that we want to do. Can you give us an example of a process that you've gone through? And then how long do those things usually take? Are we talking weeks, months? What are we talking about from idea to establishing that, "Yeah, this is something we want to keep in place." >> Dave: We always want to make it faster. So we're especially always trying to find ways, especially upfront parts of the process. So a lot of the analysis, requirements gathering, you know, stuff that's not actual building. We want to make sure that we're shrinking that as much as possible, that we're also being comprehensive so that we're not building something that doesn't meet someone's needs, right? Or that just completely misses the mark. But I mean, invoice processing is a good example. We do that internally. Obviously, we have corporate accounting. We also do that on behalf of clients. And so a lot of times, you know, we're bringing some of the internal processes, we're using the technologies for document understanding, optical character reading, and machine learning. And we're doing that on behalf of clients, but we're also doing that internally. So to be able to use some of those processes and automations, sort of client facing plus internally, are big changes. Big changes for us. But I think the other thing too is like, we're always trying to make it faster and better. I think that's one of those also processes where we put something in place and we're constantly looking to enhance it, make it better based on the process that's out here. >> And you're applying automation to that upfront piece, the planning phase? Is that right? Or? >> Yeah, yeah, so a lot of it is about sort of the work that we do on behalf of clients. And there are teams who are specifically tasked to accounts. And so we're looking to find ways to make it easier for those accounts to get their bills paid, to get visibility into, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable, their full end to end accounts lifecycle. And so yeah, we're doing that directly on behalf of clients and then we're doing that internally. >> How about the why UiPath question. Marshall, I think I heard you say that you're pretty much exclusively UiPath as your automation partner. Why? Why not play the field? Why UiPath? >> So I think it started in like 2017, 2018 for Ashling. We did an analysis of kind of an outside in of what, at that point was the big three of RPA, the vision and the roadmap and the open platform architecture of UiPath and just the self-awareness that, "Hey, we need to operate with other technologies in order for our clients to get the most value from automation." That was really the main reason, outside of the fact that we like working with UiPath, but it was just that complete vision of a platform as opposed to a tool. We felt like everybody else was more of a pointed tool and then UiPath had this platform approach and it was going to be necessary to go end to end like we all are trying to achieve. >> And UiPath continues to deepen that, right? They continues to support us with tons of new technology- >> How so? Can you be specific? >> I mean, when we're talking about document understanding, I mean, we're trying to leverage that for manual handwritten time sheets. We're also using it for, you know, Chronos integration, right? So like there's a lot of stuff that we're using it for and we can go to a single shop, right? To be able to do it, a single platform from a scalability and a supportability perspective, it's also a big game changer for us, right? As you start, you want to be able to scale, but you can't spend a ton of money supporting, you know, a hundred different platforms. You really got to invest and be smart about it. And UiPath for us was a really smart play. >> Are you budget limited relative, you're competing with other initiatives within the organization? Where's the funding come from? Is it from the business? Is it from IT? Is it a combination? >> It had been centrally funded and we are now moving into a different model. So we are constantly looking at, you know, the justification of value, speed to value, and proving it out to our business partners from all service lines and within all different functions of the organization. So we're at an interesting inflection point, but I think we also have a really good background that we're building on. >> I've been saying it all day, I've said it for years, at the UiPath events that they are awesome about putting customers on theCUBE and we love to hear from the customer stories because we get to sort of map what we hear in the keynotes and then test it, right, in the real world. And I also really love the fact that Marshall, UiPath always brings implementation partners so we can get the expertise and you have a wider observation space. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and thanks for sharing your stories and good luck in the future. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it guys. >> Very welcome. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante live from Las Vegas UiPath FORWARD 5. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

>> Hello everyone. And thanks for joining us today. My name is Brent Biddulph, managing director retail, consumer goods here at Cloudera. Cloudera is very proud to be partnering with companies like 3Soft to provide data and analytic capabilities for over 200 retailers across the world and understanding why demand forecasting could be considered the heartbeat of retail. And what's at stake is really no mystery to most retailers. And really just a quick level set before handing this over to my good friend, Kamil at 3Soft. IDC, Gartner, many other analysts kind of summed up an average here that I thought would be important to share just to level set the importance of demand forecasting in retail, and what's at stake, meaning the combined business value for retailers leveraging AI and IOT. So this is above and beyond what demand forecasting has been in the past, is a $371 billion opportunity. And what's critically important to understand about demand forecasting is it directly impacts both the top line and the bottom line of retail. So how does it affect the top line? Retailers that leverage AI and IOT for demand forecasting are seeing average revenue increases of 2% and think of that as addressing the in stock or out of stock issue in retail and retail is become much more complex now, and that it's no longer just brick and mortar, of course, but it's fulfillment centers driven by e-commerce. So inventory is now having to be spread over multiple channels. Being able to leverage AI and IOT is driving 2% average revenue increases. Now, if you think about the size of most retailers or the average retailer that, on its face is worth millions of dollars of improvement for any individual retailer. On top of that is balancing your inventory, getting the right product in the right place, and having productive inventory. And that is the bottom line. So the average inventory reduction, leveraging AI and IOT as the analysts have found, and frankly, having spent time in this space myself in the past a 15% average inventory reduction is significant for retailers, not being overstocked on product in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it touches everything from replenishment to out-of-stocks, labor planning, and customer engagement. For purposes of today's conversation, we're going to focus on inventory and inventory optimization and reducing out-of-stocks. And of course, even small incremental improvements. I mentioned before in demand forecast accuracy have millions of dollars of direct business impact, especially when it comes to inventory optimization. Okay. So without further ado, I would like to now introduce Dr. Kamil Volker to share with you what his team has been up to, and some of the amazing things are driving at top retailers today. So over to you, Kamil. >> I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to speak to you about what we deliver to our customers, but let me first introduce 3Soft. We are a 100 person company based in Europe, in Southern Poland, and we, with 18 years of experience specialized in providing what we call a data driven business approach to our customers. Our roots are in the solutions in the services. We originally started as a software house. And on top of that, we build our solutions. We've been automation that you get the software for biggest enterprises in Poland, further, we understood the meaning of data and data management and how it can be translated into business profits. Adding artificial intelligence on top of that makes our solutions portfolio holistic, which enables us to realize very complex projects, which leverage all of those three pillars of our business. However, in the recent time, we also understood the services is something which only the best and biggest companies can afford at scale. And we believe that the future of retail demand forecasting is in the product solutions. So that's why we created Occubee, our AI platform for data driven retail that also covers this area that we talked about today. I'm personally proud to be responsible for our technology partnerships with Cloudera and Microsoft. It's a great pleasure to work with such great companies and to be able to deliver the solutions to our customers together based on a common trust and understanding of the business, which cumulates at customer success at the end. So why should we analyze data at retail? Why is it so important? It's kind of obvious that there is a lot of potential in the data per se, but also understanding the different areas where it can be used in retail is very important. We believe that thanks to using data, it's basically easier to derive the good decisions for the business based on the facts and not intuition anymore. Those four areas that we observed in retail, our online data analysis, that's the fastest growing sector, let's say for those data analytics services, which is of course based on the econ and online channels, availability to the customer. Pandemic only speeds up this process of engagement of the customers in that channel, of course, but traditional offline, let's say brick and mortar shops. They still play the biggest role for most of the retailers, especially from the FMCG sector. However, it's also very important to remember that there is plenty of business related questions that need to be answered from the headquarter perspective. So is it actually good idea to open a store in a certain place? Is it a good idea to optimize a stock in a certain producer? Is it a good idea to allocate the goods to online channel in specific way, those kinds of questions, they need to be answered in retail every day. And with that massive amount of factors coming into the equation, it's really not that easy to base only on the integration and expert knowledge. Of course, as Brent mentioned at the beginning, the supply chain and everything who's relates to that is also super important. We observe our customers to seek for the huge improvements in the revenue, just from that one single area as well. So let me present you a case study of one of our solutions, and that was the lever to a leading global grocery retailer. The project started with the challenge set of challenges that we had to conquer. And of course the most important was how to limit overstocks and out of stocks. That's like the holy grail in retail, of course, how to do it without flooding the stores with the goods. And in the same time, how to avoid empty shelves. From the perspective of the customer, it was obvious that we need to provide a very well, a very high quality of sales forecast to be able to ask for what will be the actual sales of the individual product in each store every day, considering huge role of the perishable goods in the specific grocery retailer, it was a huge challenge to provide a solution that was able to analyze and provide meaningful information about what's there in the sales data and the other factors we analyzed on daily basis at scale, however, our holistic approach implementing AI with data management background and these automation solutions all together created a platform that was able to significantly increase the sales for our customer just by minimizing out of stocks. In the same time, we managed to not overflood the stock, the shops with the goods, which actually decreased losses significantly, especially on the fresh fruit. Having said that, these results, of course translate into the increase in revenue, which can be calculated in hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So how the solution actually works? Well in its principle, it's quite simple. We just collect the data. We do it online, we put that in our data, like based on the cloud, through other technology, we implement our artificial intelligence models on top of it. And then based on the aggregated information, we create the forecast and we do it every day or every night for every single product in every single store. This information is sent to the warehouses and then the automated replenishment based on the forecast is on the way. The huge and most important aspect of that is the use of the good tools to do the right job. Having said that, you can be sure that there is too many information in this data. And there is actually two-minute forecast created every night than any expert could ever check. This means our solution needs to be very robust. It needs to provide information with high quality and high veracity. There is plenty of different business process, which is based on our forecast, which need to be delivered on time for every product in each individual shop. Observing the success of this project and having the huge market potential in mind, we decided to create our Occubee, which can be used by many retailers who don't want to create a dedicated software that will be solving this kind of problem. Occubee is our software service offering, which is enabling retailers to go data driven path management. We create Occubee with retailers for retailers, implementing artificial intelligence on top of data science models created by our experts. Having data analysis in place based on data management tools that we use, we've written first attitude. The uncertain times of pandemic clearly shows that it's very important to apply correction factors, which are sometimes required because we need to respond quickly to the changes in the sales characteristics. That's why Occubee is open box solution, which means that you basically can implement that in your organization, without changing the process internally. It's all about mapping your process into the system, not the other way around. The fast trends and products collection possibilities allow the retailers to react to any changes, which occur in the sales every day. Also, it's worth to mention that really it's not only FMCG and we believe that different use cases, which we observe in fashion, health and beauty, home and garden, pharmacies, and electronics, flavors of retail are also very meaningful. They also have one common thread. That's the growing importance of e-commerce. That's why we didn't want to leave that aside of Occubee. And we made everything we can to implement a solution, which covers all the needs. When you think about the factors that affect sales, there is actually huge variety of data that we can analyze. Of course, the transactional data that every dealer possesses, like sales data from sale from stores, from e-commerce channel, also averaging numbers from weeks, months, and years makes sense, but it's also worth to mention that using the right tool that allows you to collect that data from also internal and external sources makes perfect sense for retail. It's very hard to imagine a competitive retailer that is not analyzing the competitor's activity, changes in weather or information about some seasonal stores, which can be very important during the summer and other holidays, for example. But on the other hand, having this information in one place makes the actual benefit and environment for the customer. Demand forecasting seems to be like the most important and promising use case. We can talk about when I think about retail, but it's also the whole process of replenishment that can cover with different sets of machine learning models, and data management tools. We believe that analyzing data from different parts of the retail replenishment process can be achieved with implementing a data management solution based on Cloudera products and with adding some AI on top of it, it makes perfect sense to focus on not only demand forecasting, but also further use cases down the line. When it comes to the actual benefits from implementing solutions for demand management, we believe it's really important to analyze them holistically first it's of course, out of stock minimization, which can be provided by simply better size focus, but also reducing overstocks by better inventory management can be achieved by us in the same time. Having said that, we believe that analyzing data without any specific new equipment required in point of sales is the low hanging fruit that can be easily achieved in almost every industry, in almost every regular customer. >> Hey, thanks, Kamil. Having worked with retailers in this space for a couple of decades, myself, I was really impressed by a couple of things and they might've been understated, frankly, the results of course. I mean, as I kind of set up this session, you doubled the numbers on the statistics that the analysts found. So obviously in customers, you're working with... you're doubling average numbers that the industry overall is having, and most notably how the use of AI or Occubee has automated so many manual tasks of the past, like tour tuning, item profiles, adding new items, et cetera, and also how quickly it felt like, and this is my core question. Your team can cover or provide the solution to not only core center store, for example, in grocery, but you're covering fresh products. And frankly, there are solutions out on the market today that only focus on center store non-perishable departments. I was really impressed by the coverage that you're able to provide as well. So can you articulate kind of what it takes to get up and running and your overall process to roll out the solution? I feel like based on what you talked about and how you were approaching this in leveraging AI, that you're streamlining processes of legacy, demand, forecasting solutions that required more manual intervention, how quickly can you get people set up? And what is the overall process of like to get started with this software? >> Yeah, usually, it takes three to six months to onboard a new customer to that kind of solution. And frankly, it depends on the data that the customer has. Usually it's different for smaller, bigger companies, of course, but we believe that it's very important to start with a good foundation. The platform needs to be there, the platform that is able to basically analyze or process different types of data, structured, unstructured, internal, external, and so on. But when you have this platform set is all about starting ingesting data there. And usually for a smaller companies, it's easier to start with those, let's say, low hanging fruits. So the internal data, which is there, this data has the highest veracity. It's all really easy to start with, to work with them because everyone in the organization understands this data. For the bigger companies it might be important to ingest also kind of more unstructured data, some kind of external data that need to be acquired. So that may influence the length of the process. But we usually start with the customers with workshops. That's very important to understand the reasons because not every deal is the same. Of course, we believe that the success of our customers comes also due to the fact that we train those models, those AI models individually to the needs of our customers. >> Totally understand. And POS data, every retailer has right in, in one way shape or form. And it is the fundamental data point, whether it's e-comm or the brick and mortar data, every retailer has that data. So, that totally makes sense. But what you just described was months, there are legacy and other solutions out there, that this could be a year or longer process to roll out to the number of stores, for example, that you're scaling to. So that's highly impressive. And my guess is a lot of the barriers that have been knocked down with your solution are the fact that you're running this in the cloud. from a compute standpoint on Cloudera from a public cloud stamp point on Microsoft. So there's no IT intervention, if you will, or hurdles in preparation to get the database set up and all of the work. I would imagine that part of the time savings to getting started, would that be an accurate description? >> Yeah, absolutely. In the same time, this actually lowering the business risks because we see the same data and put that into the data lake, which is in the cloud. We did not interfere with the existing processes, which are processing this data in the combined. So we just use the same data. We just already in the company, we ask some external data if needed, but it's all aside of the current customers infrastructure. So this is also a huge gain, as you said. >> Right. And you're meeting customers where they are, right? So as I said, foundationally, every retailer POS data, if they want to add weather data or calendar event data, or, one incorporated course online data with offline data, you have a roadmap and the ability to do that. So it is a building block process. So getting started with core data as with POS online or offline is the foundational component, which obviously you're very good at. And then having that ability to then incorporate other data sets is critically important because that just improves demand forecast accuracy, right. By being able to pull in those, those other data sources, if you will. So Kamil, I just have one final question for you. There are plenty of... not plenty, but I mean, there's enough demand forecasting solutions out on the market today for retailers. One of the things that really caught my eye, especially being a former retailer and talking with retailers was the fact that you're promoting an open box solution. And that is a key challenge for a lot of retailers that have seen black box solutions come and go. And especially in this space where you really need direct input from the customer to continue to fine tune and improve forecast accuracy. Could you give just a little bit more of a description or response to your approach to open box versus black box? >> Yeah, of course. So, we've seen in the past the failures of the projects based on the black box approach, and we believe that this is not the way to go, especially with this kind of, let's say specialized services that we provide in meaning of understanding the customer's business first and then applying the solution, because what stands behind our concept in Occubee is the, basically your process in the organization as a retailer, they have been optimized for years already. That's where retailers put their focus for many years. We don't want to change that. We are not able to optimize it properly for sure as IT combined, we are able to provide you a tool which can then be used for mapping those very well optimized process and not to change them. That's our idea. And the open box means that in every process that you will map in the solution, you can then in real time monitor the execution of those processes and see what is the result of every step. That way, we create truly explainable experience for our customers, then can easily go for the whole process and see how the forecast was calculated. And what is the reason for a specific number to be there at the end of the day? >> I think that is invaluable. (indistinct) I really think that is a differentiator and what 3Soft is bringing to market. With that, thanks everyone for joining us today. Let's stay in touch. I want to make sure to leave Kamil's information here. So reach out to him directly, or feel free at any point in time obviously to reach out to me. Again, so glad everyone was able to join today, look forward to talking to you soon.

>>Thank you and good morning or afternoon, everyone, depending on where you're coming to us from and welcome to today's breakout session, fast data, a retail industry business imperative. My name is Brent Bedell, global managing director of retail, consumer bids here at Cloudera and today's hosts joining today. Joining me today is our feature speaker Brian Hill course managing partner from RSR. We'll be sharing insights and implications from recently completed research across retailers of all sizes in vertical segments. At the end of today's session, I'll share a brief overview on what I personally learned from retailers and how Cloudera continues to support retail data analytic requirements, and specifically around streaming data, ingest analytics, automation for customers around the world. There really is the next step up in terms of what's happening with data analytics today. So let's get started. So I thought it'd be helpful to provide some background first on how Clare to Cloudera is supporting and retail industry leaders specifically how they're leveraging Cloudera for leading practice data analytics use cases primarily across four key business pillars. >>And these will be very familiar to, to those in the industry. Personalize interactions of course, plays heavily into e-commerce and marketing, whether that's developing customer profiles, understanding the OB omni-channel journey, moving into the merchandising line of business focused on localized promotional planning, forecasting demand, forecast accuracy, then into supply chain where inventory visibility is becoming more and more critical today, whether it's around fulfillment or just understanding where your stuff is from a customer perspective. And obviously in and outbound route optimization right now, as retailers are taking control of actual delivery, whether it's to a physical store location or to the consumer. And then finally, uh, which is pretty exciting to me as a former store operator, you know, what's happening with physical brick and mortar right now, especially for traditional retailers. Uh, the whole re-imagining of stores right now is on fire in a lot of focus because, you know, frankly, this is where fulfillment is happening. >>Um, this is where customers, you know, still 80% of revenue is driven through retail, through physical brick and mortar. So right now store operations is getting more focused and I would say it probably is had and decades. Uh, and a lot of has to do for us with IOT data and analytics in the new technologies that really help, uh, drive, uh, benefits for retailers from a brick and mortar standpoint. And then, and then finally, um, you know, to wrap up before handing off to Brian, um, as you'll see, you know, all of these, these lines of businesses are raw, really experiencing the need for speed, uh, you know, fast data. So we're, we're moving beyond just discovery analytics. You don't things that happened five, six years ago with big data, et cetera. And we're really moving into real time capabilities because that's really where the difference makers are. >>That's where the competitive differentiation as across all of these, uh, you know, lines of business and these four key pillars within retail, um, the dependency on fast data is, is evident. Um, and it's something that we all read, you know, you know, in terms of those that are students of the industry, if you will, um, you know, that we're all focused on in terms of bringing value to the individual, uh, lines of business, but more importantly to the overall enterprise. So without further ado, I, I really want to, uh, have Brian speak here as a, as a third party analyst. You know, he, he's close in touch with what's going on, retail talking to all the solution providers, all the key retailers about what's important, what's on their plate. What are they focusing on right now in terms of fast data and how that could potentially make a difference for them going forward? So, Brian, uh, off to you, >>Well, thanks, Brent. I appreciate the introduction. And I was thinking, as you were talking, what is fast data? Well, data is fast. It is fast data it's stuff that comes at you very quickly. When I think about the decision cycles in retail, they were, they were, they were time phased and there was a time when we could only make a decision perhaps once a month and then met once a week and then once a day, and then intraday fast data is data that's coming at you and something approaching real time. And we'll explain why that's important in just a second. But first I want to share with you just a little bit about RSR. We've been in business now for 14 years. And what we do is we studied the business use cases that drive the adoption of technology in retail. We come from the retail industry, I was a retail technologist, my entire working life. >>And so we started this company. So I'm, I have a built in bias, of course, and that is that the difference between the winners in the retail world and in fact, in the entire business world and everybody else is how they value the strategic importance of information, and really that's where the battle is being fought today. We'll talk a little bit about that. So anyway, uh, one other thing about RSR research, our research is free to the entire world. Um, we don't, we don't have a paywall. You have to get behind. All you have to do is sign into our website, uh, identify yourself and all of our research, including these two reports that we're showing on the screen now are available to you. And we'd love to hear your comments. So when we talk about data, there's a lot of business implications to what we're trying to do with fast data and as being driven by the real world. >>Uh, we saw a lot of evidence of that during the COVID pandemic in 2020, when people had to make many decisions very, very quickly, for example, a simple one. Uh, do I redirect my replenishments to store B because store a is impacted by the pandemic, those kinds of things. Uh, these two drawings are actually from a book that came out in 1997. It was a really important book for me personally is by a guy named Steven Hegel. And it was the name of the book was the adaptive enterprise. When you think about your business model, um, and you think about the retail business model, most of those businesses are what you see on the left. First of all, the mission of the business doesn't change much at all. It changes once in a generation or maybe once in a lifetime, um, but it it's established quite early. >>And then from that point on it's, uh, basically a wash rinse and repeat cycle. You do the things that you do over and over and over again, year in and year out season in and season out. And the most important piece of information that you have is the transaction data from the last cycle. So a Brent knows this from his experience as a, as a retailer, the baseline for next year's forecast is last year's performance. And this is transactional in nature. It's typically pulled from your ERP or from your best of breed solution set on the right is where the world is really going. And before we get into the details of this, I'll just use a real example. I'm I'm sure like, like me, you've watched the path of hurricanes as they go up to the Florida coast. And one of the things you might've noticed is that there's several different possible paths. >>These are models, and you'll hear a lot about models. When you talk to people in the AI world, these are models based on lots and lots of information that they're getting from Noah and from the oceanographic people and all those kinds of folks to understand the likely path of the hurricane, based on their analysis, the people who watch these things will choose the most likely paths and they will warn communities to lock down and do whatever they need to do. And then they see as the, as the real hurricane progresses, they will see if it's following that path, or if it's varying, it's going down a different path and based on that, they will adapt to a new model. And that is what I'm talking about here now that not everything is of course is life and death as, as a hurricane. But it's basically the same concept what's happening is you have your internal data that you've had since this, a command and control model that we've mentioned on the left, and you're taking an external data from the world around you, and you're using that to make snap decisions or quick decisions based on what you see, what's observable on the outside, back to my COVID example, um, when people were tracking the path of the pandemic through communities, they learn that customers or consumers would favor certain stores to pick up their, what they needed to get. >>So they would avoid some stores and they would favor other stores. And that would cause smart retailers to redirect the replenishments on very fast cycles to those stores where the consumers are most likely to be. They also did the same thing for employees. Uh, they wanted to know where they could get their employees to service these customers. How far away were they, were they in a community that was impacted or were they relatively safe? These are the decisions that were being made in real time based on the information that they were getting from the marketplace around them. So, first of all, there's a context for these decisions. There's a purpose and the bounds of the adaptive structure, and then there's a coordination of capabilities in real time. And that creates an internal feedback loop, but there's also an external feedback loop. This is more of an ecosystem view. >>And based on those two, those two inputs what's happening internally, what your performance is internally and how your community around you is reacting to what you're providing. You make adjustments as necessary. And this is the essence of the adaptive enterprise. Engineers might call this a sense and respond model. Um, and that's where retail is going. But what's essential to that is information and information, not just about the products that you sell or the stores that you sell it in, or the employees that you have on the sales floor or the number of market baskets you've completed in the day, but something much, much more. Um, if you will, a twin, a digital twin of the physical assets of your business, all of your physical assets, the people, the products, the customers, the buildings, the rolling stock, everything, everything. And if you can create a digital equivalent of a physical thing, you can then analyze it. >>And if you can analyze it, you can make decisions much, much more quickly. So this is what's happening with the predict pivot based on what you see, and then, because it's an intrinsically more complicated model to automate, decision-making where it makes sense to do so. That's pretty complicated. And I talk about new data. And as I said earlier, the old data is all transactional in nature. Mostly about sales. Retail has been a wash in sales data for as long as I can remember throw, they throw most of it away, but they do keep enough to create the forecast the next for the next business cycle. But there's all kinds of new information that they need to be thinking about. And a lot of this is from the outside world. And a lot of this is non-transactional nature. So let's just take a look at some of them, competitive information. >>Those are always interested in what the competitor is up to. What are they promoting? How well are they they doing, where are they? What kind of traffic are they generating sudden and stuff, significant changes in customer behaviors and sentiment COVID is a perfect example of something that would cause this consumers changing their behaviors very quickly. And we have the ability to, to observe this because in a great majority of cases, nowadays retailers have observed that customers start their, uh, shopping journey in the digital space. As a matter of fact, Google recently came out and said, 60%, 63% of all, all sales transactions begin in the digital domain. Even if many of them end up in the store. So we have the ability to observe changes in consumer behavior. What are they looking at? When are they looking at it? How long do they spend looking at it? >>What else are they looking at while they're, while they're doing that? What are the, what is the outcome of that market metrics? Certainly what's going on in the marketplace around you? A good idea. Example of this might be something related to a sporting event. If you've planned based on normal demand and for, for your store. And there's a big sporting event, like a football match or a baseball game, suddenly you're going to see a spike in demand. So understanding what's going on in the market is really important. Location, demographics and psychographics, demographics have always been important to retailers, but now we're talking about dynamic demographics, what customers, or what consumers are, are in your market, in something approaching real time, psychographics has more to do with their attitudes. What kind of folks are, are, are in them in a particular marketplace? What do they think about what do they favor? >>And all those kinds of interesting deep tales, real-time environmental and social incidents. Of course, I mentioned hurricanes. And so that's fairly, self-evident disruptive events, sporting events, et cetera. These are all real. And then we get the real time internet of things. These are, these are RFID sensors, beacons, video, et cetera. There's all kinds of stuff. And this is where, yeah, it's interesting. This is where the supply chain people will start talking about the difference, little twin to their physical world. If you can't say something, you can manage it. And retailers want to be able to manage things in real time. So IOT, along with it, the analytics and the data that's generated is really, really important for them going forward, community health. We've been talking a lot about that, the progression of the flu, et cetera, et cetera, uh, business schedules, commute patterns, school schedules, and whether these are all external data that are interesting to retailers and can help them to make better operational in something approaching real time. >>I mentioned the automation of decision making. This is a chart from Gardner, and I'd love to share with you. It's a really good one because it describes very simply what we're talking about. And it also describes where the inflection of new technology happens. If you look on the left there's data, we have lots and lots of data. We're getting more data all the time, retailers for a long time. Now, since certainly since the seventies or eighties have been using data to describe what happened, this is the retrospective analysis that we're all very familiar with, uh, data cubes and those kinds of things. And based on that, the human makes some decisions about what they're going to do going forward. Um, sometime in the not too distant past, this data was started to be used to make diagnostic decisions, not only what happened, but why did it happen? >>And me might think of this as, for example, if sales were depressed for a certain product, was it because we had another product on sale that day, that's a good example of fairly straightforward diagnostics. We then move forward to what we might think of as predictive analytics. And this was based on what happened in the past and why it happened in the past. This is what's likely to happen in the future. You might think of this as, for example, halo effect or, or the cannibalization effect of your category plans. If you're, if you happen to be a grocer and based on that, the human will make a decision as to what they need to do next then came along AI, and I don't want to oversell AI here. AI is a new way for us to examine lots and lots of data, particularly unstructured data AI. >>If I could simplify it to its maximum extent, it essentially is a data tool that allows you to see patterns in data, which might be interesting. It's very good at sifting through huge data sets of unstructured data and detecting statistically significant patterns. It gets deeper than that, of course, because it uses math instead of rules. So instead of an if then, or else a statement that we might've used with our structured data, we use the math to detect these patterns in unstructured data. And based on those, we can make some models. For example, uh, my guy in my, in my, uh, just turned 70 on my 70 year old man, I'm a white guy. I live in California. I have a certain income and a certain educational level. I'm likely to behave in this way based on a model that's pretty simplistic. But based on that, you can see that. >>And when another person who meets my psychographics, my demographics, my age group, my income level and all the rest, um, you, they might, they might be expected to make a certain action. And so this is where prescriptive really comes into play. Um, AI makes that possible. And then finally, when you start to think about moving closer to the customer on something, approaching a personalized level, a one-to-one level, you, you suddenly find yourself in this situation of having to make not thousands of decisions, but tens of millions of decisions. And that's when the automation of decision-making really gets to be pretty important. So this is all interesting stuff, and I don't want to oversell it. It's exciting. And it's new. It's just the latest turn of the technology screw. And it allows us to use this new data to basically automate decision-making in the business, in something approaching real time so that we can be much, much more responsive to real-time conditions in the marketplace. >>Very exciting. So I hope this is interesting. This is a piece of data from one of our recent pieces of research. Uh, this happens to be from a location analytics study. We just published last week and we asked retailers, what are the big challenges what's been going on in the last 12 months for them? And what's likely to be happening for them in the next few years. And it's just fascinating because it speaks to the need for faster decision-making there. The challenges in the last 12 months were all related to COVID. First of all, fulfilling growing online demand. This is a very, very real time issue that we all had to deal with. But the next one was keeping forecasts in sync with changing demand. And this is one of those areas where retailers are now finding themselves, needing to look at that exoticness for that external data that I mentioned to you last year, sales were not a good predictor of next year of sales. >>They needed to look at sentiment. They needed to look at the path of the disease. They needed to look at the availability of products, alternate sourcing, global political issues. All of these things get to be pretty important and they affect the forecast. And then finally managing a supply them the movement of the supply through the supply chain so that they could identify bottlenecks now, point to one of them, which we can all laugh at now because it's kind of funny. It wasn't funny at the time we ran out of toilet paper, toilet paper was a big problem. Now there is nothing quite as predictable as toilet paper, it's tied directly to the size of the population. And yet we ran out and the thing we didn't expect when the COVID pandemic hit was that people would panic. And when people panic, they do funny things. >>One of the things I do is buy up all the available toilet paper. I'm not quite sure why that happened. Um, but it did happen and it drained the supply chain. So retailers needed to be able to see that they needed to be able to find alternative sources. They needed to be able to do those kinds of things. This gets to the issue of visibility, real time data, fast data tomorrow's challenge. It's kind of interesting because one of the things that they've retailers put at the top of their list is improved inventory productivity. Uh, the reason that they are interested in this is because then we'll never spend as much money, anything as they will on inventory. And they want the inventory to be targeted to those places where it is most likely to be consumed and not to places where it's least likely to be consumed. >>So this is trying to solve the issue of getting the right product at the right place at the right time to the right consumer and retailers want to improve this because the dollars are just so big, but in this complex, fast moving world that we live in today, it's this requires something approaching real-time visibility. They want to be able to monitor the supply chain, the DCS and the warehouses. And they're picking capacity. We're talking about each of us, we're talking about each his level. Decision-making about what's flowing through the supply chain all the way from the, from the manufacturing doctor, the manufacturer through to consumption. There's two sides of the supply chain and retailers want to look at it, you'll hear retailers and, and people like me talk about the digital twin. This is where this really becomes important. And again, the digital twin is, is enabled by IOT and AI analytics. >>And finally they need to re to increase their profitability for online fulfillment. Uh, this is a huge issue, uh, for some grocers, the volume of online orders went from less than 10% to somewhere north of 40%. And retailers did in 2020, what they needed to do to fulfill those customer orders in the, in the year of the pandemic, that now the expectation that consumers have have been raised significantly. They now expect those, those features to be available to them all the time. And many people really liked them. Now retailers need to find out how to do it profitably. And one of the first things they need to do is they need to be able to observe the process so that they can find places to optimize. This is out of our recent research and I encourage you to read it. >>And when we think about the hard one wisdoms that retailers have come up with, we think about these things better visibility has led to better understanding, which increases their reaction time, which increases their profitability. So what are the opportunities? This is the first place that you'll see something that's very common. And in our research, we separate over performers, who we call retail winners from everybody else, average and under-performers, and we've noticed throughout the life of our company, that retail winners, don't just do all the same things that others do. They tend to do other things. And this shows up in this particular graph, this again is from the same study. So what are the opportunities to, to address these challenges? I mentioned to you in the last slide, first of all, strategic placement of inventory throughout the supply chain to better fulfill customer needs. This is all about being able to observe the supply chain, get the inventory into a position where it can be moved quickly to fast changing demand. >>And on the consumer side, a better understanding and reacting to unplanned events that can drive a dramatic change in customer behavior. Again, this is about studying the data, analyzing the data and reacting to the data that comes before the sales transaction. So this is observing the path to purchase observing things that are happening in the marketplace around the retailer, so that they can respond very quickly, a better understanding of the dramatic changes in customer preference and path to purchase. As they engage with us. One of the things we, all we all know about consumers now is that they are in control and the literally the entire planet is the assortment that's available to them. If they don't like the way they're interacting with you, they will drop you like a hot potato and go to somebody else. And what retailers fear justifiably is the default response to that is to just see if they can find it on Amazon. >>You don't want this to happen if you're a retailer. So we want to observe how we are interacting with consumers and how well we are meeting their needs, optimizing omni-channel order fulfillment to improve profitability. We've already mentioned this, uh, retailers did what they needed to do to offer new fulfillment options to consumers. Things like buy online pickup curbside, buy online pickup in store, buy online, pick up at a locker, a direct to consumer all of those things. Retailers offer those in 2020 because the consumers demand it and needed it. So when retailers are trying to do now is to understand how to do that profitably. And finally, this is important. It never goes away. Is the reduction of waste shrink within the supply chain? Um, I'm embarrassed to say that when I was a retail executive in the nineties, uh, we were no more certain of consumer demand than anybody else was, but we, we wanted to commit to very high service levels for some of our key county categories somewhere approaching 95%. >>And we found the best way to do that was to flood the supply chain with inventory. Uh, it sounds irresponsible now, but in those days, that was a sure-fire way to make sure that the customer had what she was looking for when she looked for it. You can't do that in today's world. Money is too tight and we can't have that, uh, inventory sitting around and move to the right places. Once we discovered what the right place is, we have to be able to predict, observe and respond in something much closer to your time. One of the next slide, um, the simple message here, again, a difference between winners and everybody else, the messages, if you can't see it, you can't manage it. And so we asked retailers to identify, to what extent an AI enabled supply chain can help their company address some issues. >>Look at the differences here. They're shocking identifying network bottlenecks. This is the toilet paper story I told you about over half of retail winners, uh, feel that that's very important. Only 19% of average and under performers, no surprise that their average and under-performers visibility into available to sell inventory anywhere within the enterprise, 58% of winners and only 32% of everybody else. And you can go on down the list, but you get the just retail winners, understand that they need to be able to see their assets and something approaching real time so that they can make the best decisions possible going forward in something approaching real time. This is the world that we live in today. And in order to do that, you need to be able to number one, see it. And number two, you need to be able to analyze it. And number three, you have to be able to make decisions based on what you saw, just some closing observations on. >>And I hope this was interesting for you. I love talking about this stuff. You can probably tell I'm very passionate about it, but the rapid pace of change in the world today is really underscoring the importance. For example, of location intelligence, as a key component of helping businesses to achieve sustainable growth, greater operational effectiveness and resilience, and ultimately your success. So this is really, really critical for retailers to understand and successfully evolving businesses need to accommodate these new consumer shopping behaviors and changes in how products are brought to the market. So that, and in order to do that, they need to be able to see people. They need to be able to see their assets, and they need to be able to see their processes in something approaching real time, and then they need to analyze it. And based on what they've uncovered, they need to be able to make strategic and operational decision making very quickly. This is the new world we live in. It's a real-time world. It's a, it's a sense and respond world and it's the way forward. So, Brent, I hope that was interesting for you. I really enjoyed talking about this, as I said, we'd love to hear a little bit more. >>Hey, Brian, that was excellent. You know, I always love me love hearing from RSR because you're so close to what retailers are talking about and the research that your company pulls together. Um, you know, one of the higher level research articles around, uh, fast data frankly, is the whole notion of IOT, right? And he does a lot of work in this space. Um, what I find fascinating based off the recent research is believe it or not, there's $1.2 trillion at stake in retail per year, between now and 2025. Now, how is that possible? Well, part of it is because the Kinsey captures not only traditional retail, but also QSRs and entertainment then use et cetera. That's considered all of retail, but it's a staggering number. And it really plays to the effect that real-time can have on individual enterprises. In this case, we're talking of course, about retail. >>So a staggering number. And if you think about it from streaming video to sensors, to beacons, RFID robotics, autonomous vehicles, retailers are testing today, even pizza delivery, you know, autonomous vehicle. Well, if you think about it, it shouldn't be that shocking. Um, but when they were looking at 12 different industries, retail became like the number three out of 12, and there's a lot of other big industries that will be leveraging IOT in the next four years. So, um, so retailers in the past have been traditionally a little stodgy about their spend in data and analytics. Um, I think retailers in general have got the religion that this is what it's going to take to compete in today's world, especially in a global economy. And in IOT really is the next frontier, which is kind of the definition of fast data. Um, so I, I just wanted to share just a few examples or exemplars of, of retailers that are leveraging Cloudera technology today. >>So now, so now the paid for advertisement at the end of this, right? So, so, you know, so what bringing to market here. So, you know, across all retail, uh, verticals, you know, if we look at, you know, for example, a well-known global mass virtual retailer, you know, they're leveraging Cloudera data flow, which is our solution to move data from point to point in wicked fast space. So it's open source technology that was originally developed by the NSA. So, um, it is best to class movement of data from an ingest standpoint, but we're also able to help the roundtrip. So we'll pull the sensor data off all the refrigeration units for this particular retailer. They'll hit it up against the product lifecycle table. They'll understand, you know, temperature fluctuations of 10, 20 degrees based on, you know, fresh food products that are in the store, what adjustments might need to be made because frankly store operators, they'll never know refrigeration don't know if a cooler goes down and they'll have to react quickly, but they won't know that 10, 20 degree temperature changes have happened overnight. >>So this particular customer leverages father a data flow understand temperature, fluctuations the impact on the product life cycle and the round trip communication back to the individual department manager, let's say a produce department manager, deli manager, meat manager, Hey, you had, you know, a 20 degree drop in temperature. We suggest you lower the price on these products that we know are in that cooler, um, for the next couple of days by 20%. So you don't have to worry, tell me about freshness issues and or potential shrink. So, you know, the grocery with fresh product, if you don't sell it, you smell it, you throw it away. It's lost to the bottom line. So, you know, critically important and, you know, tremendous ROI opportunity that we're helping to enable there, uh, from a, a leading global drugstore retailer. So this is more about data processing and, you know, we're excited to, you know, the recent partnership with the Vidia. >>So fast data, isn't always at the edge of IOT. It's also about workloads. And in retail, if you are processing your customer profiles or segmentation like intra day, you will ever achieve personalization. You will never achieve one-on-one communications with readers killers or with customers. And why is that? Because customers in many cases are touching your brand several times a week. So taking you a week or longer to process your segmentation schemes, you've already lost and you'll never achieve personalization in frack. In fact, you may offend customers by offering. You might push out based on what they just bought yesterday. You had no idea of it. So, you know, that's what we're really excited about. Uh, again, with, with the computation speed, then the video brings to, to Cloudera, we're already doing this today already, you know, been providing levels, exponential speed and processing data. But when the video brings to the party is course GPU's right, which is another exponential improvement, uh, to processing workloads like demand forecast, customer profiles. >>These things need to happen behind the scenes in the back office, much faster than retailers have been doing in the past. Um, that's just the world we all live in today. And then finally, um, you know, proximity marketing standpoint, or just from an in-store operation standpoint, you know, retailers are leveraging Cloudera today, not only data flow, but also of course our compute and storage platform and ML, et cetera, uh, to understand what's happening in store. It's almost like the metrics that we used to look at in the past in terms of conversion and traffic, all those metrics are now moving into the physical world. If you can leverage computer vision in streaming video, to understand how customers are traversing your store, how much time they're standing in front of the display, how much time they're standing in checkout line. Um, you can now start to understand how to better merchandise the store, um, where the hotspots are, how to in real time improve your customer service. >>And from a proximity marketing standpoint, understand how to engage with the customer right at the moment of truth, right? When they're right there, um, in front of a particular department or category, you know, of course leveraging mobile devices. So that's the world of fast data in retail and just kind of a summary in just a few examples of how folks are leveraging Cloudera today. Um, you know, from an overall platform standpoint, of course, father as an enterprise data platform, right? So, you know, we're, we're helping to the entire data life cycle. So we're not a data warehouse. Um, we're much more than that. So we have solutions to ingest data from the edge from IOT leading practice solutions to bring it in. We also have experiences to help, you know, leverage the analytic capabilities of, uh, data engineering, data science, um, analytics and reporting. Uh, we're not, uh, you know, we're not, we're not encroaching upon the legacy solutions that many retailers have today. >>We're providing a platform, this open source that helps weave all of this mess together that existed retail today from legacy systems because no retailer, frankly, is going to rip and replace a lot of stuff that they have today. Right. And the other thing that Cloudera brings to market is this whole notion of on-prem hybrid cloud and multi-cloud right. So our whole, our whole culture has been built around open source technology as the company that provides most of the source code to the Apache network around all these open source technologies. Um, we're kind of religious about open source and lack of vendor lock-in, uh, maybe to our fault. Uh, but as a company, we pull that together from a data platform standpoint. So it's not a rip and replace situation. It's like helping to connect legacy systems, data and analytics, um, you know, weaving that whole story together to be able to solve this whole data life cycle from beginning to end. >>And then finally, you know, just, you know, I want to thank everyone for joining today's session. I hope you found it informative. I can't say Brian killed course enough. Um, you know, he's my trusted friend in terms of what's going on in the industry. He has much broader reach of course, uh, in talking to a lot of our partners in, in, in, in other, uh, technology companies out there as well. But I really appreciate everyone joining the session and Brian, I'm going to kind of leave it open to you to, you know, any closing comments that you might have based on, you know, what we're talking about today in terms of fast data and retail. >>First of all, thank you, Brent. Um, and this is an exciting time to be in this industry. Um, and I'll just leave it with this. The reason that we are talking about these things is because we can, the technology has advanced remarkably in the last five years. Some of this data has been out there for a lot longer than that in it, frankly wasn't even usable. Um, but what we're really talking about is increasing the cycle time for decisions, making them go faster and faster so that we can respond to consumer expectations and delight them in ways that that make us a trusted provider of their life, their lifestyle needs. So this is really a good time to be a retailer, a real great time to be servicing the retail technology community. And I'm glad to be a part of it. And I was glad to be working with you. So thank you, Brian. >>Yeah, of course, Brian, and one of the exciting things for me to not being in the industry, as long as I have and being a former retailer is it's really exciting for me to see retailers actually spending money on data and it for a change, right? They've all kind of come to this final pinnacle of this is what it's going to take to compete. Um, you know, you know, and I talked to, you know, a lot of colleagues, even, even salespeople within Cloudera, I like, oh, retail, very stodgy, you know, slow to move. That's not the case anymore. Um, you know, religion is everyone's, everyone gets the religion of data and analytics and the value of that. And what's exciting for me to see as all this infusion of immense talent within the industry years ago, Brian, I mean, you know, retailers are like, you know, pulling people from some of the, you know, the greatest, uh, tech companies out there, right? From a data science data engineering standpoint, application developers, um, retail is really getting this legs right now in terms of, you know, go to market and in the leverage of data and analytics, which to me is very exciting. Well, >>You're right. I mean, I, I became a CIO around the time that, uh, point of sale and data warehouses were starting to happen data cubes and all those kinds of things. And I never thought I would see a change that dramatic, uh, as the industry experience back in those days, 19 89, 19 90, this changed doors that, but the good news is again, as the technology is capable, uh, it's, it's, we're talking about making technology and information available to, to retail decision-makers that consumers carry around in their pocket purses and pockets is there right now today. Um, so the, the, the question is, are you going to utilize it to win or are you going to get beaten? That's really what it boils down to. Yeah, >>For sure. Uh, Hey, thanks everyone. We'll wrap up. I know we ran a little bit long, but, uh, appreciate, uh, everyone, uh, hanging in there with us. We hope you enjoyed the session. The archive contact information is right there on the screen. Feel free to reach out to either Brian and I. You can go to cloudera.com. Uh, we even have, you know, joint sponsored papers with RSR. You can download there as well as eBooks and other assets that are available if you're interested. So thanks again, everyone for joining and really appreciate you taking the time. >>Hello everyone. And thanks for joining us today. My name is Brent Bedell, managing director retail, consumer goods here at Cloudera. Cloudera is very proud to be partnering with companies like three soft to provide data and analytic capabilities for over 200 retailers across the world and understanding why demand forecasting could be considered the heartbeat of retail. And what's at stake is really no mystery to most, to most retailers. And really just a quick level set before handing this over to my good friend, uh, Camille three soft, um, you know, IDC Gartner. Um, many other analysts have kind of summed up an average, uh, here that I thought would be important to share just to level set the importance of demand forecasting or retail. And what's at stake. I mean the combined business value for retailers leveraging AI and IOT. So this is above and beyond. What demand forecasting has been in the past is a $371 billion opportunity. >>And what's critically important to understand about demand forecasting. Is it directly impacts both the top line and the bottom line of retail. So how does it affect the top line retailers that leverage AI and IOT for demand forecasting are seeing average revenue increases of 2% and think of that as addressing the in stock or out of stock issue in retail and retail is become much more complex now, and that is no longer just brick and mortar, of course, but it's fulfillment centers driven by e-commerce. So inventory is now having to be spread over multiple channels. Being able to leverage AI and IOT is driving 2% average revenue increases. Now, if you think about the size of most retailers or the average retailer that on its face is worth millions of dollars of improvement for any individual retailer on top of that is balancing your inventory, getting the right product in the right place and having productive inventory. >>And that is the bottom line. So the average inventory reduction, leveraging AI and IOT as the analyst have found, and frankly, having spent time in this space myself in the past a 15% average inventory reduction is significant for retailers not being overstocked on product in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it touches everything from replenishment to out-of-stocks labor planning and customer engagement for purposes of today's conversation. We're going to focus on inventory and inventory optimization and reducing out-of-stocks. And of course, even small incremental improvements. I mentioned before in demand forecast accuracy have millions of dollars of direct business impact, especially when it comes to inventory optimization. Okay. So without further ado, I would like to now introduce Dr. Camille Volker to share with you what his team has been up to. And some of the amazing things that are driving at top retailers today. So over to you, Camille, >>Uh, I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to speak to you, uh, about, uh, what we, uh, deliver to our customers. But let me first, uh, introduce three soft. We are a 100 person company based in Europe, in Southern Poland. Uh, and we, uh, with 18 years of experience specialized in providing what we call a data driven business approach, uh, to our customers, our roots are in the solutions in the services. We originally started as a software house. And on top of that, we build our solutions. We've been automation that you get the software for biggest enterprises in Poland, further, we understood the meaning of data and, and data management and how it can be translated into business profits. Adding artificial intelligence on top of that, um, makes our solutions portfolio holistic, which enables us to realize very complex projects, which, uh, leverage all of those three pillars of our business. However, in the recent time, we also understood that services is something which only the best and biggest companies can afford at scale. And we believe that the future of retail, uh, demon forecasting is in the product solutions. So that's why we created occupy our AI platform for data driven retail. That also covers this area that we talked about today. >>I'm personally proud to be responsible for our technology partnerships with other on Microsoft. Uh, it's a great pleasure to work with such great companies and to be able to, uh, delivered a solution store customers together based on the common trust and understanding of the business, uh, which cumulates at customer success at the end. So why, why should you analyze data at retail? Why is it so important? Um, it's kind of obvious that there is a lot of potential in the data per se, but also understanding the different areas where it can be used in retail is very important. We believe that thanks to using data, it's basically easier to the right, uh, the good decisions for the business based on the facts and not intuition anymore. Those four areas that we observe in retail, uh, our online data analysis, that's the fastest growing sector, let's say for those, for those data analytics services, um, which is of course based on the econ and, uh, online channels, uh, availability to the customer. >>Pandemic only speeds up this process of engagement of the customers in that channel, of course, but traditional offline, um, let's say brick and mortar shops. Uh, they still play the biggest role for most of the retailers, especially from the FMCG sector. However, it's also very important to remember that there is plenty of business, uh, related questions that meet that need to be answered from the headquarter perspective. So is it actually, um, good idea to open a store in a certain place? Is it a good idea to optimize a stock with Saturday in producer? Is it a good idea to allocate the goods to online channel in specific way, those kinds of questions they are, they need to be answered in retail every day. And with that massive amount of factors coming into that question, it's really not, not that easy to base, only on the intuition and expert knowledge, of course, uh, as Brent mentioned at the beginning, the supply chain and everything who's relates to that is also super important. We observe our customers to seek for the huge improvements in the revenue, just from that one single area as well. Okay. >>So let me present you a case study of one of our solutions, and that was the lever to a leading global grocery retailer. Uh, the project started with the challenge set of challenges that we had to conquer. And of course the most important was how to limit overstocks and out of stocks. Uh, that's like the holy grail in of course, uh, how to do it without flooding the stores with the goods and in the same time, how to avoid empty shelves, um, from the perspective of the customer, it was obvious that we need to provide a very well, um, a very high quality of sales forecast to be able to ask for, uh, what will be the actual sales of the individual product in each store, uh, every day, um, considering huge role of the perishable goods in the specific grocery retailer, it was a huge challenge, uh, to provide a solution that was able to analyze and provide meaningful information about what's there in the sales data and the other factors we analyzed on daily basis at scale, however, uh, our holistic approach implementing AI with data management, uh, background, and these automation solutions all together created a platform that was able to significantly increase, uh, the sales for our customer just by minimizing out of stocks. >>In the same time we managed to not overflow the stock, the shops with the goods, which actually decreased losses significantly, especially on the fresh fruit. >>Having said that this results of course translate into the increase in revenue, which can be calculated in hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So how the solution actually works well in its principle, it's quite simple. We just collect the data. We do it online. We put that in our data lake, based on the cloud, there are technology, we implement our artificial intelligence models on top of it. And then based on the aggregated information, we create the forecast and we do it every day or every night for every single product in every single store. This information is sent to the warehouses and then the automated replenishment based on the forecast is on the way the huge and most important aspect of that is the use of the good tools to do the right job. Uh, having said that you can be sure that there is too many information in this data, and there is actually two-minute forecast created every night that any expert could ever check. >>This means our solution needs to be, uh, very robust. It needs to provide information with high quality and high porosity. There is plenty of different business process, which is on our forecast, which need to be delivered on time for every product in each individual shop observing the success of this project and having the huge market potential in mind, we decided to create our QB, which can be used by many retailers who don't want to create a dedicated software for that. We'll be solving this kind of problem. Occupy is, uh, our software service offering, which is enabling retailers to go data driven path management. >>We create occupant with retailers, for retailers, uh, implementing artificial intelligence, uh, on top of data science models created by our experts, uh, having data, data analysis in place based on data management tools that we use we've written first, um, attitude. The uncertain times of pandemic clearly shows that it's very important to apply correction factors, which are sometimes required because we need to respond quickly to the changes in the sales characteristics. That's why occupy B is open box solution, which means that you basically can implement that in your organization. We have without changing the process internally, it's all about mapping your process into this into the system, not the other way around the fast trends and products, collection possibilities allow the retailers to react to any changes, which are pure in the sales every day. >>Also, it's worth to mention that really it's not only FMCG. And we believe that different use cases, which we observed in fashion health and beauty, common garden pharmacies and electronics, flavors of retail are also very meaningful. They also have one common thread. That's the growing importance of e-commerce. That's why we didn't want to leave that aside of occupant. And we made everything we can to implement a solution, which covers all of the needs. When you think about the factors that affect sales, there is actually huge variety of data and that we can analyze, of course, the transactional data that every dealer possesses like sales data from sale from, from e-commerce channel also, uh, averaging numbers from weeks, months, and years makes sense, but it's also worth to mention that using the right tool that allows you to collect that data from also internal and external sources makes perfect sense for retail. Uh, it's very hard to imagine a competitive retailer that is not analyzing the competitor's activity, uh, changes in weather or information about some seasonal stores, which can be very important during the summer during the holidays, for example. Uh, but on the other hand, um, having that information in one place makes the actual benefit and environment for the customer. >>Okay. Demon forecasting seems to be like the most important and promising use case. We can talk about when I think about retail, but it's also their whole process of replenishment that can cover with different sets of machine learning models. And they done management tools. We believe that analyzing data from different parts of the retail, uh, replenishment process, uh, can be achieved with implementing a data management solution based on caldera products and with adding some AI on top of it, it makes perfect sense to focus on not only demand forecasting, but also further use cases down the line when it comes to the actual benefits from implementing solutions for demand management, we believe it's really important to analyze them holistically. First is of course, out of stocks, memorization, which can be provided by simply better sales focus, but also reducing overstocks by better inventory management can be achieved in, in the same time. Having said that we believe that analyzing data without any specific new equipment required in point of sales is the low hanging fruit that can be easily achieved in almost every industry in almost every regular customer. >>Hey, thanks, Camille, having worked with retailers in this space for a couple of decades, myself, I was really impressed by a couple of things and they might've been understated, frankly. Um, the results of course, I mean, you, you know, as I kind of set up this session, you doubled the numbers on the statistics that the analysts found. So obviously in customers you're working with, um, you know, you're, you're doubling average numbers that the industry is having and, and most notably how the use of AI or occupy has automated so many manual tasks of the past, like tour tuning, item profiles, adding new items, et cetera. Uh, and also how quickly it felt like, and this is my, my core question. Your team can cover, um, or, or provide the solution to, to not only core center store, for example, in grocery, but you're covering fresh products. >>And frankly, there are, there are solutions out on the market today that only focus on center store non-perishable department. So I was really impressed by the coverage that you're able to provide as well. So can you articulate kind of what it takes to get up and running and your overall process to roll out the solution? I feel like based on what you talked about, um, and how you were approaching this in leveraging AI, um, that you're, you're streamlining processes of legacy demand, forecasting solutions that required more manual intervention, um, how quickly can you get people set up and what is the overall process like to get started with soft? >>Yeah, it's usually it takes three to six months, uh, to onboard a new customer to that kind of solution. And frankly it depends on the data that the customer, uh, has. Uh, usually it's different, uh, for smaller, bigger companies, of course. Uh, but we believe that it's very important to start with a good foundation. The platform needs to be there, the platform that is able to, uh, basically analyze or process different types of data, structured, unstructured, internal, external, and so on. But when you have this platform set, it's all about starting ingesting data there. And usually for a smaller companies, it's easier to start with those, let's say, low hanging fruits. So the internal data, which is there, this data has the highest veracity is already easy to start with, to work with them because everyone in the organization understands this data for the bigger companies. It might be important to ingest also kind of more unstructured data, some kind of external data that need to be acquired. So that may, that may influence the length of the process. But we usually start with the customers. We have, uh, workshops. That's very important to understand their business because not every deal is the same. Of course, we believe that the success of our customers comes also due to the fact that we train those models, those AI models individually to the needs of our >>Totally understand and POS data, every retailer has right in, in one way shape or form. And it is the fundamental, uh, data point, whether it's e-comm or the brick and mortar data, uh, every retailer has that data. So that, that totally makes sense. But what you just described was bunts. Um, there are, there are legacy and other solutions out there that this could be a, a year or longer process to roll out to the number of stores, for example, that you're scaling to. So that's highly impressive. And my guess is a lot of the barriers that have been knocked down with your solution are the fact that you're running this in the cloud, um, you know, on, from a compute standpoint on Cloudera from a public cloud stamp point on Microsoft. So there's, there's no, it intervention, if you will, or hurdles in preparation to get the database set up and in all of the work, I would imagine that part of the time-savings to getting started, would that be an accurate description? >>Yeah, absolutely. Uh, in the same time, this actually lowering the business risks, because we simply take data and put that into the data lake, which is in the cloud. We do not interfere with the existing processes, which are processing this data in the combined. So we just use the same data. We just already in the company, we ask some external data if needed, but it's all aside of the current customers infrastructure. So this is also a huge gain, as you said, right? >>And you're meeting customers where they are. Right. So, as I said, foundationally, every retailer POS data, if they want to add weather data or calendar event data or, you know, want incorporate a course online data with offline data. Um, you have a roadmap and the ability to do that. So it is a building block process. So getting started with, for data, uh, as, as with POS online or offline is the foundational component, which obviously you're very good at. Um, and then having that ability to then incorporate other data sets is critically important because that just improves demand, forecast accuracy, right. By being able to pull in those, those other data sources, if you will. So Camille, I just have one final question for you. Um, you know, there, there are plenty of not plenty, but I mean, there's enough demand forecasting solutions out on the market today for retailers. One of the things that really caught my eye, especially being a former retailer and talking with retailers was the fact that you're, you're promoting an open box solution. And that is a key challenge for a lot of retailers that have, have seen black box solutions come and go. Um, and especially in this space where you really need direct input from the, to continue to fine tune and improve forecast accuracy. Could you give just a little bit more of a description or response to your approach to open box versus black box? >>Yeah, of course. So, you know, we've seen in the past the failures of the projects, um, based on the black box approach, uh, and we believe that this is not the way to go, especially with this kind of, uh, let's say, uh, specialized services that we provide in meaning of understanding the customer's business first and then applying the solution, because what stands behind our concept in occupy is the, basically your process in the organization as a retailer, they have been optimized for years already. That's where retailers put their, uh, focus for many years. We don't want to change that. We are not able to optimize it properly. For sure as it combined, we are able to provide you a tool which can then be used for mapping those very well optimized process and not to change them. That's our idea. And the open box means that in every process that you will map in the solution, you can then in real time monitor the execution of those processes and see what is the result of every step. That way we create truly explainable experience for our customers, then okay, then can easily go for the whole process and see how the forecast, uh, was calculated. And what is the reason for a specific number to be there at the end of the day? >>I think that is, um, invaluable. Um, can be, I really think that is a differentiator and what three soft is bringing to market with that. Thanks. Thanks everyone for joining us today, let's stay in touch. I want to make sure to leave, uh, uh, Camille's information here. Uh, so reach out to him directly or feel free at any, any point in time, obviously to reach out to me, um, again, so glad everyone was able to join today, look forward to talking to you soon.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone, thank you for joining us at the Data Cloud Summit. The last couple of months have been an exciting time at Snowflake. And yet, what's even more compelling to all of us at Snowflake is what's ahead. Today I have the opportunity to share new product developments that will extend the reach and impact of our Data Cloud and improve the experience of Snowflake users. Our product strategy is focused on four major areas. First, Data Cloud content. In the Data Cloud silos are eliminated and our vision is to bring the world's data within reach of every organization. You'll hear about new data sets and data services available in our data marketplace and see how previous barriers to sourcing and unifying data are eliminated. Second, extensible data pipelines. As you gain frictionless access to a broader set of data through the Data Cloud, Snowflakes platform brings additional capabilities and extensibility to your data pipelines, simplifying data ingestion, and transformation. Third, data governance. The Data Cloud eliminates silos and breaks down barriers and in a world where data collaboration is the norm, the importance of data governance is ratified and elevated. We'll share new advancements to support how the world's most demanding organizations mobilize your data while maintaining high standards of compliance and governance. Finally, our fourth area focuses on platform performance and capabilities. We remain laser focused on continuing to lead with the most performant and capable data platform. We have some exciting news to share about the core engine of Snowflake. As always, we love showing you Snowflake in action, and we prepared some demos for you. Also, we'll keep coming back to the fact that one of the characteristics of Snowflake that we're proud as staff is that we offer a single platform from which you can operate all of your data workloads, across clouds and across regions, which workloads you may ask, specifically, data warehousing, data lake, data science, data engineering, data applications, and data sharing. Snowflake makes it possible to mobilize all your data in service of your business without the cost, complexity and overhead of managing multiple systems, tools and vendors. Let's dive in. As you heard from Frank, the Data Cloud offers a unique capability to connect organizations and create collaboration and innovation across industries fueled by data. The Snowflake data marketplace is the gateway to the Data Cloud, providing visibility for organizations to browse and discover data that can help them make better decisions. For data providers on the marketplace, there is a new opportunity to reach new customers, create new revenue streams, and radically decrease the effort and time to data delivery. Our marketplace dramatically reduces the friction of sharing and collaborating with data opening up new possibilities to all participants in the Data Cloud. We introduced the Snowflake data marketplace in 2019. And it is now home to over 100 data providers, with half of them having joined the marketplace in the last four months. Since our most recent product announcements in June, we have continued broadening the availability of the data marketplace, across regions and across clouds. Our data marketplace provides the opportunity for data providers to reach consumers across cloud and regional boundaries. A critical aspect of the Data Cloud is that we envisioned organizations collaborating not just in terms of data, but also data powered applications and services. Think of instances where a provider doesn't want to open access to the entirety of a data set, but wants to provide access to business logic that has access and leverages such data set. That is what we call data services. And we want Snowflake to be the platform of choice for developing discovering and consuming such rich building blocks. To see How the data marketplace comes to live, and in particular one of these data services, let's jump into a demo. For all of our demos today, we're going to put ourselves in the shoes of a fictional global insurance company. We've called it Insureco. Insurance is a data intensive and highly regulated industry. Having the right access control and insight from data is core to every insurance company's success. I'm going to turn it over to Prasanna to show how the Snowflake data marketplace can solve a data discoverability and access problem. >> Let's look at how Insureco can leverage data and data services from the Snowflake data marketplace and use it in conjunction with its own data in the Data Cloud to do three things, better detect fraudulent claims, arm its agents with the right information, and benchmark business health against competition. Let's start with detecting fraudulent claims. I'm an analyst in the Claims Department. I have auto claims data in my account. I can see there are 2000 auto claims, many of these submitted by auto body shops. I need to determine if they are valid and legitimate. In particular, could some of these be insurance fraud? By going to the Snowflake data marketplace where numerous data providers and data service providers can list their offerings, I find the quantifying data service. It uses a combination of external data sources and predictive risk typology models to inform the risk level of an organization. Quantifying external sources include sanctions and blacklists, negative news, social media, and real time search engine results. That's a wealth of data and models built on that data which we don't have internally. So I'd like to use Quantifind to determine a fraud risk score for each auto body shop that has submitted a claim. First, the Snowflake data marketplace made it really easy for me to discover a data service like this. Without the data marketplace, finding such a service would be a lengthy ad hoc process of doing web searches and asking around. Second, once I find Quantifind, I can use Quantifind service against my own data in three simple steps using data sharing. I create a table with the names and addresses of auto body shops that have submitted claims. I then share the table with Quantifind to start the risk assessment. Quantifind does the risk scoring and shares the data back with me. Quantifind uses external functions which we introduced in June to get results from their risk prediction models. Without Snowflake data sharing, we would have had to contact Quantifind to understand what format they wanted the data in, then extract this data into a file, FTP the file to Quantifind, wait for the results, then ingest the results back into our systems for them to be usable. Or I would have had to write code to call Quantifinds API. All of that would have taken days. In contrast, with data sharing, I can set this up in minutes. What's more, now that I have set this up, as new claims are added in the future, they will automatically leverage Quantifind's data service. I view the scores returned by Quantifind and see the two entities in my claims data have a high score for insurance fraud risk. I open up the link returned by Quantifind to read more, and find that this organization has been involved in an insurance crime ring. Looks like that is a claim that we won't be approving. Using the Quantifind data service through the Snowflake data marketplace gives me access to a risk scoring capability that we don't have in house without having to call custom APIs. For a provider like Quantifind this drives new leads and monetization opportunities. Now that I have identified potentially fraudulent claims, let's move on to the second part. I would like to share this fraud risk information with the agents who sold the corresponding policies. To do this, I need two things. First, I need to find the agents who sold these policies. Then I need to share with these agents the fraud risk information that we got from Quantifind. But I want to share it such that each agent only sees the fraud risk information corresponding to claims for policies that they wrote. To find agents who sold these policies, I need to look up our Salesforce data. I can find this easily within Insureco's internal data exchange. I see there's a listing with Salesforce data. Our sales Ops team has published this listing so I know it's our officially blessed data set, and I can immediately access it from my Snowflake account without copying any data or having to set up ETL. I can now join Salesforce data with my claims to identify the agents for the policies that were flagged to have fraudulent claims. I also have the Snowflake account information for each agent. Next, I create a secure view that joins on an entitlements table, such that each agent can only see the rows corresponding to policies that they have sold. I then share this directly with the agents. This share contains the secure view that I created with the names of the auto body shops, and the fraud risk identified by Quantifind. Finally, let's move on to the third and last part. Now that I have detected potentially fraudulent claims, I'm going to move on to building a dashboard that our executives have been asking for. They want to see how Insureco compares against other auto insurance companies on key metrics, like total claims paid out for the auto insurance line of business nationwide. I go to the Snowflake data marketplace and find SNL U.S. Insurance Statutory Data from SNP. This data is included with Insureco's existing subscription with SMP so when I request access to it, SMP can immediately share this data with me through Snowflake data sharing. I create a virtual database from the share, and I'm ready to query this data, no ETL needed. And since this is a virtual database, pointing to the original data in SNP Snowflake account, I have access to the latest data as it arrives in SNPs account. I see that the SNL U.S. Insurance Statutory Data from SNP has data on assets, premiums earned and claims paid out by each us insurance company in 2019. This data is broken up by line of business and geography and in many cases goes beyond the data that would be available from public financial filings. This is exactly the data I need. I identify a subset of comparable insurance companies whose net total assets are within 20% of Insureco's, and whose lines of business are similar to ours. I can now create a Snow site dashboard that compares Insureco against similar insurance companies on key metrics, like net earned premiums, and net claims paid out in 2019 for auto insurance. I can see that while we are below median our net earned premiums, we are doing better than our competition on total claims paid out in 2019, which could be a reflection of our improved claims handling and fraud detection. That's a good insight that I can share with our executives. In summary, the Data Cloud enabled me to do three key things. First, seamlessly fine data and data services that I need to do my job, be it an external data service like Quantifind and external data set from SNP or internal data from Insureco's data exchange. Second, get immediate live access to this data. And third, control and manage collaboration around this data. With Snowflake, I can mobilize data and data services across my business ecosystem in just minutes. >> Thank you Prasanna. Now I want to turn our focus to extensible data pipelines. We believe there are two different and important ways of making Snowflakes platform highly extensible. First, by enabling teams to leverage services or business logic that live outside of Snowflake interacting with data within Snowflake. We do this through a feature called external functions, a mechanism to conveniently bring data to where the computation is. We announced this feature for calling regional endpoints via AWS gateway in June, and it's currently available in public preview. We are also now in public preview supporting Azure API management and will soon support Google API gateway and AWS private endpoints. The second extensibility mechanism does the converse. It brings the computation to Snowflake to run closer to the data. We will do this by enabling the creation of functions and procedures in SQL, Java, Scala or Python ultimately providing choice based on the programming language preference for you or your organization. You will see Java, Scala and Python available through private and public previews in the future. The possibilities enabled by these extensibility features are broad and powerful. However, our commitment to being a great platform for data engineers, data scientists and developers goes far beyond programming language. Today, I am delighted to announce Snowpark a family of libraries that will bring a new experience to programming data in Snowflake. Snowpark enables you to write code directly against Snowflake in a way that is deeply integrated into the languages I mentioned earlier, using familiar concepts like DataFrames. But the most important aspect of Snowpark is that it has been designed and optimized to leverage the Snowflake engine with its main characteristics and benefits, performance, reliability, and scalability with near zero maintenance. Think of the power of a declarative SQL statements available through a well known API in Scala, Java or Python, all these against data governed in your core data platform. We believe Snowpark will be transformative for data programmability. I'd like to introduce Sri to showcase how our fictitious insurance company Insureco will be able to take advantage of the Snowpark API for data science workloads. >> Thanks Christian, hi, everyone? I'm Sri Chintala, a product manager at Snowflake focused on extensible data pipelines. And today, I'm very excited to show you a preview of Snowpark. In our first demo, we saw how Insureco could identify potentially fraudulent claims. Now, for all the valid claims InsureCo wants to ensure they're providing excellent customer service. To do that, they put in place a system to transcribe all of their customer calls, so they can look for patterns. A simple thing they'd like to do is detect the sentiment of each call so they can tell which calls were good and which were problematic. They can then better train their claim agents for challenging calls. Let's take a quick look at the work they've done so far. InsureCo's data science team use Snowflakes external functions to quickly and easily train a machine learning model in H2O AI. Snowflake has direct integrations with H2O and many other data science providers giving Insureco the flexibility to use a wide variety of data science libraries frameworks or tools to train their model. Now that the team has a custom trained sentiment model tailored to their specific claims data, let's see how a data engineer at Insureco can use Snowpark to build a data pipeline that scores customer call logs using the model hosted right inside of Snowflake. As you can see, we have the transcribed call logs stored in the customer call logs table inside Snowflake. Now, as a data engineer trained in Scala, and used to working with systems like Spark and Pandas, I want to use familiar programming concepts to build my pipeline. Snowpark solves for this by letting me use popular programming languages like Java or Scala. It also provides familiar concepts in APIs, such as the DataFrame abstraction, optimized to leverage and run natively on the Snowflake engine. So here I am in my ID, where I've written a simple scalar program using the Snowpark libraries. The first step in using the Snowpark API is establishing a session with Snowflake. I use the session builder object and specify the required details to connect. Now, I can create a DataFrame for the data in the transcripts column of the customer call logs table. As you can see, the Snowpark API provides native language constructs for data manipulation. Here, I use the Select method provided by the API to specify the column names to return rather than writing select transcripts as a string. By using the native language constructs provided by the API, I benefit from features like IntelliSense and type checking. Here you can see some of the other common methods that the DataFrame class offers like filters like join and others. Next, I define a get sentiment user defined function that will return a sentiment score for an input string by using our pre trained H2O model. From the UDF, we call the score method that initializes and runs the sentiment model. I've built this helper into a Java file, which along with the model object and license are added as dependencies that Snowpark will send to Snowflake for execution. As a developer, this is all programming that I'm familiar with. We can now call our get sentiment function on the transcripts column of the DataFrame and right back the results of the score transcripts to a new target table. Let's run this code and switch over to Snowflake to see the score data and also all the work that Snowpark has done for us on the back end. If I do a select star from scored logs, we can see the sentiment score of each call right alongside the transcript. With Snowpark all the logic in my program is pushed down into Snowflake. I can see in the query history that Snowpark has created a temporary Java function to host the pre trained H20 model, and that the model is running right in my Snowflake warehouse. Snowpark has allowed us to do something completely new in Snowflake. Let's recap what we saw. With Snowpark, Insureco was able to use their preferred programming language, Scala and use the familiar DataFrame constructs to score data using a machine learning model. With support for Java UDFs, they were able to run a train model natively within Snowflake. And finally, we saw how Snowpark executed computationally intensive data science workloads right within Snowflake. This simplifies Insureco's data pipeline architecture, as it reduces the number of additional systems they have to manage. We hope that extensibility with Scala, Java and Snowpark will enable our users to work with Snowflake in their preferred way while keeping the architecture simple. We are very excited to see how you use Snowpark to extend your data pipelines. Thank you for watching and with that back to you, Christian. >> Thank you Sri. You saw how Sri could utilize Snowpark to efficiently perform advanced sentiment analysis. But of course, if this use case was important to your business, you don't want to fully automate this pipeline and analysis. Imagine being able to do all of the following in Snowflake, your pipeline could start far upstream of what you saw in the demo. By storing your actual customer care call recordings in Snowflake, you may notice that this is new for Snowflake. We'll come back to the idea of storing unstructured data in Snowflake at the end of my talk today. Once you have the data in Snowflake, you can use our streams and past capabilities to call an external function to transcribe these files. To simplify this flow even further, we plan to introduce a serverless execution model for tasks where Snowflake can automatically size and manage resources for you. After this step, you can use the same serverless task to execute sentiment scoring of your transcript as shown in the demo with incremental processing as each transcript is created. Finally, you can surface the sentiment score either via snow side, or through any tool you use to share insights throughout your organization. In this example, you see data being transformed from a raw asset into a higher level of information that can drive business action, all fully automated all in Snowflake. Turning back to Insureco, you know how important data governance is for any major enterprise but particularly for one in this industry. Insurance companies manage highly sensitive data about their customers, and have some of the strictest requirements for storing and tracking such data, as well as managing and governing it. At Snowflake, we think about governance as the ability to know your data, manage your data and collaborate with confidence. As you saw in our first demo, the Data Cloud enables seamless collaboration, control and access to data via the Snowflake data marketplace. And companies may set up their own data exchanges to create similar collaboration and control across their ecosystems. In future releases, we expect to deliver enhancements that create more visibility into who has access to what data and provide usage information of that data. Today, we are announcing a new capability to help Snowflake users better know and organize your data. This is our new tagging framework. Tagging in Snowflake will allow user defined metadata to be attached to a variety of objects. We built a broad and robust framework with powerful implications. Think of the ability to annotate warehouses with cost center information for tracking or think of annotating tables and columns with sensitivity classifications. Our tagging capability will enable the creation of companies specific business annotations for objects in Snowflakes platform. Another key aspect of data governance in Snowflake is our policy based framework where you specify what you want to be true about your data, and Snowflake enforces those policies. We announced one such policy earlier this year, our dynamic data masking capability, which is now available in public preview. Today, we are announcing a great complimentary a policy to achieve row level security to see how role level security can enhance InsureCo's ability to govern and secure data. I'll hand it over to Artin for a demo. >> Hello, I'm Martin Avanes, Director of Product Management for Snowflake. As Christian has already mentioned, the rise of the Data Cloud greatly accelerates the ability to access and share diverse data leading to greater data collaboration across teams and organizations. Controlling data access with ease and ensuring compliance at the same time is top of mind for users. Today, I'm thrilled to announce our new row access policies that will allow users to define various rules for accessing data in the Data Cloud. Let's check back in with Insureco to see some of these in action and highlight how those work with other existing policies one can define in Snowflake. Because Insureco is a multinational company, it has to take extra measures to ensure data across geographic boundaries is protected to meet a wide range of compliance requirements. The Insureco team has been asked to segment what data sales team members have access to based on where they are regionally. In order to make this possible, they will use Snowflakes row access policies to implement row level security. We are going to apply policies for three Insureco's sales team members with different roles. Alice, an executive must be able to view sales data from both North America and Europe. Alex in North America sales manager will be limited to access sales data from North America only. And Jordan, a Europe sales manager will be limited to access sales data from Europe only. As a first step, the security administrator needs to create a lookup table that will be used to determine which data is accessible based on each role. As you can see, the lookup table has the row and their associated region, both of which will be used to apply policies that we will now create. Row access policies are implemented using standard SQL syntax to make it easy for administrators to create policies like the one our administrators looking to implement. And similar to masking policies, row access policies are leveraging our flexible and expressive policy language. In this demo, our admin users to create a row access policy that uses the row and region of a user to determine what row level data they have access to when queries are executed. When users queries are executed against the table protected by such a row access policy, Snowflakes query engine will dynamically generate and apply the corresponding predicate to filter out rows the user is not supposed to see. With the policy now created, let's log in as our Sales Users and see if it worked. Recall that as a sales executive, Alice should have the ability to see all rows from North America and Europe. Sure enough, when she runs her query, she can see all rows so we know the policy is working for her. You may also have noticed that some columns are showing masked data. That's because our administrator's also using our previously announced data masking capabilities to protect these data attributes for everyone in sales. When we look at our other users, we should notice that the same columns are also masked for them. As you see, you can easily combine masking and row access policies on the same data sets. Now let's look at Alex, our North American sales manager. Alex runs to st Korea's Alice, row access policies leverage the lookup table to dynamically generate the corresponding predicates for this query. The result is we see that only the data for North America is visible. Notice too that the same columns are still masked. Finally, let's try Jordan, our European sales manager. Jordan runs the query and the result is only the data for Europe with the same columns also masked. And you reintroduced masking policies, today you saw row access policies in action. And similar to our masking policies, row access policies in Snowflake will be accepted Hands of capability integrated seamlessly across all of Snowflake everywhere you expect it to work it does. If you're accessing data stored in external tables, semi structured JSON data, or building data pipelines via streams or plan to leverage Snowflakes data sharing functionality, you will be able to implement complex row access policies for all these diverse use cases and workloads within Snowflake. And with Snowflakes unique replication feature, you can instantly apply these new policies consistently to all of your Snowflake accounts, ensuring governance across regions and even across different clouds. In the future, we plan to demonstrate how to combine our new tagging capabilities with Snowflakes policies, allowing advanced audit and enforcing those policies with ease. And with that, let's pass it back over to Christian. >> Thank you Artin. We look forward to making this new tagging and row level security capabilities available in private preview in the coming months. One last note on the broad area of data governance. A big aspect of the Data Cloud is the mobilization of data to be used across organizations. At the same time, privacy is an important consideration to ensure the protection of sensitive, personal or potentially identifying information. We're working on a set of product capabilities to simplify compliance with privacy related regulatory requirements, and simplify the process of collaborating with data while preserving privacy. Earlier this year, Snowflake acquired a company called Crypto Numerix to accelerate our efforts on this front, including the identification and anonymization of sensitive data. We look forward to sharing more details in the future. We've just shown you three demos of new and exciting ways to use Snowflake. However, I want to also remind you that our commitment to the core platform has never been greater. As you move workloads on to Snowflake, we know you expect exceptional price performance and continued delivery of new capabilities that benefit every workload. On price performance, we continue to drive performance improvements throughout the platform. Let me give you an example comparing an identical set of customers submitted queries that ran both in August of 2019, and August of 2020. If I look at the set of queries that took more than one second to compile 72% of those improved by at least 50%. When we make these improvements, execution time goes down. And by implication, the required compute time is also reduced. Based on our pricing model to charge for what you use, performance improvements not only deliver faster insights, but also translate into cost savings for you. In addition, we have two new major announcements on performance to share today. First, we announced our search optimization service during our June event. This service currently in public preview can be enabled on a table by table basis, and is able to dramatically accelerate lookup queries on any column, particularly those not used as clustering columns. We initially support equality comparisons only, and today we're announcing expanded support for searches in values, such as pattern matching within strings. This will unlock a number of additional use cases such as analytics on logs data for performance or security purposes. This expanded support is currently being validated by a few customers in private preview, and will be broadly available in the future. Second, I'd like to introduce a new service that will be in private preview in a future release. The query acceleration service. This new feature will automatically identify and scale out parts of a query that could benefit from additional resources and parallelization. This means that you will be able to realize dramatic improvements in performance. This is especially impactful for data science and other scan intensive workloads. Using this feature is pretty simple. You define a maximum amount of additional resources that can be recruited by a warehouse for acceleration, and the service decides when it would be beneficial to use them. Given enough resources, a query over a massive data set can see orders of magnitude performance improvement compared to the same query without acceleration enabled. In our own usage of Snowflake, we saw a common query go 15 times faster without changing the warehouse size. All of these performance enhancements are extremely exciting, and you will see continued improvements in the future. We love to innovate and continuously raise the bar on what's possible. More important, we love seeing our customers adopt and benefit from our new capabilities. In June, we announced a number of previews, and we continue to roll those features out and see tremendous adoption, even before reaching general availability. Two have those announcements were the introduction of our geospatial support and policies for dynamic data masking. Both of these features are currently in use by hundreds of customers. The number of tables using our new geography data type recently crossed the hundred thousand mark, and the number of columns with masking policies also recently crossed the same hundred thousand mark. This momentum and level of adoption since our announcements in June is phenomenal. I have one last announcement to highlight today. In 2014, Snowflake transformed the world of data management and analytics by providing a single platform with first class support for both structured and semi structured data. Today, we are announcing that Snowflake will be adding support for unstructured data on that same platform. Think of the abilities of Snowflake used to store access and share files. As an example, would you like to leverage the power of SQL to reason through a set of image files. We have a few customers as early adopters and we'll provide additional details in the future. With this, you will be able to leverage Snowflake to mobilize all your data in the Data Cloud. Our customers rely on Snowflake as the data platform for every part of their business. However, the vision and potential of Snowflake is actually much bigger than the four walls of any organization. Snowflake has created a Data Cloud a data connected network with a vision where any Snowflake customer can leverage and mobilize the world's data. Whether it's data sets, or data services from traditional data providers for SaaS vendors, our marketplace creates opportunities for you and raises the bar in terms of what is possible. As examples, you can unify data across your supply chain to accelerate your time and quality to market. You can build entirely new revenue streams, or collaborate with a consortium on data for good. The possibilities are endless. Every company has the opportunity to gain richer insights, build greater products and deliver better services by reaching beyond the data that he owns. Our vision is to enable every company to leverage the world's data through seamless and governing access. Snowflake is your window into this data network into this broader opportunity. Welcome to the Data Cloud. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of A New Era In Database Management. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation with Nutanix. We're talking about A New Era In Database Management. To help us dig into it, first of all, I have the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nutanix Era Databases and Business Critical Applications, that is Bala Kuchibhotla. And one of our other CUBE alongs, Monica Kumar. Who's an SVP also with Nutanix. Bala, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you so... >> Great to be here. All right, so first of all, Bala a new Era. We, have a little bit of a punj. You've got me with some punjs there. Of course we know that the database for Nutanix solution is Era. So, we always like to bring out the news first. Why don't you tell us, what does this mean? What is Nutanix announcing today? >> Awesome. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, so today's a very big day for us. I'm super excited to inform all of us and our audience that we are announcing the Eratory dot two GA bits for customers to enjoy it. Some customers can download and start playing with it. So what's new with Nutanix Eratory dot two? As you knows 1.0 is a single cluster solution meaning the customers have to have a Nutanix cluster and then have around the same cluster to enjoy the databases. But with Eratory dot two, it becomes multi-cluster solution. It's not just a multi-cluster solution, but customers can enjoy database across clusters, That means that they can have their Always On Availability Groups SQL servers, their Postgres servers across Nutanix clusters. That means that they can spread across Azure Availability Zones. Now, the most interesting point of this is, it's not just across clusters, customers can place these clusters in the cloud. That is AWS. You can have Nutanix cluster in the AWS cluster and then the primary production clusters maybe on the Nutanix and primary enterprise cloud kind of stuff, that's number one. Number two, we have extended our data management capabilities, data management platform capabilities, and what we call them as global time mission. Global time mission with a data access management. Like racing river, that you need to harness the racing river by constructing a dam and then harness it for multipurpose either irrigation projects or hydroelectric project kind of stuff. You need to kind of do the similar things for your data in company, enterprise company. You need to make sure that the right persons get the right amount of data, so that you don't kind of give all production data to everyone in the company. At the same time, they also need the accessible, with one click they can get the database, the data they want. So that's the data access management. Imagine a QA person only gets the sanitized snapshots or sanitize database backups for them to create the copies. And then we are extending our database engine portfolios too to introduce SAP HANA to the thing. As you know, that we support Oracle today, Postgres, MalSQL, Mariadb SQL server. I'm excited to inform that we are introducing SAP HANA. Our customers can do one click sandbox creation into an environment for SAP HANA predown intense platform. And lastly, I'm super excited to inform that we are becoming a Postgres vendor. We are willing to give 24 by seven, 365 day support but Postgres database engine, that's kind of a provision through Nutanix setup platform. So this way the customers can enjoy the engine, platform, service all together in one single shot with a single 180 company that they can call and get the support they want. I'm super duper excited that this is going to make the customers a truly multicloud multi cluster data management platform. Thank you. >> Yeah. And I'll just add to that too. It's fantastic that we are now offering this new capability. I just want to kind of remind our audience that Nutanix for many years has been providing the foundation the infrastructure software, where you can run all these multiple workloads including databases today. And what we're doing with Era is fantastic because now they are giving our customers the ability to take that database that they run on top of Nutanix to provide that as a service now. So now are talking to a whole different organization here. It's database administrations, it's administrators, it's teams that run databases, it teams that care about data and providing access to data and organizations. >> Well, first of all, congratulations, I've taught for a couple of years to the teams at Nutanix especially some of the people working on PostgreSQL really exciting stuff and you've both seen really the unlocking of database. It used to be ,we talked about, I have one database it's kind of the one that everything runs on. Now, customers they have more databases. You talked about that flexibility is then, where we run it. We'd love to hear, maybe Monica we start with you. You talk about the customers, what does this really mean for them? Because one of our most mission critical applications we talk about, we're not just throwing our databases or what. I don't wake up in the morning and say, Oh let me move it to this cloud and put it in this data center. This needs to be reliable. I need to have access to the data. I need to be able to work with it. So, what does this really mean? And what does it unlock for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, I love to talk about this topic. I mean, if you think about databases, they are means to an end. And in this case, the end is being able to mine insights from the data and then make meaningful decisions based on that. So when we talk to customers, it's really clear that data has not become one of the most valuable assets that an organization owns. Well, of course, in addition to the employees that are part of the organization and our customers. Data is one of the most important assets. But most organizations, the challenges they face is a lot of data gets collected. And in fact, we've heard numbers thrown around for many years like, almost 80% of world's data has been created in the last like three or four years. And data is doubling every two years in terms of volume. Well guess what? Data gets collected. It sits there and organizations are struggling to get access to it with the right performance, the right security and regulation compliance, the reliability, availability, by persona, developers need certain access, analysts needs different access line of businesses need different access. So what we see is organizations are struggling in getting access to data at the right time by the right person on the team and when they need it. And I think that's where database as a service is critical. It's not just about having the database software which is of course important but how you know not make that service available to your stakeholders, to developers to lines of business within the SLAs that they demand. So is it instantly? How quickly can you make it available? How quickly can you use have access to data and do something meaningful with it? And mind the insights for smarter business? And then the one thing I'd like to add is that's where IT and business really come together. That's the glue. If you think about it today, what is the blue between an IT Organization and a business organization? It's the data. And that's where they're really coming together to say how can we together deliver the right service? So you, the business owner can deliver the right outcome for our business. >> That's very true. Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there. What we're trying to do is we are trying to bring the cloud experience, the RDS-like experience to the enterprise cloud and then hybrid cloud. So the customers will now have a choice of cloud. They don't need to be locked in a particular cloud, at the same time enjoy the true cloud utility experience. We help customers create clouds, database clouds either by themselves if that's big enough to manage the cloud themselves or they can partner with a GSIs like Wipro, WorkHCL and then create a completely managed database service kind of stuff. So, this brings this cloud neutrality, portability for customers and give them the choice and their terms, Stu. >> Well Bala, absolutely we've seen a huge growth in managed services as you've said, maybe bring us inside a little bit. What is free up customers? What we've said for so long that back when HCI first started, it was some of the storage administrators might bristle because you were taking things away from them. It was like, no, we're going to free you up to do other things that as Monica said, deliver more business value not mapping LUNs and doing that. How about from the DBA standpoint? What are some of those repetitive, undifferentiated heavy lifting that we're going to take away from them so that they can focus on the business value. >> Yep. Thank you Stu. So think about this. We all do copy paste operations in laptops. Something of that sort happens in data center at a much larger scale. Meaning that the same kind of copy paste operation happens to databases and petabytes and terabytes of scale. Hundreds of petabytes. It has become the most dreaded complex, long running error prone operation. Why should it be that way? Why should the DBS spend all this mundane tasks and then get busy for every cloning operation? It's a two day job for me, every backup job. It's like a hobby job for provisioning takes like three days. We can take this undifferentiated heavy lifting by this and then let the DBS focus on designing the cloud for them. Looking for the database tuning, design data modeling, ML aspects of the data kind of stuff. So we are freeing up the database Ops people, in a way that they can design the database cloud, and make sure that they are energy focused on high valid things and more towards the business center kind of stuff. >> Yeah. And you know automation is really important. You were talking about is automating mundane grunt work. Like IT spends 80% of its time in maintaining systems. So then where is the time for innovation. So if we can automate stuff that's repetitive, stuff that the machine can do, the software can do, why not? And I think that's what our database as a service often does. And I would add this, the big thing our database as a service does really is provide IT organizations and DV organizations a way to manage heterogeneous databases too. It's not like, here's my environment for Postgres. Here's my environment for my SQL. Here's my environment for Oracle. Here's my environment for SQL server. Now with a single offering, a single tool you can manage your heterogeneous environment across different clouds. On premises cloud, or in a public cloud environment. So I think that's the beauty we are talking about with Nutanix's Era. Is a truly, truly gives organizations that single environment to manage heterogeneous databases, apply the same automation and the ease of management across all these different environments. >> Yeah. I'll just add one comment to that. A true managed PaaS obviously customers in like a single shop go to public cloud, just click through and then they get the database and point. And then if someone is managing the database for them. But if you look at the enterprise data centers, they need to bring that enterprise GalNets and structure to these databases. It's not like anyone can do anything to any or these databases. So we are kind of getting the best of both, the needed enterprise GalNets by these enterprise people at the same time bringing the convenience for the application teams and developers they want to consume these databases like utility. So bringing the cloud experience, bringing the enterprise GalNets. At same time, I'm super confident we can cut down the cost. So that is what Nutanix Era is all about across all the clouds, including the enterprise cloud. >> Well, Bala being simpler and being less expensive are one of the original promises of the cloud that don't necessarily always come out there. So, that's super important. One of the other things, you talk about these hybrid environments. It's not just studied, in the public cloud want to understand these environments, if I'm in the public cloud, can I still leverage some of the services that are in the public cloud? So, if I want to run some analytics, if I want to use some of the phenomenal services that are coming out every day. Is that something that can be done in this environment? >> Yeah, beautiful. Thank you Stu. So we are seeing customers who two categories. There is a public cloud customer, completely born in public cloud cloud, native services. They realize that for every database that maintaining five or seven different copies and the management of these copies is prohibited just because every copy is a faulty copy in the public cloud. Meaning you take a backup snapshot and restore it. Your meter like New York taxi, it starts with running for your EBS   and that you are looking at it kind of stuff. So they can leverage Nutanix clusters and then have a highly efficient cloning capability so that they can cut down some of these costs for these secondary environments that I talk about. What we call is copy data management, that's one kind of use case. The other kind of customers that we are seeing who's cloud is a phenomenon. There's no way that people have to move to cloud. That's the something at a C level mandate that happens. These customers are enjoying their database experience on our enterprise cloud. But when they try to go to these big hyperscalers, they are seeing the disconnect that they're not able to enjoy some of the things that they are seeing on the enterprise cloud with us. So this transition, they are talking to us. Can you get this kind of functionality with Nutanix platform onto some of these big hyperscalers? So there are kind of customers moving both sides, some customers that are public cloud they're time to enjoy our facilities other than copy data management and Nutanix. Customers that are on-prem but they have a mandate to good public cloud ,with our hybrid cloud strategy. They get to enjoy the same kind of convenience that they are seeing it on enterprise and bringing the same kind of governance that they used to do it. so that maybe see customers. Yeah. >> Yeah. Monica, I want to go back to something you talked about customers dealing with that heterogeneous environment that they have reminds me of a lot of the themes that we talked about at nutanix.next because customers have they have multiple clouds they're using, requires different skillsets, different tooling. It's that simplicity layer that Nutanix has been working to deliver since day one. What are you from your customers? How are they doing with this? And especially in the database world. What are some of those challenges that they're really facing that we're looking to help solve with the solution today. >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, what customers at least in our experience, what they want or what they're looking for is this modern cloud platform that can really work across multiple cloud environments. Cause people don't want to change running, let's say an Oracle database you're on-prem on a certain stack and then using a whole different stack to run Oracle database in the cloud. What they want is the same exact foundation. So be so they can be, for sure have the right performance. Availability, reliability, the applications don't have to be rewritten on top of Oracle database. They want to preserve all of that, but they want the flexibility to be able to run that cloud platform wherever they choose to. So that's one. So that's choosing the right and modernizing and choosing the right cloud platform is definitely very important to our customers, but you nailed it on the head Stu. It's been about how do you manage it? How do you operate it on a daily basis? And that's where our customers are struggling with multiple types of tools out there, custom tool for every single environment. And that's what they don't want. They want to be able to manage, simply across multiple environments using the same tools and skillsets. And again, and I'm going to beat the same drum, but that's when Nutanix shines. That's a design principle is. It's the exact same technology foundation that you provide to customers to run any applications. In this case it happens to be databases. Exact same foundation you can use to run databases on-prem in the cloud. And then on top of that using Era boom! Simple management, simple operations, simple provisioning simple copy data management, simple patching, all of that becomes easy using just a single framework to manage and operate. And I will tell you this, when we talk to customers, what is it that DBS and database teams are struggling with? They're struggling with SLS and performance on scalability, that's one, number two they're struggling with keeping it up and running and fulfilling the demands of the stakeholders because they cannot keep up with how many databases they need to keep provisioning and patching and updating. So at Nutanix now we are actually solving both those problems with the platform. We are solving the problem of a very specific SLA that we can deliver in any cloud. And with Era, you're solving the issue of that operational complexity. We're making it really easy. So again, IT stakeholders DBS can fulfill the demands of the business stakeholders and really help them monetize the data. >> Yeah. I'll just add on with one concrete examples too. Like we have a big financial customer, they want to run Postgres. They are looking at the public cloud. Can we do a manage services kind of stuff, but you look at this, that the cost difference between a Postgres and your company infrastructure versus managed services almost like $3X to $4X dollars. Now, with Nutanix platform and Era, we were able to show that they can do at much reduced cost, manage their best service experience including their DBA cost are including the cloud administration cost. Like we added the infrastructure picture. We added the people who are going to manage the cloud, internal cloud and then intern experience being, plus plus of what they can see to public cloud. That's what makes the big difference. And this is what data sovereignty, data control, compliance and infrastructure governance, all these things coupled with cloud experiences, what customers really see the value of Era and the enterprise cloud and with an extension to the public cloud, with our hybrid cloud strategy. if they want to move this workload to public cloud they can do it. So, today with AWS clusters and tomorrow with our Azure clusters. So that gives them that kind of insurance not getting locked in by a big hyperscaler, but at same time enjoy the cloud experience. That's what big customers are looking for. >> Alright Bala, all the things you laid out here, what's the availability of Era rotically dot two? >> Era rotically dot two is actually available today. The customers can enjoy download the bits. We already have bunches of beta customers who are trying it out with the recall big telco companies are financial companies, and even big companies that manage big pensions kind of stuff. Let's talk about that kind of stuff. People are looking to us. In fact, there are customers who are looking for, when is this available for Azure cluster so that we can move some of our workloads to and manage the databases in Azure classes. So it is available and I'm looking forward to great feedback from our customers. And I'm hoping that it will solve some of their major critical problems. And in the process they get the best of Nutanix. >> Monica, last question I have for you. This doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same traditional infrastructure go to market for a solution like this. If I think back to, people think of HCI it was like, Oh! well, it was kind of a new box. We know Nutanix is a software company. More of what you do today is subscription based. So, maybe if you could talk a little bit to just how Nutanix goes to market with a solution like this. >> Yeah. And you know what, maybe people don't realize it but I'm hoping a lot of people do that. Nutanix is not just an infrastructure company anymore. In the last many years we've developed a full cloud platform in not only do we offer the infrastructure services with hyperconverged infrastructure which is now really the foundation. It's the hybrid cloud infrastructure. As you know, Stu, we talked to you a month ago and we talked about the evolution of XCI to really becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. But in addition to that, we also offer other data center services on storage DR Networking. We also offer DevOps services with application provisioning automation, application orchestration and then of course, database services that we talking about today and we offer desktop services. So Nutanix has really evolved in the last few years to a complete cloud platform really focusing on the application and workloads that run on top of the infrastructure stack. So not just the infrastructure layer but how can we be the best platform to run your databases? Your end is the computing workloads, your analytics applications your enterprise applications, cloud native applications. So that's what this is. And databases is one of our most successful workloads that's that runs a Nutanix very well because of the way the infrastructure software is architected. Because it's really great to scale high performance because again our superior architecture. And now with Era, it's a tool, it's all in one. Now it's also about really simplifying the management of databases and delivering them speedily and with agility to drive innovation in the organizations. >> Yep. Thank you Monica. Thank you. I I'll just add a couple of lines of comments into that. DTM for databases as erotically dots two, is going to be a challenge. And historically we are seen as an infrastructure company but the beauty of databases is so and to send to the infrastructure, the storage. So the language slightly becomes easy. And in fact, this holistic way of looking at solving the problem at the solution level rather than infrastructure helps us to go to a different kind of buyer, different kinds of decision maker, and we are learning. And I can tell you confidently the kind of progress that we have seen for in one enough year, the kind of customers that we are winning. And we are proving that we can bring a big difference to them. Though there is a challenge of DTM speaking the language of database, but the sheer nature of cloud platform the way they are a hundred hyperscale work. That's the kind of language that we take. You can run your solution. And here is how you can cut down your database backup time from hours to less than minute. Here's how you can cut down your patching from 16 hours to less than one hour. It is how you can cut down your provisioning time from multiple weeks to let them like matter of minutes. That holistic way of approaching it coupled with the power of the platform, really making the big difference for us. And I usually tell every time I meet, can you give us an opportunity to cut down your database cost, the PC vote, total cost of operations by close to 50%? That gets them excited that lets then move lean in and say, how do you plan to do it? And then we go about how do we do it? And we do a deep dive and PC people and all of it. So I'm excited. I think this is going to be a big play for Nutanix. We're going to make big difference. >> Absolutely well, Bala, congratulations to the team. Monica, both of you thank you so much for joining, really excited for all the announcements. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you >> Stay with us. We're going to dig in a little bit more with one more interview for this product launch of the New Era and Database Management from Nutanix. I'm Stu Minimam as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (cool music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Summit 2020. It's virtual online, and we're the Cube virtual here in our Palo Alto studios with our covert 19 crew. We're in place here, getting all the content remotely and also digitally. We're gonna bring that in the virtual. Got a great guest here as part of the program at AWS, but more importantly, part of the community doing its part both on building applications but also around covert 19 Dean, great CEO of Skylab APS ink. And they got an app that's being featured called Do your Part Hashtag Do your part, Dean, Thanks for spending the time to come in and talk with me. >>Excited to be here. >>You got to love this virtual ization going on, and I think you know the sad news around what's going on is really an indication of a New World order that we're seeing a new expectation of virtual izing the world that we live in. Obviously, we've been doing content at events. Now it's virtual or digital, but Still, people are online there. They're converging their lives with digital technologies. You guys are in that business. You have an app that's pretty compelling and relevant for the covert. 19. Take a minute to tell us about yourself and Skylab Appsync and do it. Do your part. Uh huh. >>Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having us on first fall. Well, what we do is kind of acts as we launch rapid response platforms. That entire platform in about a week's worth. The times If you have your on Facebook or INSTAGRAM, we'll be doing for causes tribes organizations or some sort of situation that requires there was something to get it quickly. Where you can shave were warning and track behaviors of that community to hit a certain goal. So since we've been doing this for years with all kinds of communities, we code it. We started hearing all these things on the news about companies coming forward and making face faster hand sanitizers, which were great products. But there's nothing out there that was tracking and helping the people that would be in quarantine. Hi, my little heroes inside all of us. So we knew that every night on the news. We were being told to stay home, but how do we track that stuff? So we just had the ability to do it, and we stepped forward and said Amazon aws But you help us and they said, Absolutely give you credits on servers will handle the server stuff. You have a platform and look for war. All these people at home kids and parents >>talk about the app itself. You guys are doing your part and flattening the curve. Tracing has become a topic that they were digitally connected. Why not use the technology for good? You guys have an effort to flatten the curve and track, and people are opting in its not like its surveillance government surveillance. This is actually an opt in. Do your part, you mentioned heroes. It's a hero journey, if you will. But people are doing Their part here is that we talk about the app. What's it's what's it all about? >>So when you go in that it's a one stop shop to learn about leaks to the CDC information. First of all, you want to know making sure you have real news getting quality information, so resource for education. But the unique thing about it is there's tons of those out there is that you have all the action's listed where you can now. Why should you? Why in your hands reaching out to here saying Thank you for spending time with pets, unplugging all the things that just not psychological but actually coded actions that are saving lives? People voluntarily going there report that they're doing that by clicking on it instantly shows up on the wall like Instagram feed, but it's private, and everyone now can see what people are doing. Their high fiving change each other on their badges, and major companies are jumping on board one wiser or a all kinds of companies outside of Amazon. But only when people are doing these things. We'd love the highlight report that these actions state. >>It's really also, I think it's well, first, it's awesome that you're doing in your agile enough with AWS. I want to get to that in a second. But I think the trend with code 19 that I'd like to get your thoughts on this. I think this has a lot of head room is not so much the feel good nature of it that I'm doing my part. But you're starting to see the user experience. People are tired, tired of sheltering in place. We're pushing now 23 months now into this and is gonna go on for more and more. Universities want to open. People want open up their jobs, and it's almost a new norm developing where the tribes, if you will, or groups of people. My daughter lives in San Francisco. She's got some roommates. They're sheltering in place. They're watching their actions. They also want to socialize. So it's almost like a badge collected license to get into a bar. It's like, Hey, I'm doing my part So it's It's almost a signaling kind of tribal thing that you're seeing. And I think this might be part of a future that we're gonna live in, because if I'm aware of my responsibilities and I'm doing my part, I want to communicate with people who are doing their part, and there >>are people who >>aren't doing their part by the way, that's well documented. And then there's a trust element in all this. >>Bring this >>together for us. What does this all means? That tribalism communalism, norms or developing interactions, and expectations are emerging. New roles and new responsibilities are emerging from this. Your thoughts >>well, you're hitting me on the head. Everything's troubling. That's what Sky was focused around. Is, for example, well, we started to help the cheerleading industry because it was a bunch of young athletes from ages 6 to 22. And we have over 40,000 kids, for example, that are tracking behaviors and wannabe recognized for doing the things that really matter in life, not just taking a selfie be rewarded for >>being cheat. >>So how do you compete with all the concepts of being famous for the wrong reasons? So, for example, let's cheer up. We work people for being better athletes, taking the actions that advanced. They're still being a better human beings doing their homework, getting Obama complement, doing the dishes and then making the world a better place. We were already doing that. Now I'm making the world a better place. Is in addition to stopping a bully. Reaching out don't mean girl. Now we have the corporate actions of making the world a better place. Track it, and what was shocking is they can now show that we've got kids that have had 200 days streaks over the last year, and they were addicted to the positive things, not just being cute anymore, also perfectly for covert actions in there. And people are just loving it. So we've got Bruce. Whether navy seals of whether it's with cheer or whether it's with any type of affinity group is out there. >>It's interesting because, you know, people love to see the lights on their selfies on their posts. This >>is a >>new kind of social signaling, but it's got again social responsibility. Kind of built in with the Gamification is in the right way. That's what you're saying. Is that what's happening? >>Yes, and you're sitting on a white paper they wrote recently. It's called Beyond. Gamification is via rest value reinforcement systems, and it's highly. It's much more addictive and sustained engaging for long term, because Gamification is what's done to you without really knowing via Rest is, you are the organization grabbing the steering wheel of deciding what other behaviors that you should be reinforcing. So the RS is the next evolution of Gamification. >>I think that's a huge point. I'd love to do a follow up segment on that because I think this is exactly what I call the Facebook blowback, which is the users, the product that's been kind of the Silicon Valley kind of vibe, and that's really true. Facebook has been, you know, not exploiting that. Using the free service in exchange for leveraging you and being game. Gamification applied to people here. The script is flipped. The users, they're telegraphing their data into a system that's rewarding them for positive things. And it could be on anything >>well and reward them in. Our system is when you're gonna grow a tribe. If you want to take something and grow bigger, you have to have the basics. Talk to me. Follow me. Here's all the resources of channels. Here's the behaviors I want you to do consistently, and then maybe here's some certification course you go. So it's like five little absent, one that are geared for growing the community because learning something I know is not proving that I am and I am is a huge gap between just know, and so everyone was teaching out there Today needs to start backing up their incredible keynotes with an incredible continuity program to create sustained trip transparent change. And you mentioned the GDP. Our rules the world has written, has wised up, realized. I don't mind telling me what I'm doing is long is I get to see what I'm doing. I'm in volunteering. Data don't go straight behind my back when I've been a part of that. Really, Where? On whether I'm general social media, they feel like they're part of the track and will mission. That's totally different than going to a specific apt to tell you when I do. >>This is innovation. I think this is a great, innovative trend. I think this is going to be around much longer on and have a lot, a lot, a lot of headroom to it, because I mean, every wants to be an influencer and have influence. But what you're getting at is interesting. It's reputation, it's who you are, and your actions are contributing to that. You can control that. That's a really great trend. Awesome stuff, great stuff. >>Well, you said very key work. We call them. Everyone likes to be influencers, but they don't feel they can compete with the beautiful, super powerful influencers on social media, where you've got 10 million followers or a 1,000,000 you have to just be the ultimate look, the ultimate fan. People are now realizing they could be micro influencers, and they're attitude. Will it? As long as you recognize us the same way, we want you to know that we're not just customer, not just a fan. I'm a micro influencers long. You'll recognize me and I'll tear the door down. >>Well, you know what? That's something that's near and dear to our hearts. After the Cube, we have a Cube alumni network. We don't try to monetize it. It's just really smart people we share content with. And no network is too small in our mind. We think that is ultimately where it's gonna go. Really appreciate that with Covert 19 as it evolves, you guys had this rapid app. Amazon's helping out. I'll see they're involved in giving you some credits. What's going on with Amazon? What's the relationship? Free credits? Are you an Amazon customer using Amazon Cloud? What's your relationship with AWS? >>Well, first, we wouldn't be able to do what we do about them. So all of our APs for communities are powered by Amazon in AWS. So in addition to that by the given its Cremins, they didn't just want to do your partner. They have all of the other existing communities rapidly deploy these actions, like the cheerleading young athletes like the ones for personal development. So we suddenly were able to track over a 1,000,000 actions taken in people's households of people have shown funny moments and give these with what they're doing is basically making off color. So Amazon really stepped up and help them not just the general public, but on the existing ones, with their leveraging technology that we run off of, as well as providing credits for all of those people. >>Well, congratulations for being featured on the Amazon Summit Virtual Appliances Cube online here is, well, virtual great stuff. Love to follow the progress quickly get a plug in for the company where you guys are at and share the length of that white paper. I think that's something that's worth promoting the white paper you mentioned. >>So the people get all this information sky dot world, so that's kind of the world that we're basically a platform that people have access to this white label. So you have a community organization that you want to be able to train, track to reward people, own your data, and we allow you own a copy of your of your source code. So we truly are empowered people. If you have a tribe, man, right, get your world. You know, this is where the science of engagement business we like to help you get that sustaining and, you know, what >>are you fast forward of? What's the pricing model? >>Yeah, so we started to set up a VM on a monthly fee unless they end up buying out the code and then typically just face to maintain it. So we were I was a customer, was someone was a young person who had developed a large tribe with decent sized multiple countries, and they realized I sold my company. All my people were on Facebook and Instagram, so I was only valued a certain value. Had I had all that community on a platform that I owned. Oh my gosh, I was like a younger rock star realized >>that you're rolling out the rock star and >>again having social >>graph and having that interest graph really creates a lot of value and congratulations. And I >>think you >>look forward to seeing the success. And thanks for doing your part. Literally, Figuratively with the march, check it out online bringing social responsibility and Gamification in the hands of the users where they can control it. The reputation and thank you for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching this Cube. Virtual covering AWS Summit Online. Their virtual event as we are in our quarantine crew studio here in Palo Alto doing all the remote interviews. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.