Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

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

>>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.

>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hey, welcome back everyone. Through the cubes coverage of VMware Explorer, 22, I'm John Fett, Dave ante, formerly world, our 12th year extracting the signal from the noise. A lot of great guests. It's very vibrant right here. The floor's great. The expo halls booming, the keynotes went great. We just had a keynote announce. So our next first guest here on day one is car Capor C co-founder and COO min IO. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you for having >>Me. You're also angel investor of variety of companies of Q alumnis and been in the valley for a long time. Thanks for coming on sharing. What's going on. So, first of all, obviously VMware still on the wave. They've always been relevant and they've always been part of it. Yes. But as that's changing a lot's going on security data's big conversation. Yeah. And now with their multi-cloud we call super cloud. But their multi-cloud it's it's about hyperscaler participation. Yes. Yes. Cloud universal. Yes. It's clear that VMware has to be successful in every cloud. Okay. And that's really important. And storage is one of it. You guys do that? So talk about how you guys relate with min IO, the vision, how that connects with what's happening here. >>Yeah. So like you already said, right? Most of the enterprises are become data enterprises in itself and storage is a foundation layer of how, and you do need a system that is simple, scalable, and high perform it at scale. Right? So that's where min IO fits into the picture. And we are software defined, open source. So, you know, like VMware has traditionally been focused on enterprise it, but that world is fast changing. They are making a move in terms, developer first approach and min IO, because it's open source. It's simple enough to start, get, start deploying object storage and cloud native applications on top. So that's where we come in. We have around 1.3 million DACA downloads a day. So we own the developer market overall. And that is where I feel the partnership with VMware as they are coming into multi-cloud on their own min IO is a foundational layer. >>So just to elaborate on it, whenever you talk about multi-cloud, there are two pieces to it. One is the compute side and one is on the storage side. So compute Kubernetes takes care of the compute sites. Once you containerize an application, you can deploy it any cloud, but the data has gravity and all the clouds that you see AWS, your Google cloud, they're inherently incompatible with each other. So you need a consistent storage layer with industry standard APIs that you can just deploy it around with your application without a single line of code change. So that's what we >>Do. Oh, so you got a great value proposition, love the story. So just kind of connect on something. So we heard the keynote today. We gotta win the developers. They didn't say that, but they said, they said that they have the ops lockdown, but DevOps is now the new developer. Yes. We've been covering a lot of the poop coupon as you know, and shifting left everyone's in the C I C D pipeline. So developers are driving all the action and it has to be self-service. Absolutely. It has to be high velocity. Can't be slow. Yes. Gotta be fast. So that sounds like you're winning that piece. >>Yes. Yes. And I think more than that, what is most important is it needs to be simple. It needs to get your job done in a very simple and efficient way. And I think that is very important to the developers overall. They don't like complex appliances or complex piece of software. They just want to get their job done and move on the next thing in order to build their application and deploy it successfully. So whatever you do, it needs to be very simple. And of course, you know, it needs to be feature rich and high performant and whatnot that comes with the, with the flow in itself. But I think simplicity is what wins, the developers, hearts and minds overall. >>So object storage always been simple, get put right. Pretty simple, you know, paradigm. Yes. But it was sort of the backwater before, you know, Amazon, you know, launched. Yes. You know, it's cloud. How have you seen object evolve? You mentioned performance. So I presume yes. Yes. You're not just for cheap and deep you're for cheap bin performance. So you could describe that a little bit if you would, >>For, for sure. Like you mentioned, right. When AWS was launched, S3 was the foundation layer. They launched S3 first and then came everything else around it. So object storage is the foundation of any cloud that you go with. And over a period of time, when we started the company back in 20 end of 2014, beginning 2015, it was all about cheap and deep storage. You know, you just get, put it into one basket, but over years, if you see, because the scale of data has increased quite a bit, new applications have emerged as well. That require high performance. That is where we partnered very closely with Intel early on. And I have to give it to them. Intel was the one who convinced us that you need to do high performance. You need to optimize your software with all the AVX five, 12 instruction set and so on. >>So we partnered very closely with them and we were the first one to come up with, you know, you need high performance, object storage and that in collaboration with Intel. So that's something that we take a lot of pride in, in terms of being the leader in that direction of bringing high performance object storage to the market, especially for big data workloads, AI ML, workloads, they're all object first, like even, you know, new age applications like snowflake and data bricks, they are not built on sand or file system. Right. They're all built on object storage rates. So that's where the, you need >>Performance. And I think the, I think the data bricks, snowflake examples. Good. And then you mentioned in 2014, when you started yes. At that time, big data was Hudu and you know, data, legs, data swamp. Yes. Yes. But the ones that were successful, the ones who optimize had the right bets, like you guys. Yeah. Now we're in an era. Okay. I gotta deploy this. So you got great downloads and update from developers. Now we see ops struggling to keep up yes. With the velocity of the development cycle. Yes. And with DevOps driving the cloud native yeah. Security data ops becomes important. Okay. Exactly. Security and data. A lot with storage going on there. Yes. How do you guys see that emerging? Cuz that becomes a lot of the conversations now in the architecture of the ops teams. I want to be supportive in enablement of dev. Yes. Yes. Do you guys target that world too? Or >>Yeah, we, we do target that. So the good thing about object storage is that if you look at the architecture in itself, it's very granular in terms of the controls that it can give to the end user. Right? So you can really customize in terms of, you know, what objects need to be accessible to whom what kind of policies you need to implement on the bucket level, what kind of access controls and provisions that you need to do. And especially like with ransomware attacks and what not, you can enable immutability and so on, so forth. So that's an important part of it. Especially I think the ransomware threats have increased quite a bit, especially with, you know, the macro, you know, situation with war and stuff. So we see that come up quite a bit. And that's where I think, you know, the data IU immutability, the data governance and compliance becomes extremely, extremely important for organizations. So we, we are partnering very closely with a lot of big organizations just for this use case itself. >>So how's it work if I want to build some kind of multi-cloud whatever X, right. Okay. I, I can use S three APIs or Azure blah. Okay. And I, and are all different. Yes. But if I want to use min IO, what's the experience like describe how I go about doing >>So if you've had any experience working with AWS, you don't need to even change a single line of code with us. You can just bring your applications directly onto min IO and it just behaves and act same way transparently what you would've experienced in AWS. Now you can just lift and shift that application and deploy it wherever you need it to be. Whether it is Azure, blah, whether it is Google cloud or even on edge. Like what we are seeing is that data is getting generated outside of public cloud. And most of the data that, you know, the emerging trend is that we see that data gets generated on edge quite a bit, whether it is autonomous cars, whether it is IOT, manufacturing units and so on. And you cannot push all that data back in the central cloud, it's extremely expensive for bandwidth and latency reasons. >>So you need to have an environment that looks and feels exactly what you have experienced at the central cloud on the edge itself. So a lot of our use cases are also getting deployed with Mani on the edge itself, whether it is on top of VMware because of the footprint of that VMware has within all these organizations itself. So we see that emerging quite a bit as well. And then you can tier the data off to any cloud, whether it is mid IO cloud, whether it is AWS, Azure, Google cloud, and so on. So you can have like a true multi-cloud environment. >>So you would follow VMware to the edge and be the object store there, or not necessarily if it's not VMware Kubernetes or whatever. >>Exactly. Exactly. Depending on the skill set that the organization has within, within their setup, if their DevOps savvy Kubernetes is becomes a very natural choice. If they are traditional enterprise, it, VMware is an ideal choice. So yeah. >>So you're seeing a lot of edge action you're saying, and we, >>We, we have seen starting it increasing yes. And >>Are customers. So they're persisting data at the edge. Yes. Yes they >>Are. Okay. >>It's not just the femoral and >>No, they are not because what the cost of putting all the data through bandwidth is extremely expansive to push all the data in central cloud and then process it and then store it. So we see that the data gets persisted on edge cloud as well in terms of processing and only the data that you need for, for the processing through whatever application systems that you, whether it is snowflake or data, bricks and whatnot, you know, you choose what applications from compute side, you want to bring on top of storage. And that can just seamlessly and transparently work. Yeah. >>Maria, you were saying that multi-cloud yeah. Games around Kubernetes. You, yes. That Kubernetes is all about multi-cloud that's the game. >>Yes. >>Yes. Can you explain what you mean by that? Why is multi-cloud a Kubernetes game? >>So multi-cloud has two foundations to it. One is the compute side. Another one is the storage side. Compute Kubernetes makes it extremely simple to deploy any application that is containerized. Once you containerize an application, it's no longer tied to the underlying infrastructure. You can actually deploy it no matter where you go. So Kubernetes makes that task extremely easy. And from storage standpoint, you know, the state of applications need to be held somewhere. You know, it's it, people say it's cloud, but it's computer somewhere. Right? So >>Exactly it's the >>Container. It needs, it needs to be stored somewhere. So that's where, you know, storage systems like man IO come into play where you can just take the storage and deploy it wherever you go. So it gets tightly bound with application itself, just like Kubernetes is for compute. Mano is for storage. >>I saw Scott Johnson, the CEO of Docker in Palo Alto last week did yeah. The spring to his step. So to speak Dockers doing pretty well as a result, they got, you know, starting to see certifications. Yes. So people are really rallying around containers in a more open way. Yes. But that's open source, but it's the Kubernetes, that's the action. Absolutely. That the container's really there now Docker's got a great business. Yes. Right now going yes. With how they're handling. I thought they did a great job. Yeah. But the Docker's now lingua Franco, right? Yes. That's the standard. It >>Is. It is. And I think where Kubernetes really makes it easy is in terms of when the scale is involved. Right. If there are, if the scale is small, it's okay. You can, you can work around it. But Kubernetes makes it extremely simple. If you have the right Kubernetes skill, I just need to put a disclaimer around there because not lot of people are Kubernetes expert, at least not yet. So if you have the expertise, Kubernetes makes the task extremely simple, predictable and automate and automated scale. I think that is what is >>The, so take me through a use case, cuz I've talked to a lot of enterprises, multiple versions, we're lifting and shifting to the cloud, that's kind of the, you know, get started, get your feet wet. Yes. Then there's like, okay, now we're refactoring really doing some native development and they're like, we don't have a staff on Kubernetes. We do a managed service. Yeah. So how does, how do you see that evolution piece taking place? Cause that's a critical adoption component as they start figuring out their Kubernetes relationship yes. To compute yes. How they roll it out. Yes. How do you see that playing out as a big part of this growth for a customer? >>Yeah. So we see a mix, you know, we see organizations that are born within cloud. Like they have just been in mono cloud like AWS. Now they are thinking about two things, right. With the economy being, you know, and the state that it is, they're getting hurt on the margin. Some of the SaaS companies that were born in cloud. So they are now actively thinking in terms of what mode they can do to bring the cost down. So they are partnering with min IO either to, you know, be in a colocation at Equinix, like data centers or go to other clouds to optimize for the compute modes and so on. So that's one thing that we see increasingly amongst enterprise. Second thing that we see is that because you know of that whole multi-cloud and cloud does go down, it's not like it, you know, and it's been evident over the last year or so that, you know, we've seen instances where Amazon was down or Google cloud was down. So they want to make sure that the data is available across the clouds in a consistent way. So with man IO, with the active, active application and so on, you can make the data available across the cloud. So your applications, even if one cloud is down for Dr. Purposes and so on, you can, you know, transparently, move the applications to another cloud and make sure that your business is not affected. So from business continuity reasons as well, the customers are partnering with us. So like I said, it's a mix. >>So the Tansu, you know, 1.3, the application development platform that we heard in the keynotes this morning, critical, you have to have that for cross cloud services. If you don't have a consistent experience, absolutely forget it. I mean it's table stake. Absolutely. But there's a lot of chatter on Twitter. A lot of skepticism that VMware can appeal to developers, some folk John as well chimed in saying, well, you know, it's, don't forget about the op side of the equation as well. They need security and consistency. Yes. What are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of VMware, specifically their customers and, and what do you, what do you, how do you rate their chances in terms of them being able to track the developer crowd, your, your peeps? >>Yeah. So VMware has a very strong hold on enterprise. It, you know, you have to give it to them. I don't come across any organization that does not have VMware, you know, for, with 500,000 customers. Right. Right. So they have done something really right for themselves. And if you have such a strong hold on the customers, it's not that hard to make the transition over to the developer mindset as well. And that is where with VMware partnership with partners like us, they can make, make that jump happen. So we partnered with them very closely for the data persistence layer and they wanted to bring Kubernetes the VMware tan natively to the VSAN interface itself. So we partnered with them, you know, we were their design partner and in, I think, 2020 or something, and we were their launch partner for that platform service. So now through the vCenter itself, you can provision object storage as a service for the developers. So I think they are working in terms of bridging the gap and they have the right mindset. It's all about execution like this. Right. >>They gotta get it >>Justed >>And it's the execution and timing. Exactly. And if they overshoot and the, it shifts over here, you know, this comes up a lot in our conversations. I want to get your reaction to this because I think that's a really great point. You guys are a nice foundational element. Yes. For VMware that plugs into them. That makes everything kind of float for them. Yes. Now we would, we were comparing OpenStack back in the day, how that had so much promise. Yes it did. If you remember, and storage was a big part of that conversation. It, it did. But the one thing that a lot of people didn't factor in on those industry discussions was Amazon was just ramping. Yes. So assuming that the hyper scales aren't stopping, innovating. Yeah. How does the multi-cloud fit with the constant struggles? Cuz abs is not rah multi-cloud cause they're there for the cloud, but customers are using Azure for yeah. Say office productivity teams or whatever, and then they have apps over here and then I'll see on private, private. Right. So hybrids there we get hybrid. Yeah. The clouds aren't changing. Yes. How does that change the dynamics in the market? Because it's a moving train. Some say, >>You know, it is, I would not characterize it like that because you know, AWS strength is that it is AWS, but also that it is not outside of AWS. Right. So it comes with the strengths and weaknesses and same goes for Azure. And same goes for Google cloud where VMware strength lies is the enterprise customers that it has. And I think if they can bridge the gap between the developers, enterprise customers and also the cloud, I think they have a really fair shot at, you know, making sure that the organizations and enterprise have the right experiences in terms of, you know, everyone needs to innovate. There is just no nothing that you can just sit back and relax. Everyone needs to innovate. And I think the good part about VMware is the partnership ecosystem that they have developed over the years and also making sure that their partners are successful along with them. And I think that is, that is going to be a key determining factor in terms of how well and how fast they can execute because nobody can do it alone in, in the enterprise world. So I think that that would be the >>Key, well, gua you're a great guest. Thanks for coming on and sharing you for having perspective on the cube. And obviously you've been on a, this from day 1, 20 15. Yes. I mean that's early and you guys made some great moves. Thank you. In a great position with VMware. Thank you. I like how you're the connective tissue and bridge to developers without a lot of disruption. Right? Real enablement. I think the question is can the VMware customers get there? So congratulations. No, thank you. And we got a couple minutes left. Take a minute to explain what's going on with the company that you co-founded, the team what's going on. Any updates funding very well, well funded. Yeah. How many people do you have? What's new. Are you gonna hire where take a minute to give the plug, give the commercial real quick >>For sure. So we started in 24 15, so it has been like seven, eight years now that we are at it. And I think we've been just very focused with the S3 compatible object storage, being AWS S3 for rest of the world. Like we get characterized at and over the years we've been like now we, we are used 60% in fortune 500 companies in some shape or format. So in terms of the scale and growth, we couldn't be more happier. We are about to touch a billion dollar billion Docker downloads in September. So that's something that we, we are very excited about. And in terms of the funding, we closed the, our series B sometime I think end of December last year and it's a billion dollar valuation and we have great partners in Intel capital and Dell ventures and soft bank. So we couldn't be in a more happier >>Spot. You're a unicorn soon to be decor. Right. >>What's next? Yes. I think, I think what is exciting for us is that the market, we could not be more happier with how the market is coming together with our vision, what we saw in 2015 and how everything is coming together nicely with, from the, the organization, realizing that multi-cloud is the core foundation and strategy of whatever they do next and lot has been accelerated due to COVID as well. Yeah. So in those terms, I think from market and product alignment, we just couldn't be more happier. >>Yeah. We think multi-cloud hybrids here. Steady state multi-cloud is gonna be a reality. Yeah. It becomes super cloud with the new dynamics. And again, David and I were talking last night, storage, networking, compute never goes away, never goes the operating. System's still gonna be out there. Just gonna be looked different and that >>Differently. Yes. I mean, yeah. And like, you know, in 10 years from now, Kubernetes might or might not be there as the foundation for, you know, compute, but storage is something that is always going to be there. People still need to persist the data. People still need a performance data store. People still need something that can scale to hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So we are here. You bet against data >>As indie gross head once, you know, let chaos rain, rain in the chaos. There you go. Chaos cloud is gonna be simplified. Yeah. That's what innovation looks like. That's, >>That's what it is. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate thank you for having me more coverage here. I'm John furrier with Dave Alane. Thanks for watching. More coverage. Three days just getting started. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live at HPE Discover '22. Dave, it's great to be here. This is the first Discover in three years and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends. >> Yeah. You know, I tweeted out this, I think I've been to 14 Discovers between the U.S. and Europe, and I've never seen a Discover with so much energy. People are not only psyched to get back together, that's for sure, but I think HPE's got a little spring in its step and it's feeling more confident than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to. >> I think so, too. I think there's definitely a spring in the step and we're going to be unpacking some of that spring next with one of our alumni who joins us, Keith White's here, the executive vice president and general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services. Welcome back. >> Great. You all thanks for having me. It's fantastic that you're here and you're right, the energy is crazy at this show. It's been a lot of pent up demand, but I think what you heard from Antonio today is our strategy's changing dramatically and it's really embracing our customers and our partners. So it's great. >> Embracing the customers and the partners, the ecosystem expansion is so critical, especially the last couple of years with the acceleration of digital transformation. So much challenge in every industry, but lots of momentum on the GreenLake side, I was looking at the Q2 numbers, triple digit growth in orders, 65,000 customers over 70 services, eight new services announced just this morning. Talk to us about the momentum of GreenLake. >> The momentum's been fantastic. I mean, I'll tell you, the fact that customers are really now reaccelerating their digital transformation, you probably heard a lot, but there was a delay as we went through the pandemic. So now it's reaccelerating, but everyone's going to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Data is the new currency. And obviously, everyone's trying to push out to the Edge and GreenLake is that edge to cloud platform. So we're just seeing tons of momentum, not just from the customers, but partners, we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it and offer their solutions to our customers as well. So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers that you may not be aware of is we have over a 96% retention rate. So once a customer's on GreenLake, they stay on it because they're seeing the value, which has been fantastic. >> The value is absolutely critically important. We saw three great big name customers. The Home Depot was on stage this morning, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses. So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present. >> Yeah. It is. And we're hearing it from a lot of customers. And I think you guys talk a lot about, hey, there's the cloud, data and Edge, these big mega trends that are happening out there. And you look at a company like Barclays, they're actually reinventing their entire private cloud infrastructure, running over a hundred thousand workloads on HPE GreenLake. Or you look at a company like Zenseact, who's basically they do autonomous driving software. So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities. They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data to then make driving safer and so you're seeing it on the data front. And then on the Edge, you look at anyone like a Patrick Terminal, for example. They run a whole terminal shipyard. They're getting data in from exporters, importers, regulators, the works and they have to real-time, analyze that data and say, where should this thing go? Especially with today's supply chain challenges, they have to be so efficient, that it's just fantastic. >> It was interesting to hear Fidelma, Keith, this morning on stage. It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity on the platform itself and that it's obviously her job is, okay, here's the platform, now, you guys got to go build on top of it. Both inside of HPE, but also externally, so your ecosystem partners. So, you mentioned the financial services companies like Barclays. We see those companies moving into the digital world by offering some of their services in building their own clouds. >> Keith: That's right. >> What's your vision for GreenLake in terms of being that platform, to assist them in doing that and the data component there? >> I think that was one of the most exciting things about not just showcasing the platform, but also the announcement of our private cloud enterprise, Cloud Service. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're creating that framework for what most companies are doing, which is they're becoming cloud service providers for their internal business units. And they're having to do showback type scenarios, chargeback type scenarios, deliver cloud services and solutions inside the organization so that open platform, you're spot on. For our ecosystem, it's fantastic, but for our customers, they get to leverage it as well for their own internal IT work that's happening. >> So you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about private cloud, what's your vision? You know, we use this term Supercloud. This in a layer that goes across clouds. What's your thought about that? Because you have an advantage at the Edge with Aruba. Everybody talks about the Edge, but they talk about it more in the context of near Edge. >> That's right. >> We talked to Verizon and they're going far Edge, you guys are participating in that, as well as some of your partners in Red Hat and others. What's your vision for that? What I call Supercloud, is that part of the strategy? Is that more longer term or you think that's pipe dream by Dave? >> No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave, 'cause it has to be part of the strategy. What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example. They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal with Google cloud for their internal cars and they run HPE GreenLake. So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds. How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that? And Chris Lund, who is the VP of information technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today, where he said, hey, I can deliver these services to my business unit. And they don't know, am I running on the public cloud? Am I running on our HPE GreenLake cloud? Like it doesn't matter to the end user, we've simplified that so much. So I think your Supercloud idea is super thoughtful, not to use the super term too much, that I'm super excited about because it's really clear of what our customers are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud, it's about the solution and the business outcome that gets to work. >> Well, and I think it is different. I mean, it's not like the last 10 years where it was like, hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds and I'm replicating as much as I can, the cloud experience on-prem. I think you guys are there now and then to us, the next layer is that ecosystem enablement. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving and what role does Green Lake play there? >> Yeah. This has been really exciting. We had Tarkan Maner who runs Nutanix and Karl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well. And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say, one plus one has to equal three for our customers. So when you bring these together, it has to be that scenario, but we are joking that one plus one plus one equals five now because everything has a partner component to it. It's not about the platform, it's not about the specific cloud service, it's actually about the solution that gets delivered. And that's done with an ISV, it's done with a Colo, it's done even with the Hyperscalers. We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution. It happens with managed service providers, delivering managed services out to their folks as well. So that platform being fully partner enabled and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that, and so we have to jointly go to market to our customers for their business needs, their business outcomes. >> Some of the expansion of the ecosystem. we just had Red Hat on in the last hour talking about- >> We're so excited to partner with them. >> Right, what's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible and Rel, but talk about the customer influence in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem. We know we've got to meet customers where they are, they're driving it, but we know that HPE has a big presence in the enterprise and some pretty big customer names. How are they from a demand perspective? >> Well, this is where I think the uniqueness of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach with our customers. Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor that provided hardware components for, and we talked a lot about hardware costs and blah, blah, blah. Now, we're actually a partner with those customers. What's the business outcome you're requiring? What's the SLA that we offer you for what you're trying to accomplish? And to do that, we have to have it done with partners. And so even on the storage front, Qumulo or Cohesity. On the backup and recovery disaster recovery, yes, we have our own products, but we also partner with great companies like Veeam because it's customer choice, it's an open platform. And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic. Because, hey, from a container platform standpoint, OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers, 90% of the fortune 500 that they engage with, with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift and implement that container capabilities on-prem. So it's fantastic. >> We were talking after the keynote, Keith Townsend came on, myself and Lisa. And he was like, okay, what about startups? 'Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud. And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal customer profile necessarily for HPE. Although we saw Evil Geniuses up on stage, but I threw out and I'd love to get your thoughts on this that within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs, they're trying to build their own clouds or Superclouds as I use the term, is that really the target for the developer audience? We've talked a lot about OpenShift with their other platforms, who says as a partner- >> We just announced another extension with Rancher and- >> Yeah. I saw that. And you have to have optionality for developers. Is that the way we should think about the target audience from a developer standpoint? >> I think it will be as we go forward. And so what Fidelma presented on stage was the new developer platform, because we have come to realize, we have to engage with the developers. They're the ones building the apps. They're the ones that are delivering the solutions for the most part. So yeah, I think at the enterprise space, we have a really strong capability. I think when you get into the sort of mid-market SMB standpoint, what we're doing is we're going directly to the managed service and cloud service providers and directly to our Disty and VARS to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake, powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers because that's what the customer wants. I think on the developer side of the house, we have to speak their language, we have to provide their capabilities because they're going to start articulating apps that are going to use both the public cloud and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake. And so that's got to work very well. And so you've heard us talk about API based and all of that sort of scenario. So it's an exciting time for us, again, moving HPE strategy into something very different than where we were before. >> Well, Keith, that speaks to ecosystem. So I don't know if you were at Microsoft, when the sweaty Steve Ballmer was working with the developers, developers. That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that. But that really is the sort of what you just described is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake. That's critical. >> Yeah. And this is one of the things I learned. So, being at Microsoft for as long as I was and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint, it was all about the partner and I mean, in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered has some sort of partner component to it. Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service, might be in a Colo, might be with our hybrid cloud, with our Hyperscalers, but everything has a partner component to it. And so one of the things I learned with Azure is, you have to sell through and with your ecosystem and go to that customer with a joint solution. And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful for what our customers are trying to accomplish. >> When we think about the data gravity and the value of data that put massive potential that it has, even Antonio talked about it this morning, being data rich but insights poor for a long time. >> Yeah. >> Every company in today's day and age has to be a data company to be competitive, there's no more option for that. How does GreenLake empower companies? GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies to really live being data companies so that they can meet their customers where they are. >> I think it's a really great point because like we said, data's the new currency. Data's the new gold that's out there and people have to get their arms around their data estate. So then they can make these business decisions, these business insights and garner that. And Dave, you mentioned earlier, the Edge is bringing a ton of new data in, and my Zenseact example is a good one. But with GreenLake, you now have a platform that can do data and data management and really sort of establish and secure the data for you. There's no data latency, there's no data egress charges. And which is what we typically run into with the public cloud. But we also support a wide range of databases, open source, as well as the commercial ones, the sequels and those types of scenarios. But what really comes to life is when you have to do analytics on that and you're doing AI and machine learning. And this is one of the benefits I think that people don't realize with HPE is, the investments we've made with Cray, for example, we have and you saw on stage today, the largest supercomputer in the world. That depth that we have as a company, that then comes down into AI and analytics for what we can do with high performance compute, data simulations, data modeling, analytics, like that is something that we, as a company, have really deep, deep capabilities on. So it's exciting to see what we can bring to customers all for that spectrum of data. >> I was excited to see Frontier, they actually achieve, we hosted an event, co-produced event with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale day. >> Yeah. >> But we weren't quite at Exascale, we were like right on the cusp. So to see it actually break through was awesome. So HPC is clearly a differentiator for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And you talk about the egress. What are some of the other differentiators? Why should people choose GreenLake? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is, that it's truly is a edge to cloud platform. And so you talk about Aruba and our capabilities with a network attached and network as a service capabilities, like that's fairly unique. You don't see that with the other companies. You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities. But what's interesting now is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services that you saw on stage, private cloud, AI and machine learning, high performance computing, VDI, SAP. And now we're actually getting into these industry solutions. So we talked last year about electronic medical records, this year, we've talked about 5g. Now, we're talking about customer loyalty applications. So we're really trying to move from these sort of baseline capabilities and yes, containers and VMs and bare metal, all that stuff is important, but what's really important is the services that you run on top of that, 'cause that's the outcomes that our customers are looking at. >> Should we expect you to be accelerating? I mean, look at what you did with Azure. You look at what AWS does in terms of the feature acceleration. Should we expect HPE to replicate? Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence, we're starting to see that. Should we expect that actually to go faster? >> I think you couched it really well because it's not as much about the quantity, but the quality and the uses. And so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot? Where do we have a superpower? And where are the areas that we have that superpower and how can we bring those solutions to our customers? 'Cause I think, sometimes, you get over your skis a bit, trying to do too much, or people get caught up in the big numbers, versus the, hey, what's the real meat behind it. What's the tangible outcome that we can deliver to customers? And we see just a massive TAM. I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion in the next three years, TAM and the Azure service on-prem space. And so we think that there's nothing but upside with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions and the cloud services that we bring. So yeah, we'll continue to innovate, absolutely, amen, but we're not in a, hey we got to get to 250 this and 300 that, we want to keep it as focused as we can. >> Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud is still compute. I mean, not withstanding, Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS, but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service. Still, well, I would say over 50%. And so there's a lot of the services that don't make any revenue and there's that long tail, if I hear your strategy, you're not necessarily going after that. You're focusing on the quality of those high value services and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest. >> This is where I think the, I mean, I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem because this is where their sweet spot is. They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases, a service or VDI, or even with SAP, like they're the experts on that piece of it. So we're enabling that together to our customers. And so I don't want to give you the impression that we're not going to innovate. Amen. We absolutely are, but we want to keep it within that, that again, our swim lane, where we can really add true value based on our expertise and our capabilities so that we can confidently go to customers and say, hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver this business value or this capability for you. >> The partners might be more comfortable with that than, we only have one eye sleep with one eye open in the public cloud, like, okay, what are they going to, which value of mine are they grab next? >> You're spot on. And again, this is where I think, the power of what an Edge to cloud platform like HPE GreenLake can do for our customers, because it is that sort of, I mentioned it, one plus one equals three kind of scenario for our customers so. >> So we can leave your customers, last question, Keith. I know we're only on day one of the main summit, the partner growth summit was yesterday. What's the feedback been from the customers and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction that HPE is going? >> Well, I think the fantastic thing has been to hear from our customers. So I mentioned in my keynote recently, we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital, and they're implementing HPE GreenLake in a variety of different ways, from a private cloud standpoint to a data center consolidation. They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that. They're seeing us take on management for them so they can take their limited resources and go focus them on innovation and value added scenarios. So the flexibility and cost that we're providing, and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life in a real customer scenario because what Texas Children is trying to do is improve patient care for women and children like who can argue with that. >> Nobody. >> So, yeah. It's great. >> Awesome. Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about all of the momentum with HPE Greenlake. >> Always. >> You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Always. Thank you you for the time. Yeah. Great to see you as well. >> Likewise. >> Thanks. >> For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, day one coverage from the show floor at HPE Discover '22. We'll be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome to Las Vegas. It's the cube live on the show floor at HPE discover 2022, the first in person discover in three years, there are about 8,000 people here. The keynote was standing room only Lisa Martin here. I got a powerhouse group joining me for this keynote analysis. Dave ante joins us, Keith Townsend, John farrier, guys. Lot of news. It's all about HPE GreenLake. What were some of the things Dave, that stuck out to you? >>Well, I'll tell you right now, I gotta just quote, Antonio OIR said, Neri said four years ago, I declared that the enterprise of the future would be edge centric, cloud enabled and data driven. As a result, we launched HPE GreenLake. It kind of declared victory. Now I would say that what they're talking about and what they announced, I would consider table stakes. You know, I wish it started in 2014. I wish Antonio took over in 2015 instead of 2018, but I have to give credit, he's brought a focus and uh, and a, he think he's amped it up, John. I mean, if he's really prioritizing, uh, the, as a service they're going on in all in they're burning the boats, uh, and it's good. They got a lot of work to do. They >>Got a lot of work to do three years ago, John Antonio stood on this very stage saying we, and by 2022, we're gonna be delivering our entire portfolio as a service here we are with GreenLake. What I wanna get your thoughts on Keith's as well. >>Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that the crowded house was, uh, and a sign of people wanna come back together. So it's, to me, that was the first good news I saw, which was the HP community, their customer base. They're all here. They're glad to be back and forth. So it shows that they, their customer base it's resonating their value proposition of annual recurring revenue as a service plus the contract values with GreenLake are up. So this resonance with the customers, Dave, on the new operating model, that's a great check the box there. Um, I would say that I don't think HP's, as far along as Antonio had hopes, he'd be the pandemic was a setback. Um, but GreenLake is a real shining star. It's, uh, it's producing some green if you will money for them in terms of contracts, but they still got a lot more work to do because they're in a really interesting zone, Dave, because edge the cloud, although relevant and accurate where the, the shift is going, are they really there with, with the goods? And to me, I'm looking forward to seeing this discover if they have it or not. Certainly the messaging's good, but we're gonna UN UN unpeel that onion back and look at it. But >>Keith they're on the curve, right? At least they're on the cloud curve. >>They're absolutely on the curve. They have APIs, they have consistent developer experience. They announced the developer portal. They're developer centric. You can now consume your three par storage array services via a Terraform, uh, provider. They speak the language of cloud practitioners. You might struggle a little bit if I'm a small startup, you know, why would I look towards HPE? They kind of answered that a little bit. They had evil genius as a customer on stage, not a huge organization. A lot of the pushback they've been given is that if I may startup, I can simply go to a AWS portal, launch, a free trial service and run it. HPE kind of buried the lead. They now have, at least they announced preannounced the capability to, to trial GreenLake. So they're moving in the right direction. But you know, it's, it's it's table states. Well, >>Here's the thing. Here's the dynamic day that's going on. This is something that we've got got we're first of we've been covering HPE HP for now 11 years with the cube and look at Amazon's success and look at where Amazon's struggling. If you can say that they're having crossed overs to the enterprise, uh, cuz the enterprises are now just getting up to speed. You're seeing the rise of lack of talent. It certainly changing, uh, cyber security. You can't find talent. Kubernetes, good luck with that. Try to find someone. So you're seeing the enterprise aren't really geared up or staffed up for doing what I call, you know, high end cloud. So the rise of managed services is, is what we're seeing out there right now. You want Kubernetes clusters is a great set of managed services. You want other services? So that's the tell sign that the enterprises H HP's customers are now walking before they can run. They're crawling, they're now they're walking. So it's they have time to get in the Amazon lane in my opinion. Well, you >>Think about the hallmarks of cloud, obviously there's as a service, there's consumption based pricing. There's a developer, you know, friendliness, uh, there's ecosystem, which is really, really important. I think today, a lot of the ecosystem is partners, resellers and managed service providers. And to your point, Keith table stakes are things like single sign on being able to have, you know, a console being able to do it from a, from a URL to your point about startups is really interesting because that's one of the other hallmarks of cloud is you attract startups. And Lisa, we were at the snowflake summit and I asked the same question, can snowflake attract startups with their own super cloud. And what you saw was ecosystem partners developing in the snowflake cloud and monetizing. And that's something that we're waiting to see here. And I, I think they know >>You're suggesting way you suggesting that HP's gonna attract startups. >>Well, >>I, I think that's a sign if they can do that. That's a sign. And, and right now, I mean, you heard the example that Keith Keith gave. Uh, but, but not, not many. >>Yeah. I'm hoping that H I don't think HP is gonna ever attract startups, but I think the opportunity GreenLake affords the ecosystem is build clouds or purpose driven clouds around GreenLake. Mm-hmm <affirmative> whether it's the agreement with Equinix or all the cos and semi clouds, I think GreenLake gets most small CSPs, a leg up or 80% of the way there, where they can add that 20% of the IP and build services around GreenLake. And then that can attract the, the startup >>Or entrepreneurs. So the, the big question is, okay, where are these developers gonna come from? They could come from incumbents inside of companies. You know, the, the, the DevOps crowd from the enterprise, the really ops dev crowd. Right? I mean, yeah, don't you see that as a sort of a form of innovation startup, even though it's not a true startup. >>Yeah. Even though it's not, >>So Todd's making faces over there, we <laugh> >>Look, it, look it, they have >>Listen, if they don't, if they can't >>Do that, no, this is their focus is not startups. I agree with Keith on this one, they have to take care of business, home Depot. They have big customers and they have a lot of SMBs as well. They've got a great channel. H HP's got amazing infrastructure and, and client action going on. They gotta get the operating model, right job one as a service ARR, and then contract value and, and nail that with GreenLake. >>Who's their ideal customer profile. >>Their ideal is their install base. Look what Microsoft did with 365, they were going down. Their stock price was 26. At one point go to the, they went to the cloud 365, moved everything to the cloud and look at the success they're having. HP has the same kind of installed base. They gotta bring them along. They gotta get the operating model, right. And the developers that they're targeting are the ones inside the company and, or manage services that they're gonna go to the ecosystem for. That's where the cloud native comes in. That's where thing kind of comes together. So to me, I'm bullish on the operating model, but I'm skeptical that HP can get that cloud native developer. I haven't seen it yet. I'm looking for it. We're gonna look for it here. >>A key to that is going to be consistently. I, the, one of the things I'm looking for on the tech side, I, I hate to compare what HPE is doing to what VMware did with vCloud error years ago, but vCloud error on the outside looked >>Wonderful. Yes, >>It did. Once you tried to use it, it was just flaky underneath. And that's the part I'm looking to see customers pounding on it and saying, you know what API call after API I call, can I, uh, provision 10,000 pods a day? Does it scale down? Does it scale? And is it consistent? Is it >>Fragile Al roo she's co seasoned veteran? Uh, she was at V VMware cloud. She saw that movie. She gets a Mulligan, Dave. So I think her leadership is impressive. And I think she could bring a lot to the table to your point about don't make that same mistake and they gotta get this architecture, right. If they get the operating model right with GreenLake, they can double down on that and enable the developers that are driving the digital transformation. That to me is the, the key positions that they have to nail. And they do that. The rest is just fringe work. In my opinion, >>The reason why Alma was brought in, sorry, Lisa, it was, and then you gotta chime in here was to really build out that platform so that internal people at HPE can actually build value on top of it and the ecosystem that's her priority. >>We're gonna hear a lot from the ecosystem in the next couple of days, but I wanna get your perspective on, you've been following HPE a long time, all three of you. What are some of the things that you're hearing right now that are differentiators? We were just at Dell technologies. We talking about apex. We saw the big announcement they had with snowflake. We were at snowflake two weeks ago. I wanna get all three of your opinions on what are you seeing? Where is HP leading? >>I mean, HPE and Dell will, both with Dell, with apex are go, they're both gonna differentiate with their strengths. And, you know, for Dell, that's their breadth and their, their portfolio. And for, for HPE, that's their sort of open posture. I mean, John, you, you know this well, uh, that's their, their ecosystem, which I know has to evolve. And to me, their focus, you know, Antonio laid out some of the key differentiators. I, I, I think some of them were kind of, you know, pushing the envelope a little bit. Uh, but, but I think they're focus on as a service burning the, the, the boats telling wall street, this is our business. I think that's their differentiator. Is that they're, they're all in. >>Yeah. I, I think they, they try to highlight it by re announcing their private cloud service. I don't even know why they needed to announce that they have a private cloud. GreenLake is a cloud it's is a private cloud >>With block storage, hit disaster recovery. It's like good >>With like everything you get. But I think the, the key is, is that all of that is available today and you can get it in all kinds of frame of, of formats and, and frames specifically, if I'm a customer and I wanna get outta the data center and you, you know, Dave, we go back and forth about this all the time, and I wanna repatriate some workloads to Kubernetes on prem. I don't need to spend up another data center. I can go to Equinix, get GreenLake min IO, object storage on the back end, HPE lighthouse, all those services that I need for Kubernetes and repatriate my workloads without buying a new data center. And I get it as a service. I can get that Dave from HPE GreenLake, Dell apex is on the way. The >>Other thing they're differentiating with Aruba, that's something that Dell doesn't have. Yeah. And, and that is their edge play, I think is stronger than >>Of the others. Mean the, to me, the differentiator for HP is their, their history. Their channel's amazing. They got great Salesforce and they have serious customers and they have serious customers that have serious problems, uh, cyber security, uh, infrastructure, the security paradigm's changed. Uh, the deployment is changed how they deploy applications in their customer base. So they gotta step up to that challenge. And I think their differentiator is gonna be their size, their field and their ability to bring that operating model. And the hybrid model is a steady state. That's clear multi-cloud is just hybrids stitched together, but hybrid cloud, which is basically on premises and cloud to edge operating model is the number one thing that they need to nail. And if they nail that right, they will have a poll position that they could accelerate on. And again, I'm really gonna be watching how well they could enable cloud native developers, okay. To build modern agile applications while solving those serious problems with those serious customers. So again, I think hybrids spun in their direction. I'm not gonna say they got lucky, cuz they've always been on the hybrid bandwagon since we've been covering them. But I thought they'd be for a long day, but they're lucky to have hybrid. That's good for them. And I think do what Microsoft did convert their customers over and they do that, right? >>I think the key to that is gonna be ecosystem. Again, the developers need to see, especially the data piece, they talk about the cloud operating model. I think they're really moving that direction. The data piece to me is the weakest. Like they'll, they'll make claims that we can do anything that the cloud can do. You can't run snowflake, can't run data bricks, can't run Mongo Atlas. So they gotta figure out that data layer and that's optionality of, of data stores. And they don't have that today. >>Yeah. They, they, they have an announcement coming and I can't pre-announce it, but they're, they've, I've deemed them against it. They have the vision, Emeral data services, their data fabric multi-protocol access is a great start. They need the data network behind it. They need the ability to build a super cloud, a across multiple cloud providers, bringing some Google infos love inside of, uh, right next to your data. They have the hardware, they have the infrastructure, but they don't have the services. >>That's a key thing. I think one, you just brought up great point, Keith, and that is, is that at the end of the day, Dave, we're in a market now where agility and speed can be accomplished by startups or any company and HP's customers. Okay. Can move fast too. Okay. And so whoever can extend that value. If HPE can enable value creation for their customers, that's gonna be truly their, their task at hand, they got the channel, they got some leverage, but at the end of the day, the customers have alternatives now and they can move faster to get the value that they need to solve their serious problems. Uh, like cyber, like scalable infrastructure, like infrastructures code, like data ops, like AI ops, it's all here. And it's all coming really fast. Can GreenLake carry the day. And >>By the way, everything we just said about GreenLake in terms of table stakes and everything else, it applies for Dell. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>No question. It does guys. We have, and jam packed three days. We're gonna be talking with the ecosystem. We're gonna be talking with HPE leaders with customers. You're gonna hear all of these, uh, all this information unpacked over the next three days. We will be right back with our first guest for Dave ante, Keith Townson and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. Our first guest joins us momentarily.

(bright intro music) >> The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer to pizza teams and DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model, and security, of course, the shift from CapEx to OPEX, and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning, at least not the way you used to. You'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story, and while pay for use more closely ties IT consumption to business value, procurement teams don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing and as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave Vellante and welcome to "At Your Storage Service" made possible by Pure Storage, and with me is Prakash Darji who's the General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure. Prakash, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You bet. Okay, we've seen this shift to as a service, the as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's clear over the past several years. What's driving this shift? Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >> Well, look, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, "Hey, I can go for a pay up front or pay as I go." Service is more about, "How do I not buy something just by the outcome?" So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage, performance, capacity, availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning, capacity management? Those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the SaaSification of storage, and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >> So that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you've made inroads here, pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really Pure's raison d'etre. How does storage as a service fit in to your innovation agenda overall? >> Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned, with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the Evergreen Architecture. That architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, "I can improve performance or capacity as I need it." Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, "Oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte," but how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non-disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via software update? Those elements of non-disruptive updates, when you think SaaS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update. You don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability. It just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and SaaSification in service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, "I want to change from this service here to that service here," and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >> Okay, so I like the Salesforce analogy, but I want to jump out do a little side for a second. So I've got to make some commitment to Pure, right? Some baseline commitment, and if I do, then I can dial up and then pay for what I use, and I can dial it down, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce, all right? I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce, I would argue. Okay. >> Yeah. I would agree with that. >> Okay, so, and I got to pay for everything up front. Anyway, let's go back to I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the all-important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customer standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >> Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue, most of the time, people are guessing, right? It's like, "Well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need or this is the capacity I think I need," and, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something, and you're like, "Do I need more? Do I need less?" You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy, and that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >> Yeah. >> They're going to want different levels of storage. They're going to want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogy for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. You don't, you can pay less, and you can actually get lower performance tiers. Not everything is a tier one application, and you need the ability to deploy it, but when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are going to be consuming or do you need a dictated upfront? 'Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >> I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, "Okay, what should I get, should we get red wine? We got to go white wine, we got to get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles." 'Cause you don't know what people are going to have, and so you over provision everything and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, "Ah, we're running the bubbles," so you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I got to do business with those guys every time 'cause it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or I can dial up performance, and dial it back down if I don't use it. >> Where you're going to be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >> Yeah, exactly, like which is the last thing you want. Okay, so let's talk about how Pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your differentiators from others in the market. You know, love to hear about the momentum. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, look, our business is growing well largely built on, you know, what customers need. Specifically, where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX. Like that definitely exists in the industry around, "How do I get a paper use model?" The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in, "How do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage?" And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, "How do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage?" Being a storage producer should be about standardization so I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier, in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. Linux has new vulnerabilities every other day, like find two, three critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, "Look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem, and assume the vendor's going to deliver this to me." So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets a like a fine line that gets better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA so it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >> Yeah, I mean, just even though words you're using and the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are different, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to Pure's R&D. I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. So let's stick with the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the as a service economy? >> Well, the first thing is I always tell people you can't deliver a service without monitoring because if you can't monitor something, how you're going to know whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IoT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car. It'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's going to crash and drive you off the road. In the same way, what if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the view of an application. An application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted and MSP can run it. It can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices, very similar to an IOT system? So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack regardless of your application, regardless of, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in it you're on. That approach is very similar to the way the IoT industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to storage, and that's the foundation on which we built Pure as a service. >> So that implies or, at least I infer, that you've, obviously, got control of the experience on prem, but you're extending that into AWS, Google, Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world, and then eventually, actually today, 'cause you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe mini Pure at some point in time, but so I call that super cloud, that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value and is a singular experience, what you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout. Is that the right way to think about it? And how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >> Oh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets. First, you need management. So how do you ensure consistent management experience, creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape? The second one is monitoring. How do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at? And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement, meaning what happens when you run out? Do you need to increase your reserve commits? Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models such that you can say, "I can use what I need," and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's going to break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring, and procurement across the tech, and yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, you know, Pure mini at the edge, right? So, you know, all of those things are tied to our Pure as a service delivery. >> Yeah, technically, non-trivial, but hey, you guys are on it. Well, we got to leave it there, Prakash. Thank you, great stuff, really appreciate your time. >> All right, thanks for having me, man. >> You're very welcome. Okay, in a moment, Steve McDowell. For more insights and strategies, he's going to give us the analyst perspective on as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright outro music)

>>When AWS introduced the modern cloud in 2006, many people didn't realize the impact that it would have on the industry, but some did see the future of an as a service economy coming. I mean, SAS offerings came out several years before. And the idea of applying some of these concepts to infrastructure and simplifying deployment and management, you know, kinda looked enticing to a lot of customers and a subscription model, or, but yet a consumption model was seen as a valuable proposition by many customers. Why not apply it to infrastructure? And why should the hyperscalers have all the fun welcome to at your storage service? My name is Dave ante. And as an analyst at the time, I was excited about the, as a service trend early on. And one of the companies that caught my attention back in the beginning of last decade was pure storage. >>Pure not only was delivering cloud- simplicity, but it's no forklift approach to infrastructure was ahead of its time. And that's why we're here today to dig into what's happening with the, as a service trends that we see popping up all over the world today, we're gonna dig into three sessions with noted experts in the field. First pre Darie is the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure storage. He's gonna join us. And then we bring in Steve McDowell, Steve's a senior analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy, a well known consultancy and analyst firm. And finally, we close with Amil sta Emil is the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer at open line, open lines, a managed service provider. They serve the mid-market and Emil's got a very wide observation space. He's gonna share what he's seeing with customers. So sit back and enjoy the show. >>The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer two pizza teams, a DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model in security. And of course the shift from CapEx to OPEX and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning. At least not the way you used to you'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story and well pay for use more closely ties. It consumption to business value procurement teams. Don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing. And as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave ante and welcome to at your storage service made possible by pure storage. And with me is Pash DJI. Who's the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure Pash. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >>You bet. Okay. We've seen this shift to, as a service, the, as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's it's clear over the past several years, what's driving this shift. Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >>Well, look, um, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, Hey, I can go for pay up front or pay as I go. Service is more about how do I not buy something just by the outcome. So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage performance, capacity availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning capacity management, those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important, where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the ation of storage and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >>So that's, that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you, you, you've made inroads here pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really pures rayon Detra. How does storage as a service fit into your innovation agenda overall? >>Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the evergreen architecture, that architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, I can improve performance or capacity as I need it? Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte. But how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via a software update, those elements of non disruptive updates. When you think SAS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update, you don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and sation and service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, I want to change from this service tier to that service tier and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >>Okay. So I like the Salesforce analogy, but I wanna jump out, do a little side for a second. So I I've gotta, I've gotta make some commitment to pure, right. Some baseline commitment. And if I do, then I can dial up and pay for what I use and I can dial it down. Correct? Correct. Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce. <laugh> right. I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce. I would argue. Okay. Yeah, >>I would, I would agree with that. >>Okay. So, and I gotta pay for everything up front anyway. Um, let's go back. I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the, the all important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customers standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >>Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue most of the time people are guessing, right? It's like, well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need. Or this is the capacity I think I need. And, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something and you're like, do I need more? Do I need less? You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy. And that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >>Yeah. They're gonna want different levels of storage. They're gonna want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogies for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. Um, you don't, you can pay less and you can actually get lower performance, tiers, not everything is a tier one application. And you need the ability to deploy it. But when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are gonna be consuming? Or do you need a dictated upfront? Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >>I, I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, okay, what should I get? Should we get red wine? We gotta go white wine. We gotta get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles. Cause you don't know what people are gonna have. And so you over provision everything <laugh> and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, ah, we run outta bubbles. So you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I gotta do business with those guys every time. Cuz it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or can dial up performance and dial it back down if I don't use it >>Or you or you're gonna be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >>Yeah, exactly. Which is the last thing you want. Okay. So let's talk about how pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your, your differentiators from others in the market. Um, you know, love to hear about the momentum. What, what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. Look, our business is growing well, largely built on, you know, what customers need. Um, specifically where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX, where like that definitely exists in the industry around how do I get a pay use model? The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in how do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage? And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, how do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage. Being a storage producer should be about standardization. So I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. >>Linux has new vulnerabilities every, every other day, like find 2, 2, 3 critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem. And assume the vendor's gonna deliver this to me. So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day a, the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets like a fine line that gets better, better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA. So it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >>Yeah. I mean, just even though words you're using in the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are, are, are different. Uh, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to pures R and D I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. Um, so let's, let's, let's stick with the, the, the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the, as a service economy? >>Well, the first thing is I always tell people, you can't deliver a service without monitoring, because if you can't monitor something, how you're gonna know what your, whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology. Differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level, OB obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly, meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IOT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that push pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car it'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. >>It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's gonna crash and drive you off the road in the same way. What if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the world in the view of an application, an application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center, it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted, an MSP can run. It can, can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices? >>Very similar to an I IOT system. So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack, regardless of your application, regardless of, uh, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in you're on that approach is very similar to the way the T industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest, thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to. And that's the foundation on which we built PI as a service. >>So that implies, or at least I infer that you've obviously got control of the experience on Preem, but you're extending that, uh, into AWS, Google Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world. And then eventually, actually today, cuz you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe, maybe mini pure at some point in time. But so I call that super cloud that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value. And is this singular experience? What you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout, is that the right way to think about it and how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >>Oh, uh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from a, an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets, first, you need management. So how do you ensure a consistent management experience creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories, like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape. The second one is monitoring, how do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or uh, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at. And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement. Meaning what happens when you run out, you need to increase your reserve commits. Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models, such that you can say, I can use what I need and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's gonna break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring and procurement across the tech. And yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, um, you know, pure mini at the edge. Right. <laugh> so, you know, tho all of those things are tied to our pure, a service delivery. >>Yeah, technically non-trivial but uh, Hey, you guys are on it. Well, we gotta leave it there. Pash. Thank you. Great stuff. Really appreciate your time. >>All right. Thanks for having me, man. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, Steve McDowell from more insights and strategies, it's gonna give us the analyst perspective on, as a service, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why are customers making the change to pure as a service >>Other vendors, offering flexible consumption models will promise you the world on the surface. It's just what you need. But then you notice the asterisk that dreaded fine print. That turns just what you need into long-term commitments, disruptive upgrades and unpredictable costs, pure storage, launched pure as a service to provide the flexibility to respond to your ever changing needs. With clear per unit costs, no large upfront purchases and no asterisks. A usage based model should be simple, innovative, and adapt with the changing market. Unlike other vendors, pure is offering exactly that with options, for service tiers and short term contracts in a single unified subscription that allows you to improve your discounts over time. Pure makes sure you can grow and upgrade without ever taking your environment offline and without the constant worry of hidden costs with complete billing, transparency, unlike any other, you only pay for what you use and pure one helps track and predict demand from day to day, making sure you never outgrow your storage. So why are customers making the change to pure as a service convenient solutions with unlimited potential without the dreaded fine print? It's as simple as that, >>We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on, tell us a little bit about yourself. You got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >>Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's OnPrim or cloud or, or, or, you know, software as a service. Uh, my background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. Uh, came up through the ranks and, and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. Uh, and I've been doing, uh, working as an industry analyst now for about five years, more insights and strategy. >>Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's gonna snowballing, you know, however you look at it, percent of spending on storage that you think is gonna land in as a service. How, how do you see the evolution here? >>I think it buyers are looking at as a service, a consumption based is, is, uh, uh, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right. That also come with a public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I've worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much, uh, adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, uh, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's, it's clearly popular with CIOs and, and it practitioners alike. >>So Steve organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're gonna have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an it buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever >>Can absolutely be, uh, a growth leader. Uh, it, it gives me the flexibility as, as an it architect to scale my business over time, without worrying about how much money I have to invest in, in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloudlike flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. Uh, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my permit. And I manage it like a storage array that I own. Uh, so you know, it, it's, it's beautiful for, for organizations that are scaling and, and it's equally nice for organizations that just wanna manage and control cost over time. Um, so it's, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and, and certainly growing in adoption and popularity. >>How about from a technology vendor perspective you've worked for in the, in the tech industry mm-hmm <affirmative> for, for companies? What do you think is gonna define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for, uh, storage company, what would you say? >>I, I think the days of, of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right, what would, what these organizations like pure delivering, but they're offerings is, is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right. It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption based economic model of, of, uh, as a service. Uh, it, it's also the manageability that comes with that, or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to, to, uh, you know, a workload that needs it. Um, and it just becomes very simple, right. For the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school OnPrim storage can't really deliver. >>You know, I wanna, I wanna ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are, you know, moving, hopping on the, as a service bandwagon, I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives, the innovation is gonna come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Um, do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >>Well, there there's two levels of innovation, right? One, one is business model innovation, right? I, I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure, to support my digital transformation efforts. Um, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form, right. I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, uh, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud, I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that, uh, uh, manageability experience, uh, to, to the it administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know, end to end management of my data and, and, you know, and all of the things around that. >>Yeah. So you, to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to, to, you have to over provision, whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting model, right? Cuz you gotta read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you gotta commit to some level typically. And then if, you know, if you go over you, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's, that's gotta be very attractive for folks. I, I wonder if you will ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing, that is two edges to it. Right. You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah. People like it, the lines of business maybe cuz they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it cuz they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >>No, I, I do. I do see that maturing. Right? And, and when you work with a company like pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, uh, it, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You, you buy in at a certain level, uh, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the it buyer than uh, well certainly then traditional CapEx based on-prem but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. >>Okay. Thanks Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there at your storage service continues in a moment. >>Some things are meant to last your storage should be one of them say hello to the evergreen storage program, say goodbye to refreshes and rebates. Forget planned downtime, performance impact and data migrations. Forget forklift upgrades. Evergreen storage starts with your agile storage architecture and covers the entire life cycle of the array from first purchase to ongoing use. And whenever it's time to modernize and grow, your satisfaction is covered with an evergreen subscription. You can get a full refund within 30 days for any reason, >>Our right size guarantee lets you buy just the storage you need never too much. Never not enough. Your array software is all inclusive. Even future releases and features maintenance and support costs remain constant throughout the life of your array. Proactive expert support is a true white glove experience. Evergreen maintenance ensures availability of any replacement components. Meet the demands of your business and protect your investment. Evergreen gold includes controller upgrades every three years. And if something unplanned comes up, evergreen gold provides upgrade flex the leading anytime upgrade feature to upgrade controllers whenever you need it. As you expand evergreen gold provides credits to consolidate storage with denser more modern flash. Evergreen is your subscription to continuous innovation for storage that lasts 10 years or more. Some things are meant to last make your storage. One of them >>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you Emil for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yes. Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the spheres that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midst size companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide 'em with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, a lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>And I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our manage services provider that first of course are looking for stability and continuity. Uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs. But nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps about how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me. Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it is the way that you integrate all those solutions toward something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers, >>You see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, I, I think that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeping our busy all the time. We do see a trend in a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And that really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from our consultancy, our guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Uh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how your sort of your philosophy and, and as relates, I think in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't and send them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, thing that people is customer intimacy. That's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers. They just not looked at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach. Uh, but we also involve our customers in, uh, defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Yeah. If, if, if the internet stops that we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there. And these moments of truth that we really embrace, we got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game, uh, you know, the other thing Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption. >>Uh, yeah, pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services to provide storage solutions, storage over is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits, to be honest, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fastest, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is that way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway the meal is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, cetera, but we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, does it transform their business? I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really a transformation is just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because, because, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I tell not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well, which you have when you have imutable storage and you have been, you have a ransomware attack at least have you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all very happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for us as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say, security operation center. Cuz now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We were closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer, uh, and uh, the whole pure concept is fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me to fish in how they launched, uh, pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card. Just a simple thought of put that as your big area, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for us, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with pur in the near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect. And that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. 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(digital pulsing music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. I've got another mass boy coming on. Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at HPE. Good to see you again, my friend. It's been a long time. >> It's been way too long, thank you very much for having me. >> I can't even remember the last time we saw each other. It might have been in our studios in the East Coast. Well, it's good to be here with you. Lots have been going on, of course, we've been following from afar, but give us the update, what's new with HPE? We've done some stuff on GreenLake, we've covered that pretty extensively and looks like you got some momentum there. >> Quite a bit of momentum, both on the technology front and certainly the customer acquisition front. The message is certainly resonating with our customers. GreenLake is, that's the transformation that's fueling the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So the momentum is great on the technology side. We're at well over 50 services that we're providing on the GreenLake platform. Everything from solutions and workloads to compute, networking and storage. So it's been really fantastic to see the platform and being able to really delight the customers and then the momentum on the sales and the customer acquisition side, the customers are voting with their dollars, so they're very happy with the platform, certainly from an operational perspective and a financial consumption perspective and so our target goal, which we've said a bunch of times is we want to be the hyperscaler on on-prem. We want to provide that customer experience to the folks that are investing in the platform. It's going really well. >> I'll ask you a question, as a former analyst, it could be obnoxious and so forth, so I'll be obnoxious for a minute. I wrote a piece in 2010 called At Your Storage Service, saying the future of storage and infrastructure as a service, blah, blah, blah. Now, of course, you don't want to over-rotate when there's no market, there was no market for GreenLake in 2010. Do you feel like your timing was right on, a little bit late, little bit early? Looking back now, how do you feel about that? >> Well, it's funny you say that. On the timing side, we've seen iterations of this stops and start forever. >> That's true. Financial gimmicks. >> I started my career at Sun Microsystems. We talked about the big freaking Web-tone switch and a lot of the network is the computer. You saw storage networks, you've seen a lot, a ton of iterations in this category, and so, I think the timing's right right now. Obviously, the folks in the hyperscaler class have proved out that this is something that's working. I think for us, the big thing that's really resonating with the customers is they want the operational model and they want the consumption model that they're getting from that as a service experience, but they still are going to run a number of their workloads on-prem and that's the best place to do it for them economically and we've proved that out. So I think the time is here to have that bifurcated experience from operational and financial perspective and in the past, the technology wasn't there and the ability to deliver that for the customers in a manner that was useful wasn't there. So I think the timing's perfect right now to provide them. >> As you know, theCUBE has had a presence at HPE Discover. Previous, even HP Discover and same with Veeam. But we got a long history with HP/HPE. When Hewlett Packard split into two companies, we made the observation, Wow, this opens up a whole new ecosystem opportunity for HPE generally, in storage business specifically, especially in data protection and backup, and the Veeam relationship, the ink wasn't dry and all of a sudden you guys were partnering, throwing joint activities, and so talk about how that relationship has evolved. >> From my perspective, we've always been a big partnering company, both on the route to market side, so our distributors and partners, and we work with them in big channel business. And then on the software partnership side, that's always evolving and growing. We're a very open ecosystem and we like to provide choice for our customers and I think, at the end of the day, we've got a lot of things that we work on jointly, so we have a great value prop. First phase of that relationship was partnering, we've got a full boat of product integrations that we do for customers. The second was a lot of special sauce that we do for our customers for co-integration and co-development. We had a huge session today with Rick Vanover and Frederico on our team here to talk about ransomware. We have big customers suffering from this plague right now and we've done a lot together on the engineering side to provide a very, very well-engineered, well thought out process to help avoid some of these things. And so that wave, too, of how do we do a ton of co-innovation together to really delight our customers and help them run their businesses, and I think the evolution of where we're going now, we have a lot of things that are very similar, strategically, in terms of, we all talk about data services and outcomes for our customers. So at the end of the day, when we think about GreenLake, like our virtual machine backup as a service or disaster recovery, it's all about what workloads are you running, what are the most important ones, where do you need help protecting that data? And essentially, how can we provide that outcome to you and you pay it as an outcome. And so we have a lot of things that we're working on together in that space. >> Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. First of all, I'm from California, so I'm having a really hard time understanding what either of you were saying. Your accents are so thick. >> We could talk in Boston. >> Your accents are so thick. (Dave laughing) I could barely, but I know I heard you say something about Veaam at one point. Take a closer look at that. What does that look like from a ransomware perspective in terms of this concept of air gaping or immutable, immutable volumes and just as an aside, it seems like Veeam is a perfect partnership for you since customers obviously are going to be in hybrid mode for a long time and Veeam overlays that nicely. But what does it look like specifically? Immutable, air gap, some of the things we've been hearing a lot about. >> I'm exec sponsor for a number of big HPE customers and I'll give you an example. One of our customers, they have their own cloud service for time management and essentially they're exploited and they're not able to provide their service. It has huge ripple effect, if you think about, on inability to do their service and then how that affects their customers and their customers' employees and all that. It's a disaster, no pun intended. And the thing is, we learn from that and we can put together a really good architectures and best practices. So we're talking today about 3-2-1-1, so having three copies of your data, two different types of media, having an offline copy, an offsite copy and an offline copy. And now we're thinking about all the things you need to do to mitigate against all the different ways that people are going to exploit you. We've seen it all. You have keys that are erased, primary storage that is compromised and encrypted, people that come in and delete your backup catalog, they delete your backups, they delete your snapshots. So they get it down to essentially, "I'm either going to have one set of data, it's encrypted, I'm going to make you pay for it," and 40 percent of the time they pay and they get the data back, 60 percent of the time they pay and they get maybe some of the data back. But for the most part, you're not getting your data back. The best thing that we can do for our customers that come with a very prescriptive set of T-shirt configuration sizes, standardization, best practices on how they can take this entire ecosystem together and make it really easy for the customers to implement. But I wouldn't say, it's never bulletproof, but essentially, do as much as you can to avoid having to pay that ransomware. >> So 3-2-1-1, three copies, meaning local. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> So you can do fast recovery if you need to. Two different types of media, so tape fits in here? Not necessarily flashing and spinning disks. Could it be tape? >> A lot of times we have customers that have almost four different types. So they are running their production on flash. We have Alletras with HPE networking and servers running specific workloads, high performance. We have secondary storage on-prem for fast recovery and then we have some form of offsite and offline. Offsite could be object storage in the cloud and then offline would be an actual tape backup. The tape is out of the tape library in a vault so no one can actually access it through the network and so it's a physical copy that's offline. So you always have something to restore. >> Patrick, where's the momentum today, specifically, we're at VeeamON, but with regard to the Veeam partnership, is it security and ransomware, which is a new thing for this world. The last two years, it's really come to the top. Is it cloud migration? Is it data services and data management? Where's the momentum, all of the above, but maybe you could help us parse that. >> What we're seeing here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, especially through GreenLake, is just an overall focus on data services. So what we're doing is we've got great platforms, we always had. HPE is known as an engineering company. We have fantastic products and solutions that customers love. What we're doing right now is taking, essentially, a lot of the beauty of those products and elevating them into an operational experience in the cloud, so you have a set of platforms that you want to run, you have machine critical platform, business critical, secondary storage, archival, data analytics and I want to be able to manage those from the cloud. So fleet management, HCI management, protocol management, block service, what have you, and then I want a set of abstracted data services that are on top of it and that's essentially things like disaster recovery, backup, data immutability, data vision, understanding what kind of data you have, and so we'll be able to provide those services that are essentially abstracted from the platforms themselves that run across multiple types of platforms. We can charge them on outcome based. They're based on consumption, so you think about something like DR, you have a small set of VMs that you want to protect with a very tight RPO, you can pay for those 100 VMs that are the most important that you have. So for us driving that operational experience and then the cloud data service experience into GreenLake gives customers a really, gives them a cloud experience. >> So have you heard the term super cloud? >> Patrick: Yeah. (chuckles) >> Have you? >> Patrick: Absolutely. >> It's term that we kind of coined, but I want to ask you about it specifically, in terms of how it fits into your strategy. So the idea is, and you kind of just described it, I think, whether your data is on-prem, it's in the cloud, multiple clouds, we'll talk about the edge later, but you're hiding the underlying complexities of the cloud's APIs and primitives, you're taking care of that for your customers, irrespective of physical location. It's the common experience across all those platforms. Is that a reasonable vision, maybe, even from a technical standpoint, is it part of HPE strategy and what does it take to actually do that, 'cause it sounds nice, but it's probably pretty intense? >> So the proof's in the pudding for us. We have a number of platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality. We have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Alletra and we have a block service, we have VM backup as a service and DR On top of that. That's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think, it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything, so it's real. We have the proof point for it. >> So, GreenLake is essentially, I've said it, it's the HPE cloud. Is that a fair statement? >> A hundred percent. >> You're redefining cloud. And one of the hallmarks of cloud is ecosystem. Roughly, and I want to talk more about you got to grow that ecosystem to be successful in cloud, no question about it. And HPE's got the chops to do that. What percent of those services are HPE versus ecosystem partners and how do you see that evolving over time? >> We have a good number of services that are based on HPE, our tried and true intellectual property. >> You got good tech. >> Absolutely, so a number of that. And then we have partners in GreenLake today. We have a pretty big ecosystem and it's evolving, too. So we have customers and partners that are focused, our customers want our focus on data services. We have a number of opportunities and partnerships around data analytics. As you know, that's a really dynamic space. A lot of folks providing support on open source, analytics and that's a fast moving ecosystem, so we want to support that. We've seen a lot of interest in security. Being able to bring in security companies that are focused on data security. Data analytics to understand what's in your data from a customer perspective, how to secure that. So we have a pretty big ecosystem there. Just like our path at HPE, we've always had a really strong partnership with tons of software companies and we're going to continue to do that with GreenLake. >> You guys have been partner-friendly, I'll give you that. I'm going to ask Antonio this at Discover in a couple of weeks, but I want to ask you, when you think about, again, to go back to AWS as the prototypical cloud, you look at a Snowflake and a Redshift. The Redshift guys probably hate Snowflake, but the EC2 guys love them, sell a lot of compute. Now you as a business unit manager, do you ever see the day where you're side by side with one of your competitors? I'm guessing Antonio would say absolutely. Culturally, how does that play inside of HPE? I'm testing your partner-friendliness. How would you- >> Who will you- >> How do you think about that? >> At the end of the day, for us, the opportunity for us is to delight our customers. So we've always talked about customer choice and how to provide that best outcome. I think the big thing for us is that, from a cost perspective, we've seen a lot of customers coming back to HPE repatriation, from a repatriation perspective for a certain class of workloads. From my perspective, we're providing the best infrastructure and the best operational services at the best price at scale for these costumers. >> Really? It definitely, culturally, HPE has to, I think you would agree, it has to open up. You might not, you're going to go compete, based on the merit- >> Absolutely. >> of your product and technology. The repatriation thing is interesting. 'Cause I've always been a repatriation skeptic. Are you actually starting to see that in a meaningful way? Do you think you'll see it in the macro numbers? I mean, cloud doesn't seem to be slowing down, the public cloud growth, I mean, the 35, 40 percent a year. >> We're seeing it in our numbers. We're seeing it in the new logo and existing customer acquisition within GreenLake. So it's real for us. >> And they're telling you? Pure cost? >> Cost. >> So it's that's simple. >> Cost. >> So, they get the cloud bill, you do, too. I'd get the email from my CFO, "Why the cloud bill so high this month?" Part of that is it's consumption-based and it's not predictable. >> And also, too, one of the things that you said around unlocking a lot of the customer's ability from a resourcing perspective, so if we can take care of all the stuff underneath, the under cloud for the customer, the platform, so the stores, the serving, the networking, the automation, the provisioning, the health. As you guys know, we have hundreds of thousands of customers on the Aruba platform. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers calling home through InfoSight. So we can provide a very rich set of analytics, automated environment, automated health checking, and a very good experience that's going to help them move away from managing boxes to doing operational services with GreenLake. >> We talk about repatriation often. There was a time when I think a lot of us would've agreed that no one who was born in the cloud will ever do anything other than grow in the cloud. Are you seeing organizations that were born in the cloud realizing, "Hey, we know what our 80 percent steady state is and we've modeled this. Why rent it when we can own it? Or why rent it here when we can have it as operational cost there?" Are you seeing those? >> We're seeing some of that. We're certainly seeing folks that have a big part of their native or their digital business. It's a cost factor and so I think, one of the other areas, too, that we're seeing is there's a big transformation going on for our partners as well, too, on the sell-through side. So you're starting to see more niche SaaS offerings. You're starting to see more vertically focused offerings from our service provider partners or MSPs. So it's not just in either-or type of situation. You're starting to see now some really, really specific things going on in either verticals, customer segmentation, specific SaaS or data services and for us, it's a really good ecosystem, because we work with our SP partners, our MSP partners, they use our tech, they use our services, they provide services to our joint customers. For example, I know you guys have talked to iland here in the past. It's a great example for us for customers that are looking for DR as a service, backup as a service hosting, so it's a nice triangle for us to be able to please those customers. >> They're coming on to tomorrow. They're on 11/11. I think you're right on. The one, I think, obvious place where this repatriation could happen, it's the Sarah Wong and Martin Casano scenario where a SaaS companies cost a good sold become dominated by cloud costs. And they say, "Okay, well, maybe, I'm not going to build my own data centers. That's probably not going to happen, but I can go to Equinix and do a colo and I'm going to save a ton of dough, managing my own infrastructure with automation or outsourcing it." So Patrick, got to go. I could talk with you forever. Thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Go, Celts. How you feeling about the, we always talk sports here in VeeamON. How are you feeling about the Celts today? >> My original call today was Celtics in six, but we'll see what happens. >> Stephen, you like Celtics? Celtics six. >> Stephen: Celtics six. >> Even though tonight, they got a little- >> Stephen: Still believe, you got to believe. >> All right, I believe. >> It'd be better than the Miami's Mickey Mouse run there, in the bubble, a lot of astronauts attached to that. (Dave laughing) >> I love it. You got to believe here on theCUBE. All right, keep it right- >> I don't care. >> Keep it right there. You don't care, 'cause you're not from a sports town. Where are you in California? >> We have no sports. >> All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back. (digital music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "Dell Technologies World," brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of "Dell Technologies World 2022" live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited. I dunno if you heard that, a group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited, if you heard that big applause when we went live. (Jules laughing) So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live "Dell Technologies World" since 2019. A lot of people here, this Expo Hall is packed. A lot of momentum here, but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, so many exciting things for Equinix and this partnership of Dell sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about and we just were named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively. But underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets but then interconnecting them. So they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds. They have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint has set us on the path we're on today, which we're very grateful to be at in. And really, the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about the last two years. The moments of the last two years have been very challenging >> They have. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, we, together, Dell and Equinix, what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation. And digital transformation is hard. It's not a one and done and it's not an overnight solution. And so, what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem. And then pairing that with these interconnected enterprises. So, Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution on-prem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge, together. And that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Equinix is an amazing company. Like you said, it's... I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart, it'll blow your mind. Really incredibly successful. And part of the reason... It's funny, 10, 15 years ago, people thought, well... Or, 10 years ago, anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was the exact opposite. And that's because Charles Phillips used to joke, "Friends don't let friends build data centers." >> Yes. >> And it's not a good use of capital for most companies, unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course, you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because... And we get that. Are you and Dell in fact competitors? No, we see them as wholly complimentary. And in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge, which involves their servers. And PowerStore, which involves their storage, and then VxRail, which is really the hyper-converged infrastructure. And those are just a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell. And if you think about Metal, and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what Metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance, have the equipment placed in our data centers so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves of that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare Metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community, in terms of the partnership with Dell? Partners must be excited, the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, that's what's near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for, Equinix's global partnerships. And they're just very excited about what we're doing with Dell. And to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell. So it makes sense that we bring it together. So, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with, AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kendra, Deloitte, Accenture, WiPro, DXC. All of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call Power of Three, that together we're better. Because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner. So they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own. And so, they're excited about it. You see, it's a big opportunity for them from a... Of revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status. So partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix... 'Cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships. It's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide, wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet of things and content providers, we do see it as our role to the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems. It is our mission to continue to grow that, enrich it, because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider. And it's the combination of the ecosystem that you'd find and the people you can connect to at Equinix. And then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And it's a lot of technology underneath these. It's that first layer one, I guess, if you will, of the data center, right? And so, a lot of your customers or your partner's customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before. I mean, it's just too expensive. The power requirements are going through the roof. So you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact... So first of all, you're right. It's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest. So it's very difficult for people to do it themselves. But even show... Another point you mentioned actually about the power, is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability. And so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy. And it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives. So partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's... How do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air. Is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> On sustainable... I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say... >> This is the high level, yeah. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts people who, all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that. And then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents. It's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey, and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that, >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it. And we do see other people following, which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well, how important is that in your partnership conversations. That partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has. >> Partners care a lot about it, but customers ask us both all the time. We increasingly see a portion of an RFP or scope of work asking, "Before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment. Tell me about your commitment." And so, we are committed to it, but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's... >> Where do you... Go ahead please. >> Oh, I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer, which Equinix is listening to, we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry, one more time. >> That the sustainability, the ESG demand is coming from the customers, as you were saying. >> Both. I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it, but our customers are holding us accountable to it. And sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us. And it is for companies like Dell and it is for partners and customers. >> It really is... It's up there with security in terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next let's call it three to five years. In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, I think that our partners and by that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, We've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell. So our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey. Whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke, do-it-yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well. That's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are, the customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is. And you know, the customers are getting savvier, but we are all still early in this journey as far as the edge. I think we are all still grappling that. Right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now. And then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well, that's the thing about your business? It's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff, but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> Jules: You can, >> And you can put anything in your data center. That's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet. And so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions, architects and our sales to people together, but they'll talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of on-prem and in an Equinix data center, and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than they are even thinking about today. And, they may expand their edge over time, because they may see that as at the customer end point. Today, most businesses are still using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change. And so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah. That's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every co couple of years. If you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah, sure. You might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like Metal where they also do prevent that sort of rip and replace, but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages. And being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this? You mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in a last few years. How much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying, "Help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves." >> We have been fortunate to be... If you're asking me how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh customers it has. Oh, okay I get it. So it is a challenge for them, but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent, but partners are filling that gap. And we with Equinix being forced to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest. And so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind? >> Well, they come with all the requisite biometrics and man traps and all of the sort of bells and whistles that are actually the first slay of physical security, but then once you get into the data center, then we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. >> Yeah, it's good. And you know, it's not like you drive by the data center, and there's a big sign that says, here's the data center. They're trying to stay a little hidden and then like getting in, it's like getting into Fort Knox. It's probably harder. And then, but then the it's like this giant clean room. It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> And inside the data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside their, the most direct roam reps to the cloud. So you would expect there's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure clean... >> Cooling systems and power systems that are just... >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is really. >> We need a tour. >> Do you let people tour your data center? >> I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Great. >> Sounds fantastic. Would love to. >> We'll bring a camera. (laughing) Oh, no, we're not allowed. >> Not today. >> No phones, no phones sequester. So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> We are excited about the conversations that we're going to have, power of three that I was talking about. So, we really pride ourselves on having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer. And so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts. Equinix and Dell will meet with almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us. So I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently, because that is good choice for the market. That is good choice for the customer set, for the enterprises out there. So that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week. But thank you for coming on Jules, >> Oh my pleasure, thank you. talking about... >> How Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you. Well, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage day one, "Dell Technologies World" live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (slow upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, (gentle electronic music) brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Dave, I think first time we've co-hosted this week. >> Yeah. >> Excited to be with you. >> Very excited. >> Live wall to wall coverage. Two and a half days, two days and one evening. I'd say 7,000 plus people here, so really good showing. Caitlin Gordon is here, she's the vice president of product management for cloud solutions and tech alliances at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. >> It is really good to be back in a physical cube, with three dimensional humans. >> Yeah, so unbelievable. >> And it was good to see you up on stage today, so fantastic job. I think the keynotes have been good. I think it's funny, coming out of COVID, it seems like the keynotes are really tight. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> This year, you know. And, so I think that's good. You have a lot to say, so that's why we love theCube, so you can come back and. >> Caitlin: Nice to have a live audience, get the feedback, yeah. Yeah, they were, I tell you, the audience was engaged today, right? I mean, lots of hooping and hollering, so let's talk about multicloud. You know, it's, pre-COVID, post-COVID, feels like things have changed. Maybe, maybe due to COVID, maybe not, but what are you seeing, the patterns in customers around multicloud? >> Well it's been interesting. I've been in a multicloud world tour here over the last six to nine months, and you know, one thing is clear, for the first time as an industry, we agree on something, (Dave laughing) And that's multicloud. We don't agree on what it means, but we do agree that multicloud is our reality. And customers are having a lot of challenges with what that means. That means today reality is multicloud most of the time just means multi contract, alright. I know what hyperscaler's my primary, I have secondary, I probably brought someone that brought someone else in. I've got SaaS providers, I got my on-prem partners. But there's not a lot of continuity and consistency across that. It's really operational silos, data silos, being able to predict that spend is the challenge. And there's a lot of people challenges in there. Whether it's developer velocity, as Jen talked about earlier today. Or even just simply having enough people with the right skills, is a real big challenge because no matter what definition you have of multicloud, it means distributed, and it means a lot of different places, and that's a big challenge. >> I tagged you in my Tweet today, when you were up on stage, I don't know if you saw it. But basically you know, we use this term super cloud, and it was pretty clear to me anyway, an example of what I think of as what multicloud should be. An experience that spans location, that is the consistent experience with all my policies, and my security, my governance. Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends that you see. >> You used my favorite phrase, consistent experience. And really what we're doing is two things. We're building a portfolio of software and services, and that's really targeted at that consistent experience. You can have your data, and your workloads in the right place, but you can have a consistent experience with what you already have on-prem. We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations. We overused that term and we ruined it, and then we didn't use it anymore. But that's what we're talking about. On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency. But that's not enough because this is just such a complex landscape. The second part of what we're building is really an ecosystem of cloud partnerships. So whether it's the hyperscaler, certainly. But also colocation providers like Equinix. Or SaaS providers like Snowflake. The more we can partner with the key providers in the multicloud landscape, the more we can simplify that across. >> Yes, so you mentioned something that's key. Most people when they think about multicloud, they're not going into that because they really want to do the same thing nine different ways. So that consistency. >> Caitlin: It's not the design point. >> No, exactly. >> Caitlin: No. >> It's like, I want multi something. But not multi everything you offer. So the concept of using this well worn, well proven set of storage intelligence software titles, and putting them out into a variety of cloud providers, linking them with a unified experience is obviously powerful. And that seems to be what's behind Alpine? Is that the strategy? >> Yeah, it's absolutely right. Because you want that consistency because you have established multi lots of things. But you want to be able to get the consistency. But you want to be able to get that across all your data types. You can't just have consistency for file. You can't not only have consistency for object. You want to have that flexibility in who the providers are, and what type of data. And yet have, still have that operational consistency not so matter what. So that's that, that's the tough combination. Keeping flexibility, but also that simplicity and consistency. >> So Project Alpine, tell us more about it, what it is, why is is called a project, when will it be a product. >> (laughing) All of the things. >> Dave: Yeah. So Project Alpine, if you've been tuned in this week, you've heard this a few times. But it is our initiative to bring our block file and object storage software, to all of the major public clouds. So that is all about being able to really break the barriers between your data, and native public cloud services. The key thing, that you started off with it, operational consistency. If I have a power store on-prem, I can run our block software in the cloud, have that operational consistency, so it's the same UI, it's the same API's. Why that really matters, the undercurrent of that comes back to people. If you have the same tools, the same API's, you don't have to learn anything new. You don't have to re-skill or re-hire any people. And eventually you can drive that even more efficiently all through API's. So it's all about that consistent operations. I'm not going to ignore your project questions so I'll get to that as well. >> Thank you. >> It's a project because for a number of reasons, it's something we're working towards, and it's going to have deliverables and milestones over a number of months and years, to be honest. We actually first announced Project Alpine back in January as you know. And we have already extended that now in May to say what we're talking about and any news, started to show you what that's looking like. So original announcement as a project in January. Technology preview here in May. And then we're going to start to have early access for some of these to customers later this year. And then availability into next year. >> Excellent. So the primary value proposition I've been hearing is that operational consistency. Is there another dimension of value, in terms of function? In other words, I get why I'm not going to get that operational consistency across clouds and on-prem from a public cloud provider. Are there functional capabilities that you bring, I mean yes, help us understand that gap. >> Yeah. >> Between what you can offer as a long term, you know, the leader in storage, versus kind of the new entrance in the public cloud. >> Yeah, two things come to mind. The number one is data mobility. So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility. Because what's the most efficient way to send data from an on-prem storage appliance? Use the native mobility services that are already built into that platform. They're already there, you already know how to use them, and they're very efficient. So they're going to be very smart about what data you send to, and what data you send back from the cloud. Which is critical from a people standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint. Which is the other piece of this. We've been talking about the technology, but as you well know, the business requirements are pretty important. So being able to also, not only have your software in the cloud, but transact that through a public cloud marketplace, and in one case will actually be delivered as a native cloud service, is critical. So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one of these hyperscalers, you can actually draw down against that credit to purchase these software and services, which is equally important to the technology value prop. >> Hence your expanding ecosystem kind of goes both ways. Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public clouds, I want to go into Alpine, and now I'm into a Dell experience. Is that correct? >> I talked about flexibility right, and choice. You have that consistency to say, if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscaler ecosystems, we'll inter-operate that through our API's. We're not going to force you into any single walled garden, but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working through, you can abstract out our value through API's and still leverage that underneath the covers, really at the data layer. So we are really all about that consistency at the data layer, but inter-operating with whatever control planes, and whatever ecosystems you are working with. Which is, I've said it five times, but API's are a critical part of this. We love UI's, and they're pretty in a nice demo, but the reality is probably API's is where this is mostly going to be consumed. >> So, I have a question for you as a marketer. You mentioned technology versus business value. Clearly, outcomes, the actual business value associated with what we do in technology, is key. However, as an old time storage guy myself, (Caitlin laughing) I realize that what you're talking about here is decades of development, focusing on things like data protection, resiliency, performance, built originally in an environment that wasn't instrumented for high availability. >> Caitlin: Hmm. >> You needed things like clusters. There wasn't the concept of just JBOD in servers, one server fails, you throw it away, and it automatically goes to another. How do you balance, this is a very long question here, how do you balance the fact that your underlying technology is so good, with the desire to communicate the business value? Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology as much anymore? Because there's so much impressive stuff there. >> Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself. Um, it is really interesting having been at this show for many, many, many years. Not as many as Dave probably. (Dave laughing) >> Old man Dave. (Caitlin laughing) >> What can I say. >> I would say, a number of those years we spend most of our time talking about speeds and feeds. How many IOPS? What's the latency? What's our HERO number of the day? And we still care about that right, and data protection, what's your BD braid? How much can we save you? Still important. But it's a secondary conversation. What are we talking about now? Cloud native app mobility, and that modernization, and the underlying infrastructure isn't always going to be Dell's anymore, it's going to by in the hyperscalers in some cases. So it's a completely different conversation and different people we're talking to. It's very exciting, it's a little bit foreign to us, but we welcome it, and it's also still important that we understand the infrastructure side too. Because ultimately, even if this is being delivered as a service, someone is still delivering and managing that infrastructure and that is still critically important. >> So okay, Project Alpine, is it multicloud? Is it Apex? Is it subscription? Is it as a service? >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> We should be thinking about it. >> Yeah, all those things. Yes, check. (Dave laughing) All of the things. >> So they're coming together is the. >> It's coming together, right. You hit all of the right buzz words, bingo. But multicloud, the value prop is Project Alpine, multicloud data, and yes subscription is going to really be the model from an economic standpoint, that's really the key. But ultimately it all comes together. >> What are you seeing with data architectures? Kind of up leveling a bit these days, where you know, customers generally, they'll shove everything into a big data warehouse, or a single store, or cloud. You you guys talked about the edge a lot. We just had a great conversation with Lowes, and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores. How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures? >> I think the Snowflake announcement was a really really really good example. And it came through as an announcement but it's a partnership, right. And what's really interesting is it's very clear that what we've kind of inherently understood as an on-prem, primarily an on-prem vendor traditionally, is that data has a ton of gravity, and between data privacy, and just governance regulations, there's a lot of reason the data is not going to move. And what that means from a modern cloud based analytics standpoint like Snowflake, is they need to be able to support the data no matter where it lives. That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud. Many customers including us will not do that. It means being able to access that data so that more distributed data architecture, but still being able to use those cloud based tools, is really where we're seeing, and why we've really announced this partnership this week. I think there's a ton more opportunity in that space. >> Well that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data, into the Snowflake data cloud, that's a first. >> Caitlin: Yup. >> Now there, I'm sure Snowflake is going to want to migrate it at some point. But to your point, you won't as a customer, a lot of customers to say, no. First of all, a lot of times, it's not a business case. If I don't have to move it, why should I move it? If it's cost effective, and it's protected. And then, there are constraints. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> To moving data, like legal constraints and so forth. >> Absolutely. And data regulations are not getting less stringent, right? >> Right. Alright, we got to go. Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. It was great to see you. Congratulations for all the announcements, and awesome to see you face to face. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're very welcome. >> Good to have you. >> Thank you for watching, this is Dave Vellante, for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin, and John Furrier. You're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (gentle electronic music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World 2022 Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited I dunno if you heard that. A group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vallante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited if you heard that. Big applause going went live. So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell Technologies World since 2019, a lot of people here, this expo hall is packed, lot of momentum here but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, you know, so many exciting things for Equinix and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them so they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds, they have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint, has set us on the path we're on today which we're very grateful to be at in and really the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about that. The last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. >> They have been. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and digital transformation is hard, it's not of one and done and it's not an overnight solution and so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center, to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem and then pairing that with, you know these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution OnPrem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge together and that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Eqiuinix's an amazing company, like you said, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart it'll blow your mind, really incredibly successful and part of the reason is funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was exact opposite and that's because, you know Charles Phillips used to joke, friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Yes. >> Right? And it's not a good use of capital for most companies unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because, you know, and we get that are you and Dell in fact competitors? And no we see them as wholly complimentary and in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge which involves their servers and PowerStore which involves their storage and then VxRail which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure and those are a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell and if you think about metal and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance have the equipment placed in our data center so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves to that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community in terms of the partnership with Dell? Are partners must be excited the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, you know, that's what near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for Equinix's global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell and to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell so it makes sense that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with the AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kyndryl, Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro all, DXC, all of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner so they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own and so if they're excited about it, it's a big opportunity for them from a revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status so partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix, you know, 'cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet, things many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider and it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinix and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And there's a lot of technology underneath these, it's that first layer one I guess if you will of the data center, right? And so a lot of your customers or your partners customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before, I mean it's just too expensive, the power requirements are going through the roof so you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest so it's very difficult for people to do it themselves but even show, another point you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability and so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy and it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives or partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's, how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air or is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> It's sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say. >> This is at high level. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts. People who, you know who all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that and then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that. >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it and we do see other people following which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well how important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has? >> Partners care a lot about it but customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking, before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment, tell me about your commitment and so we are committed to it but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's com-- >> Where do you. Go ahead please. >> Oh I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer which EquinIx is listening to we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry one more time? >> That the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers you were saying? >> It both, like I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it but our customers are holding us accountable to it and, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us and it is for companies like Dell and it is for our partners and customers. >> It really is. I mean, it's up there with security. >> It is. >> In terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next, let's call it three to five years? In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, you know, I think that they, our partners, and that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, you know, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell so our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke do it yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well that's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are. The customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is and, you know, the customers are getting savvier but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we're all still grappling that. For right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now and then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well that's the thing about your business, it's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> You can. >> And you can put anything in your data center, that's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet and so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions architects and our sales people together with Dell talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinix data center and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than the year you're even thinking about today and they may expand their edge over time because they may sort of see that at the customer end point. Today most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change and so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah, that's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every couple of years if you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah sure, you might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So you know, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this, you mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in the last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves? >> We have been fortunate to to be... If you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh our customers it has. >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes. >> So it is a challenge for them but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent but partners are filling that gap and we've at Equinix have been fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest and so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean-- >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. >> Well I mean, they come with all the requisite, bio metrics and man traps and all of the sort bells and whistles that are actually the first layer of physical security, but then once you get into the data center then we have sort of, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's-- >> Yeah, it's good and you know, it's not like you drive by the data center and there's a big sign that says here's the data center, it is kind of, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then it's, getting in it's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder but then, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> Inside these data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside the most direct RomReps to the cloud so you would expect. There's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, clean-- >> Cooling systems and power systems and it's just. >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is. >> So I need a tour. >> You should. Do you let people tour your data centers? >> Well I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Yeah, great. >> It sounds fantastic. >> We'd love to. >> So last couple-- >> We'll bring a camera. (both laugh) Oh, no, not allowed. >> Not today. No phones, no phones sequester. >> So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> So well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're going to have power of three that I was talking about. So you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer and so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinix and Dell will meet with, you know almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us so I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently because that is good choice for the market, that is good choice for the customer set so for the enterprises out there so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on Jules talking about-- >> Oh, my pleasure >> An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner, your program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's Live Coverage day one Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of day. One of Dell technologies world 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited. I dunno if you heard that a group behind me, very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave ante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johns SVP of channel from McQuin. Jill, welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>And those people back there are very excited. If you heard that big applause >>That >>Went live <laugh> so the, the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell technologies world since 2019. A lot of people here, this expo hall is packed a lot of, of momentum here, but there's also a lot of momentum critics. Talk to us about what's going on. >>Well, and you know, so, so many exciting things for Equinex and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it gives us a chance to, to share that, uh, with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively, but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continent in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them. So they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds. They have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers, so that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint has set us on the path we're on today, which we're very grateful, um, to be at in. And, and really this, the things that are happening with Equinex and Dell together can, couldn't be more of the moment. >>Talk to me about that. The, the last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. They have for everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >>Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix, what we're doing is really helping, helping our shared interface, customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and, and digital transformation is hard and it's not a one and done, and it's not an overnight solution. And so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell it stack in an Equinex data center to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our, all the clouds and, and, and all, everything else. They need to participate in the ecosystem. And then pairing that with, you know, these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution on Preem some of their solution in the cloud access, public clouds, and use that collectively to diff fine. We're calling the intelligent edge together. And that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >>E's amazing company, like you said, it's, it's, you know, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters, but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart, blow your mind, really incredibly successful. And part of the reason it's funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago, people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago, anyway, the cloud is gonna hurt companies like equity. It was exact opposite it. And, and that's because, you know, Charles Phillips used to joke friends. Don't let friends build data centers. Yes. Right. And, and it's not a good use of capital for most companies, unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. We do. What's the overlap with, with Dell? How do they compliment each other? It, >>It's a good question because, you know, and we get that, are you and Dell in fact competitors, and no, we see them as who complimentary. And in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call power edge, which involves their servers and power store, which involves their storage. And, and then V RIL, which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure. And those are just few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell. And if you think about metal and, and it's Equinex metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance, have the equipment placed in our data centers so that they can access that capacity. And according to spikes or needs that they have that equipment in our data centers, that's there for them to avail themselves of that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal is a service together. >>What are some of the, the things that you're hearing from, from your partner community, in terms of the partnership with Dell, what are partners supposed be excited, the momentum there what's going on in the partner community? >>So, you know, that is that's, that's what near and dear to my heart, since that's what I'm responsible for. Equinex is global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell. And to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell. So it makes that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who will meet with the at T orange business services. Those folks, in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kendra, Deloitte, Accenture, we pro, uh, all DXC. All of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three, that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinex are delivering the customers, most often don't have the experience. They need to execute it without a partner. So they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own. And so, so if they're excited about it, it is a, it's a big opportunity for them from a, a revenue services, a and an opportunity for them to step into a next level, trusted advisor status. So partners are excited and, and we're gonna be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. Do you >>See Equinix? You know, these cuz these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and, and growing. Can it be, are you a dot connector in a way, can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >>Well, I mean our, so our E ecosystems that, um, that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, um, to the internet things, many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers and six continents that provide those ecosystems. It's, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider. And it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinex, and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >>And it's a lot of technology underneath these, you know, it's that first layer one, I guess, if you will, of the data center, right. And so a lot of your, your customers or your cus your partner's customers, they just don't want to be in that business. As we were saying before, I mean, it's just too expensive. The, the power requirements are going through the roof, so you gotta be really good at managing power. >>You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment, to keep a data center. They would ran, they would manage themselves at the level that Equinex is able to invest. So it's very difficult for people to do it themselves, but even show another, you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because is super committed to sustainability. And so we've made a commitment to holy renewable energy. And it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives, so, or partners like at T meet their connected climate goals. So we, we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. And, >>And that's, that's how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air. Is it being near the Columbia river? How what's, what's your strategy in that regard, >>Uh, and sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I, uh, I would be out of my depth if I didn't say >>This is the high level. Yeah. >>So, um, we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that, and then experts people who, you know, who all they do is really help us to, um, to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that. And then also to, um, to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six cotton, it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption. And your burden are different in Africa, as you just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India, or then they are in, in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey, and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that, but >>You're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >>And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it. And, um, and we do see other people following, which is, is a good thing for all of us. Well, >>How important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has >>Partners care a lot about it, but, uh, customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking before I decide to go with Equinex and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment. Tell me about your commitment. And so, um, so we are committed to it, but customers are demanding it to >>Where >>Do you go ahead please? >>Oh, I was just gonna say, it's, it's coming from the, from the voice of a customer, which Equinox is listening to, we know Dell is listening to it as well. >>I'm so >>Sorry. One more time that, that the, the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers. You were saying, it, >>It both like, I mean, we wanna do the right thing and we've made commitments to it, but our customers are holding us accountable to it. And, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us. And it is for companies like Dell and it is for partners and customers. >>It really is. It's it's, I mean, it's up there with security in terms of the board level conversation, where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the, the, the next let's call it three to five years in your business? You can look out that far. >>Well, you know, I, I think that, um, they, our partners, um, and I, that, I mean, Dells and our mutual partners, you know, are, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinex and Dell. So our partners are gonna be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they wanna buy apex as a service, whether they wanna buy Equinex metal, whether they wanna have car some, uh, a partner put together, bespoke, do it yourself, combination with other services. Uh, I, I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are gonna embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them >>Well, that's, that's incredibly important these days to meet customer where they are, the customers have a lot of choice. It is, but everything that we're all doing is for the customer, ultimately at the end of the day, <laugh> >>Yes, it, it, it, it is. And, and, you know, the customers are getting Savier, but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we are all still, um, we're all still grappling at the, at for right now. We like to say that as customers are looking to define that the, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an, an awfully robust set of choices for now. And then we wanna continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >>Well, that's the thing about your business? It's it's optionality. I mean, you can't, I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff, but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. You can, and you can put anything in your data center. That's, that's, you know, it, >>You can, but you may not know what you need yet. And so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions, architects and our sales people together, but they'll talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinex data center, and maybe some public and future proofing leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud based services a year to five years from now than the year, even thinking about today. And, and they may expand their edge over time, because they may, they may sort of see that as a, at the customer end point today, most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change. And so we wanna be there when it does. >>Yeah. That's a great point because you don't wanna necessarily have to rip it out every cup of years. If you, if you, if you can have a, an architecture that can grow. Yeah, sure. You might want to upgrade it >>Well, and it's one, that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, uh, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace, but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So this that's been, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinex data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. Have >>You also seen this? You mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in a last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap on, on folks coming, Tolin saying help. We don't have the resources here to do this ourselves. >>We have been fortunate to, to not, to, to be, um, if you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company, no, >>Your customers >>Or customers that has oh, okay. Yes. So it is, it is a challenge for them, but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent, but partners are filling that gap and we've access Aon fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest. And so we put them together with our partner and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >>Well, that's most important thing, filling those gaps. >>You, you ever been one in inside one of these ultra modern data centers? I have not, >>Not yet. >>It's pretty cool. Isn't it? I mean, >>Have you, have you ever had a tour of one? >>I I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. Well, >>I mean, they, they come with all the requisite, uh, bio and man traps and all of the bells and, and, and whistles that are actually the first slay of physical security. But then once you get into the data center, then we have sort, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's, >>Yeah, it's good. And you know, it's not like you drive by the data center, it's a big sign. Here's the data center. It is kind of, you know, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then like, it's get in. It's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder. And then, but then the it's, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. >>There are all >>Your >>Mind. And inside this data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside their, the, the most direct rom reps to the cloud. So you would expect there, there's a, there's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, >>Clean systems and power system >>Environment. For sure. >>Amazing engineering. >>It is really >>A >>Tour. You should, you, if they do, you let people tour >>Your, I, I will bring both of you on a tour. Awesome. >>I, my guess >>Would love to. >>Yeah. Great. Sounds fantastic >>On that. So >>Last >>Couple, we'll bring a camera. <laugh> Oh, no, we're not allowed. Not today. >>No phones, no phones sequester. So what, what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we've all gotten to be together in so long? >>So, um, well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're gonna have power of three that I was talking about. So, you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more, to benefit the customer. And so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinex and Dell will meet with you almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us. So I am most excited about those conversations and about, uh, the education I'm gonna get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently, because that is good choice for the market. That is good choice for the customer set. So for the enterprises out there, so that I'm most excited about. Awesome. >>Sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on, just talking An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner program is growing. And of course the momentum of the company will can't wait to see what happens next year. Thank >>You. Thank you. Well, we aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. Thanks, >>Jules. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes live coverage day one, Dell technologies world live from Las Vegas, stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies. Caitlin is great to see you again though virtually. >> This is good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well, global client executive at Equinix. Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin, let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we're trying to remember when did we last see each other of course it was virtual, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here. (all laughs) Go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had preannounced, but we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future, it really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in theCUBE, right? What's happening in IT. What's happening with our customers is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly, still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on, the management can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage-based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services. >> Talk to me a little bit Caitlin about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah, and it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about the product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything 'cause what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for, which is in the case of storage, they're looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier. So it was at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it. And I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing, and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services, this is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block storage of services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Store and Services, you've pick your type, you pick your tier, pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in this view and as little as 14 days, time to value. And for us, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage is really something it's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced some the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, let's start with you and then Tony will bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released the APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple of exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here in our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell-through. Our partners are really, really important, whether they're resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. Partner sell-through is another important piece. And of course, most important for our conversation today is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available on Equinix facilities all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this, to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell is doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to deliver, to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities storage as a service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprint of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix, talk to me about what the reception has been from from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We all already had been working together in many different ways and matters taking this partnership to the next level and what we've already seen actually all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us either first step first, it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that, right? We have the combination of the right infrastructure. And with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer and we were solving those separately and now we're solving those together. >> The spokes wanting to get out of the data center. If we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market. And as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data centers that we've seen in the last 18 months, help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier is a really important part of really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became out in rural America, out rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way for as an IT team to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible, my partners that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together? So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your least favorite way to do business. But the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are zooming with each other right now. Let's talk about, Tony I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one pro leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems. And those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading, also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large, and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank, trying to hire people and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool, the compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So some ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership, He said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that 'cause it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There were very short list to choose from. Once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony, you already hit on, the networking, the interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. 'Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of the data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that, oftentimes what actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects, the ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyperscalers and the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched. And that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base. >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for storage as a service, the next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going by directionally right now, the volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like a snowball, just going down the hill, it's just picking up speed. And with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focus teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last few months, or have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability in this partnership. >> Yeah, I would point to highly regulated industries thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a U.S. situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in is defined by the different governments around the world. You see the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted thankfully prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, the healthcare, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors we've got this covered. That's something we're able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries certainly. >> Got it, thanks for that Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed so single bill from Dell, where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex, you'll learn more about all things, APEX, really the APEX consoles, the experience. So you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner. Now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix, and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)