>>The cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Good morning. Live from the MGM Grand. It's the cube at Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2022. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante, day two, Dave of our coverage, or last live day of the year, which I can't believe, lots of good news coming out from Palo Alto Networks. We're gonna sit down with its Chief product officer next and dissect all of that. >>Yeah. You know, oftentimes in, in events like this, day two is product day. And look, it's all about products and sales. Yeah, I mean those, that's the, the, the golden rule. Get the product right, get the sales right, and everything else will take care of itself. So let's talk product. >>Yeah, let's talk product. Lee Claridge joins us, the Chief Product Officer at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome Lee. Great to have >>You. Thank you so much. >>So we didn't get to see your keynote yesterday, but we heard one of the things, you know, we've been talking about the threat landscape, the challenges. We had Unit 42, Wendy on yesterday. We had Nash on and near talking about the massive challenges in the threat landscape. But we understand, despite that you are optimistic. I am. Talk about your optimism given the massive challenges that every organization is facing today. >>Look, cybersecurity's hard and often in cybersecurity in the industry, a lot of people get sort of really focused on what the threat actors are doing, why they're successful. We investigate breaches and we think of it, it just starts to feel somewhat overwhelming for a lot of folks. And I just happen to think a little bit differently. I, I look at it and I think it's actually a solvable problem. >>Talk about cyber resilience. How does Palo Alto Networks define that and how does it help customers achieve that? Cuz that's the, that's the holy grail these days. >>Yes. Look, the, the way I think about cyber resilience is basically in two pieces. One, it's all about how do we prevent the threat actors from actually being successful in the first place. Second, we also have to be prepared for what happens if they happen to find a way to get through, and how do we make sure that that happens? The blast radius is, is as narrowly contained as possible. And so the, the way that we approach this is, you know, I, I kind of think in terms of like threes three core principles. Number one, we have to have amazing technology and we have to constantly be, keep keeping up with and ideally ahead of what attackers are doing. It's a big part of my job as the chief product officer, right? Second is we, you know, one of the, the big transformations that's happened is the advent of, of AI and the opportunity, as long as we can do it, a great job of collecting great data, we can drive AI and machine learning models that can start to be used for our advantage as defenders, and then further use that to drive automation. >>So we take the human out of the response as much as possible. What that allows us to do is actually to start using AI and automation to disrupt attackers as it's happening. The third piece then becomes natively integrating these capabilities into a platform. And when we do that, what allows us to do is to make sure that we are consistently delivering cybersecurity everywhere that it needs to happen. That we don't have gaps. Yeah. So great tech AI and automation deliver natively integrated through platforms. This is how we achieve cyber resilience. >>So I like the positivity. In fact, Steven Schmidt, who's now the CSO of, of Amazon, you know, Steven, and it was the CSO at AWS at the time, the first reinforced, he stood up on stage and said, listen, this narrative that's all gloom and doom is not the right approach. We actually are doing a good job and we have the capability. So I was like, yeah, you know, okay. I'm, I'm down with that. Now when I, my question is around the, the portfolio. I, I was looking at, you know, some of your alternatives and options and the website. I mean, you got network security, cloud security, you got sassy, you got capp, you got endpoint, pretty much everything. You got cider security, which you just recently acquired for, you know, this whole shift left stuff, you know, nothing in there on identity yet. That's good. You partner for that, but, so could you describe sort of how you think about the portfolio from a product standpoint? How you continue to evolve it and what's the direction? Yes. >>So the, the, the cybersecurity industry has long had this, I'm gonna call it a major flaw. And the major flaw of the cybersecurity industry has been that every time there is a problem to be solved, there's another 10 or 20 startups that get funded to solve that problem. And so pretty soon what you have is you're, if you're a customer of this is you have 50, a hundred, the, the record is over 400 different cybersecurity products that as a customer you're trying to operationalize. >>It's not a good record to have. >>No, it's not a good record. No. This is, this is the opposite of Yes. Not a good personal best. So the, so the reason I start there in answering your question is the, the way that, so that's one end of the extreme, the other end of the extreme view to say, is there such a thing as a single platform that does everything? No, there's not. That would be nice. That was, that sounds nice. But the reality is that cybersecurity has to be much broader than any one single thing can do. And so the, the way that we approach this is, is three fundamental areas that, that we, Palo Alto Networks are going to be the best at. One is network security within network security. This includes hardware, NextGen, firewalls, software NextGen, firewalls, sassy, all the different security services that tie into that. All of that makes up our network security platforms. >>So everything to do with network security is integrated in that one place. Second is around cloud security. The shift to the cloud is happening is very real. That's where Prisma Cloud takes center stage. C a P is the industry acronym. If if five letters thrown together can be called an acronym. The, so cloud native application protection platform, right? So this is where we bring all of the different cloud security capabilities integrated together, delivered through one platform. And then security, security operations is the third for us. This is Cortex. And this is where we bring together endpoint security, edr, ndr, attack, surface management automation, all of this. And what we had, what we announced earlier this year is x Im, which is a Cortex product for actually integrating all of that together into one SOC transformation platform. So those are the three platforms, and that's how we deliver much, much, much greater levels of native integration of capabilities, but in a logical way where we're not trying to overdo it. >>And cider will fit into two or three >>Into Prisma cloud into the second cloud to two. Yeah. As part of the shift left strategy of how we secure makes sense applications in the cloud >>When you're in customer conversations. You mentioned the record of 400 different product. That's crazy. Nash was saying yesterday between 30 and 50 and we talked with him and near about what's realistic in terms of getting organizations to, to be able to consolidate. I'd love to understand what does cybersecurity transformation look like for the average organization that's running 30 to 50 point >>Solutions? Yeah, look, 30 to 50 is probably, maybe normal. A hundred is not unusual. Obviously 400 is the extreme example. But all of those are, those numbers are too big right now. I think, I think realistic is high. Single digits, low double digits is probably somewhat realistic for most organizations, the most complex organizations that might go a bit above that if we're really doing a good job. That's, that's what I think. Now second, I do really want to point out on, on the product guy. So, so maybe this is just my way of thinking, consolidation is an outcome of having more tightly and natively integrated capabilities. Got you. And the reason I flip that around is if I just went to you and say, Hey, would you like to consolidate? That just means maybe fewer vendors that that helps the procurement person. Yes. You know, have to negotiate with fewer companies. Yeah. Integration is actually a technology statement. It's delivering better outcomes because we've designed multiple capabilities to work together natively ourselves as the developers so that the customer doesn't have to figure out how to do it. It just happens that by, by doing that, the customer gets all this wonderful technical benefit. And then there's this outcome sitting there called, you've just consolidated your complexity. How >>Specialized is the customer? I think a data pipelines, and I think I have a data engineer, have a data scientists, a data analyst, but hyper specialized roles. If, if, let's say I have, you know, 30 or 40, and one of 'em is an SD wan, you know, security product. Yeah. I'm best of breed an SD wan. Okay, great. Palo Alto comes in as you, you pointed out, I'm gonna help you with your procurement side. Are there hyper specialized individuals that are aligned to that? And how that's kind of part A and B, how, assuming that's the case, how does that integration, you know, carry through to the business case? So >>Obviously there are specializations, this is the, and, and cybersecurity is really important. And so there, this is why there had, there's this tendency in the past to head toward, well I have this problem, so who's the best at solving this one problem? And if you only had one problem to solve, you would go find the specialist. The, the, the, the challenge becomes, well, what do you have a hundred problems to solve? I is the right answer, a hundred specialized solutions for your a hundred problems. And what what I think is missing in this approach is, is understanding that almost every problem that needs to be solved is interconnected with other problems to be solved. It's that interconnectedness of the problems where all of a sudden, so, so you mentioned SD wan. Okay, great. I have Estee wan, I need it. Well what are you connecting SD WAN to? >>Well, ideally our view is you would connect SD WAN and branch to the cloud. Well, would you run in the cloud? Well, in our case, we can take our SD wan, connect it to Prisma access, which is our cloud security solution, and we can natively integrate those two things together such that when you use 'em together, way easier. Right? All of a sudden we took what seemed like two separate problems. We said, no, actually these problems are related and we can deliver a solution where those, those things are actually brought together. And that's just one simple example, but you could, you could extend that across a lot of these other areas. And so that's the difference. And that's how the, the, the mindset shift that is happening. And, and I I was gonna say needs to happen, but it's starting to happen. I'm talking to customers where they're telling me this as opposed to me telling them. >>So when you walk around the floor here, there's a visual, it's called a day in the life of a fuel member. And basically what it has, it's got like, I dunno, six or seven different roles or personas, you know, one is management, one is a network engineer, one's a coder, and it gives you an X and an O. And it says, okay, put the X on things that you spend your time doing, put the o on things that you wanna spend your time doing a across all different sort of activities that a SecOps pro would do. There's Xs and O's in every one of 'em. You know, to your point, there's so much overlap going on. This was really difficult to discern, you know, any kind of consistent pattern because it, it, it, unlike the hyper specialization and data pipelines that I just described, it, it's, it's not, it, it, there's way more overlap between those, those specialization roles. >>And there's a, there's a second challenge that, that I've observed and that we are, we've, we've been trying to solve this and now I'd say we've become, started to become a lot more purposeful in, in, in trying to solve this, which is, I believe cybersecurity, in order for cyber security vendors to become partners, we actually have to start to become more opinionated. We actually have to start, guys >>Are pretty opinionated. >>Well, yes, but, but the industry large. So yes, we're opinionated. We build these products, but that have, that have our, I'll call our opinions built into it, and then we, we sell the, the product and then, and then what happens? Customer says, great, thank you for the product. I'm going to deploy it however I want to, which is fine. Obviously it's their choice at the end of the day, but we actually should start to exert an opinion to say, well, here's what we would recommend, here's why we would recommend that. Here's how we envisioned it providing the most value to you. And actually starting to build that into the products themselves so that they start to guide the customer toward these outcomes as opposed to just saying, here's a product, good luck. >>What's, what's the customer lifecycle, not lifecycle, but really kind of that, that collaboration, like it's one thing to, to have products that you're saying that have opinions to be able to inform customers how to deploy, how to use, but where is their feedback in this cycle of product development? >>Oh, look, my, this, this is, this is my life. I'm, this is, this is why I'm here. This is like, you know, all day long I'm meeting with customers and, and I share what we're doing. But, but it's, it's a, it's a 50 50, I'm half the time I'm listening as well to understand what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish, and how, what they need us to do better in order to help them solve the problem. So the, the, and, and so my entire organization is oriented around not just telling customers, here's what we did, but listening and understanding and bringing that feedback in and constantly making the products better. That's, that's the, the main way in which we do this. Now there's a second way, which is we also allow our products to be customized. You know, I can say, here's our best practices, we see it, but then allowing our customer to, to customize that and tailor it to their environment, because there are going to be uniquenesses for different customers in parti, we need more complex environments. Explain >>Why fire firewalls won't go away >>From your perspective. Oh, Nikesh actually did a great job of explaining this yesterday, and although he gave me credit for it, so this is like a, a circular kind of reference here. But if you think about the firewalls slightly more abstract, and you basically say a NextGen firewalls job is to inspect every connection in order to make sure the connection should be allowed. And then if it is allowed to make sure that it's secure, >>Which that is the definition of an NextGen firewall, by the way, exactly what I just said. Now what you noticed is, I didn't describe it as a hardware device, right? It can be delivered in hardware because there are environments where you need super high throughput, low latency, guess what? Hardware is the best way of delivering that functionality. There's other use cases cloud where you can't, you, you can't ship hardware to a cloud provider and say, can you install this hardware in front of my cloud? No, no, no. You deployed in a software. So you take that same functionality, you instantly in a software, then you have other use cases, branch offices, remote workforce, et cetera, where you say, actually, I just want it delivered from the cloud. This is what sassy is. So when I, when I look at and say, the firewall's not going away, what, what, what I see is the functionality needed is not only not going away, it's actually expanding. But how we deliver it is going to be across these three form factors. And then the customer's going to decide how they need to intermix these form factors for their environment. >>We put forth this notion of super cloud a while about a year ago. And the idea being you're gonna leverage the hyperscale infrastructure and you're gonna build a, a, you're gonna solve a common problem across clouds and even on-prem, super cloud above the cloud. Not Superman, but super as in Latin. But it turned into this sort of, you know, superlative, which is fun. But the, my, my question to you is, is, is, is Palo Alto essentially building a common cross-cloud on-prem, presumably out to the edge consistent experience that we would call a super cloud? >>Yeah, I don't know that we've ever used the term surfer cloud to describe it. Oh, you don't have to, but yeah. But yes, based on how you describe it, absolutely. And it has three main benefits that I describe to customers all the time. The first is the end user experience. So imagine your employee, and you might work from the office, you might work from home, you might work while from, from traveling and hotels and conferences. And, and by the way, in one day you might actually work from all of those places. So, so the first part is the end user experience becomes way better when it doesn't matter where they're working from. They always get the same experience, huge benefit from productivity perspective, no second benefit security operations. You think about the, the people who are actually administering these policies and analyzing the security events. >>Imagine how much better it is for them when it's all common and consistent across everywhere that has to happen. Cloud, on-prem branch, remote workforce, et cetera. So there's a operational benefit that is super valuable. Third, security benefit. Imagine if in this, this platform-based approach, if we come out with some new amazing innovation that is able to detect and block, you know, new types of attacks, guess what, we can deliver that across hardware, software, and sassi uniformly and keep it all up to date. So from a security perspective, way better than trying to figure out, okay, there's some new technology, you know, does my hardware provider have that technology or not? Does my soft provider? So it's bringing that in to one place. >>From a developer perspective, is there a, a, a PAs layer, forgive me super PAs, that a allows the developers to have a common experience across irrespective of physical location with the explicit purpose of serving the objective of your platform. >>So normally when I think of the context of developers, I'm thinking of the context of, of the people who are building the applications that are being deployed. And those applications may be deployed in a data center, increasing the data centers, depending private clouds might be deployed into, into public cloud. It might even be hybrid in nature. And so if you think about what the developer wants, the developer actually wants to not have to think about security, quite frankly. Yeah. They want to think about how do I develop the functionality I need as quickly as possible with the highest quality >>Possible, but they are being forced to think about it more and more. Well, but anyway, I didn't mean to >>Interrupt you. No, it's a, it is a good, it's a, it's, it's a great point. The >>Well we're trying to do is we're trying to enable our security capabilities to work in a way that actually enables what the developer wants that actually allows them to develop faster that actually allows them to focus on the things they want to focus. And, and the way we do that is by actually surfacing the security information that they need to know in the tools that they use as opposed to trying to bring them to our tools. So you think about this, so our customer is a security customer. Yet in the application development lifecycle, the developer is often the user. So we, we we're selling, we're so providing a solution to security and then we're enabling them to surface it in the developer tools. And by, by doing this, we actually make life easier for the developers such that they're not actually thinking about security so much as they're just saying, oh, I pulled down the wrong open source package, it's outdated, it has vulnerabilities. I was notified the second I did it, and I was told which one I should pull down. So I pulled down the right one. Now, if you're a developer, do you think that's security getting your way? Not at all. No. If you're a developer, you're thinking, thank god, thank you, thank, thank you. Yeah. You told me at a point where it was easy as opposed to waiting a week or two and then telling me where it's gonna be really hard to fix it. Yeah. Nothing >>More than, so maybe be talking to Terraform or some other hash corp, you know, environment. I got it. Okay. >>Absolutely. >>We're 30 seconds. We're almost out of time. Sure. But I'd love to get your snapshot. Here we are at the end of calendar 2022. What are you, we know you're optimistic in this threat landscape, which we're gonna see obviously more dynamics next year. What kind of nuggets can you drop about what we might hear and see in 23? >>You're gonna see across everything. We do a lot more focus on the use of AI and machine learning to drive automated outcomes for our customers. And you're gonna see us across everything we do. And that's going to be the big transformation. It'll be a multi-year transformation, but you're gonna see significant progress in the next 12 months. All >>Right, well >>What will be the sign of that progress? If I had to make a prediction, which >>I'm better security with less effort. >>Okay, great. I feel like that's, we can measure that. I >>Feel, I feel like that's a mic drop moment. Lee, it's been great having you on the program. Thank you for walking us through such great detail. What's going on in the organization, what you're doing for customers, where you're meeting, how you're meeting the developers, where they are. We'll have to have you back. There's just, just too much to unpack. Thank you both so much. Actually, our pleasure for Lee Cler and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22, the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, 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, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been 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 gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, 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 decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna 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, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, 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, the act of managing that amount of data is, 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 are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, 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 minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, 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? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta 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, to wield that data somehow turn it, 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, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, 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, 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, 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, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even 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 Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, 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, 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, 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 come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of 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, 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, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, 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, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, 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, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, 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, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, 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, 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, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, 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, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, 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 a hundred percent data, 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, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion 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, 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 them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array 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, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, 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 their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, 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 our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. 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 partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna 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 vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, 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, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, 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, 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, that's a competitive advantage for us. 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, this, 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, 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, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, 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 onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what 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 the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van 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. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 find Lisa Martin and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events with AWS in this ecosystem partners. This year, we have two live sets, two remote sites over 100 guests talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And we're excited to be joined by Patrick Jeanne, the CTO of OutSystems Patrick. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you. I appreciate being one of those 100 guests, >>One of the 100, one of the elite, 100, we'll say it like that. Right? So, so OutSystems has some revolutionary news. You guys are saying, you know, what developer experience needs to change? Tell us more. >>It does. I mean, it needs to change. And I've been in the industry developing applications for too many years dimensions basically since I was 12 years old writing software and, you know, going over that time and thinking about it, doing the traditional software development route. So many applications that take too long was, you know, costly to build so much risk involved in it. Eventually it didn't meet all the requirements. And if you look at the investment we make in software, which is important, I mean, software is a, is a unique differentiator for, for businesses. That investment has such a high risk and a high cost, and that needs to change and it needs to change just because of the complexity that is in that process inherent in it that's. And that is what we are doing and OutSystems is tackling that problem. And, um, from a business standpoint, it must change. >>It must change that that is strong words there. So talk to me about what you're announcing, what, what were the gaps in the market customer feedback? Was it, or were there any catalysts from the pandemic going we've got to change this developer experience and this is the time >>For sure. I mean, if you think about from the pandemic and I mean, we were on a journey for digital transformation. We've been on this journey for a number of years and it really accelerated that the experiences that we have with each other, with you and me, we're not the same studio today. I mean, there's there reasons that we have used this experience remote, we have a technology that can do it, the pandemic accelerated that. And so, so much of the experiences we have are digital experiences. And if you think about it, there's a device in between us. There's going to be a device in between all the people viewing what we're looking at, that experience that, uh, that they will have with us will be basically surfaced through an application on that device. And the pandemic has really accelerated that. And that's an area that we play in, obviously for what's considered low code application development. >>And if you just think about application development in general, that's what powers all of these experiences. And going back to that, you know, statement about that, it needs to change if we need these experiences to be diverse, if we need these experiences to be meaningful, if we need them to make sure that when people engage, as far as what that device is, something that brings, you know, delight and pleasure to them, we need developers across the board. Investing in that today, there is a very constrained market for professional developers, but because of the inherent complexity in software development. And so if you think about how that's almost almost you're limiting access to the people who can create those experiences, that's not a good situation. There's about 25 million developers in the world that would consider themselves developers today, 7, 8, 9, 10 billion devices out there. Think of that disparity between those two numbers. >>And so we need a larger number of people to actually develop applications. So that experience can be much more diverse. We need to expose development to many more people. That is the problem today with software development is that it is complex. It is too specialized. It's too inherit as far as with failure when you get it together. And so either you shy away from that as an organization or as an individual to do development, or you go on these very long development as far as cycles to actually create these applications. What we do is we take the approach of let's make it very simple to get into, you know, some terms and call it citizen developer, low code, basically all they're saying is let's, let's reduce the risk of development. Let's go into a process where we make it accessible to more and more people. You can go through and develop applications with the lower risk. You can build change into that process and you can get value into end users as rapidly as possible. So that's, that is the value proposition. That is what needs to change >>Strong value proposition well said, Patrick, talking about reducing the complexity, uh, the risk as well. So, so go ahead and crack crack open what you guys are actually announcing today. >>Yeah, for sure. So with, we we've been doing this for many years, we have, um, software development, we have 14 million plus as far as end-users using applications that have been developed with the Al systems platform, what we're announcing is taking some of the great benefits that we have to what you'd consider as the first part of that low code process, where you have a, you have a developer that has an idea, and there's a canvas in front of you. You know, you're, you're an artist, right? But again, this is what you are as a developer. And so you go in and you create that application. We've been doing this for many years and it works really well. But thing that we're improving upon now is the ability to do that and scale that out to millions of end-users 10 millions of end-users. So if you think about that inherent speed of developing an application, using a platform like OutSystems, we're taking that same concept and rolling that into an internet scale application, hosting architecture. >>So any developer that uses our systems, basically like it would be comparable to a traditional development team that has application architects, cloud architects, security, engineers, database engineers, a whole team of very smart individuals that generally the, the biggest technology companies in the world can put together. Most companies can't do that. You don't have access to that type of that type of skillset. And so we're providing that with project Neo, which is what we're announcing today in our, um, at our user conference and customer conference, is this brand new as far as platform that allows you to build these applications at scale. And this is initially built on AWS using all the great AWS technologies. If you look at what AWS has done and provided to developers today, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. The amount of technologies that you can leverage. It's also daunting because as a traditional developer, you have to go in and choose, you know, what do you do? It's like, there's just massive cognitive load as far as upfront when you're going to design and application and what type of messaging what's at the data store. Well, how do I host my application? What type of network, you know, as far as security do I use, we're taking all that heavy lifting, all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting off of the developers, putting it into the project, Neo platform, allowing a single developer or a small group of developers to actually leverage that best in class architecture on AWS today. >>So when you're talking to developers, what are some of the things that you described as the unique differentiators of project Neo? It sounds like this was really apt and apt time for change, but when you're talking to those folks, what do you say? You know, 1, 2, 3, these are the things that make project Neo unique. >>Yeah. So you're the first is don't worry about the application architecture. Like I mentioned, don't when you go in that, the idea, the concept of that application and what it means to, to deliver some value, whether it's into a business or a hobby or whatever. I mean, however, you're developing application, you're doing it for a reason. You want that value to come out as quickly as possible. You want that experience. And so that first thing is you don't have to worry about the architecture anymore. So in the past, you know, you'd have to think about if it's a very large application, it's millions and millions of end-users. How do you structure that? How do you put it together? That concern is removed from you in that process? The other thing is we solve the problem of software disintegration. So with traditional development, when you develop an application and you get it into the hands of end, users get immediately starts to disintegrate. >>So there will be bugs that will appear. There will be, as far as, um, security flaws that will come up services that you use will become deprecated. We'll swap out cloud services, you know, AWS or Azure or Google, we'll swap out cloud services with different services behind the scenes version that we new versions of those that is software disintegration. As soon as you develop software today and all of these beautiful cloud services that you use and components, they often something will become outdated almost by the time you release it. A lot of times with software development projects, it literally is you start with some version or some component before you can get that out in a traditional mode. Something becomes outdated. We solve that issue. What I like to call software disintegration, we, as far as our systems, ensure we invest in that platform. And so when we need to change out those components, so services, those versions fix is for a security flaws, fixed bugs. >>We do that and it seamless. And so your application, you do not have to rewrite your application. You do not have to go through that process as a tradition, as a developer on our systems like you would, as your traditional developer, we solve that software disintegration issue. So it is it's, it's very empowering to developers to not have to worry about that. There are many, you look at the numbers today about how much is invested in innovation versus maintenance. You know, a lot of companies start out at 70% innovation, 30% as far as maintenance. And then over time that flips and you'll get to 30% of your time spent on innovations development, 70% maintenance, that burden we removed that burden. >>Those are some really powerful statements protect that you mean, I really liked the way that you described software disintegration. I've actually never heard that term before. And it kind of reminded me of, you know, when you buy a brand new car, you drive it off. The lot the value goes down right away, then before you even get things out. And on the consumer side, we know that as soon as we buy the newest iPhone, the next one's going to be out, or there's some part of it, that's going to be outdated in terms of technical debt. I was reading a stat that technical debt is expected to reach and costs businesses 5 trillion us dollars over the next 10 years. How does OutSystems helps customers address the challenges with technical debt and even reduce it? >>Yeah. If you think about the guy, the truest sense of technical debt, it's a, it's a decision that you make in the development process to basically, you know, load up the future with some work that you don't want to do right now. And so we're solving that issue where number one, we, you don't even have to make that decision. So you can go back to that concept of removing that cognitive load of, do I get the software out right now or do I get it out in the right way? And that's really what technical debt technical debt is saying. I need to get it out now. And there are some things I want to do that it'd be better if I did them now, but I'm going to go ahead and push that out into the future. You don't have to do that today with us. >>And so what happens with our systems? We invest in that platform, and this is hard. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. This is why we have some of the best and brightest engineers focusing on this process at the heart of this, not to get too technical, but the heart of this is what we call the true change engine. But then, um, within our platform, we go through and we look at all of the changes that you need to make. So if you think of that concept of technical debt of like, oh, I want to get this into the hands of man users, but I don't want to invest in the time to do something right. It's always done right. As far as with the OutSystems platform. So we take that, we look at the intent of your change. So it's like a, it's like a process where you tell us the intent. >>When you, as a application developer, you're designing an application, you tell us the intent of the application is to look and feel. It could be some business processes can be some integrations. We determine what's the best way to do that. And then once again, from a software disintegration standpoint, we continue to invest in all the right ways to do that the best way possible. And so, I mean, we have customers that have written applications. That's 10, 15 years ago, they're still using our platform with those same applications they've added to them, but they actually have not rewritten those applications. And so if you think about the normal traditional development process, the technical debt incurred over that type of lifetime would be enormous with us. There's no technical debt. They're still using the same application. They have simply added capabilities to it. We invest in that platform. So they don't have to >>So big business outcomes there, obviously from a developer productivity perspective, but from the company wide perspective, the ability to eliminate technical debt, some significant opportunities there. Talk to me about the existing OutSystems customers. When are they going to be able to take advantage of this? What is the migration or upgrade path that they can take? >>Yeah. And so it's, it was very important to me and, and, uh, and the team, as far as our systems, to be able to integrate, to innovate as far as for customers, without disrupting customers. And we've probably all been through this path of great new technology is awesome. But then to actually utilize that technology when you're a current customer, it creates pain. And so we've invested heavily in making sure that the process is pain-free so you can use project Niamh. So we are announcing it as it was in public preview, as far as now, and then we will release it from GA as far as in the first quarter of next year. So over this timeframe, you'll be able to get in and try it out and all that continue to use your current version, which is OutSystems 11. So what we, what we affectionately call it 11, as far as Alice systems, Al systems, 11 version, and continued to use, and you can continue to use that today. >>Side-by-side and coexistence with the project, Neo and project Neo is a code name. So we will, we will have an official product name is for as at launch, but it's our it's. Our affectionate is kind of a unofficial mascot as Neo. So we call it project Neo bit of a fun thing, and you can use it side by side. And then in the future, you'll be able to migrate applications over, or you can just continue to coexist. I mean, we see a very long lifetime for OutSystems 11, it's a different platform, different technology behind the scenes project, Neos, Kubernetes base, Lennox containers. Based once again on the bill, we went in with the, just looked at it and said, rearchitect re-imagined, how would you do this? If you had the best and brightest, as far as engineers, architects, um, you know, we have, which we do, you know, very smart in those people. >>And we did that. And so we did that for our customers. And so Neo is that how systems 11 still a great choice. If you have applications on it, you can use it. And we have, we anticipate that customers will actually side by side, develop on both in which we have some customers in preview today. And that's the process that they have. They will develop on 11, they will develop on the Neo and they will continue to do that. And there's no, we, we are dedicated to making sure that there's no disruption and no pain in that process. And then when customers are ready to migrate over, if that's what they choose, we'll help them migrate over. >>You make it sound easy. And I was wondering if project Neo had anything to do with the new matrix movie, I just saw the trailer for it the other day. >>It was a happy coincidence. It is not easy. Let me, let me be clear. It is something we have been working on for three years and really this last year really kicked into high gear. And, um, you know, a lot of behind the scenes work, obviously for us, but once again, that's our value proposition. It's we do the hard work. So developers and customers don't have to do that hard work, uh, but no relations in the L I love, I do love the matrix movies. So it's a, it's a nice coincidence. >>It is a nice coincidence. Last question, Patrick, for you, you know, as we wrap up the calendar year 2021, we head into 20, 22. I think we're all very hopeful that 2022 will be a better year than the last two. What are some of the things that you see as absolutely critical for enterprises? What are they most concerned about right now? >>Yeah, I think it's look, I mean, it's, obviously it has been a crazy couple of years. And, um, and if you think about what enterprises want, I mean, they want to provide, uh, a great experiences for their customers, a great experience for their employees. Once again, digital transformation, we're where you don't even kind of talk about digital transformation more because we're in it. And I think that customers need to make sure that the experiences they provide these digital experiences are the best possible experiences. And these are differentiators. These are differentiators for employees is, are differentiators for customers. I believe that software is one of the big differentiators for businesses today and going forward, and that will continue to be so we're where businesses may be invested in supply chains and invested in certain types of technologies. Business will continue to invest in software because software is that differentiator. >>And if you look at where we fit, you can go, you can go buy, you know, some great satisfied where my software as a service off the shelf in the end, you're just like every other business you bought the same thing that everybody else has bought. You can go the traditional development route, where you invest a bunch of money. It's a high risk, takes a long time. And once again, you may not get what you want. We believe what is most important to businesses. Get that unique software that fits like a glove that is great for employees is great for their customers. And it is a unique differentiator for them. And I really see that in 2022, that's going to be big and, and going forward. They're the legs for that type of investment that companies make and their return on that is huge. >>I agree with you on that in terms of software as a differentiator. No, we're seeing every company become a software company in every industry these days to be first to survive in the last 20 months and now to be competitive, it's really kind of a must have. So Patrick, thank you for joining me on the program, talking about project Neo GA in quarter of calendar year 22 exciting stuff. We appreciate your feedback and your insights and congratulations on project Neil. Thanks, Lisa. Appreciate it for Patrick Jean I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of re-invent 2021.

(Upbeat intro music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events with AWS in this ecosystem partners this year. We have two live sets, two remote sets over 100 guests talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And we're excited to be joined by Patrick Jean the CTO of OutSystems, Patrick welcome to the program. >> Thank you, I appreciate being one of those 100 guests. >> One of the 100, one of the elite 100, we'll say it like that, right? >> Yes. >> So OutSystems has some revolutionary news. You guys are saying, you know what, developer experience needs to change, tell us more. >> It does I mean, it needs to change. And I've been in the industry developing applications for too many years to mention, basically since I was 12 years old writing software and going over that time and thinking about it, doing the traditional software development route. So many applications that take too long was costly to build, so much risk involved in it. Eventually it didn't meet all the requirements. And if you look at the investment we make in software, which is important, I mean, software is a unique differentiator for businesses. That investment has such a high-risk and a high cost and that needs to change. And it needs to change just because of the complexity that is in that process inherent in it. That's and that is what we are doing in OutSystems is tackling that problem. And from a business standpoint, it must change. >> It must change that is strong words there. So talk to me about what you're announcing what were the gaps in the market, customer feedback, were there any catalysts from the pandemic going we've got to change this developer experience and this is the time. >> For sure. I mean, if you think about from the pandemic and I mean, we were on a journey for digital transformation. We've been on this journey for a number of years the pandemic really accelerated that the experiences that we have with each other, you and me are not in the same studio today. I mean, there reasons that we use this experience remotely. We have a technology that can do it. The pandemic accelerated that. And so, so much of the experiences we have are digital experiences. And if you think about it, there's a device in between us. There's going to be a device in between all the people viewing what we're looking at. That experience that they will have with us will be basically surfaced through an application on that device. And the pandemic has really accelerated that. And that's an area that we play in, obviously for what's considered low-code application development. And if you just think about application development in general, that's what powers all of these experiences. And going back to that statement about that it needs to change. If we need these experiences to be diverse, if we need these experiences to be meaningful, if we need them to make sure that when people engage as far as what that device is something that brings, delight and pleasure to them. We need developers across the board investing in that. Today there is a very constrained market for professional developers because of the inherent complexity in software development. And so if you think about how that's almost, almost here limiting access to the people who can create those experiences, that's not a good situation. There's about 25 million developers in the world that would consider themselves developers today, seven, eight, nine, 10 billion devices out there. Think of that disparity between those two numbers. And so we need a larger number of people to actually develop applications so that experience can be much more diverse. We need to expose development to many more people. That is the problem today with software development is that it is complex, it is too specialized. It's too inherent as far with failure when you get it together. And so either you shy away from that as an organization or as an individual. To do development are you going on these very long development as far as cycles to actually create these applications? What we do is we take the approach of let's make it very simple to get into. Sometimes we call it citizen developer, low-code, basically all they're saying is let's reduce the risk of development. Let's go into a process where we make it accessible to more and more people. You can go through and develop applications with the lower risk. You can build change into that process. You can get value into end users as rapidly as possible. So that is the value proposition, that is what needs to change. >> Strong value proposition well said, Patrick. Talking about reducing the complexity, the risk as well. So go ahead and crack open what you guys are actually announcing today. >> Yeah, for sure. So we've been doing this for many years. We have software development, we have 14 million plus as far as end-users using applications that have been developed with the Allo systems platform. What we're announcing is taking some of the great benefits that we have to what you'd consider as the first part of that low-code process. Where you have a developer that has an idea, and there's a canvas in front of you. You're an artist, right, with a canvas that's what you are as a developer. And so you go in and you create that application. We've been doing this for many years and it worked really well. The thing that we're improving upon now is the ability to do that and scale that out to millions of end-users, 10 millions of end-users. So if you think about that inherent speed of developing an application, using a platform like OutSystems, we're taking that same concept and rolling that into an internet scale application, hosting architecture. So any developer that uses OutSystems, basically like it would be comparable to a traditional development team that has application architects, cloud architects, security engineers, database engineers, a whole team of very smart individuals that generally the biggest technology companies in the world can put together. Most companies can't do that, you don't have access to that type of skillset. And so we're providing that with Project Neo, which is what we're announcing today in our, at our user conference and customer conference. Is this brand new as far as platform that allows you to build these applications at scale. And this is initially built on AWS using all the great AWS technologies. If you look at what AWS has done and provided to developers today, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. The amount of technologies that you can leverage. It's also daunting because as a traditional developer, you have to go in and choose what do you do? It's like, there's just massive cognitive load. As far as upfront when you go in to design an application. What's up in messaging, what's up at data store, well, how do I host my application? What type of network as far as security do I use? We're taking all that heavy lifting, all that undifferentiated heavy lifting off of the developers, putting it into the Project Neo platform. Allowing a single developer or a small group of developers to actually leverage that best in class architecture on AWS today. >> So when you're talking to developers, what are some of the things that you describe as the unique differentiators of Project Neo? It sounds like this was really apt and apt time for change. But when you're talking to those folks, what do you say you know, one, two three, these are the things that make Project Neo unique. >> Yeah, so the first is don't worry about the application architecture. Like I mentioned when you go in, the idea, the concept of that application and what it means to deliver some value, whether it's into a business or a hobby or whatever. I mean, however you're developing application, you're doing it for a reason. You want that value to come out as quick as possible. You want that experience. And so that first thing is, you don't have to worry about the architecture anymore. So in the past you'd have to think about if it's a very large application, it's millions and millions of end-users. How do you structure that? How do you put it together? That concern is removed from you in that process. The other thing is we solve the problem of software disintegration. So with traditional development, when you develop an application and you get it into the hands of end users it immediately starts to disintegrate. So there will be bugs that will appear. There will be as far as security flaws that will come up services that you use will become deprecated. We'll swap out cloud services by AWS or Azure or Google. swap out cloud services with different services behind the scenes. Version, there'll be new versions of those that is software disintegration. As soon as you develop software today and all of these beautiful cloud services that you use and components. Something will become outdated almost by the time you release it. A lot of times with software development projects, it literally is you start with some version or some component before you can get that out in a traditional mode, something becomes outdated. We solved that issue. What I like to call software disintegration. We, as far as OutSystems, ensure we invest in that platform. And so when we may need to change out those components, those services, those versions fix is for security flaws, fixed bugs, we do that and it's seamless. And so your application, you do not have to rewrite your application. You do not have to go through that process as a tradition, as a developer on OutSystems like you would, as your traditional developer. We solve that software disintegration issue. So it's very empowering to developers to not have to worry about that. There are many, you look at the numbers today about how much is invested in innovation versus maintenance. A lot of companies start out at 70% innovation, 30% as far as maintenance, and then overtime that flips. And you'll get to 30% of your time spent on innovations development, 70% maintenance, that burden, we remove that burden. >> Those were some really powerful statements Patrick that you made and I really liked the way that you described software disintegration. I've actually never heard that term before. And it kind of reminded me of when you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot, the value goes down right away then before you even get things out. And on the consumer side, we know that as soon as we buy the newest iPhone, the next one's going to be out, or there's some part of it, that's going to be outdated. In terms of technical debt, I was reading a stat that technical debt is expected to reach in costs of businesses, 5 trillion, US dollars over the next 10 years. How does OutSystems help customers address the challenges with technical debt and even reduce it? >> Yeah, I mean if you think about in the kind of the truest sense of technical debt, it's a decision that you make in the development process to basically load up the future with some work that you don't want to do right now. And so we're solving that issue where not only, you don't even have to make that decision. So you can go back to that concept of removing that cognitive load of, do I get the software out right now or do I get it out in the right way? And that's really what technical debt, technical debt is saying I need to get it out now. And there are some things I want to do that it'd be better if I did them now, but I'm going to go ahead and push that out into the future. You don't have to do that today with us. And so what happens with OutSystems is we invest in that platform. And this is hard. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. This is why we have some of the best and brightest engineers focusing on this process at the heart of this, not to get too technical, but the heart of this is what we call the true change engine within our platform. We go through and we look at all of the changes that you need to make. So you think of that concept of technical debt of like, ah, I want to get this in the hands of end users, but I don't want to invest in the time to do something right. It's always done right, as far as with the OutSystems platform. So we take that, we look at the intent of your change. So it's like a process where you tell us the intent. When you as a application developer, you're designing an application, you tell us the intent of the application is to look and feel. It could be some business processes this could be some integrations. We determine what's the best way to do that and then once again, from a software disintegration standpoint, we continue to invest in all the right ways to do that the best way possible. And so, I mean, we have customers that have written applications that's 10, 15 years ago. They're still using our platform with those same applications they've added to them, but they have not rewritten those applications. And so if you think about the normal traditional development process, the technical debt incurred over that type of lifetime would be enormous. With us there's no technical debt. They're still using the same application they've simply added capabilities to it. We invest in that platform so they don't have to. >> So big business outcomes down, obviously from a developer productivity perspective, but from the company wide perspective, the ability to eliminate technical debt, some significant opportunities there. Talk to me about the existing OutSystems customers. When are they going to be able to take advantage of this? What is the migration or upgrade path that they can take and when? >> Yeah and so it is very important to me and the team as far as OutSystems to be able to integrate, to innovate as far as for customers, without disrupting customers. And we've probably all been through this path of great new technology is awesome. But then to actually utilize that technology when you're a current customer, it creates pain. And so we've invested heavily in making sure that the process is pain-free. So you can use Project Neo. So we are announcing it as in, it was in public preview as far as now, and then we will release it from GA as far as in the first quarter of next year. So over this timeframe, you'll be able to get in and try it out and all that. Continue to use your current version, which is OutSystems 11. So what we affectionately call O-11, as far as Allo systems. The Allo systems 11 version continue to use, and you can continue to use that today side-by-side and coexistence with the Project Neo. And Project Neo is a code name. So we will have an official product name as for as at launch but it's our affectionate it's kind of a unofficial mascot as Neo. So we call the Project Neo is a little bit of a fun name and you can use it side by side and then in the future, you'll be able to migrate applications over. Or you can just continue to co-exist. I mean, we see a very long lifetime for OutSystems 11, it's a different platform, different technology behind the scenes. Project Neo's Kubernetes-base Linux containers. Based once again, on the ability, we went in with the gist and looked at it and said, re-architect, re-imagine, how would you do this if you had the best and brightest as far as engineers, architects, we have, which we do. Various market and those people and we did that. And so we did that for our customers. And so Neo is that OutSystems 11 still a great choice. If you have applications on it, you can use it. And we have, we anticipate the customers will actually side by side develop on both in which we have some customers in preview today. And that's the process that they have. They will develop on 11, they will develop on Neo and they will continue to do that. And there's no, we are dedicated to making sure that there's no disruption and no pain in that process. And then when customers are ready to migrate over, if that's what they choose, we'll help them migrate over. >> You make it sound easy. And I was wondering if Project Neo had anything to do with the new matrix movie I just saw the trailer for it the other day, I wonder if this is related. >> It was a happy coincidence. It is not easy let me, let me be clear. It is something we have been working on for three years and really this last year really kicked into high gear. And a lot of behind the scenes work, obviously for us, but once again, that's our value proposition. It's we do the hard work. So developers and the customers don't have to do that hard work. But no relations to Neo, I love, I do love the matrix movies. So it's a nice coincidence. (Lisa laughs) >> It is a nice coincidence. Last question, Patrick, for you, as we wrap up the calendar year 2021, we heading into 2022. I think we're all very hopeful that 2022 will be a better year than the last two. What are some of the things that you see as absolutely critical for enterprises? What are they most concerned about right now? >> Yeah, I think it's, look I mean, it's obviously it has been a crazy a couple of years. And if you think about what enterprises want, I mean, they want to provide a great experiences for their customers, a great experience for their employees. Once again, digital transformation, where you don't even kind of talk about digital transformation more because we're in it. And I think that customers need to make sure that the experiences they provide these digital experiences are the best possible experiences. And these are differentiators. These are differentiators for employees. These are differentiators for customers. I believe that software is one of the big differentiators for businesses today and going forward. And that will continue to be so where businesses may be invested in supply chains, invested in certain types of technologies. Business will continue to invest in software because software is that differentiator. And if you look at where we fit, you can go, you can go buy, some great set of software, my software as a service off the shelf. In the end, you're just like every other business you bought the same thing that everybody else had bought. You can go the traditional development route, where you invest a bunch of money, it's a high risk, takes a long time. And once again, you may not get what you want. We believe what is most important to businesses. Get that unique software that fits like a glove that is great for employees, it's great for their customers. And it is a unique differentiator for them. And I really see that in 2022, that's going to be big and going forward. They're the legs for that type of investment that companies make and they return on that is huge. >> I agree with you on that in terms of software as a differentiator. Now we're seeing every company become a software company in every industry these days to be, first to survive in the last 20 months and now to be competitive, it's really kind of a must have. So, Patrick thank you for joining me on the program, talking about Project Neo, GA in the first quarter of calendar year 22. Exciting stuff we appreciate your feedback and your insights and congratulations on Project Neo. >> Thanks, Lisa, appreciate it. >> For Patrick Jean, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBEs continuous coverage of re:Invent 2021. (Outro music)

>>Mhm Yes. Hi lisa Martin here with the cube we are covering Dell technologies world, the digital event experience. I have two guests here with me today that are new to the program. So I would like to welcome David Lowe, the Director of product management for Dell Technologies. David. Welcome to the >>program. Hi, how are you >>doing well? And Catherine Ward is here as well, customer experience strategist at Dell Technologies Catherine, it's great to have you join us. Thanks. Happy to be here lisa. So we're talking about embracing as a service. That was a big announcement at Dell Technologies World as we were talking before we went live just a few months ago in the end of 2020 where the new Dell Technologies cloud console was announced. David start with our audience in terms of describing the apex council, what it is when it was launched and give us some color around that. >>Absolutely. Back in october we announced the Dell Technologies cloud console as part of unveiling the apex vision and this was really uh in response to what we heard from our customers about the need to be able to take advantage of cloud and as a service, operating models, being able to take advantage of our products and services around infrastructure in a way that really uh you know, met their needs in terms of the business results that they were trying to drive the kind of flexibility that they needed about how to get those offerings in place and be able to to run them having simplicity and how they managed those offers while also having just a greater degree of control, of course, that's afforded by having infrastructure running on premises versus uh in the public cloud. So with the apex console today, again, we're just listening to what customers say about being able to double down on that vision and provide even more functionality and capabilities on top of additional services that we're making available in the apex console today, >>Captain, let's get some point of view from the customers. David mentioned them a number of times. Obviously this is why you're doing this, but how does apex designed to help simplify operations? What are some of the things that you're hearing from the customer experience about it being able to simplify ops? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we've we've talked to many customers that's part of my team's job to ensure we're delivering a great experience. We've really heard >>that customers >>appreciate that they can now subscribe to services and and that the Dell offers. Um we've heard a lot from customers and sales folks that tells us that not every project they want to do is funded in a complex way. And so one of the great benefits of Dell clouds offers and the apex console is being able to get things in an op X way so they can pay on a subscription, uh sorry, so they can play on a subscription basis uh to meet, you know, their business needs is one major positive that we've been hearing from customers. >>One of the things that I read when apex launched a few months ago was this really as a way to demonstrate cloud as an operating model rather than a destination and lets you get both of your opinions on that and since launched what you thought, David, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, Well that's it's a great it's a great concept that customers really that really resonates with customers. So I mean, you know, cloud as an operating model has been something that many companies have moved towards over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, where there are fundamental characteristics of cloud that are defined as being on demand, being self service, providing easier access with elastic scale and then also just paying for what you use. And and and these are the things that customers really care about. And so as part of the apex vision and unveiling today in the in the apex console where offering services, for example, like apex storage services, where customers will have the ability to subscribe to that service on demand through the Apex Council in a self service way, they'll be able to take advantage of it in a way they pay for what they use because on top of a a committed storage capacity, it's an on demand usage model, uh and they have the ability to come in at any time and increase as their business demands what storage is available to them. So we really are capitalizing on those cloud characteristics that customers want to be able to take advantage of but doing so, you know, on top of uh, infrastructure products from Dell that customers have trusted for decades. >>Right. So one of the things that we've talked about so many times in the last year is the acceleration that we've seen in every industry with perspective digital transformation and seeing so many businesses in every industry pivot multiple times here. And that speed up, you know, like, you know, here we are using SAS applications to communicate and to reach customers. I'd love to know Katherine, what some of the things are that you've learned since the initial launch. Kind of given the interesting times that we're in, what are some of the things that you've learned from customer feedback that are going to be utilized to help uh, uh, kind of modify the product going forward? >>Yeah, absolutely. So one thing is customers echoing David, really value self serve. They want to be able to do things on their time when they want. And one of the great things that customers can do through the console is build solutions, choose services that best meet their needs, they don't have to involve sales, they obviously can if they want to, but they don't have to. And that is a big selling point key, you know, meets a key need of that. We've heard from customers, I'd say. The second thing that we've heard from folks is that they really like how we have set up our role based access >>and identity >>management capabilities. Uh and I'll give you an example, So there are company very large companies, let's say who may have one finance department and they are the only people who are empowered to sign off on orders, let's say. So maybe a more purchaser type role, you may have an entire separate set of folks who are more technical folks who understand how to configure an offer, how to put it all together and those, but those folks can't buy. Um And so we have built in some workflows um to help support those processes that we've heard from customers that they have, and by doing that they can ensure appropriate separation of duties according to their internal policies as well as help them get a handle on unexpected spend from I. T. Services. >>Catherine is really touching on an incredibly important point there that customers over the last 10 years as they've used cloud services from other providers. We know that the democratization of cloud, that said that anybody can come in off the street with a credit card and start using services. That's a great way for people to get up and running. But that also leads to the problem of shadow I. T. It also leads to uh you know, an unbounded expenses and and you know difficulty in managing costs and unpredictable expenditure. So we've seen over time how even other cloud providers have had to come back laser and based on customer feedback, start adding governance, start adding policies, start adding, you know budget management and spend controls, uh Start ensuring that the kind of workflow that Catherine mentioned is in place around uh you know, ordering And we decided to put that in just from day 1. So when customers come to the apex console, they're going to be coming in the context of a company or an organization where there will be users that have specific roles. And as Catherine mentioned, they'll have specific permissions that might align with their particular job function and there will be governance that an administrator can implement to ensure that only certain people can perform certain tasks, which, you know, we already know from customer feedback is incredibly important to give customers that kind of control that they might not get or that they might have been asking for from other cloud providers in order to ensure that this is truly like an enterprise grade level of servants. >>Yeah. And just to play off that David, you know, I've talked also while I also, I talked to customers a lot also make sure I interact quite a bit with our sales team so to get their views as well. And there's a university customer that we have who has this exact problem of shadow it. And they were, their goal was to unify and get all their main campuses on same system, following same policies, same procedures, same infrastructure. Um And one of the key challenges that they have is people, developers get excited, they want to build stuff and they will go to the public cloud, use a credit card for example and just get up and running. And now this company realizes that a those folks kind of going off and doing some of that on their own are actually spending more than their central it spends. So again I think it's a real world problem that we think we're we're well positioned to solve. >>Yeah, those guardrails seem really outstanding for customers to be able to get that. You both mentioned shadow I. T. And that's one of the things that we know so easy to spin up services. But yet you then disconnect I thi from different business units which is always a challenge for organizations. So having the governance and the role based access controls really provides your customers with more of a chance to, as you said I think a minute ago David consume and only pay for what they're consuming but also have that line of sight that visibility across who's using these services. What are we paying? Are we are we getting what we need and are we ensuring that we're getting more control over our environment? I can't even imagine how much more important that is these days with so many people still scattered and remote. >>Yeah and and and and and and it's it's just really part of the whole customer lifecycle as they work with our services. So after customer is able to subscribe to something like apex data storage services and after it has been deployed at their data center they'll be able to come in to the apex council, they'll be able to see information about that subscription and about the infrastructure that they're running including having health monitoring and alerts and be able to see the capacity usage of that service. Uh And with that telemetry and insight then be able to take action. Uh Perhaps as you say to you know either uh you know put in place additional controls within their teams on on spending or consumption or increase the available storage that they have to ensure that it meets uh their business needs. And and as we build out this end and life cycle within the apex console customers will see more and more features coming to help with you know tagging of expenditure for show back purpose is to simplify the way in which uh you know both I. T. Teams and financial uh personnel within a company are able to ensure that they're being responsible and and have that governance over over what's being consumed and spent. >>Yeah. Absolutely critical. Catherine talked to us about for existing Dell customers, how can they access the apex console? What's the what's the process there that you advise? >>Yeah. Great great question. So the good news is if you already have a Dell account, whether you're an existing premier customer or perhaps you visit us through Dell dot com your credentials will work. All you need to do is talk to your sales team, your sales representative and ask them to be enabled and the process typically goes that they will sales will help enable an administrator and from there the administrator at your company can start giving access and assigning those roles as as as you as you need. >>Just a little bit of a pivot on that. And what are we talking about in terms of time frame when we think of cloud services being able to spend them up knowing that there's still so much remote work going on. How quickly can Adele customer follow that process that you just mentioned and activate these services? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So our goal is to be able to, once, you know, we have your interest, we understand what you want to get you equipment and get you up and running within 14 days is our is our goal and our target. Um It's a lot depends on on what the customer needs and if they can get, you know, if they can accept delivery that quickly and all that. But but that is our that's our goal is get you up and running in 14 days. >>Excellent. That time to values David. Go ahead. >>Oh yeah, the the getting access to the council can be can be can be, you know, certainly a lot faster. But as Catherine said, you know, once you get into the console and you want to be able to consume the services, especially for those infrastructure services that are going to show up and be deployed at your data center. Uh You know, we we include features like integrated site survey that customers are going to see shortly when they're able to go through the subscription process and enter information about their physical data center. Maybe uh you know, physical access characteristics or power or networking configurations that they have So that our deployment services team knows what to expect when they show up. We can get everything wrapped and stacked and ready to go put it on the truck and have it uh you know, to the customer as quickly as possible as Catherine said, with the time to value promise of 14 days. >>Excellent. And that fast access last question David, before we wrap up, talk to us about what's next? This was only announced in the last 67 months so lots of Development and progress, lots of customer feedback helping to tune the services. What can customers expect you know going out the rest of 20 calendar year 2021 >>more. Just I mean you know we'll have access for more customers in more countries to be able to consume more services and more capabilities within the console to provide that richer and to end experience today we already have access Uh for the console within 17 countries around the world with customers from the US and. UK. and France and Germany already able to subscribe to certain services. We have access for apex data storage services and other countries uh Coming very soon. Uh So we'll be adding more countries or languages will be adding more services uh in the coming months. And as we alluded to earlier more capabilities to ensure that the end and experience that customers have crosses all of the different boundaries within their organizations and supports all of the different roles who need to be able to come in and do everything from discover services. Subscribe to them, provision, resources, uh manage, operate support and and and build solutions on on top of what they have. So it really is all about ensuring that it's a single consistent and to end life cycle within the apex console. >>Well, that word more was perfect when I said, what's coming next book? And folks expect more? It's like that. But wait, there's >>more. So I'm sure >>folks will will get a lot more information as the event unfolds in the weeks after David and Catherine. Thank you for joining me talking to me about all of the progress that's happened in such a short amount of time with apex concept. We look forward to seeing what's next. >>Thanks lisa. >>Thanks for having us. >>My pleasure for David Lo and Catherine Ward. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world, The virtual event experience. Yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell technologies world, digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Hey, welcome to the CUBE's coverage of Dell technologies, world 2020. The digital experience. I am Lisa Martin, and I've got a cube alum back with me talking about managed services. David Mensing is here the senior director of product management for Dell technology services. David it's great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So here we are very, very socially distant since the whole event is socially distant this year. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on with managed services with (indistinct), you guys have been in managed services for a long time, but there's some new stuff coming out. Talk to us about that. >> Sure. Yeah. I mean, from a Dell technology services perspective, there's a lot that we do from consulting, support, deployment, education managed services has been one of those other areas that we've been working on for over 15 years. We've been managing a variety of different environments for many large enterprise customers. And so what we're trying to do right now is take a lot of that capability and start making it more widely available to more of our customers. And today what we're focusing on is in the data protection space and offering a standard managed service or data protection that's available with our flex on demand consumption model. >> So flux on demand consumption model was announced last year towards the end of calendar year 2019. Remind us what the flex on demand consumption program is. And then let's dig into why data protection was one of the first managed services launched through it. >> Yeah. So last year when we announced flex on demand, what we wanted to do is come up with a different consumption model where customers don't have to pay anything significant upfront as part of a CapEx investment. They pay for what they consume. And so we offering or offering that today on our power protect data, database products are Avamar networking software, as well as our integrated data protection appliances. And so customers can pay only for what they have to consume and then we'll charge them extra as they consume beyond that minimal commitment. And then now we have managed services. That's one of those options that we can provide as part of that solution. >> Tell me about some of the trends. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. >> No, but I think you asked the question though, as well as, you know, why did we choose managed services for data protection to start with versus doing something else? And, you know, it's an excellent question because you know, there's a lot of different environments that we do manage today. I mean, storage data protection, Hyper-converge, cloud, and we're doing that with a variety of different global customers around the world. Now, what we've seen though, is that these customers are running into a lot of common challenges, particularly around the complexity and growth in their environment. And so that's why we've been doing a lot of research with IDC and with others to focus on what specifically they're seeing in their environment. And so what they found particularly IDC came back and told us that, yeah, you know, one of the number one concerns that customers have with a flexible consumption model is backup and recovery. And so that's why we went with the service essentially from what we were already seeing from our existing customers, but also for what we were hearing from analysts. >> So since that survey that you did research with IDC, I'm curious in the COVID era, we've seen so much going on with respect to security. Ransomware is way up, I think a ransomware attack right now happens every 11 seconds. We're seeing hospitals as targets. The New Zealand stock exchange was targeted. The department of veterans affairs, social media, is there any additional or one additional data from IDC or others shows that backup and recovery is even more critical since so many people are working from home accessing networks from personal devices, what's the influence been on COVID on really accelerating this data production managed service? >> Well, I think there's two things to it. Number one with COVID we're hearing from a lot of our customers that their it staff are having to focus on more things than they did before. You know, that like you were saying, there's more security, there's more compliance, there's more other issues. And so by offering a managed service in a space like backup and recovery, we're able to reduce some of their workload free up their time so they can focus on other more critical projects. Now, furthermore, when we survey with these customers, you know, we found that most of them say You know, it was a 64% said, they lack the confidence that they can fully recover systems or data from all their platforms in the event of a data loss. And so that's one of the things that we can provide by being able to troubleshoot monitor it 24 by seven, you know, when a backup job fails, you know, there's a lot of different things that may be going on. And so we'll use the expertise that we have and our tools to go ahead and troubleshoot those so that our customers can spend their time in more important areas. >> So as we look at the multi-cloud world, in which so many businesses across industries live, we talk about multi-cloud, we talk about complex in IT, a lot of businesses have multiple data protection solutions within them, some maybe for on prem, some protecting cloud applications. Talk to me about how this managed service would enable a business in any industry to get that centralized management and that visibility into everything they're backing up from physical servers to SAS applications for example. >> That's a great question there. So, you know, going back to one of the things I mentioned earlier, I mean, we're number right now in the marketplace for data, project software and appliances. And so all of our products provide those different flexible options to whether you're managing an on prem environment that you need to do data protection for, or a hybrid or public cloud environment. And so with that, as part of the managed service, we'll run a series of different reports and monitoring, and we'll be able to unify all those different pieces into a couple of different dashboards and reports provide that visibility back to the customers about what's being backed up what they need to go ahead and restore that particular moment, as well as see some of the other trends that are going on with their environment. >> So let's talk about the actual consumption of this. You talked a little bit about when the flux on-demand program was launched towards the calendar end of 2019. So much has changed since then for many, many months, many businesses globally were really in this, how do we survive mode? The pivot were pivots were so quickly, there were a lot of them they're still happening. So talk to us about how this select on demand program I imagine of the facilitator of some businesses being able to get to survival and eventually to being able to thrive in this new era. >> It's a, it's a great point. You know, it'd be the great thing about the option that we now have with flux on demand is, you know, like I said before, customers don't have to pay everything upfront. You know, generally speaking, when we sell a product, you know, we're thinking about a multi-year commitment that a customer has, that they pay all upfront at that point with this they're only paying month to month, and that could be anywhere from 40% consumption of the box or 80% consumption of the box. And then they can pick and choose whether that's over a one year, two year, three year or even a five year term. And so we'll establish a rate so that, Hey, based off that commitment, you know, you'll know exactly what you pay for 40%. If you exceed that, you'll know exactly what you'll be charged for that as well. So that provides not only some predictability in what the customers need to budget for pay every month, but more importantly, they're saving a lot of money from the standpoint of, Hey, they're not having to pay for that all upfront anymore. They can actually spread that out overtime. And so that flexibility particularly in the economic space we are right now is really, really important. >> So no more risk of over provisioning and then having in three to five years to buy more, even if you haven't used that capacity. And that's one of the challenges that we hear often in that space. >> Correct, Correct. I mean, the great thing with data is we're generating more data every single day, but you know, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it in the fact that, Hey, you can make a commitment, 40% consumption. You can work with that. If you find a couple of months later that, Hey, we need to readjust that to another level. We can absolutely work with you to do that as well. >> So I'm curious what that the kind of split is between what the managed services group does and what the customers can do. Knowing that there's a lot of experts on the managed services team. What actions can customers take? For example, you talked about we'll determine what them, what percentage between 40 and 80 they've paid per month, when things change on their end, how can they adjust that. >> Now? it's a great point. When we talk about managed services, that's always the first question that comes up of, Hey, exactly what are you going to manage for me versus what does my staff need to continue to look at? And so we're going to go ahead and manage the jobs. We'll make sure that they run. And, you know, if there are issues where we need to go in there and troubleshoot and make changes, we'll go ahead and do that. And really what we're designing here is a process to where the customer doesn't have to call us, we're going to call the customer to let them know when, Hey, we see an issue. We need to make a change in their environment and notify them, but we still want to give the customers the flexibility of, Hey, if they need to make a change to their backup policy. Cause their environment has changed. Call us, submit a ticket. Let's talk through it. Let's make those changes together so that you got the right protection strategy. Furthermore, the customer, if they need to restore a file, they can submit a ticket and we'll go ahead and assist to make sure that we can get that data restored back for them with the right version and the right place as part of that. >> Had any interesting stories. I know we talked a minute ago about, you know, when the pandemic hit, there was this massive pivot to work from home. And suddenly you had people that were either taking a desktop. Out of, their physical location, bringing it home, or they were having to use one of their own devices connecting to a corporate network. We think about endpoints as being even absolutely critical. There's a lot of business, critical data on end points. What are some of the restorations that you've seen? For example, if someone deletes an entire mailbox or a calendar or there's corrupt data on a somebody gets hit with ransomware, how quickly can your data protection managing production service, recover data? >> You know, it's a great question. And, you know, we've got a variety of different ways to approach that, you know, depending on the customer environment, it may be something where it's acceptable to wait a few days or longer to restore files. It may not be critical, but certainly if it is very critical data and it is something that you need up and running right away, you know, you've got to look at not just the managed service approach, but you've also got to look at what is the software and the hardware approach to data protection? How many copies do you have? How closely, located is some of that equipment. And more importantly, have we looked at the networking latency impact of, Hey, if we did have to do a critical restore, how long would that take? And so that is part of what we can do for managed services is address. Hey, is the policy and the strategy we have in place is it actually meeting our customer needs? Is that the outcome that they're looking for? And so at that time, you know, we may find that, Hey, this may not be the right size solution. There may be some adjustments we need to make. Furthermore, it may be just simply making some changes in the configuration, in the policy to make sure that, Hey, we've got multiple copies that we're doing backups maybe a little bit more frequently, but that's always a really good discussion point with our customers to make sure do we have the right data protection strategy in place with not just the hardware and software, but with the service strategy we're applying against it. >> You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that a survey that I forget if it was IDC or a different one you mentioned that 64% of the IT folks surveyed said, we don't have confidence that we can fully recover. Given what you are talking about here, data protection is a managed service offered through the flux on demand program. Ideal technologies world, those folks in the 64% of we don't have that confidence, what can they learn? What can they expect? and how can this new managed service help move them over the line to getting that confidence that they can recover anything they need? >> Yeah, the confidence that we can help them with on that is transparency. You know, like I'd mentioned, you know, we want to change the paradigm to where customers not having to call us, we're calling them. But even from that standpoint, you know, it's really important for us to be able to demonstrate through the reports through the other work that we're doing, that we are doing the backups that we are restoring and we're meeting the service level objectives that we defined with those customers. And so as part of that, we have a service delivery manager that will work with the customer on a scheduled meeting every month to go through those reports, check with them about their expectations to make sure that we're doing everything that they need us to answer any questions. And then if we need to meet with them more frequently than once a month, we absolutely can. But we want to ensure that the service is totally addressing what the customer is looking for and that they're seeing the right amount of information and data to give them confidence that we're delivering the services they need them to. >> Sounds to me like proactive support. Is that something that you think the customers in that majority who don't feel confident have they not had data protection services. that were proactively saying, Hey guys, here's what's going on in your environment? >> Yeah so, you know, certainly in the, in the industry, I mean, there's a lot that we provide from proactive services We' ll practically notify you when we see a hardware error in your environment. But in the absence of managed services, the customer is in charge, the customer is the one that is running the environment. They're having to monitor all the different events, have a backup job fails they need to figure out well, did it fail because I had a networking issue or because the system had too much IOPS at that point, or was it just, we had two conflicting jobs trying to ride, run at the same time, means the customer takes on all that complexity themselves when they go ahead and manage it. And for a lot of customers that may be the right solution. They may have the right expertise in house. They may have the right requirements or require that, but there's a lot of other customers we're finding, particularly in the state we are right now with COVID that they want to go ahead and move some of that complexity over another partner, which is what we're offering with the managed services. >> Last question at Dell technologies world, the digital experience this year. Tell me about what you're going to be talking about. what can folks expect to learn from you? (laughs) >> We're going to talk a lot more about the managed services for data protection. We're going to talk about how that aligns very, very cleanly with the flux on demand and talk about the benefits you get from both of those different models. >> Excellent. David, thanks so much for joining us on the cube today. Sharing what's going on with flux on demand program, managed services for data protection and how you can help customers navigate their complex data protection needs in a very strange world. We appreciate your time. (chuckles) >> Thank you >> For David Mensing, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage with Dell technologies world 2020. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE DISCOVER VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of HPE DISCOVER 2020, the virtual event this year. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have a couple of women from HPE joining me next first time on theCUBE. Very pleased to welcome Jas Sood, the US VP of Sales, Commercial and SLED at HPE, and Sandy Ono, the VP of Marketing Strategy at HPE. Ladies great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Wow, excited. >> So we want to talk about customers, what's going on. The SMB market is one that has been near journal. A lot of folks hearts the last few months, we're hearing so much, even in our local neighborhood about small and medium local businesses, really being challenged as COVID has just disrupted everything. What are some of the things Jas, we'll start with you that you're seeing in today's SMB market? >> Yeah, so I think the SME market is dynamic. And you got a lot of really, really small customers. You have the medium-sized businesses and so forth. So there is a wide range of what customers are feeling today. I think on the one spectrum, just thinking about, how are they going to stay open as a viable business, given the current economic condition? Whereas others are trying to figure out, now that we are in more of a remote working environment, how do they support their employees? How do they make sure that there's remote connectivity that we're able to communicate? Obviously, we're all using the same sort of bandwidth. How do we make that work? I'm also thinking about, there was still a lot of exchange of data going through the remote workplace. And so, how do we make sure that information coming back is secure and so forth? So, one of the things that we're trying to do is just make sure that we're there for our customers, let them know that, "Hey, we just want to hear you. "We want to be there for you." And be able to provide many, many options, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a couple of minutes. But Sandy, what's your take? >> Certainly, Jas, I echo everything you're saying. I think revenue and cash flow is very much on top of everybody's mind, and just 75% of SMEs revenues have been disrupted. And when you think about that, really, how do you not just move to the new normal, but a lot of businesses are going to have to go through some change. Now, change really first is how do we contain costs? Look at the cost things we need to get done to service customers, have a supply chain, how can infrastructure an IT help with that to contain costs? And then, second, how do you find new revenue streams? The world is much more virtual today than it was yesterday. How do we evolve our businesses in order to actually find new revenue streams? I think is very much on that people signed. >> That's an interesting one, Sandy, that you bring up new revenue streams. Jas, let me ask you as the leader of Sales for Commercial and SLED in the US, how are you finding new revenue streams, knowing that as Sandy said, 75% of SMBs are dramatically affected by COVID, what are you doing? What do you think, even working with your channel partners to open up some new revenue opportunities? >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, channel partners are a key part of our strategy. To go to market strategy first. So we work with them on a daily basis trying to think about, "Hey, how could we really help? "How can we really be out there to provide certain options for customer?" So, one of the few things in terms of helping SMB customers to continue the revenue stream is to provide really lucrative financing options as well. So currently, we have many offers that they don't have to pay until the end of this calendar year, which is the end of our fiscal year. So being able to really think out of the box to say, how could we come together and really be able to help when there is a certain sort of cash flow shortfall right now. I think the other thing too is there are certain industries within SMBs that actually have higher demand right now, healthcare customers, some financial services customers as well. I mean, those are areas that as people in the community that we rely on heavily these days. So, again, being able to be there for those customers to help them think through ways that we can help them to monetize their businesses a little bit more proactively today is also an area where we're trying to help. >> And Jas, how has your role as an executive sponsor in a lot of accounts, how is it changing? >> Very interesting question. And it's more actually often conversation now that we've all been at home. It's not really a, "Hey, can we talk about this project?" Or, "Can we talk about what you have kind of coming up "and how can I help," but it's just more around just a general conversation. So I've had so many conversations with customers just to say, "Hey, how are you guys coping? "How are you dealing with being able to... "Are you able to work remotely? "First of all." I mean, I think we all have that capability, but really to have all your employee base, being able to do that, what impacts does that have on their business long term, short term? And I think that's just opened up just a general, how's it going conversation, we share best practices, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're trying to figure that out as well. We are all at home as well. And so it really creates more of a personal conversation. I think the main thing that we want to make sure is that we're just there for our customers. We realize that it's a trying time right now, and cash flow might be tight, and that's okay. Because, eventually, we're going to come back as the United States, as the economy and things are going to come back in, we just want to make sure that we're there for our customer base, whenever that time comes for them. >> That personal vision is so important. Is there I'm a marketer you're a marketer. And for a long time, we've been talking about personalization and how effective those marketing tactics can be when they can really deliver a message to a perspective buyer that hits exactly, "That's what I'm looking for." Even more, as Jas was saying, now it's even more important, not just your SMB customers, to get personal with them, but to allow them to have that experience with their customers. Sandy, how have you changed your marketing mix or even your marketing messaging in light of this new need for a different type of personal touch, that's only virtual? >> It's a great question. Two things are from how you talk to your customer-based perspective. And it's true for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and it's true for all of our customers out there. Really it has to be authentic to the point where we can't just be selling the thing anymore. Everybody is not only cash-strapped, time-strapped. But they're also looking for a genuine connection to something that they need. So to be much more articulate around the problems we solve, the solutions that are readily deployable, how can we help in these moments has been much more forefront and the marketing messages and just the way we talk with our customers. The other thing is from a marketing mix perspective. We're going to the same thing everybody else is right? I was just thinking the other day, probably half of our typical marketing investment is in physical events, just like Discover was a year ago. And really having to rethink what that is now, how do you stay connected with customers? What does a virtual event have to be? What is a meetup now in a Zoom. Getting really comfortable with that. And these technologies that can help us, but still maintaining those customer touchpoints. And particularly, as we think about... Everybody's thinking about new revenue streams, how do you get to the newer customers that don't know you yet? What are the points of personalization, interconnectedness, the ongoing ways you can stay in touch via digital, all become much more forefront as we think about conical the new normal? And along those lines engagement, is so key. You brought a Discover being for how many years before this year physical event, and the cute covers many physical events a year. And so it's very... Everyone's trying to figure out how do we actually engage our customers and our prospects as vendors and maintain their engagement? Because now you're not just in an audience with a phone and email and phone calls as distractions, you're at home, you're sharing bandwidth. You've maybe have kids at home. There's more distractions. So Sandy, what are some of the things that HPE is doing at DISCOVER 2020, the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE to engage folks and maintain that engagement? >> Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, talk about getting ourselves an order of being very, I guess I'll use the worst snackable, a lack of anything else. We are used to being in a room, talking about the problems we solve, and the solution we have in for an hour. Discover what you're going to find is 15 minutes, that's all people have in a virtual world is 15 minutes. What used to be two, three hours in terms of a keynote, is much more targeted. And we're doing a lot more on demand. I would say that, if one of the things that we're really trying to do, particularly with this fund and across the board, is, how do you stay connected? And it's not just about one way delivery of content, but it's really that interaction plan. Are people talking to our chat agents? What are they chatting about? How do we get them to the next phase? What are all the different ways you can light up in a digital way that helps people follow up? Again, they're going to come in and out experience something. And this is the world of digital is not a one conversation. It's kind of a... It's like a dating game. You got to keep going. To keep the conversation going just the read of me. >> That two-way conversation, is... I'm glad that you brought that up. Because Jas, so many events, every event probably is a big opportunity for every vendor to close some big deals. There's just something about that face-to-face connection where execs can sit down with customers or whatnot. We can't do that this year. So what are some of the ways that your team and through your channel is doing what Sandy was talking about and doing that really, that dialogue, that interactive conversation through just video conferencing? >> Yeah, well, the neat thing about it is that we've still been able to keep some of those personable tracks through Discover. So we have like the CIO Summit, so that'll be an area of open dialogue. It's sort of an invite-only type of thing event. We will be having customer round table specific to many different topics. I'm hosting a couple of those myself. And so it's an intimate group of 12 to 15 customers doing the same thing on the partner side and having our senior executives being there with us to host it. So I think just the neat thing about it is even though it's virtual and to Sandy's point in trying to keep some of the keynotes and of that nature at a shorter timeframes so that we keep attention and make it succinct. I think at the same time, we're able to still chip the small group environment where we're able to have open dialogue. And I think one of the great things about being able to do that now is, there's so much that customers can learn from one another. We talked about us really sharing with them. I mean, customers are a little bit more open to talking to one another as well, and figuring out, "Hey, what are you doing? "Is this working?" "This is sort of issue that we have, "how are you handling that?" So, I think just in our environment now there's a little bit more opportunity, an openness to share. And the good thing about being virtual is, you can do more of that. 'Cause, as Sandy mentioned, some of that too, the sessions are on demand. So a little bit on your own time also based on your own schedule. So I think having the variety of both will be key and successful. >> Yeah, having that mix of those intimate conversations that can help really HPE, from a revenue perspective, close big deals, as well as allowing folks with 70 cents. Give me some... It's like crazy, right? That snackable digestible content on my time, probably one of the things that we're hearing on theCUBE, the last a couple of months of everything being virtual is that so many events are getting even more and more and more attendees because people don't have to travel and budgets and that sort of thing. But I got to ask you a question, Sandy, as a marketer, how do you measure engagement? Typically they think of like badge stands at a booth or downloads is as this pivot was done so quickly, and I accolade HPE for being able to do that. That's hard thing to do. How are you as a marketer... What are you looking to do to measure success for this event? >> It's a great question. We look at success in kind of three ways. Obviously is the reach, how many folks we can bring in this is the first time we're doing this so global, which is quite fascinating to kind of see it come to life. Really being able to address the global audience, the customers, the partners, and our employee base that we're going to be able to reach. Second is relevance. We're thinking about, are we talking about the right things that are going to resonate with our customers? How are they reacting to that? There's so many mechanisms. We are going to get feedback from social to the way they engage with us. They're going to vote by their clicks. That's the end of the day. They're going to tell us what they're interested in after we put the content out there, and we're going to soak that up as digital signals that come back. And then lastly, obviously just driving pipeline, this is a conversation. And hopefully an acceleration point, we in digital marketing have a lot of different ways that we're going to score engagement. We tend to think about it pretty simply. It's either a hot lead, a warm lead, or a cold lead. And it's a way to kind of almost think about engagement in a way of the speed of follow up. Is the customer ready to engage in the next step? Maybe they're super hot. Maybe they're just slightly warm. But we have kind of data science models that help us take all that data that we're going to sit on because it's digital, turn it into something that makes sense and then be able to hand over to like Jas's team, some of those signals. So our sales teams can actually the next steps. >> I like that. It's all about speed these days, right? >> Yeah. >> HPE, quickly to turn this event digital. We also knew that SMBs and customers are having to work quickly to start in place the right digital equipments to move forward. Last thing I want to leave you guys with, Jas, what are some of the things that are going on at Discover that you're excited about to engage with customers? >> Yeah, so I think just one, the virtual experience, I think, is going to be really cool. We have some cool entertainment type things going on as well. We'll give all that away, but I think that keeps it fun. I think it'll be unique experience. I'm really excited also about the different tracks that we have. So we actually do have a small, medium business track, a lot of on-demand sessions. So there's a lot of vertical sessions. There's a lot of industry sessions as well. So really to be able to go in there depending upon what your area of interest is and focus is, I think you're going to find something and it's really easy to navigate. I'm excited because I think there'll be more customers that can come having our state and local government customers be able to log on, and really get a sense for what's really happening in the industry with all of the cares act funding and so forth. So I think it'll be really exciting to be able to showcase tracks like that now that we have a virtual environment that we didn't get an opportunity to do for. So I think there's more that we have to offer and I'm really interested and excited about that. >> More without the... As ladies will know and appreciate that the mass of foot ache-- >> That's fine. >> From walking miles and miles and Las Vegas. (Jas and Sandy laughing). And next thing, Sandy, you're hosting a panel, I've discovered. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Yes, I am. Jas mentioned that we have a whole SMB track. So we're hosting a panel that's going to be just geared for the small-medium businesses. It's going to be on June 30th as we kind of continue of rolling thunder with DISCOVER VIRTUAL. It's with an analyst, couple of our SMB experts really talk a little bit deeper around the solutions that we have, the problems we're hoping to help people solve, and certainly have those on-demand sessions. I'll just add onto what Jas is saying. I'm really excited because, for the first time, particularly for our small-medium businesses, this is a no entry fee type of event. So there's no entry fee. We're actually giving $10 back to charity. So for our smaller businesses to be able to kind of consume this content and really see the demos, see the technology, really help shape what's the next step for them. I think what I'm excited about, that's all. >> Excellent, Sandy, Jas, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. It was great talking to you both. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, cool. >> I appreciate it. >> Our pleasure, looking forward to seeing the impact. Well, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Coverage at HPE DISCOVER the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Hi and welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Getting to the end of a full day wall-to-wall coverage. We've been rather than everyone getting together in Dublin where we talk to SUSE executives, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe, happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Cassidy, she is the Senior Vice President of Global Channel and Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so love getting to talk a little bit about the channel, talk about the whole go to market piece, maybe you start a little bit if you would, Channel and Cloud, how do those two go together? Talk to us a little bit about what your organization does? >> Okay, sure. That's great. So I think this is something new for SUSE. So at the beginning of this calendar year, we actually saw a lot of synergy between how you're going to market with our full end to end ecosystem, and really pulling in all of the different partner type-- around with supporting our customer, digital transformation to the Cloud. So that allowed us to pull all of the alliances together that really support end to end that transformation. So under this charter, we're basically looking to fulfill and support our customers, regardless of what route they want to use to help them through this time of digital transformation, enabling them in whatever type of Cloud environment is best suited for their business, whether it's hybrid, or completely public or born in the Cloud, etc. So that's what our team is is focused to do. >> Excellent, interesting to see how those pieces are coming together. Of course, one of the big discussions is, moving more towards that cloud model we've been saying for years, you know, public Cloud really is that bar that everything gets managed to add everything from the consumption model to price and everything and the like. I know one of the pieces is that you have a new partner program, could you lay out, what's changing? How does that all work? Well, what does it mean that how SUSE is going to work with that ecosystem? >> Great. Yeah. So we're very excited about this. We're releasing or unfolding slowly our SUSE one partner program. And this is one holistic partner across all of SUSEs. I think historically, we had some different programs that address certain go to market routes or what have you. And we're pulling that all together, so we have this larger all encompassing offering. Already today, we've just soft launched a brand new partner portal, so there'll be easier look and feel and ability to use our systems, Coming soon, we'll also have an updated Learning Management System behind the scenes, so you'll have easier and more access to different types of training to support the different roles as you going to build out your panel in cloud strategy within your organization, and all of the supporting services and solutions that support that as well. The other big things that we're doing, and this is a preview of what I mean later towards the end of the summer, so this isn't released yet, but I'm giving you that precursor here. Is a different approach. So we're not going to categorize our partners by I'm an IHV or I'm an ISV, what we're going to do is focus on specialization. So how to sell Are you a seller of a solution? Are you a builder? So you're building integrated solutions that other partners in the downstream channel can sell? Are you a managed service provider or services provider or CSP? Yeah, so we'll have those different areas of specialization. But then our partners can opt into one or more and make their business more impactful to their customers and we'll support them along that journey. >> Sounds like that that move is to kind of align more with what you're seeing customers, I'm assuming. What do you expect that seems to have a ripple effect the SUSE's business? >> Yeah, I think it allows us to have more of an impact with our customers make our end and offerings more strategic, and also allows us to really leverage and create relationships across the full partner ecosystem. So it's not just the a SUSE's specific solution, but we're looking at what are the use cases that our customers are trying to solve? And how do we put the different parts and pieces of the ecosystem together to help them get to that next state of success, whatever that looks like for them, and oftentimes that's the trifecta of a multi partner solution. That then we can package bundle support, and enable our partner ecosystem to support customers on as well. >> Excellent, Rachel, how are you seeing some of the changes in that ecosystem impacting what you're doing? We talked a bit about Cloud, AI, of course, is a big discussion point for the event this week. So how are some of those larger technology trends, impacting your channel and go to market? >> Yeah, I mean, the first piece is I think the different partners are changing their businesses, there were traditional IAT, they're looking and expanding their offerings into more services or MSP type offerings. So they're looking to really engage and support their customers through that digital transformation. And that's what the partner program and how we're aligning our organization is in support (mumbles) And then maybe on the technology roadmap, we're looking to move up the stack and be more more impactful with some of those application-driven solutions. So MLN, AI, etc. And how we can be a bigger part of that and enable our partners to be successful in that as well. And then on top of that, I think the other compelling factor that we have to offer is through source initiative. I think especially now in this marketplace, we're seeing a lot of more, you know, it was already becoming mainstream, if you will, but now with COVID-19, it is a catalyst for innovation. And we are all about through open source opportunities and offerings. And that's what we're also enabling our partner ecosystem and our end customers jointly together around so that they can also be successful. >> Yeah, I've had some great conversations covering SUSECON, with your partner ecosystem, talking about the digital transformation, talking about the date. Is their framework, are there some new training that you're rolling out? Maybe you can expand a little bit on that, that digital transformation discussion, how you make sure that you've got a holistic solution for customers between SUSE and it's in an ecosystem. >> Yeah, great question. So one of the things that we're doing is, we're calling them to the one partner stack. And they're modularized, integrated solutions stack. And we're doing these basically top down and bottom up. So from a market demand perspective, where should we be playing? What are the partners that we should be interlocking with to create those end to end solutions that meet high market demand opportunities and challenges that our customers face today. And at the same time, we're also building and defining these from the ground up. So what are the assets that we're seeing from the field without any marketing support or anything just kind of proactively coming through us, help us solve this problem, and pulling those parts and pieces together, and then also making them very modularized. So that they can be almost like a LEGO Block, if you will. So you can plug and play the pieces that are relevant to your specific solutions. And in the partner world, if you have your own storage offering or whatnot, you can use that or you can use art. So it's very modular. And it also really helps to address very tailored civic solutions. We're starting these kind of a horizontal play. So looking at some of these new technologies, like you mentioned, what are we doing in AI veteran to help support that partner ecosystem and an end to end solution. But then the next wave of this is, what can we do more of that repeatable and scalable to help our healthcare providers or automotive opportunities as well. So the next iteration, our neck neck, will be to have these solutions to one partner stack, if you will, for vertical offerings as well. And then if we're sorry, you also mentioned framing. So all of this it's not just building it in the background. We're doing it in the field, with our customers, with our partners and then all of the different supporting components that you need to be successful from how to support, do it yourself marketing tips so that we can empower our partners to build this into their solutions or services are also part of this. And then enablement is a key table stakes for all of it. And not just on the the parts and pieces but the end to end offering. And also looking at that role base. Like what do I need to really help my customer understand the value of this end to end solution all the way down to the support technician or the deployment architect. >> Excellent, so Rachel is both in the keynote and the conversation that I had with Melissa, there was really a celebration of SUSE being fully independent now, for a year. I'm curious what impact that has on the ecosystem, and how does just being an independent open source company impact the relationship that you have? >> I think we've seen a nice uplift and excitement and opportunity from just that. So when people choose or go or embrace an open source option is because they want choice and we are now the largest independent open source company in the world, and we're offering advice and flexibility. And all those values that are key in the open source, culture and world are part of SUSE's culture, which I also think is really important and it resonates through our partner ecosystem, but also then extends to our customers. >> Excellent, I want to give you any final words you want to share with the ecosystem as to what they should be looking for, you give a little bit of a hint for some things coming out in the summer. But final takeaways from SUSECON. >> Yeah, our logo or tagline, if you will, is the power of many. And this isn't something that any one of us can do on our own. And I think especially in this days, environment, all the challenges that we're facing, we're really seeing people come together. And that is the definition of open source. And I've been in this environment for quite some time. I drank the Kool Aid a long, long time ago, and it's important to us. So for the partner ecosystem, like they say, the power of many and work together as one. And I think that's kind of the the message that resonates, and we want to make working with us, whether you're a customer or a partner, easier to go to market, easier to be innovative and find those solutions together. And, part of our overarching mentality is, to simplify, modernize and accelerate. So everything we do are under those three pillars, which I think is really exciting. And I'm excited to be here and be a part of this, especially at this time. >> Well, Rachel Cassidy, thank you so much for updates, I think perfect note to end things on community, obviously something that a big focus at the show, as well as something that is near and dear to the heart of theCUBE team. So it's been a pleasure for us to participate in SUSECON this year and definitely look forward to many more SUSE events in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stuart thanks for having me. Have a great day. >> All right, make sure to check out theCUBE dot net for all the interviews that we have. That, well, it shows we will be at future. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for joining us for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 emia taught to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin coming to you from London I'm at Koopa inspire 19 pleased to be joined by one of Koopas spent setters hit me here is alla Williams the managing director and chief procurement officer at Barclays al welcome to the cube Thank You Lisa thanks for having me so Barclays is a three hundred plus year old Bank three hundred and thirty five years I think I also was was headquartered in London I didn't know this until he did some research Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM yes and a credit card in the UK credit card why first credit card in the UK and the pioneer in inventor of the ATM correct yes so when we think of an organization that is three hundred and thirty five years old we think how agile is that organization how transformative can it be talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff which or not but tight and culture like that's a great question right could you think about a three hundred thirty-five year old Bank how innovative could it can it be right how agile can it be and the market in the the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector especially on the retail and consumer side expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in this sector and so for Barclays it's it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank how influential is the consumer side because as consumers we are so used to being able to get anything that we want we can buy products and services we can pay bills with a click or swipe on the on the business side it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate it's a lot of other risks and security issues how influential is Barclays Barclays is your retail your consumer business in terms of your b2b work and that's a great question because I think the the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to b2b and traditionally business-to-business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated streamlined or frictionless you know as you would in a consumer model so the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business and business models been playing catch-up for the last several years as a result talk to me about now the role of finance leaders I was reading surgery that Kupa did recently have 253 uk-based financial decision makers and a big number of them I think it was 96 percent said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spent there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper but talk to me about how the role of the chief procurement officer is changing you've been doing it for quite a while you're a veteran right some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in right so I've been the chief procurement officer of Barclays for two and half years and the CEO of a large global technology company for nine years before that so I think the the the role of the chief procurement officer has changed significantly over the course of the last say 10 years five years two years we're at a point now where the chief procurement officer is seen as a source of and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation it's seen as a source of capacity creation for the the the organization for the company and it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spins for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain so the expectations for procurement have tripled quadrupled or more fold in the last you know four or five years some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Koopa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply initiative to simply but beyond you know dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spent but it's being transformative to completely other areas like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability yes Wow so talk to me a little bit about I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition how are you leveraging that and maybe your old American football days to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays yes so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business I think the concept of teams is key and effective teams are built on trust they're built on empowerment they they're built on collaboration open communication limited asymmetry and information as it's passed and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on this on the football field American footballer or other football or on or in a business environment of business context so you know it's really and as a CEO and for all of the leaders on my team it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem but more importantly when you need to be coached and and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more success see Bennet Berkeley's a couple years now talk to me about your use case the purpose has with Koopa what are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve yeah so the relationship with coop has been great again I joined to make a couple of years ago one of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations to building out a new organization structure and operating model for for procurement I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology and we didn't have a common procure-to-pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing and supply chain so early on when I joined Barclays partnered partnering with Koopa working both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform we're going to point to six more by the end of this calendar year and over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational banks so it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for for Barclays and part of that transformation journey the technology piece is important that all a lot of its cultural we talked about a history of a three hundred and thirty-five year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform that's challenging to get folks on board right being comfortable with change is your spirit of competitiveness was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get them well I think so I mean I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives the the adage we ought to be pulling on the rope together to achieve achieve the end result and I think in the case of the sort of our Koopa journey both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able able to galvanize around and in feel like they were a part of and it it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well and kind of put his front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had we'd never been before so in terms of procurement having a seat at the board table is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business yeah and look at Barclays compared to some of my other experiences it's not an it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table we might have a seat at too many tables sometimes there's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives so with that seat comes a lot of responsibility so I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that that that component of it's not just about having a seat at the table it's about what we're going to contribute what are we going to do differently when we're at that table when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization and what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that will pick up as a result and deliver on those promises that's absolutely critical one of the things that was talked about this morning is to trust Rob Bernstein talked about it they also had a guest speaker Rachel Botsman who's a trusted expert it was such an interesting conversation you know we talked about any chuck event that the cube goes to you always talk about trust got to have trust in the data you gotta have trust in your suppliers but what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust but cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers tell me about how has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have marked trusted relationships with your executive and your peer team yeah I mean it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front office because we're in the business of trust I mean Bank a bank is in the business of trust that's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients and I think you know within procurement we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers in the case of Kupa frankly it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability right don't over promise and under deliver but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability but if something and I always do if something goes so not according to plan right it's be open communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it that to me is how we build trust in any team and that's how we built trust with Kupa through our transformation over the last two years that's critical mister your point no deployment probably ever goes perfectly according to plan there are always things that happen whatever it is software hardware is that we're talking about and I think for companies to address that confront it help the customer through those challenges to me that's more valuable I'm saying everything went beautifully was flawless that's not reality right I completely agree and I think that's that's what separates good from great companies to write is their ability to build that trust whether it be within their supply chain with their clients with their employees and look it's it's a journey it's not something you're one and done and you can say okay we've got the trust you can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on on those trusting relationships should think about that we've earned this trust but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it so we grow X having the focus on that because you're right whether it's a deployment of software it's not one and it's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship right it's maintaining that it's ensuring that there's value right being delivered on both sides that's right tell me a little bit about your ability Barclays ability as a spend setter in this program that Cooper has to influence technology directions like they talk a lot about the community all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community as Burton is able to be a strategic her gir with Cooper rather than just a customer yeah Phil we are I mean Rob and his team Raja Ravi the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclays now look I'll be the first to admit Barclays and in banking and banking specifically in the UK it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that kupo would work in so what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us and kind of flipping that around there's certain things that we need from Koopa that that we've been able to partner with them to deliver over the course of the last two years and the relationship of coop has been fantastic they hear us they listen to us they help us understand what the solution can do what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term and then how do we augment that in the right way so we don't create cottage industries of activity with Impa cure med when we could be leveraging the capability of ghupat to deliver on those services right so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Koopa pay with American Express for example and just some of the other innovations that Koopa is making what are some of your thoughts what are some of the things that excite you about the direction are going in well yes so on the Koopa pay front I'm actually going to be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Koopa pay because Mark Lee card is also a key component of that capability for the first virtual card that they integrated probably I believe it was yeah and and so so I think about payments is sort of the one not the only but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective and it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having that through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers you know detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through there's a lot of cost in that a lot of time and very little speed we want to move the dial on speed the value we want to move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our our payment process and that's where Koopa pay and the Barclaycard partnership with Koopa pay is really played a key role in making that happen so in q1 we made our commitment to deploy Koopa pay in q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the base of the platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year on the payment side one last thing that just popped up I was doing some research and the b2c side is transformed much faster a lot of demand from the consumers we talked about that a moment ago do you see what the direction could the pay is going in with Barclays card for example as bringing in some of the consumer implements to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there and I think yes I think that's exactly right because again when you think about the consumer side of payments or use it we're all using our phones we're using other digital means we're using wearables we're using different ways of buying and paying especially in retail and the first question we have to ask ourselves why can't those innovations be applied in a b2b space now kupah pay is I think a start of sort of that journey and certainly not the end you know destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction yeah we as consumers are quite demanding yes I'll thank you for doing you on the cube ensuring the Barclays spends that our success rate good luck tomorrow in your keynote thank you for having me thank you pleasure I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from cuca inspire London 19 thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Justin Warren, and this is theCUBE, live from the lobby of Moscone North here in San Francisco. The 10th year we've had theCUBE and happy to bring back two CUBE alums. Which, of course, in 2010 we didn't even have the idea of a CUBE alum, we were just gathering some friends, some industry experts. To my right is Jaspreet Singh, who's the founder and CEO of Druva. Sitting next to him is Kit Colbert, who's the Vice President CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good morning. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Jaspreet, I remember talking to you when Druva was a new company and cloud native wasn't the thing that came to mind when we were talking about it. We've known for a long time how important data is, and protecting that and managing that, of course, is something the industry's been looking at a long time. But give us the update on kind of Druva and you brought along Kit, so we're going to be talking about some of the cool, cloud native multi-cloud modernization type things, how that fits in your world. >> Absolutely. If you think about the world, right? In 1998, say for a start, they would create a whole notion of size and no software and the whole picture, right? Since then applications went in size, then came developer tools which were in size, and now it's all about infrastructure and first your management which is getting to be a cloud native, public cloud orientated size world. To where Druva comes in. As the world gets more and more fragmented, the data gets more and more fragmented. The multiple versions of cloud are different parts of strategy. Data management has to get more and more centralized. Which is where Druva comes in and which is where me and Kit are together. I think as VMware build a strategy for multi-cloud. Pulling the whole VMC approach to multiple versions of public cloud. Druva is a great partner, to sort of bring the data management together. A single control plane to manage multiple versions of cloud deployment on a single plane. >> All right, great so Kit it sounds like VMC is the kind of key component work together. 'cause when I think at Druva, a lot of what I think of is SaaS. And SaaS isn't necessarily the first thing that I think of when I think of VMware, so... >> We're tryin' to get there, tryin' to get there Stu. >> Yeah, no but pull it together as to where your customers intersect. >> Yeah absolutely, so it's a great partnership and definitely really focused on rallying around VMware Cloud and native AWS. And the core idea there was that we could deliver a cloud service to our customers of our VMware infrastructure, right? And we'll become a SaaS company, transforming into that. And that's something that we've been very focused on strategically, right? And so VMware Cloud and AWS is really the first offering. But there's many more coming. So just earlier today we announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This idea of bringing our cloud service, STDC as a service on premises, to customer data centers, to customer edge locations. And the cool part about it, as Jaspreet mentioned, is that this world is becoming more and more distributed and we're seeing that with just the number of STDCs and how they're proliferating everywhere and you do need that centralization in terms, from a management perspective in order to handle all that diversity. And so, that's the big focus for us, in terms of the infrastructure, kind of just the core compute, source, network but you then have to up-level and say, how do you think about the data? And that's really where this partnership comes in. >> Right, so Jaspreet so if I understand that correctly, what you're trying to do here is to provide one data management method, no matter where the data lives. So, I don't have to go and find one tiny thing for, oh okay, I've got this other weird bit in the corner here, that I need a special, dedicated data protection thing for, 'cause that's always difficult. Data protection is hard enough. I really don't need to have, oh how am I going to deal out of this particular thing? Oh, now I've got to go and get another tool. And learn how to use it, maintain it, keep everyone skilled in it. Well actually, I can just pick Druva and then I've solved that problem. >> That's right. I think we are more forward-looking, than backward-looking. So, what we're doing is, any new application comes into an enterprise. Think about, from a point of view of a new cloud, like a VMC, AWS deployment. If you're deploying, you know, a lot of new edge location or data centers or new cloud services, Druva's a perfect partner to bring data management, along with it. For a legacy application that you always had, you can keep your legacy vendor with you. Where it has a con wall, you can keep them as they remain in your enterprise. Bring Druva for the new applications at hence. All the new workload that are more cloud bound workload, is our core focus, hence the VMC partnership. >> Right, so does that mean I'll be able to use Druva wherever VMC is available? >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Because you're expanding how many places I can get VMC now, I've noticed. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> That's very interesting >> It is, yeah, and I think that's again, the beauty of the partnership, is that we're doing a ton of work to deliver VMC to more and more locations. We've partnered with AWS, and now we've got global coverage, almost all the regions by the end of this calendar year. And now with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC , we can go wherever the customer is. They essentially give us a street address, and we can deliver hardware there and then operate it remotely and they can take advantage of that. And the cool thing about it, that all comes up to this control plan that we have running in the cloud and this is how we can interact with Druva. They can have a few simple APIs they can manage via us to access all those workloads that are distributed all over the place. >> Think of public cloud. Public cloud is nothing but Amazon's, initially was a concept of Amazon applying retail to IT. You can buy a resource anywhere in the globe at a fixed price point at certain SLA. That's the promise of, public cloud promise of VMC to get same VMware experience wherever you go across the world same price point. Same promise with Druva . The same data you put anywhere, can be managed, predicted end-to-end, same policy, same price point across the globe. >> And people often forget that part of it, that we're technologists. So people like to look at that the speeds and feeds and what does the technology do but there's, when you're running a business is actually a lot more to it and pricing models and things that technologists sometimes find boring. I love a good spreadsheet but something as, a simple pricing model where I can understand it and I know what it's going to do for me, was when I spin up a brand new application and I understand how am I going to manage this over the long term, how am I going to protect it, and what's it going to do for the the ROI on that? And what's that going to look like in three years' time? Not just turning up the brand new project. What is the operational cost of that going to look like? These are the kinds of things that people, I think are starting to get a lot more used to now that they particularly with cloud it's a much more operational model. It's not a build model. It's, yes build is one part of it, but you also need to be able to run and manage it >> And think of what we call the world of two ransomwares. There is a ransomware when you're worried about a data breach or data loss and there's another ransomware we have to, your data production vendor or your hardware vendors say is, you know, give me five years of money up front with the promise to manage the data eventually. So in the public cloud world, it's pay-as-you-go on demand. You need a new application you spin up a new workload in VMC in AWS. You need data protection spin up right there and then, no pre-planning, pre-positioning, architecture reviews needed. >> And I think like, the great thing about Druva and what we're talking about here in this consistency of operations. How you're managing data, really goes into the whole strategy that VMware has around driving consistency across infrastructure as well. I think one of the big value propositions that we can help with is taking a lot of this very heterogeneous infrastructure with different capabilities, different hardware form factors and layering on our virtual infrastructure which simplifies a lot of that and delivering that consistent experience. And of course data management as we said is a key part of that experience. >> Yeah, you mentioned kind of the move of VMware towards being more of a SaaS player and working in those environments. One of the flags along that journey is VMware's always had a robust ecosystem. But in the cloud my understanding is you've released now a VMware Cloud Marketplace. Reminds me a little bit of a certain cloud provider that has a very well-known marketplace. Give us a little bit about it, and Jaspreet'll, of course tell us about the Druva piece of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. We're kind of really evolving our strategic aims. Historically we've looked at how do we really virtualize an entire data center? This concept of the software-defined data center. Really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases. And now as we've been talking about, we're in this world where you kind of have STDCs everywhere. On Prem, in the cloud, different public clouds. And so how do you really manage across all those? These are things we've been talking about. So the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can give people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners as well as open source solutions, and these are things that come from the Bitnami acquisition that we recently did. So, the idea here is that we cannot make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to draw those consistent operations that exists on top of our platform and with our partners and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well >> And Druva's part of it. We were day one launch partner on the marketplace. Marketplace serves predominantly two purposes. One is, the ease of E-commerce, you can drive through a marketplace. Second, is the ease of integration. You have a prepackaged solution, which comes along with it. It's a whole beauty of cloud, exactly as I mentioned. We see cloud beyond technology. It's an E-commerce model most companies should adapt to. And as the part of the progress, our commitment is to be in marketplace day one. Druva is right now number one ISP globabally for AWS. So we understand the whole landscape of how E-commerce gets done on public cloud very very well, and we are super thrilled to be a partnership with VMC on the marketplace, the VMC Marketplace. >> It's another one of those important indicators. I think about VMware's Cloud journey. Cloud isn't a destination, it's not a location. It's a way of doing things-- >> Kit: It's a model, yep. >> So having this this marketplace way of consuming software and becoming far more like as you say, it's STDC, but with that software as a service on Earth. You can have STDC as a service. That's probably too many letters in that. >> We use that internally, yes the STDC, AAS (laughs). >> Seeing those features coming to VMware and the partners that you bring in to that ecosystem. And Stu and I we spoke before, it's like VMware is always been a great partner for everyone in that ecosystem and it does have a real ecosystem and we see it again this year at the show. That you have these partners who come in, and you're finding ways to make it easier for those integrations to happen in a nice, easy to consume way and customers like that. So the enterprise is a heterogeneous environment. If you just do one acquisition and all of a sudden, I've got two different ways of doing the same thing. So being able to have known trusted solutions to do that, where I don't have to spend ages and ages figuring out how to, how do I configure this? I don't actually make this do what I need it to do. It's like I'm trying to solve a customer problem. I'm not trying to build technology for its own sake for most of the customers. I just want something that works, and particular with data protection, I just want it to work. >> The owners aren't producing more back abutments. >> No, which, I don't think it should. it's kind of a shame. I used to be a back out man but we don't need anymore of those >> I think this is the idea. You talked in the beginning about this notion of service delivery and how can we take all these STDC's that we have out there that customers are running, and enhance their value and enhance the value to the customer's business by adding on these value-added services. So, I think that's one of the beauties of cloud marketplace is that they can very easily extend what they, customers can extend what they already have with these additional services. >> Jaspreet, VMware's been going through a lot of change. They've made acquisitions. I saw a number of announcements today, that I don't think I would have seen back in the EMC days of you know, some of the data protection solutions being baked into the platform. Tell us what it means to be a VMware partner today. >> I think it's great to see VMware innovating and making strong progress. I think in this world of constant change it can either be in the front end of, you can never never over-innovate. You can be in the front end of, being in the edge, driving change, driving Innovation, driving chain industry or taking a back seat and then be in HPE. So I think I love to see VMware what they're doing and making all the progress and great to be a partner in this change, in this journey to see as a strong partner. >> Yeah, I mean, we're not standing still and it's funny like. So one of the biggest announcements today in my mind is Project Pacific, this re-architecture of vSphere to building Kubernetes into the fabric of what vSphere is. And it's funny when you start looking at that because I think folks have a concept in their mind, of what vSphere is, right? It's VM-based and I have worked with it in certain ways. It's got a certain API or interface and we're fundamentally changing all that. We're rethinking, as I mentioned how we deliver our STDC's, our customers consume them. And so I think that notion of being at the forefront, we're very committed to that >> Kit, I'm glad you broke it up 'cause I'm still having a little trouble thinking through it. Now on the one hand, every company is going through this, we're going to containerize everything, we're going to make it microservices, every infrastructure component, now has that fundamental building block. Docker had a ripple effect on what happens, similar to what VMware had a decade before. But I look at Project Pacific and I'm like well, when Cloud Foundry was originally created, it was, we want back then we called it Paz, but I want a thin layer, and I don't want to pull VMware along for that necessarily. It might fit underneath it, but it might not. So help us understand as to like, how is this not like, a lock into what, you're going to use vSphere and you're going to have your license agreement with us every year and now you're going to be locked into this because this is your Kubernetes platform. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So look, I actually think it drives more openness because Kubernetes is an open platform and we're integrating that in, and we're leveraging the Kubernetes API. And so, the vSphere will have two northbound APIs, one of which is based on the existing VM-based one and the other one which is Kubernetes. And so partially, it's we're actually opening it up. The cool thing about what we can do with Pacific is that we have what, 300, 400000 customers running vSphere. They have an aggregate around 70 million workloads. We're able to take that massive footprint and move it forward almost overnight by building Kubernetes into vSphere. And so the way I look at it, is this is a huge force multiplier for our customers, this ability to move their fleet of applications forward at basically, zero cost, very little cost. And while leveraging all the tools and technologies, they already have. This is another good thing, that our partnership with Druva as well, is that because the way we've architected this, all the tools that use vSphere today and the vSphere's APIs, those APIs will see the Kubernetes pods and things that are provisioned and those tools can operate on those pods just like they can on VMs. And those things just work out of the box. So like if a customer gets specific and uses Druva, and they start provisioning some pods, into Kubernetes on vSphere, Druva will see those they can manage the data, it's all automatic. And of course, Druva can do extra cool things, like even get deeper integration there. But the point is that we've got, you know thousands of partners again who's out of the box that stuff will work. Now is that lock in? No, I actually think that because people are switching over to Kubernetes, they now have the ability to move that to a different Kubernetes environment if they so see fit. Anyway, so that's my quick answer >> Think about the world. Virtualization is practically free right now. What you pay for is the enterprise, once you pay for abstraction level, remove complexity, make my scale happen, and this is where you pay for the whole VMware stack. When the customer start deploying containers, they haven't seen the complexity they would see at scale. When you see the complexity in management and data plane and insecurity plane, then they would need the ecosystem of providers to solve those complexities at scale but as we're a think if Kubernetes takes off and production application, right now it's mostly dev and test, it goes to a production application, the world would need something which is a much more robust sort of control planes to manage it end-to-end >> Yeah, I mean, we solved a lot of the hard problems around running applications in production. And I think what we're doing with Pacific, is enabling all those cool innovations to work not just for existing apps but for new Kubernetes-based apps as well. >> All right, well Kit and Jaspreet, thank you so much. A lot of new things for everybody to dig into and I always appreciate both of you and your teams are very responsive and dig in. Be looking forward to more blog posts and more podcasts from your team and the like, to go into it more. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We have tons more coverage here at VMworld 2019. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California. It's theCUBE, covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at Fisherman's Wharf at the IBM CDO conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, Joe Selle is here. He's the Global Advanced Analytics and Cognitive Lead at IBM, Boston base. Joe, good to see you again. >> You to Dave. >> And Jerry Gupta, the Senior Vice President and Digital Catalyst at Swiss Re Institute at Swiss Re, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me Dave. >> You're very welcome. So Jerry, you've been at this event now a couple of years, we've been here I think the last four or five years and in the early, now this goes back 10 years this event, now 10 years ago, it was kind of before the whole big data meme took off. It was a lot of focus I'm sure on data quality and data compliance and all of a sudden data became the new source of value. And then we rolled into digital transformation. But how from your perspective, how have things changed? Maybe the themes over the last couple of years, how have they changed? >> I think, from a theme perspective, I would frame the question a little bit differently, right? For me, this conference is a must have on my calendar, because it's very relevant. The topics are very current. So two years ago, when I first attended this conference, it was about cyber and when we went out in the market, they were not too many companies talking about cyber. And so you come to a place like this and you're not and you're sort of blown away by the depth of knowledge that IBM has, the statistics that you guys did a great job presenting. And that really helped us inform ourselves about the cyber risk that we're going on in cyber and so evolve a little bit the consistent theme is it's relevant, it's topical. The other thing that's very consistent is that you always learn something new. The struggle with large conferences like this is sometimes it becomes a lot of me too environment. But in conference that IBM organizes the CDO, in particular, I always learn something new because the practitioners, they do a really good job curating the practitioners. >> And Joe, this has always been an intimate event. You do 'em in San Francisco and Boston, it's, a couple hundred people, kind of belly to belly interactions. So that's kind of nice. But how do you scale this globally? >> Well, I would say that is the key question 'cause I think the AI algorithms and the machine learning has been proven to work. And we've infiltrated that into all of the business processes at IBM, and in many of our client companies. But we've been doing proof of concepts and small applications, and maybe there's a dozen or 50 people using it. But the the themes now are around scale AI at scale. How do you do that? Like we have a remit at IBM to get 100,000 IBMers that's the real number. On our Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform by the end of this calendar year, and we're making great progress there. But that's the key question, how do you do that? and it involves cultural issues of teams and business process owners being willing to share the data, which is really key. And it also involves technical issues around cloud computing models, hybrid public and private clouds, multi cloud environments where we know we're not the only game in town. So there's a Microsoft Cloud, there's an IBM Cloud, there's another cloud. And all of those clouds have to be woven together in some sort of a multi-cloud management model. So that's the techie geek part. But the cultural change part is equally as challenging and important and you need both to get to 100,000 users at IBM. >> You know guys what this conversation brings into focus for me is that for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's laws, as the innovation engine for our industry, that feels like just so yesterday. Today, it's like you've got this data bedrock that we built up over the last decade. You've got machine intelligence or AI, that you now can apply to that data. And then for scale, you've got cloud. And there's all kinds of innovation coming in. Does that sort of innovation cocktail or sandwich makes sense in your business? >> So there's the innovation piece of it, which is new and exciting, the shiny, new toy. And that's definitely exciting and we definitely tried that. But from my perspective and the perspective of my company, it's not the shiny, new toy that's attractive, or that really moves the needle for us. It is the underlying risk. So if you have the shiny new toy of an autonomous vehicle, what mayhem is it going to cause?, right? What are the underlying risks that's what we are focused on. And Joe alluded to, to AI and algorithms and stuff. And it clearly is a very, it's starting to become a very big topic globally. Even people are starting to talk about the risks and dangers inherent in algorithms and AI. And for us, that's an opportunity that we need to study more, look into deeply to see if this is something that we can help address and solve. >> So you're looking for blind spots, essentially. And then and one of them is this sort of algorithmic risk. Is that the right way to look at it? I mean, how do you think about risk of algorithms? >> So yeah, so algorithmic risk would be I would call blind spot I think that's really good way of saying it. We look at not just blind spots, so risks that we don't even know about that we are facing. We also look at known risks, right? >> So we are one of the largest reinsurers in the world. And we insure just you name a risk, we reinsure it, right? so your auto risk, your catastrophe risk, you name it, we probably have some exposure to it. The blind spot as you call it are, anytime you create something new, there are pros and cons. The shiny, new toy is the pro. What risks, what damage, what liability can result there in that's the piece that we're starting to look at. >> So you got the potentially Joe these unintended consequences of algorithms. So how do you address that? Is there a way in which you've thought through, some kind of oversight of the algorithms? Maybe you could talk about IBM's point of view there. >> Well we have >> Yeah and that's a fantastic and interesting conversation that Jerry and I are having together on behalf of our organizations. IBM knowing in great detail about how these AI algorithms work and are built and are deployed, Jerry and his organization, knowing the bigger risk picture and how you understand, predict, remediate and protect against the risk so that companies can happily adopt these new technologies and put them everywhere in their business. So the name of the game is really understanding how as we all move towards a digital enterprise with big data streaming in, in every format, so we use AI to modify the data to a train the models and then we set some of the models up as self training. So they're learning on their own. They're enhancing data sets. And once we turn them on, we can go to sleep, so they do their own thing, then what? We need a way to understand how these models are producing results. Are they results that we agree with? Are these self training algorithms making these, like railroad trains going off the track? Or are they still on the track? So we want to monitor understand and remediate, but it's at scale again, my earlier comments. So you might be an organization, you might have 10,000 not models at work. You can't watch those. >> So you're looking at the intersection of risk and machine intelligence and then you're, if I understand it correctly applying AI, what I call machine intelligence to oversee the algorithms, is that correct? >> Well yes and you could think of it as an AI, watching over the other AI. That's really what we have 'cause we're using AI in as we envision what might or might not be the future. It's an AI and it's watching other AI. >> That's kind of mind blowing. Jerry, you mentioned autonomous vehicles before that's obviously a potential disruptor to your business. What can you share about how you guys are thinking about that? I mean, a lot of people are skeptical. Like there's not enough data, every time there's a another accident, they'll point to that. What's your point of view on that? From your corporation standpoint are you guys thinking is near term, mid term, very long term or it's sort of this journey, that there's quasi-autonomous that sort of gets us there. >> So on autonomous vehicles or algorithmic risk? >> On autonomous vehicles. >> So, the journey towards full automation is a series of continuous steps, right? So it's a continuum and to a certain extent, we are in a space now, where even though we may not have full autonomy while we're driving, there is significant feedback and signals that a car provides and acts or not in an automated manner that eventually move us towards full autonomy, right? So for example, the anti-lock braking system. That's a component of that, right? which is it prevents the car from skidding out of control. So if you're asking for a time horizon when it might have happened, yeah, at our previous firm, we had done some analysis and the horizons were as sort of aggressive as 15 years to as conservative as 50 years. But the component that we all agreed to where there was not such a wide range was that the cars are becoming more sophisticated because the cars are not just cars, any automobile or truck vehicles, they're becoming more automated. Where does risk lie at each piece? Or each piece of the value chain, right? And the answer is different. If you look at commercial versus personal. If you look at commercial space, autonomous fleets are already on the road. >> Right >> Right? And so the question then becomes where does liability lie? Owner, manufacturer, driver >> Shared model >> Shared, manual versus automated mode, conditions of driving, what decisions algorithm is making, which is when you know, the physics don't allow you to avoid an accident? Who do you end up hitting? (crosstalk) >> Again, not just the technology problem. Now, last thing is you guys are doing a panel, on wowing customers making customers the king, I think, is what the title of it is. What's that all about? And get into that a little bit? >> Sure. Well, we focus as IBM mostly on a B2B framework. So the example that I that I'll share to you is, somewhere between like making a customer or making a client the king, the example is that we're using some of our AI to create an alert system that we call Operations Risks Insights. And so the example that I wanted to share was that, we've been giving this away to nonprofit relief agencies who can deploy it around a geo-fenced area like say, North Carolina and South Carolina. And if you're a relief agency providing flood relief or services to people affected by floods, you can use our solution to understand the magnitude and the potential damage impact from a storm. We can layer up a map with not only normal geospatial information, but socio-economic data. So I can say find the relief agency and I've got a huge storm coming in and I can't cover the entire two-state area. I can say okay, well show me the area where there's greater population density than 1000 per square kilometer and the socio-economic level is, lower than a certain point and those are the people that don't have a lot of resources can't move, are going to shelter in place. So I want to know that because they need my help. >> That's where the risk is. Yeah, right they can't get out >> And we use AI to do to use that those are happy customers, and I've delivered wow to them. >> That's pretty wow, that's right. Jerry, anything you would add to that sort of wow customer experience? Yeah, absolutely, So we are a B2B company as well. >> Yeah. >> And so the span of interaction is dictated by that piece of our business. And so we tried to create wow, by either making our customers' life easier, providing tools and technologies that make them do their jobs better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently, or by helping create, goal create, modify products, such that, it accomplishes the former, right? So, Joe mentioned about the product that you launched. So we have what we call parametric insurance and we are one of the pioneers in the field. And so we've launched three products in that area. For earthquake, for hurricanes and for flight delay. And so, for example, our flight delay product is really unique in the market, where we are able to insure a traveler for flight delays. And then if there is a flight delay event that exceeds a pre established threshold, the customer gets paid without even having to file a claim. >> I love that product, I want to learn more about that. You can say (mumbles) but then it's like then it's not a wow experience for the customer, nobody's happy. So that's for Jerry. Guys, we're out of time. We're going to leave it there but Jerry, Joe, thanks so much for. >> We could go on Dave but thank you Let's do that down the road. Maybe have you guys in Boston in the fall? it'll be great. Thanks again for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM CDO in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Let me check. (uptempo orchestral music) (uptempo techno music) >> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live here with theCUBE in San Francisco, Moscone West, for Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with John Troyer co-host, analyst this week. the TechReckoning co-founder. Our next two guests are Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift Platform and Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, interview of the week because CoreOS now part of Red Hat. Congratulations, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> So obviously this is for us, we've been covering both of you guys pretty heavily and we've been commenting very positively around the acquisition of CoreOS. Two great companies that know open-source, pure open-source. You guys got the business model nailed down, these guys got great tech. You bring it together. So the first question is how's everyone doing? How's everyone feeling? And where's the overlap, if any and where's the fix? Explain the true fit of CoreOS. >> I'm going to start Alex, you want to jump in after. We're very excited right, so when we first had interactions with CoreOS, we knew this is going to be a great fit. The conversation we had earlier, both companies delivers in open-source, delivers in the mission center to take us forward regard to Kubernetes, as the container orchestration engine, and then being able to build out value for our customers around it. I think from our perspective, the work that both CoreOS did in advancing the community forward but also the work they've done around automation or their upgrades, management metering, charge back and so on. Being able to bring all those qualities into Red Hat is incredible. So I think the fits been good. It's been three months, I'll let Alex comment some more on that but we've been doing a lot of work from integration perspective around engineering, around product management. At Red Hat Summit this week, we reveal details around some of the converged road maps, which I can talk about some more as well. So we're feeling pretty good about it. >> Alex, your reaction. >> Yes, it's been three months. If you've studied CoreOS at all, you know everything that we do really centers around this concept of automated operations. And so by being part of Red Hat, we're starting to bring that to market in a much bigger and faster way of really accelerating it. The way the acquisition are really successful is either mutually beneficial to both companies and they accelerate the adoption of technology and that's definitely happening. We had the announcement yesterday with Red Hat CoreOS around the Linux distribution. Last week, we did the operator framework. It was very central to the work that we've been doing as part of CoreOS, and then as companies in a lot of ways is being part of Red Hat for three months now. This is what our company would have looked like if we ever just another 10 years along or whatever very similar, we're like a mini Red Hat, and now we're leaped ahead in a big way. >> And you guys done a good work. We've documented on theCUBE many times, and we were in Copenhagen last week. Now covering the operating framework but I want to get your reaction. You guys did a lot of great work on the tech side obviously, you can go into more detail but we've always been saying on theCUBE. If you try to force monetization in these emerging markets, you're optimizing behavior. And this was something that's gone on, we've seen containers. It's been well documented obviously what's happened. It's certainly a beautiful thing. Got Kubernetes now on top working together with that. If as an entrepreneur out there that are building companies. If you try to force the monetization too early, you really thinking differently. You guys stay true to it. Now we've got a good home with Red Hat. Talk about that dynamic because that was something that I know you guys faced at CoreOS and you've managed through it. Tempted probably many times to do something. Talk about the mission that you had, staying true to that and just that dynamic. It's challenging. >> Yeah, as we set out to build a company in general, there are really three operating principles. There is build a great technology to solve our mission which is to secure the internet through automated operations, build a great place to spend their days which is really about the people and the culture and so on. Why are we doing this, and the third was to make it sustainable and by that I mean to build their own money fountains, building out of the middle of our campus. And so by joining Red Hat it's we have a money fountain sitting there. (laughing) It's spewing off a ton of cash flow every single quarter that allows us to continue to do those first two things in perpetuity, and that third one is something every company needs in order to continue to execute towards the mission. And the thing that's so awesome about working with Red Hat is we're very much aligned and compatible. Red Hat's mission isn't exactly the same thing we are working but it's definitely compatible. It's like Apache and GPL are compatible. It's like that type of compatible. >> You both believe in open-source in a big way. Talk about the Red Hat perspectives. Now you got like a kid in a candy store. Openshift made a big bed with Kubernetes. You see now, you have the CoreOS, how has it changed in Red Hat internally? Things moving around actually accelerates the game a bit for you guys, and you're seeing new life being pumped into OpenStack. You're seeing clear line of sight with Kubernetes on the app side. We were just at KubeCon. A lot of people are pretty excited. There's clear lines of sight on what's defacto. What people are going to build around, and also differentiate. >> Right, so I'll start off by saying I really hope our CEO, Jim Whitehurst doesn't see this interview but if it goes off in terms of money factor. I'm currently make budget request. I think I know what's going on. >> Balance sheet, cashless now. It's in the public filings. If I see a fountain of money spewing off the thing, >> The ability to reinvest. >> This is a really good fit. (laughing) The way to say this, they have a great business model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Some of us will make money, some of us will spend the money. Some of us will spend the money, it will work out well. (laughing) >> It's a great win. It's a great win. It obviously accelerates the plans. The commercialization is already there with Red Hat. This is just a good thing for everybody but the impact of you guys accelerating, just seeing OpenShift. You can boil it down to the impact of Red Hat. What is the impact? >> So in all seriousness, I think the focus for us really has been about there is so much complimentary work that's been going on with the CoreOS team that we're bringing into OpenShift, and to Red Hat in general that accelerates everything that you're seeing. You saw some amazing announcements happen this week with regard to our partnership with Microsoft and getting OpenShift out and Azure, and joint support offering. The work we're doing with IBM to get IBM middleware as well as IBM Cloud Private support integrated with OpenShift. The work that Alex referred to around automation, being able to bring that to our customers. We see all the excitement around that front as well so we want to take all Techtonic work that has been going on at CoreOS, then move that to OpenShift. Carry forward the community that CoreOS built around Container Linux, and actually inject a lot those ideas into that Linux, our flagship technology. Bring that passion and energy to bear as well, and then carry forward a lot of the other projects that they have. For example, the Quake Container Registry, that's extremely popular. Carry that forward, support our customers to use that both stand alone integrated with the OpenShift platform. Other projects like FCB that Alex has been talking about which is the underpinnings of Kubernetes plus running worldwide. So all of those things, we can bring forward, and then all the advancements that were made in place by CoreOS as they're working towards their money fountain, just plug that right into it. >> And just as a point of reference, Brendan Burns flew in yesterday. Microsoft Build is going up so he left their own conference to come down here. >> As did Scar Guthrie, right? >> That's a great testament. This is the testament. They're coming down, really laying down support. This is a real big deal. This is not a fake deal, it's real. >> And so I want to talk a little bit about specifics of the timeline, the road maps. Sometimes with these mergers or acquisitions, it's well the technology will be incorporated at some point, and then it goes away to die and you never see it again. And then the people all leave, and then you ask what was going on. But here, you actually have, I was great. You were talking to me. You have some specific timelines and we'll start to see some of the Techtonics Stack in OpenShift fairly soon. >> Yes, absolutely so the acquisition was announced three months ago and we said at that time that by Red Hat Summit, we'll lay out for you a road map and so we're now starting to do that. We put out release of some materials around some details with regard to how that's coming out. We have detailed sessions going on at Red Hat Summit around the integration plans between Red Hat, OpenShift and CoreOS with a few specific areas with regard to OpenShift. You'll start seeing the earliest versions if you will of the work that's being done. This summer, we'll deliver the full road map to you there by the end of this calendar year. With regard to, for example pieces like the Quake Container Registry that's being made available and being sold now as we speak. Customers can go get that, and we want to make sure no customer is left behind. Right, that's a principle we put out. And with regard to supporting any existing customers on Techtonic or the Container Linux space, we're doing that as we're working to integrate them into the Red Hat portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about the decision for Red Hat's atomic coast and Container Linux? Now re-named again, CoreOS. That was one of the seminal inventions that you all made as you started the company. I think it had some brilliant ideas again about security and the operational aspects but can you talk about some of those technologies and the decisions made there? >> Yeah, like I said, the acquisition of CoreOS Red Hat was about saying look what can we take that CoreOS has been doing to accelerate both work and community but also what could be doing to deliver this technology to customers. So the goal was we'll take all the atomic and the word that's been going on there have that be superseded by the work that's coming out of CoreOS Container Linux carry the community forward. Release a version of that called Red Hat CoreOS and in its initial form make that actually an underlying environment to run OpenShift in. Okay so for customers who want the automation that Alex talked about earlier. They made that available both at the underlying platform. Make it available in OpenShift platform itself via the work that's come from Techtonic, and then ultimately, Alex will talk about this some more through operators. So trusted operations from ISP or third party software that would run on the platform. All right so now if you will, we'll have full stack automation all the way through. OpenShift also support Red Hat Linux, a traditional environment for the thousands of customers that we have globally. Over a period of time, you should expect to see much of the work that's going on Red Hat CoreOS find its way into it as well. So I think this just benefits all around for us both in the near term as well as long. >> And Red Hat Container certification, where does that fit into all this? >> Yeah, a great question, so what we announced maybe was, actually was two years ago was a Container certification program. Last year, we spent some time talking about the health of those containers, and being able to provide that to customers. And this year, we're talking about trusted operations around those containers. That carries forward, we've got hundreds of ISPs that have built certified containers around it, and now with the operator framework, we've had, I think it's four ISPs demonstrating previews of their operators working with our platform as well as 60 more that are committed to building ISP operators that will be certified again. >> So people are certified in general, pretty much. I think we're very excited. The fact that we went to KubeCon last week, announced that the operating framework have been based on the ideas that the CoreOS team has been working on for at least two years. Making that available to the community and then saying for the ISPs that want a path to market. Going back to the money fountain again for the ISP that want to pass through market which is pretty much all of them. We also have the ability to do that so give them an opportunity to make sure that as wide as possible some adoption of the software at the same time help with commercialization. >> Can you guys share your definition of operator because I saw the announcement but we we're on a broader definition when we see the DevOps movement going the next level. It's all about automation and security, you mentioned that admin roles are being automated in a way to see more of an operator function within enterprise and emerging service providers. So the role operator now takes on two meanings. It's a software developer. It also is a network operator, it's also a service, so what is that, how do you guys view that role because if this continues, you're going to have automation. More administrator is going to be self healing, all this stuff is going to go on. Potentially operations is now the developers and IT all blurring together. How do you guys define the word operator in the future state? >> Well I know the scenario of great interest to you. >> So operator is the term for the piece of software that implements the automated operations. And so automated operations, what is that? Well that's what sets apart, the way I think about it is what sets apart a cloud provider verses a hosting provider. It's a set of software that really runs the thing for you and so if we're going to get into specific Kubernetes lingo, it would be an application specific controller. That's a piece of software that's implements the automated operations. And automated operation is a software that gives you that simplicity of cloud. It's at the core of a database as a service. It's both hosting but also automated operations. Those two things together make up a cloud service and that software piece is what we're decoupling from the hosting providers for the first time and allowing any open-source project or ISP brings the simplicity of cloud but in any environment. And that's what the operator is a piece of software that actually goes and implements that. >> So a microservices framework, this fits in pretty nicely. How do you see obviously? >> Microservices, there's all these terms. Microservice is more of an architecture than anything but it's saying look, there's these basic things that every operations team has to go and do. You have to go and install something, you have to upgrade it, you have to back it up, when it crashes in the middle of the night, get it going again. A lot of these things, the best practices for how you do them are all common. There's no ingenuity in it. And for those things, we can now because of Kubernetes write software that just automates it, and this was not possible five years ago. You couldn't write those software. There were things like configuration management systems and stuff like that that would allow companies to build their own custom versions of this. But to build a generic piece of software that knows how to run application like Prometheus or a database or so on. It wasn't possible to write that and that's what the first four or five years of CoreOS was is making it possible, that's why you saw all these mat and new open-source projects being built. But once it was possible it was like let's start leveraging that. You saw the first operator come out about a year ago, and I think it was our ATD operator was the first one, and we started talking about this as a concept. And now we're releasing operator framework which is from all the learnings of building the first couple. We now made a generic, so anybody can go and do it, and as part of Red Hat, we're now bringing it to the whole ISP ecosystem. So the whole plan to make automated operations ubiquitous is still well underway. >> I'd love to extend that conversation though to the operator, the person. >> Right. I think you and your team brought the perspective of the operational excellence right to the table. A lot of cloud has been driven by the role of developer and DevOps but I've always felt like well wait a minute operators the people who use to be known as IT insisted they had a lot to bring to the table too about security and about keeping things running, and about compliance and about all that good stuff. So can you talk a little bit as you see the community emerging, and as you see all these folks here. How do you talk to people who want to understand what their role is going to be with all this automation in keeping the clouds running? >> Computers use to be people too. (laughing) But we're not going to completely automate away everything because there's still parts of this wildly complex system that justifies whole conferences of thousands of people that require a whole lot of human ingenuity. What we're doing is saying let's not like do the part that is the fire drill in the middle of the might that keeps you from making forward progress. The typical role of an operations person today is just fighting fires of mundane things that don't actually add a lot of value to the business. In fact, this guy is difficult because you only get brought up when things are on fire. You never get an praise when things are going well. And so what we want to do is help the operations folks put out those fires like the security updates. Let's just roll those out automatically. The way you do those across all organizations does not need to be special and unique but they're really critical to do right. >> Well it's just automate that stuff away and let the operations team focus on moving the business forward. The parts that require the human spirit to actually go and do, and if we get to a point where a CEO of a company is like, wow, I can not come up with a new vision for this imitative 'cause my operations team are just so fast at influencing them. Then we have to start worrying about operations people's job but I don't see that happening for a very long time. >> And no one is going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs either. >> Let me just extend that point a little bit. The whole point of operators is to encapsulate human knowledge that ISPs have and bring that in the platform and automate it. So the challenge that we've had is an operations person is required to know a lot about a lot. So the question then really is how can we at least take some of what's already known by people and be able to replicate that and that allows for every one to move forward. I think that's just forward-- >> Well, there's a bigger picture beyond that, so I agree but there is also scale. With cloud, you have scale issues. So with scale automation is a beautiful thing 'cause the fire has also grown exponentially too so you can't be operating like this. Scale matters, super. >> The reason that this stuff was invented at Google initially was not because of Google's high career per second. Is that they were, to build the application they're building required so many servers that you couldn't hire enough operations people without writing software to automate it. So they were forced to custom design the system because they had so many servers to run to build the software that they wanted to build. And other companies are just now getting to that point because every company is going through a digital transformation. They have to have thousands of servers just to run their applications. There's no way you're just going to hire the operations staff to go and do it all by hand. You have to write software to turn the operations people into mech warriors of running servers. You need to wrap them in automation in order to scale that. >> At KubeCon, she made a comment that all those operations folks at Google are software developers. >> Brand engineers. >> Brand engineering, so they're not Ops guys just pushing buttons and provisioning gear and what not. They're actually writing code. You bring up the Google piece, the other piece that we heard at KubeCon. We hear this consistently that this is now a new way to do software development. So when a former Googler went to work for another company, left Google. She went in and she said, "Oh my God, you guys don't do. "You don't use board?" To her, she's like how do you write software? So she was like young and went out in the real world and was like wait a minute, you don't do this? So this is a new model in software development at scale with these new capabilities. >> I think so and I think what's really important is the work we're doing with regards to an ecosystem perspective to help folks. So one of the top things I hear from customers all the time is this sounds fantastic. Everyone's talking about DevOps or microservices or wanting to run Kubernetes at scale. Do I have the skills? Can I keep up with the change that's in place and how do I continue going forward around that? So we announced at Red Hat Summit Managed offerings from let's say Atos and DXC where you've got goals to integrate us helping folks, or companies like Extension T systems. The CEO came and spoke today about the work we're doing with them to help connected cars, and those applications be rolled out quick and fast. I think it's going to take a village to get us to where we want to because the rate of change is so fast around all of these areas and it's not slowing down that we'll have to ensure there's more automation and then there's more enablement that's going on for our customers. >> So some clarity, can you guys comment on your reaction to obviously we've seen OpenStack has done over the years and now with well Containers, now Kubernetes. You seeing at least two ecosystems clearly identified. Application developers, cloud native and then I would call under the hood infrastructure, you got OpenStack. Almost it clarifies where people can actually focus on real problems that the Kubernetes needs. So how has the Container, maturation of Containers with Kubernetes clarified the role of the community? If this continues with automation, you can almost argue that the clarity happens everywhere. Can you comment on how you see that happening? Is it happening or is it just observation that's misguided? >> I think we're getting better with regard to fit for a purpose or fit for use case. All right, so if you start thinking about the earliest days of OpenStack. OpenStack is going to be AWS in a box, and then you realize well that's not a practical way of thinking about what a community can do a build at scale. And so when you start thinking about a Word appropriate use case for this. Now you start betting if you will, a set of scales, you set expectations around how to make that successful. I think we'll go through the same if we haven't already or even going through it with regard to Kubernetes. So not every company in the world can run Managed World call. DYI Kubernetes, don't many companies will start with that. And so the question is how do we get to the point where there's balance around it and then be able to take advantage of the work? For example, companies like Red Hat work for us was doing to help accelerate that path 'cause to the point Alex was trying to make is the value for them being able to keep up with the core release of Kubernetes? And every time a bug shows up to go off and be able to fix and patch it, and watch that or is the value building the next set of applications set on top of platforms. >> That's great, well congratulations guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the insight. Congratulations on the three months into Red Hat. Good fit, and enjoy the rest of the show. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks. >> Live from Red Hat Summit, it's theCUBE's coverage here of Red Hat and all the innovation going on out in the open. We're here in the middle of, we open the floor with Moscone West with live coverage. Stay with us for more after this short break. (uptempo techno music)