>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners Welcome back to the Cube. Virtual coverage of KUB Con Cloud native 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not face to face. Were normally in person where we have great interviews. Everyone's kind of jamming in the hallways, having a good time talking tech, identifying the new projects and knew where So we're not. There were remote. I'm John for your host. We've got two great gas, both Cuba alumni's Chris. And is it chief technology officer of the C and C F Chris, Welcome back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Glad to be here. >>And, of course, another Cube alumni who is in studio. But we haven't had him at a Show Jr store meant executive director of the Fin Ops Foundation. And that's the purpose of this session. A interesting data point we're going to dig into how cloud has been enabling Mawr communities, more networks of practitioners who are still working together, and it's also a success point Chris on the C N C F vision, which has been playing out beautifully. So we're looking forward to digging. Jr. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, John. >>So, first of all, I want to get the facts out there. I think this is really important story that people should pay attention to the Finn Ops Foundation. That J. R. That you're running is really an interesting success point because it's it's not the c n c f. Okay. It's a practitioner that builds on cloud. Your experience in community you had is doing specific things that they're I won't say narrow but specific toe a certain fintech things. But it's really about the success of Cloud. Can you explain and and layout for take a minute to explain What is the fin Ops foundation and has it relate to see NCF? >>Yeah, definitely. So you know, if you think about this, the shift that we've had to companies deploying primarily in cloud, whether it be containers a ciencia focuses on or traditional infrastructure. The thing that typically people focus on right is the technology and innovation and speed to market in all those areas. But invariably companies hit this. We'd like to call the spend panic moment where they realize they're They're initially spending much more than they expected. But more importantly, they don't really have the processes in place or the people or the tools to do things like fully, you know, understand where their costs are going to look at how to optimize those to operate that in their organizations. And so the foundation pinups foundation eyes really focused on, uh, the people in practitioners who are in organizations doing cloud financial management, which is, you know, being those who drive this accountability of this variable spin model that's existed. So we were partnering very closely with, uh, see NCF. And we're now actually part of the Linux Foundation as of a few months ago, Uh, and you know, just to kind of put into context how that you kind of Iraq together, whereas, you know, CNC s very focused on open source coordinative projects, you know, For example, Spotify just launched their backstage cloud called Management Tool into CFCF Spotify folks, in our end, are working on the best practices around the cloud financial management that standards to go along with that. So we're there to help, you know, define this sort of cultural transformation, which is a shift to now. Engineers happen to think about costs as they never did before. On finance, people happen to partner with technology teams at the speed of cloud, and, you know executives happen to make trade off decisions and really change the way that they operate the business. With this variable page ago, engineers have all the access to spend the money in Cloud Model. >>Hey, blank check for engineers who doesn't like that rain that in its like shift left for security. And now you've got to deal with the financial Finn ops. It's really important. It's super point, Chris. In all seriousness. Putting kidding aside, this is exactly the kind of thing you see with open sores. You're seeing things like shift left, where you wanna have security baked in. You know what Jr is done in a fabulous job with his community now part of Linux Foundation scaling up, there's important things to nail down that is specific to that domain that are related to cloud. What's your thoughts on this? Because you're seeing it play out. >>Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I talked to a lot of our end user members and companies that have been adopting Cloud Native and I have lots of friends that run, you know, cloud infrastructure at companies. And Justus Jr said, You know, eventually there's been a lot of success and cognitive and want to start using a lot of things. Your bills are a little bit more higher than you expect. You actually have trouble figuring out, you know, kind of who's using what because, you know, let's be honest. A lot of the clouds have built amazing services. But let's say the financial management and cost management accounting tools charge back is not really built in well. And so I kind of noticed this this issue where it's like, great everyone's using all these services. Everything is great, But costs are a little bit confusing, hard to manage and, you know, you know, scientifically, you know, I ran into, you know, Jr and his community out there because my community was having a need of like, you know, there's just not good tools, standards, no practices out there. And, you know, the Finau Foundation was working on these kind of great things. So we started definitely found a way to kind of work together and be under the same umbrella foundation, you know, under the under Linux Foundation. In my personal opinion, I see more and more standards and tools to be created in this space. You know, there's, you know, very few specifications or standards and trying to get cost, you know, data out of different clouds and tools out there, I predict, Ah, lot more work is going to be done. Um, in this space, whether it's done and defendants foundation itself, CNC f, I think will probably be, uh, collaboration amongst communities. Can I truly figure this out? So, uh, engineers have any easier understanding of, you know, if I spent up the service or experiment? How much is this actually going to potentially impact the cost of things and and for a while, You know, uh, engineers just don't think about this. When I was at Twitter, we spot up services all time without really care about cost on, and that's happening a lot of small companies now, which don't necessarily have as a big bucket. So I'm excited about the space. I think you're gonna see a huge amount of focus on cloud financial management drops in the near future. >>Chris, thanks for that great insight. I think you've got a great perspective. You know, in some cases, it's a fast and loose environment. Like Twitter. You mentioned you've got kind of a blank check and the rocket ships going. But, Jr, this brings up to kind of points. This kind of like the whole code side of it. The software piece where people are building code, but also this the human error. I mean, we were playing with clubs, so we have a big media cloud and Amazon and we left there. One of the buckets open on the switches and elemental. We're getting charged. Massive amounts for us cash were like, Wait a minute, not even using this thing. We used it once, and it left it open. It was like the water was flowing through the pipes and charging us. So you know, this human error is throwing the wrong switch. I mean, it was simply one configuration error, in some cases, just more about planning and thinking about prototypes. >>Yeah. I mean, so take what your experience there. Waas and multiply by 1000 development teams in a big organization who all have access to cloud. And then, you know, it's it's and this isn't really about a set of new technologies. It's about a new set of processes and a cultural change, as Chris mentioned, you know, engineers now thinking about cost and this being a whole new efficiency metric for them to manage, right? You know, finance teams now see this world where it's like tomorrow. The cost could go three x the next day they could go down. You've got, you know, things spending up by the second. So there's a whole set of cross functional, and that's the majority of the work that are members do is really around. How do we get these cross functional teams working together? How do we get you know, each team up leveled on what they need, understand with cloud? Because not only is it, you know, highly variable, but it's highly decentralized now, and we're seeing, you know, cloud hit. These sort of material spend levels where you know, the big, big cloud spenders out there spending, you know, high nine figures in some cases you know, in cloud and it's this material for their for their businesses. >>And let's just let's be honest. Here is like Clouds, for the most part, don't really have a huge incentive in offering limits and so on. It's just, you know, like, hey, the more usage that the better And hopefully getting a group of practitioners in real figures. Well, holy put pressure to build better tools and services in this area. I think actually it is happening. I think Jared could correct me if wrong. I think AWS recently announced a feature where I think it's finally like quotas, you know, enabled, you know, you have introducing quotas now for and building limits at some level, which, you know, I think it's 2020 Thank you know, >>just to push back a little bit in support of our friends, you ask Google this company, you know, for a long time doing this work, we were worried that the cloud would be like, What are you doing? Are you trying to get our trying to minimize commitments and you know the dirty secret of this type of work? And I were just talking a bunch of practitioners today is that cloud spend never really goes down. When you do this work, you actually end up spending more because you know you're more comfortable with the efficiency that you're getting, and your CEO is like, let's move more workloads over. But let's accelerate. Let's let's do Maurin Cloud goes out more data centers. And so the cloud providers air actually largely incentivized to say, Yeah, we want people to be officially don't understand this And so it's been a great collaboration with those companies. As you said, you know, aws, Google, that you're certainly really focused in this area and ship more features and more data for you. It's >>really about getting smart. I mean, you know, they no, >>you could >>do it. I mean, remember the old browser days you could switch the default search engine through 10 menus. You could certainly find the way if you really wanted to dig in and make policy a simple abstraction layer feature, which is really a no brainer thing. So I think getting smarter is the right message. I want to get into the synergy Chris, between this this trend, because I think this points to, um kind of what actually happened here if you look at it at least from my perspective and correct me if I'm wrong. But you had jr had a community of practitioners who was sharing information. Sounds like open source. They're talking and sharing, you know? Hey, don't throw that switch. Do This is the best practice. Um, that's what open communities do. But now you're getting into software. You have to embed cost management into everything, just like security I mentioned earlier. So this trend, I think if you kind of connect the dots is gonna happen in other areas on this is really the synergy. Um, I getting that right with CNC >>f eso The way I see it is, and I dream of a future where developers, as they develop software, will be able to have some insight almost immediately off how much potential, you know, cost or impact. They'll have, you know, on maybe a new service or spinning up or potentially earlier in the development cycle saying, Hey, maybe you're not doing this in a way that is efficient. Maybe you something else. Just having that feedback loop. Ah lot. You know, closer to Deb time than you know a couple weeks out. Something crazy happens all of a sudden you notice, You know, based on you know, your phase or financial folks reaching out to you saying, Hey, what's going on here? This is a little bit insane. So I think what we'll see is, as you know, practitioners and you know, Jr spinoffs, foundation community, you know, get together share practices. A lot of them, you know, just as we saw on sense. Yeah, kind of build their own tools, models, abstractions. And, you know, they're starting to share these things. And once you start sharing these things, you end up with a you know, a dozen tools. Eventually, you know, sharing, you know, knowledge sharing, code sharing, you know, specifications. Sharing happens Eventually, things kind of, you know, become de facto tools and standards. And I think we'll see that, you know, transition in the thin ops community over the next 12 to 4 months. You know, very soon in my thing. I think that's kind of where I see things going, >>Jr. This really kind of also puts a riel, you know, spotlight and illustrates the whole developer. First cliche. I mean, it's really not a cliche. It's It's happening. Developers first, when you start getting into the calculations of our oi, which is the number one C level question is Hey, what's the are aware of this problem Project or I won't say cover your ass. But I mean, if someone kind of does a project that it breaks the bank or causes a, you know, financial problem, you know, someone gets pulled out to the back would shed. So, you know, here you're you're balancing both ends of the spectrum, you know, risk management on one side, and you've got return on investment on the other. Is that coming out from the conversation where you guys just in the early stages, I could almost imagine that this is a beautiful tailwind for you? These thes trends, >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the work that we're doing in our practice you're doing, it's not about saving money. It's about making money because you actually want empower those engineers to be the innovation engines in the organization to deliver faster to ship faster. At the same time, they now can have, you know, tangible financial roo impacts on the business. So it's a new up leveling skill for them. But then it's also, I think, to Christmas point of, you know, people seeing this stuff more quickly. You know what the model looks like when it's really great is that engineers get near real time visibility into the impact of their change is on the business, and they can start to have conversations with the business or with their finance partners about Okay, you know, if you want me to move fast, I could move fast, But it's gonna cost this if you want me to optimize the cost. I could do that or I can optimize performance. And there's actually, you know, deeper are like conversation the candidate up. >>Now I know a lot of people who watch the Cube always share with me privately and Chris, you got great vision on this. We talked many times about it. We're learning a lot, and the developers are on the front lines and, you know, a lot of them don't have MBAs and, you know they're not in the business, but they can learn quick. If you can code, you can learn business. So, you know, I want you to take a minute Jr and share some, um, educational knowledge to developers were out there who have to sit in these meetings and have to say, Hey, I got to justify this project. Buy versus build. I need to learn all that in business school when I had to see s degree and got my MBA, so I kind of blended it together. But could you share what the community is doing and saying, How does that engineer sit in the meeting and defend or justify, or you some of the best practices what's coming out of the foundation? >>Yeah, I mean, and we're looking at first what a core principles that the whole organization used to line around. And then for each persona, like engineers, what they need to know. So I mean, first and foremost, it's It's about collaboration, you know, with their partners andan starting to get to that world where you're thinking about your use of cloud from a business value driver, right? Like, what is the impact of this? The critical part of that? Those early decentralization where you know, now you've got everybody basically taking ownership for their cloud usage. So for engineers, it's yes, we get that information in front of us quickly. But now we have a new efficiency metric. And engineers don't like inefficiency, right? They want to write fishing code. They wanna have efficient outcomes. Um, at the same time, those engineers need to now, you know, have ah, we call it, call it a common lexicon. Or for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, folks. Ah, Babel fish that needs to be developed between these teams. So a lot of the conversations with engineers right now is in the foundation is okay. What What financial terms do I need to understand? To have meaningful conversations about Op X and Capex? And what I'm going to make a commitment to a cloud provider like a committed use discount, Google or reserved instance or savings Planet AWS. You know, Is it okay for me to make that? What? How does that impact our, you know, cost of capital. And then and then once I make that, how do I ensure that I could work with those teams to get that allocated and accounted? The right area is not just for charge back purposes, but also so that my teams can see my portion of the estate, right? And they were having the flip side of that conversation with all the finance folks of like, You need to understand how the variable cloud, you know, model works. And you need to understand what these things mean and how they impact the business. And then all that's coming together. And to the point of like, how we're working with C and C f you know, into best practices White papers, you know, training Siri's etcetera, sets of KP eyes and capabilities. Onda. All these problems have been around for years, and I wouldn't say they're solved. But the knowledge is out there were pulling it together. The new level that we're trying to talk with the NCF is okay. In the old world of Cloud, you had 1 to 1 use of a resource. You're running a thing on an instance in the new world, you're running in containers and that, you know, cluster may have lots of pods and name spaces, things inside of it that may be doing lots of different workloads, and you can no longer allocate. I've got this easy to instance and this storage to this thing it's now split up and very ephemeral. And it is a whole new layer of virtualization on top of virtual ization that we didn't have to deal with before. >>And you've got multiple cloud. I'll throw that in there, just make another dimension on it. Chris, tie this together cause this is nice energy to scale up what he's built with the community now, part of the Linux Foundation. This fits nicely into your vision, you know, perfectly. >>Yeah, no, 100% like, you know, so little foundation. You know, as you're well, well aware, is just a federation of open source foundations of groups working together to share knowledge. So it definitely fits in kind of the little foundation mission of, you know, building the largest share technology investment for, you know, humankind. So definitely good there with my kind of C and C f c T o hat, you know, on is, you know, I want to make sure that you know, you know my community and and, you know, the community of cloud native has access and, you know, knowledge about modern. You know, cloud financial management practices out there. If you look at some of the new and upcoming projects in ciencia things like, you know, you know, backstage, which came out of Spotify. They're starting to add functionality that, you know, you know, originally backstage kind of started out as this, you know, everyone builds their own service catalog to go catalog, and you know who owns what and, you know and all that goodness and developers used it. And eventually what happened is they started to add cost, you know, metrics to each of these services and so on. So it surfaces things a little bit closer, you know, a depth time. So my whole goal is to, you know, take some of these great, you know, practices and potential tools that were being built by this wonderful spinoffs community and trying to bring it into the project. You know, front inside of CNC F. So having more projects either exposed, you know, useful. You know, Finn, ops related metrics or, you know, be able to, you know, uh, you know, tool themselves to quickly be able to get useful metrics that could be used by thin ox practitioners out there. That's my kind of goal. And, you know, I just love seeing two communities, uh, come together to improve, improve the state of the world. >>It's just a great vision, and it's needed so and again. It's not about saving money. Certainly does that if you play it right, but it's about growth and people. You need better instrumentation. You need better data. You've got cloud scale. Why not do something there, right? >>Absolutely. It's just maturity after the day because, you know, a lot of engineers, you know, they just love this whole like, you know, rental model just uses many Resource is they want, you know, without even thinking about just basic, you know, metrics in terms of, you know, how many idle instances do I have out there and so, like, people just don't think about that. They think about getting the work done, getting the job done. And if they anything we do to kind of make them think a little bit earlier about costs and impact efficiency, charge back, you know, I think the better the world isn't Honestly, you know, I do see this to me. It's It's almost like, you know, with my hippie hat on. It's like Stephen Green or for the more efficient we are. You know, the better the world off cloud is coming. Can you grow? But we need to be more efficient and careful about the resource is that we use in sentencing >>and certainly with the pandemic, people are virtually you wanted mental health, too. I mean, if people gonna be pulling their hair out, worrying about dollars and cents at scale, I mean, people are gonna be freaking out and you're in meetings justifying why you did things. I mean, that's a time waster, right? I mean, you know, talking about wasting time. >>I have a lot of friends who, you know, run infrastructure at companies. And there's a lot of you know, some companies have been, you know, blessed during this, you know, crazy time with usage. But there is a kind of laser focused on understanding costs and so on and you not be. Do not believe how difficult it is sometimes even just to get, you know, reporting out of these systems, especially if you're using, you know, multiple clouds and multiple services across them. It's not. It's non trivial. And, you know, Jared could speak to this, But, you know, a lot of this world runs in like terrible spreadsheets, right and in versus kind of, you know, nice automated tools with potential, a p I. So there's a lot of this stuff. It's just done sadly in spreadsheets. >>Yeah, salute the flag toe. One standard to rally around us. We see this all the time Jr and emerging inflection points. No de facto kind of things develop. Kubernetes took that track. That was great. What's your take on what he just said? I mean, this is a critical path item for people from all around. >>Yeah, and it's It's really like becoming this bigger and bigger data problem is well, because if you look at the way the clouds are building, they're building per seconds and and down to the very fine grain detail, you know, or functions and and service. And that's amazing for being able to have accountability. But also you get people with at the end of the month of 300 gigabyte billing files, with hundreds of millions of rows and columns attached. So, you know, that's where we do see you companies come together. So yeah, it is a spreadsheet problem, but you can now no longer open your bill in a spreadsheet because it's too big. Eso you know, there's the native tools are doing a lot of work, you know, as you mentioned, you know, AWS and Azure Google shipping a lot. There's there's great, you know, management platforms out there. They're doing work in this area, you know, there's there's people trying to build their own open source the things like Chris was talking about as well. But really, at the end of the day like this, this is This is not a technology. Changes is sort of a cultural shift internally, and it's It's a lot like the like, you know, move from data center to cloud or like waterfall to Dev ops. It's It's a shift in how we're managing, you know, the finances of the money in the business and bringing these groups together. So it it takes time and it takes involvement. I'm also amazed I look like the job titles of the people who are plugged into the Phenoms Foundation and they range from like principal engineers to tech procurement. Thio you know, product leaders to C. T. O. S. And these people are now coming together in the classic to get a seat at the table right toe, Have these conversations and talk about not How do we reduce, you know, cost in the old eighties world. But how do we work together to be more quickly to innovate, to take advantage of these cognitive technologies so that we could be more competitive? Especially now >>it's automation. I mean, all these things are at play. It's about software. I mean, software defined operations is clearly the trend we've been covering. You guys been riding the wave cloud Native actually is so important in all these modern APS, and it applies to almost every aspect of stacks, so makes total sense. Great vision. Um, Chris props to you for that, Jr. Congratulations on a great community, Jerry. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the folks watching on the fin ops Foundation where you're at. What are you looking to do? You adding people, What's your objectives? Take a minute to give the plug? >>Yeah, definitely. We were in open source community, which means we thrive on people contributing inputs. You know, we've got now almost 3000 practitioner members, which is up from 1500 just this this summer on You know, we're looking for those who have either an interesting need to plug into are checked advisory council to help define standards as part of this event, The cognitive gone we're launching Ah, white paper on kubernetes. Uh, and how to do confidential management for it, which was a collaborative effort of a few dozen of our practitioners, as well as our vendor members from VM Ware and Google and APP Thio and a bunch of others who have come together to basically defined how to do this. Well, and, you know, we're looking for folks to plug into that, you know, because at the end of the day, this is about everybody sort of up leveling their skills and knowledge and, you know, the knowledge is out there, nobody's head, and we're focused on how toe drive. Ah, you know, a central collection of that be the central community for it. You enable the people doing this work to get better their jobs and, you know, contribute more of their companies. So I invite you to join us. You know, if your practitioner ITT's Frito, get in there and plug into all the bits and there's great slack interaction channels where people are talking about kubernetes or pinups kubernetes or I need to be asked Google or where we want to go. So I hope you consider joining in the community and join the conversation. >>Thanks for doing that, Chris. Good vision. Thanks for being part of the segment. And, as always, C N C F. This is an enablement model. You throw out the soil, but the 1000 flowers bloom. You don't know what's going to come out of it. You know, new standards, new communities, new vendors, new companies, some entrepreneur Mike jump in this thing and say, Hey, I'm gonna build a better tool. >>Love it. >>You never know. Right? So thanks so much for you guys for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate. >>Thanks so much, John. >>Thank you for having us. >>Okay. I'm John Furry, the host of the Cube covering Coop Con Cloud, Native Con 2020 with virtual This year, we wish we could be there face to face, but it's cute. Virtual. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Ashley Gaare to the program, Global Extended Executive Board Member and President, North America at SoftwareONE. Ashley, welcome, it's great to have you here. >> Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> Talk to us a little bit about you, about SoftwareONE, about your role, give us that context. >> So SoftwareONE is a global services provider for end-to-end software cloud management. We operate in over 90 countries. Our headquarters globally are in Zurich, Switzerland. Our North American headquarters are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I run the North American region with scales from the US, Canada, we have parts in Costa Rica, in Mexico. And our primary purpose and to serve our clients is to help them really understand the restraints in cloud management, everything from licensing used rights to financial operations to workload migrations, to help them drive better outcomes for their business. >> It's all about outcomes for the business. Every conversation we have always goes back to outcomes, but I want to learn a little bit more actually about you. Talk a little bit about your career path and then give us some recommendations that you would have for others who are looking to really kind of step the ladder in their tech careers. >> Yeah, so I've been very fortunate and blessed to be able to be at SoftwareONE for 15 years. So I came up through inside sales. I had no idea how the tech world operated, didn't even know what a server was. And I learned on the job, and this was before even cloud was really relevant. And I think for me, I get asked a lot, "How did you work your way up," so to speak, and it's really about understanding where your strengths sit and investing in those strengths, building a brand of yourself and what your identity is like within the workplace. What do you want people to know of you? Do they want to, "Oh, I got to get Ashley on this project because she accelerates and executes cleanly," right? Or, "I need Ashley to do this because she can collaborate with peers and bring people along." So really understanding where you want to sit, what your skills are, and your strengths, and then asking for mentorship, getting career advice, raising your hand, take on more, and don't ever be afraid to ask questions and admit stuff when you don't know, that humble is part of our core value within SoftwareONE, and it's really, really helped me grow in my own career. >> Ashley, I love that you talked about creating your own personal brand. Another thing that I hear often from women in this situation is creating your own personal board of directors, of mentors, and sponsors who can help guide you along that path. You also talk about investing in you, and I think that is such pertinent advice for those to be able to create success stories within their career. I would love to then know about some of the successes that you've had, where you've helped solve problems relating to cloud computing for organizations, internal, external. >> Yeah, it's a great question. That's why we're here, right? Women of the Cloud. Yeah, SoftwareONE in particular, took the approach early on that we were going to go cloud first in our services portfolio offering, right? We saw the writing on the wall. There was no reason to invest backwards and build (indistinct) and data center consulting practices. So for us, everything we built from the ground up has been cloud native. And so some of the amazing client stories that we've had are really I think, I know it's a silver lining coming out of the pandemic when you had industries hit so hard but hit so differently. And technology was at the core on how they address those problems. So you had the healthcare space that had to get protection and be able to meet with their patients face to face but virtual at the same time. So they had to be able to take the data and still governance with HIPAA laws, keep it secure but then move it to the cloud and shift it fast, right? And then you had manufacturing who had employees who had to stay on site, right? To keep the supply chain running, but at the same time you had office workers that had to move home and completely be 100% remote. And so what we've been able to do really with AWS and our certifications in that practice is AWS differentiates itself with its agility, its framework, it allows for true development in the the PaaS space. It provides a really, really secure robust end to end solution for our clients. And when you have to be able to be nimble that quickly it's created this new expectation in the industry that it could happen again. So are you set up for the next recession? Are you set up for the next pandemic? God willing, there isn't one, but you never know. And so investing in the right infrastructure there in the cloud is critical. And then having the framework, to manage it and go it is second in line and importance. >> Being able to be just aware of the situations that can happen. In hindsight, it's, that's a silver lining coming at a COVID cheer point, being able to prepare for disasters of different types or the need to establish business continuity. I mean, we saw so many organ, well every, almost that survived every surviving organization pivot to cloud during the last couple of years that had no choice to one, survive and two, to be able to be competitive in our organization. And so we've seen so many great stories of successes. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has really been at the forefront of enabling a lot of businesses, I would imagine. Can the industry be successful in that migration and that quick pivot to being competitive advantage competitively, competitive? >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think our differentiator which comes from our core strength of this licensing and asset financial management piece. So with COVID, right? When you had this great acceleration to the cloud whether it was remote workplace or it was IaaS you then had no choice but to pay what you had to pay. It was all about keeping the lights on and running the business and thriving as much as you could. And so cost wasn't a concern. And then you had the impact in certain industries where it became a concern pretty quick. And so now we're seeing this over pendulum kind of this pendulum swing back where it's like, okay we're in the cloud, now we got to go back in time and kind of fix the processes and the financial piece and the components and the compliance that we didn't really address or have time to sit and think because we were in survival mode. And that's where SoftwareONE really comes in with this end to end view on everything from what should you move to the cloud? How does it impact your budget, your bottom line should you capitalize it? Can you capitalize it? And so the CFO and the CEO and that CIO suite have to be working end to end on how to do this effectively, right? So that they can continue to thrive in the business and not just run in survival mode anymore. >> Absolutely, we're past that point of running in survival mode. We've got to be able to thrive to be able to be agile and nimble and flexible to develop new products, new services to get them to market faster than our competition. So much has changed in the last couple of years. I'm wondering what your perspective is on diversity. We've talked about it a lot in technology. We talk about DEI often. >> Yeah. >> A lot's gone on in the last couple of years thought there's so much value in thought diversity alone. But talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing through the diversity lens and what are some of the challenges that are still there that organizations need help to eradicate? >> Yeah, topic I'm very passionate about. So there's a couple of big bullets, right? That are big rocks that we have to move. There's a gender gap, we know this. There's a wage gap, we know this. Statistics state, essentially that women make 82 cents for every $1 a man makes. Men hold 75% of the US tech jobs and working mothers, for example. 34% of them do not return to the workforce. It's mind blowing, fun facts and SoftwareONE is we actually have a hundred percent return working mothers come back and stay for at least a year, yeah. And it requires really intentional investment in making sure that they have an environment that they can be successful as they transition back making diligent choices on the benefits that you provide those women so that they don't feel that they have to make some of the tough choices that they feel pressured to do. And then you have this talent shortage, right? So on top of gender, on top of pay, then you have this all up shortage of underrepresented groups, right? And you also have, in the tech space there's just a lack of talent all up. And I think looking back, hindsight's always 2020 but as a community and as a vertical in the tech space, the organizations didn't do enough good job of reaching into high schools, understanding early on in elementary and middle school to provide equal opportunity to make the computer coding classes a requirement and not an elective to give everybody exposure to how tech works in the real world, right? As opposed to offering it as an elective. It should be a requirement. I mean, it's like financial management. It's how the world runs today is on tech. So something that SoftwareONE has done to really address that is we built this academy it's only two years in its infancy, so it's young but we go intentionally to schools and we hand select and we create a program, right? To get them exposed to the industries that they're interested in. Personally though, I think we need to start way earlier on and I think that's something that we all can work better at and is exposing the next generation to setting an expectation that tech is going to be in your life. And so let's learn about it and not be afraid of it and turn it into a career, right? >> Absolutely, every company these days has to be a data company. They have to be a tug company whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, a manufacturer, a car dealer. So that kind of choice isn't really there anymore that's just the direction that these companies have to go in. You mentioned something that I love because I've been hearing it a lot from women in this series. And that is, with respect to diversity organizations need to be intentional. It has to be intentional, really from the get go. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has done a great job with intention about creating the program and looking at how can we go after and solve some of the challenges that we have today but really go after some of these younger groups who might not understand the impact and the influence that tech is having in their lives. >> Yeah, and the only way to be intentional with the right outcome is to ensure that you have diversity of thought in the leadership teams that make those decisions, right? So you can put your best foot forward in being intentional with trying to keep women in the workforce but if you don't have women on your leadership team where are you getting that feedback from? And so it starts by this getting the talent into the company at the very bottom level from an inclusion standpoint, keeping them, but also intentionally selecting the right diversity of thought at the leadership levels where they make decisions. Because that's where the magic happens Where, I have the privilege to be able to choose and work with my HR partner on what benefits we provide. And you have to have a team that's all inclusive in understanding the needs of all the groups, right? Otherwise you end up intentionally in with the best intent of heart creating benefits that don't really help women. I think it takes a lot of work and and time, but it's something that's very important. >> Very, very important. The fact that you mentioned thought diversity, the amount of value that can come from thought diversity alone is huge. I've seen so many different data points that talk about when there are females or people of color in the executive positions at organizations they are x percent say 20% more profitable. So the data is there to demonstrate the power and the business value that can come from thought diversity alone. >> Yep. Exactly. Yep. >> So moving on, we've got a couple minutes left. I want to understand what you are seeing in your crystal ball or maybe it's a magic ball about what's next in cloud. How do you see your role evolving in the industry? >> So, well, what I think what's next in cloud both from an industry and a SoftwareONE standpoint is expanding outside of this infrastructure as a service mindset where cloud was there to run your business. And the beauty of it now is that cloud is there to also drive your business and create new products and capabilities. And so one of the biggest trends we're seeing is all organizations at some form or at some point in time will become a service provider or have an application that they host that they provide to their clients, right? And so they're a tech company. And so it's not just using tech to run it's using tech to build and innovate and be able to create a profit center to be able to drive back those to meet your clients' needs. And in order for you to make the appropriate decisions on financial strategy and budget management you have to know the cost to go into, to building the product, right? And if you don't know the cost to go into the building the product then you don't know the profit margins to set and you don't have a strategy to go sell it, at market value. And so it really becomes this linchpin in all of the areas of the business where you're not only running but you're also developing and building. So you have to have a very good, strong investment in the financial operations component of cloud. And I think that's where FinOps is coming in. You'll hear that phrase a lot, right? And so the end to end ability to financially manage cloud while secure, but also with visibility is that is this next generation, and it's going to include SaaS, right? 'Cause they're going to be plugging in it's going to include governance because it's not just the CIO making decisions anymore. It's business line leaders. And so how do you have this cloud center of excellence to be able to provide the data to the decision makers so that they can drive the business? >> And that's what it's all about, is data being able to be be used, extracting insights from it in a fast real time manner to create those business decisions that help organizations to be successful to pivot when needed and to be able to meet consumer demand. Last question for you, Ashley is, if you think about in the last say five years what are some of the biggest changes in terms of the tech workforce and innovation that you've seen? And what excites you about the direction that we're going in? >> Oh, I think that, well I think the biggest change over the last five years is the criticality of the space. It used to be like, well we're not so mature in cloud. We'll eventually get there, we'll dabble in it, we'll dip our toes in it, eventually, we'll move everything. And it's like, well, we're there.(laughs) So if you're not in it, you're behind. And I think what is really important for people who want to get into this space is it doesn't mean you have to be super techy, right? The number of times people are like can you help me with my computer? And I'm like, "No, I don't even know how." Like, "No, I not can help you with your computer." I consult and I help drive, business decisions with clients. And so there's all these peripheral roles that people can get involved in, whether it's marketing or it's sales or it's product design. It's not just engineering anymore. And I think that's what's really exciting about what's to come in this space. >> The horizon is infinite. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about your role, what you're doing at SoftwareONE, some of the great successes that you've had in the cloud and some of your recommendations for organizations and people to grow their careers and really increase diversity in tech. We so appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Ashley Gaare, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE special program series; Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks so much for watching. (soft upbeat music)

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.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We are live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand Hotel, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, covering our first time covering Palo Alto Ignite. 22 in person. Dave, we've had some great conversations so far. We've got two days of wall to wall coverage. We're gonna be talking with Palo Alto execs, leaders, customers, partners, and we're gonna be talking about the partner ecosystem >>Next. Wow. Super important. You know, it's funny you talk about for a minute, you didn't know where we were. I, I came to Vegas in May. I feel like I never left two weeks ago reinvent, which was I, I thought the most awesome reinvent ever. And it was really all about the ecosystem and the marketplace. So super excited to have that >>Conversation. Yeah, we've got Wet Whit Krump joining us, director of America's business development worldwide channels and customer programs at AWS marketplace. Wet, welcome to the Cube. Great to have >>You. Thanks for having me. Give >>Us a, you got a big title there. Give us a little bit of flavor of your scope of work at aws. >>Yeah, sure. So I, I've been with the marketplace team now almost eight years and originally founded our channel programs. And my scope has expanded to not just cover channels, but all things related to customers. So if you think about marketplace having sort of two sides, one being very focused on the isv, I tend to manage all things related to our in customer and our, our channel partners. >>What are some of the feedback that you're getting from customers and channel partners as the marketplace has has evolved so much? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's been interesting to watch over the course of the years, getting to see it start its infancy and grow up. One of the things that we hear often from customers and from our channel partners, and maybe not so directly, is it's not about finding the things they necessarily want to buy, although that's important, but it's the actual act of how they're able to purchase things and making that a much more streamlined process, especially in large enterprises where there's a lot of complexity. We wanna make that a lot simple, simpler for our customers. >>I mean, vendor management is such a hassle, right? But, so when I come into the marketplace, it's all there. I gotta console, it's integrated, I choose what I want. The billing is simplified. How has that capability evolved since the time that you've been at aws and where do you, where do you want to take it? >>Yeah, so when we, we first started Marketplace, it was really a pay as you go model customer come, they buy whatever, you know, whatever the, the whatever the solution was. And then it was, you know, charged by the hour and then the year. And one of the things that we discovered through customer and partner feedback was especially when they're dealing with large enterprise purchases, you know, they want to be able to instantiate those custom price and terms, you know, into that contract while enjoying the benefits of, of marketplace. And that's been, I think the biggest evolution started in 2017 with private offers, 2018 with consulting partner private offers. And then we've added things on over time to streamline procurement for, for >>Customers. So one of the hottest topics right now, everybody wants to talk about the macro and the headwinds and everything else, but when you talk to customers like, look, I gotta do more with less, less, that's the big theme. Yeah. And, and I wanna optimize my spend. Cloud allows me to do that because I can dial down, I can push storage to, to lower tiers. There's a lot of different things that I can do. Yeah. What are the techniques that people are using in the ecosystem Yeah. To bring in the partner cost optimization. Yeah. >>And so one of the key things that, that partners are, are, are doing for customers, they act as that trusted advisor. And, you know, when using marketplace either directly or through a partner, you know, customers are able to really save money through a licensing flexibility. They're also able to streamline their procurement. And then if there's an at-risk spin situation, they're able to, to manage that at-risk spend by combining marketplace and AWS spin into into one, you know, basically draws down their commitments to, to the company. >>And we talk about ask at-risk spend, you might talk about user or lose IT type of spend, right? Yeah. And so you, you increase the optionality in terms of where you can get value from your cloud spend. That's >>All right. Customers are thinking about their, their IT spend more strategically now more than ever. And so they're not just thinking about how do I buy infrastructure here and then software here, data services, they wanna combine this into one place. It's a lot less to keep up with a lot, a lot less overhead for them. But also just the simplification that you alluded to earlier around, you know, all the billing and vendor management is, and now in one, one streamlined, one streamlined process. Talk >>About that as a facilitator of organizations being able to reduce their risk profile. >>Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that, that came out earlier this year with Forrester was a to were total economic impact studies for both an ISV and for the end customer. But there was also a thought leadership study done where they surveyed over 700 customers worldwide to sort of get their thoughts on procurement and risk profile management. And, and one of the things that was really, you know, really surprising was is was that, you know, I guess it was like over 78% of of respondents DEF stated that they didn't feel like their, their companies had a really well-defined governance model and that over half of software and data purchases actually went outside of procurement. And so the companies aren't really able to, don't, they don't really have eyes on all of this spin and it's substantial >>And that's a, a huge risk for the organization. >>Yeah. Huge risk for the organization. And, and you know, half of the respondents stated outright that like they viewed marketplaces a way for them to reduce their risk profile because they, they were able to have a better governance model around that. >>So what's the business case can take us through that. How, how should a customer think about that? So, okay, I get that the procurement department likes it and the CFO probably likes it, but how, what, what's the dynamic around the business? So if I'm a, let's say I'm, I'm a bus, I'm a business person, I'm a, and running the process, I got my little, I get my procurement reach around. Yeah. What does the data suggest that what's in it from me, right? From a company wide standpoint, you know, what are the, maybe the Forester guys address this. So yeah, that overall business case I think is important. >>Yeah, I think, I think one of the big headlines for the end customer is because of license flexibility is that is is about a 10% cost savings in, in license cost. They're able to right size their purchases to buy the things they actually need. They're not gonna have these big overarching ELAs. There's gonna be a lot of other things in there that, that they don't, they don't really aren't gonna really directly use. You're talking about shelfware, you know, that sort of the classic term buy something, it never gets used, you know, also from just a, a getting things done perspective, big piece of feedback from customers is the contracting process takes a long time. It takes several months, especially for a large purchase. And a lot of those discussions are very repetitive. You know, you're talking about the same things over and over again. And we actually built a feature called standardized contract where we talked to a number of customers and ISVs distilled a contract down into a, a largely a set of terms that both sides already agreed to. And it cuts that, that contract time down by 90%. So if you're a legal team in a company, there's only so many of you and you have a lot of things to get done. If you can shave 90% off your time, that that's, that's now you can now work on a lot of other things for the, the corporation. Right. >>A lot of business impact there. You think faster time to value, faster time to market workforce optimization. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, you know, from an ISV standpoint, the measurement is they're, they're able to close deals about 40% faster, which is great for the isv. I mean obviously they love that. But if you're a customer, you're actually getting the innovative technologies you need 40% faster. So you can actually do the work you want to take it to your customers and drive the business. >>You guys recently launched, what is it, vendor Insights? Yeah. Talk a little bit about that, the value. What are some of the things that you're seeing with that? >>Yeah, so that goes into the, the onboarding value add of marketplaces. The number of things that go into, to cutting that time according to Forrester by 75%. But Vendor Insights was based on a key piece, offa impact from customers. So, you know, marketplace is used for, one of the reasons is discoverability by customers, Hey, what is the broader landscape? Look for example of security or storage partners, you know, trying to, trying to understand what is even available. And then the double click is, alright, well how does that company, or how does that vendor fit into my risk profile? You know, understanding what their compliance metrics are, things of that nature. And so historically they would have to, a customer would've to go to an ISV and say, all right, I want you to fill out this form, you know that my questionnaire. And so they would trade this back and forth as they have questions. Now with vendor insights, a customer can actually subscribe to this and they're able to actually see the risk profile of that vendor from the inside out, you know, from the inside of their SaaS application, what does it look like on a real time basis? And they can go back and look at that whenever they want. And you know, the, the, the feedback since the launch has been fantastic. And that, and I think that helps us double down on the already the, the onboarding benefits that we are providing customers. >>This, this, I wanna come back to this idea of cost optimization and, and try to tie it into predictability. You know, a lot of people, you know, complain, oh, I got surprised at the end of the month. So if I understand it wit by, by leveraging the marketplace and the breadth that you have in the marketplace, I can say, okay, look, I'm gonna spend X amount on tech. Yeah. And, and this approach allows me to say, all right, because right now procurement or historically procurement's been a bunch of stove pipes, I can't take from here and easily put it over there. Right. You're saying that this not only addresses the sort of cost optimization, does it also address the predictability challenge? >>Yeah, and I, I think another way to describe that is, is around cost controls. And you know, just from a reporting perspective, you know, we, we have what are called cost utilization reports or curve files. And we provide those to customers anytime they want and they can load those into Tableau, use whatever analysis tools that they want to be able to use. And so, and then you can actually tag usage in those reports. And what we're really talking about is helping customers adopt thin op practices. So, you know, develop directly for the cloud customers are able to understand, okay, who's using what, when and where. So everyone's informed that creates a really collaborative environment. It also holds people accountable for their spin. So that, you know, again, talking about shelfware, we bought things we're not gonna use or we're overusing people are using software that they probably don't really need to. And so that's, that adds to that predictable is everyone has great visibility into what's happening. And there's >>Another, I mean, of course saving money is, is, is in vogue right now because you know, the headwinds and the economics, et cetera. But there's also another side of the equation, which is, I mean, I see this a lot. You know, the CFO says financial people, why is our cloud bill so high? Well it's because we're actually driving all this revenue. And so, you know, you've seen it so many so often in companies, you know, the, the spreadsheet analysis says, oh, cut that. Well, what happens to revenue if you cut that? Right? Yeah. So with that visibility, the answer may be, well actually if we double down on that, yeah, we're actually gonna make more money cuz we actually have a margin on this and it's, it's got operating leverage. So if we double that, you know, we could, so that kind of cross organization communication to make better decisions, I think is another key factor. Yeah. >>Huge impact there. Talk ultimately about how the buyer's journey seems to have been really transformed >>The >>Correct. Right? So if you're, if you're a buyer, you know, initially to your point is, you know, I'm just looking for a point solution, right? And then you move on to the next one and the next one. And now, you know, working with our teams and using the platform, you know, and frankly customers are thinking more strategically about their IT spend holistically. The conversations that we're having with us is, it's not about how do I find the solution today, but here's my forward looking software spend, or I'm going through a migration, I wanna rationalize the software portfolio I have today as I'm gonna lift and shift it to aws. You know, what is going to make the trip? What are we gonna discard entirely because it's not really optimized for the cloud. Or there's that shelf wheel component, which is, hey, you know, maybe 15 to 25% of my portfolio, it's just not even getting utilized. And that, and that's a sunk cost to your point, which is, you know, that's, that's money I could be using on something that really impacts the bottom line in various areas of the business. Right. >>What would you say is the number one request you get or feedback you get from the end customers? And how is that different from what you hear from the channel partners? How aligned or Yeah. Are those >>Vectors? I would say from a customer perspective, one of the key things I hear about is around visibility of spin, right? And I was just talking about these reports and you know, using cost optimization tools, being able to use features like identity and access management, managing entitlements, private marketplaces. Basically them being able to have a stronger governance model in the cloud. For one thing, it's, it's, you know, keeping everybody on track like some of the points I was talking about earlier, but also cost, cost optimization around, you know, limiting vendor sprawl. Are we actually really using all the things that we need? And then from a channel partner perspective, you know, some of the things I talked about earlier about that 40% faster sales cycle, you know, that that TEI or the total economic impact study that was done by Forrester was, was built for the isv. >>But if you're a channel partner sitting between the customer and the isv, you kind of get to, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds, right? You're acting as that, you're acting as that that advisor. And so if you're a channel partner, the procurement streamlining is a huge benefit because the, you know, like you said, saving money is in vogue right now. You're trying to do more with less. So if you're thinking about 20, 27% faster win rates, 40% faster time to close, and you're the customer who's trying to impact the bottom line by, by innovating more, more quickly, those two pieces of feedback are really coming together and meeting in, in the middle >>Throughout 2021, or sorry, 2022, our survey partner, etr Enterprise Technology Research has asked their panel a question is what's your strategy for, you know, doing more with less? By far the number one response has been consolidating redundant vendors. Yes. And then optimizing cloud was, you know, second, but, but way, way lower than that. The number from last survey went from 34%. It's now up to 44% in the January survey, which is in the field, which they gave me a glimpse to last night. So you're seeing dramatic uptick Yeah. In that point. Yeah. And then you guys are helping, >>We, we definitely are. I mean, it, there's the reporting piece so they have a better visibility of what they're doing. And then you think about a, a feature like private marketplace and manage entitlements. So private marketplace enables a customer to create their own private marketplace as the name states where they can limit access to it for certain types of software to the actual in customer who needs to use that software. And so, you know, not everybody needs a license to software X, right? And so that helps with the sprawl comment to your point, that's, that's on the increase, right? Am I actually spending money on things that we need to use? >>But also on the consolidation front, you, we, we talked with nikesh an hour or so ago, he was mentioning on stage, if you, if you just think of this number of security tools or cybersecurity tools that an organization has on its network, 30 to 50. And we were talking about, well, how does Palo Alto Networks what's realistic in terms of consolidation? But it sounds like what you're doing in the marketplace is giving organizations the visibility, correct, for sure. Into what they're running, usage spend, et cetera, to help facilitate ultimately at some point facilitate a strategic consolidation. >>It's, that's exactly right. And if you, you think about cost optimization, our procurement features, you know, the, the practice that we're trying to help customers around, around finops, it's all about helping customers build a, a modern procurement practice and supply chain. And so that helps with, with that point exactly. The keynotes >>Point. Exactly. So last question for you. What, what's next? What can we expect? >>Oh, so what's next for me is, you know, I, I really want to, you know, my channel business for example, you know, I want to think about enabling new types of partners. So if we've worked really heavily with resellers, we worked very heavily with Palo Alto on the reseller community, how are we bringing in more services partners of various types? You know, the gsi, the distributors, cloud service providers, managed security service providers was in a keynote yesterday listening to Palo Alto talk about their five routes to market. And, you know, they had these bubbles. And so I was like, gosh, that's exactly how I'm thinking about the business is how am I expanding my own footprint to customers that have deeper, I mean, excuse me, to partners that have deeper levels of cloud knowledge, can be more of that advisor, help customers really understand how to maximize their business on aws. And, and you know, my job is to really help facilitate that, that innovative technology through those partners. >>So sounds like powerful force, that ecosystem. Exactly. Great alignment. AWS and Palo Alto, thank you so much for joining us with, we >>Appreciate, thanks for having >>With what's going on at aws, the partner network, the mp, and all that good stuff. That's really the value in it for customers, ISVs and channel partners. I like. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. >>Our guests and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Lee Leer in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(gentle music) >> Welcome back to our coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re:Invent 22. We are on day three, starting to wind down, but still a lot of exciting topics to cover here on the AWS Global Showcase, part of the startup program there at AWS. Joining us now, two representatives from LTI Mindtree. You say LTI Mindtree? I thought they were two different companies. Well, they're actually one and the same. Been together just a mere two weeks now. We'll hear more about that from Sid Bohra, who is the Chief Business Officer at LTI Mindtree and Ashish Varerkar, who is the Vice President of Cloud Success at LTI Mindtree. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Pleasures all ours. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations. So two weeks in the making in its infancy, still in the honeymoon period, but how's the two weeks been? Everything all right? >> Well, two weeks have been very exciting. >> I'll bet. >> Well, I would say the period prior to that was just as exciting as you can imagine. >> John: Oh, sure. And we are super excited about what the future holds for this company because we truly believe that we have a remarkable opportunity to create value for our clients as one company. >> Well let's talk about LTI Mind tree then a little bit. Ashish, I'll let you carry the ball on this. Tell us about your services, about your core focus, and about those opportunities that Siddharth was just telling us about. >> So I think with the two companies coming together, we have a larger opportunity to like go to market with our end to end business transformation services and leveraging cloud platforms, right? So, and that's what we do. My responsibility particularly is to see to it that what customers are deploying on cloud is aligned to their business outcomes and then take it forward from there. >> Yeah, Vice President of Cloud Success, that gives you a lot of runway, right? Does it not? I mean, how do you define success in the cloud? Because there are a lot of different areas of complexity with which companies are dealing. >> So I think you would agree that in today's scenario, customers are not looking for a platform, right? But they're looking for a platform which can deliver business value. They're looking at business value and resiliency and then at the end, the cost, right? So if you're able to deliver these three things to the customer through the cloud implementation, I think that's success for us. >> Right. We've talked about transformation a lot this week and modernization, right, which is those are two pretty key buzzwords right now we're hearing a lot of. So when you see said, you know, companies come to you and they say, okay, it's time for us to make this commitment. Do they make it generally wholeheartedly? Is there still some trepidation of the unknown? Because there's a lot of, as we've said, complexity to this, it's multidimensional. We can go public, we can go hybrid, we can go multicloud. I mean, we got a lot of flavors. >> Yeah >> Absolutely. >> No, we see a spectrum. There are customers who are very early in the journey of getting onto cloud and are a little uncertain about what value they can get out of it. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are companies who are well into the journey who have understood what are the benefits of truly leveraging cloud who also understand what are the challenges they will face in getting onto the journey. So we get to meet a spectrum of customers, I would say. If you ask me where do bulk of them lie, I would say early in their journey. I would say there are only a handful who have that maturity where they can predict what's exactly going to happen on the cloud journey, what value they will accumulate through the process. So there's a lot of hand holding to be done, a lot of, you know, solving together to be done with our clients. >> You know, it is such a dynamic environment too, right? You have new opportunities that seem to be developed and released on a daily basis, almost, right? There's a large amount of flexibility, I would think, that has to be in place because where you think you're going to go today might not be where you wind up in six months. >> That's true. >> Is that fair? >> Absolutely fair. And I think from that perspective, if you look at the number of services that AWS provides, right? And what customers are looking for is how can they compose their business processes using this multiple services in a very seamless manner. And most of the announcements that we have seen during the re:Invent as well, they're talking about seamless connectivity between their services. They're talking about security, they're talking about creating a data fabric, the data zone that they announced. I think all these things put together, if you're able to kind of connect the dots and drive the business processes, I think that's what we want to do for our customers. >> And the value to AWS, it just can't be underscored enough I would assume, because there's comfort there, there's confidence there. When you bring that to the table as well along with your services, what kind of magnitude are we talking about here? What kind of force do you think? How would you characterize that? >> Well I think, you know, firstly, I would say that most of our engagements are not just services. Ashish and team and the company have invested heavily in building IP that we pair with our services so that we bring non-linearity and more, I would say, certainty to the outcomes that our customers get. And I can share some examples in the course of the conversation, but to answer your question in terms of magnitude, what we are collaborating with AWS on for our clients ranges from helping customers build more resiliency. And I'm talking about life sciences companies build more resiliency in the manufacturing R and D processes. That's so critical. It was even more critical during the pandemic times because we were working with some of the pharma companies who were contributing to the efforts in the pandemic. That's one end of the spectrum. On the other side, we are helping streaming companies and media companies digitize their supply chain, and their supply chains, the media supply chain, so that it is more effective, it's more efficient, it's more real time, again, using the power of the cloud. We are helping pharmaceutical companies drive far greater speed in the R and D processes. We are helping banking companies drive far more compliance in their anti-money laundering efforts and all of those things. So if you look at the magnitude, we judge the magnitude by the business impact that it's creating and we are very excited about what AWS, LTI Mindtree, and the customer are able to create in terms of those business impacts. >> And these are such major decisions. >> That's right. >> For a company, right, to make, and there are a number of factors that come into play here. What are you hearing from the C-Suite with regard to what weighs the most in their mind and is there, is it a matter of, you know, fear missing out? Or is it about trying to stay ahead of your competition, catching up the competition? I mean, generally speaking, you know, where are the, where's the C-Suite weighing in on this? >> I think in the current times, I think there is a certain level of adoption of cloud that's already happened in most enterprises. So most CIOs in the C-suite- >> They already get it. They already get it. >> They kind of get it, but I would say that they're very cagey about a bunch of things. They're very cagey about, am I going to end up spending too much for too little? Am I going to be able to deliver this transformation at the speed that I'm hoping to achieve? What about security? Compliance? What about the cost of running in the cloud? So those are some really important factors that sometimes end up slowing the cloud transformation journeys down because customers end up solving for them or not knowing for them. So while there is a decent amount of awareness about what cloud can do, there are some, a whole bunch of important factors that they continue to solve for as they go down that journey. >> And so what kind of tools do you provide them then? >> Primarily, what we do is, to Siddharth's point, right? So on one end, we want to see to it that we are doing the business transformation and all our cloud journeys start with a business North Star. So we align, we have doubled down on, say, five to six business domains. And for each of these business domains industries, we have created business North Star. For these business North Star, we define the use cases. And these use cases then get lit up through our platform. So what we have done is we have codified everything onto our platform. We call it Infinity. So primarily business processes from level one, level two, level three, level, and then the KPIs which are associated with these business processes, the technical KPIs and the business KPIs, and then tying it back to what you have deployed on cloud. So we have end to end cloud transformation journeys enabled for customers through the business North Star. >> And Infinity is your product. >> Can I add something? >> Please do. Yeah, please. >> Yeah so, you know, Ashish covered the part about demystifying if I were to do this particular cloud initiative, it's not just modernizing the application. This is about demystifying what business benefit will accrue to you. Very rare to find unless you do a very deep dive assessment. But what the platform we built also accelerates, you talked about modernization early in the conversation, accelerates the modernization process by automating a whole bunch of activities that are often manual. It bakes insecurity and compliance into everything it does. It automates a whole bunch of cloud operations including things like finops. So this is a life cycle platform that essentially codifies best practices so that you are not getting success by coincidence, you're getting success by design. So that's really what, that's really how we've approached the topic of realizing the true power of cloud by making sure that it's repeatedly delivered. >> Right. You know, I want to hit on security too because you brought that up just a few moments ago. Obviously, you know, we all, and I'd say we, we can do a better job, right? I mean, there's still problems, there's still challenges, there are a lot of bad actors out there that are staying ahead of the game. So as people come to you, clients come to you, and they raise these security concerns, what's your advice to them in terms of, you know, what kind of environment they're going into and what precautions or protections they can put in place to try to give themselves a little bit of peace of mind about how they're going to operate? >> You want to take it? >> So I think primarily, if you are going to cloud, you are going with an assumption that you are moving out of your firewalls, right? You're putting something out of your network area. So and from that perspective, the parameter security from the cloud perspective is very, very important. And then each and every service or the interactions between the services and what you integrate out of your organization, everything needs to be secured through the right guard rates. And we integrate all those things into our platform so that whatever new apps that get deployed or build or any cost product that gets deployed on cloud, everything is secure from a 360 degree perspective. So primarily, maintaining a good security posture, which on a hybrid cloud, I would not say only cloud, but extending your on-prem security posture to cloud is very, very important to when you go to implementing anything on could. >> If you had a crystal ball and we were sitting down here a year from now, you know, what do you think we'd be talking about with regard to, you know, developing these end-to-end opportunities that you are, what's the, I wouldn't say missing piece, but a piece that you would like to have refined to the point where you come back next year and say, John, guess what we did? Look what we were able to accomplish. Anything that you're looking at that you want to tackle here in 2023? Or is there some fine tuning somewhere that you think could even tighten your game even more than it is already? >> We have a long, long way to go, I would say. I think my core takeaway in terms of where the world of technology is headed because cloud is, you know, is essentially a component of what customers want to achieve. It's a medium through which they want to achieve. I think we live in a highly change oriented economy. Every industry is what I call getting re-platformed, right? New processes, new experiences, new products, new efficiency. So a year from now, and I can tell you even for few years from now, we would be constantly looking at our success in terms of how did cloud move the needle on releasing products faster? How did cloud move the needle on driving better experience and better consumer loyalty, for example. How did cloud move the needle on a more efficient supply chain? So increasingly, the technology metrics like, you know, keeping the lights on, or solving tickets, or releasing code on time, would move towards business metrics because that's really the ultimate goal of technology or cloud. So I would say that my crystal ball says we will increasingly be talking business language and business outcomes. Jeff Bezos is an incredible example, right? One of his annual letters, he connected everything back into how much time did consumers save by using Amazon. And I think that's really where in the world, that's the world we are headed towards. >> Ashish, any thoughts on that? >> I think Siddharth put it quite well. I would say if you are able to make a real business impact for our customers in next one year, helping them in driving some of their newer services on cloud through cloud, that would be a success factor for us. >> Well gentlemen, congratulations on the merger. I said two weeks. Still very much in the honeymoon phase and I'm sure it's going to go very well and I look forward to seeing you back here in a year. We'll sit down, same spot, let's remember, fifth floor, and we'll give it a shot and see how accurate you were on that. >> Absolutely. >> Wonderful. It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Very good. Ashish, good to see you, sir. >> Thank you. >> A pleasure. We'll continue here. We're at the Venetian at AWS re:Invent 22, continue at the AWS Global Showcase startup. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

(techno music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage here at AWS reInvent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, wrapping up our day one coverage here in the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and with me to talk about Accenture, couple of guys who are no strangers at all to the Cube. In fact, I think we got to give you like alumni passes or something. (Chris and Merim laugh) We got to come up with something like that. Um, Merim Becirovic is with us. Uh, Merim's a global IT at Accenture. And Chris Wegmann, who's already been on once today, as a matter of fact. >> Yeah (indistinct) >> So we're going to start charging you rent, Chris. (Chris and Merim laugh) Uh, global technology and practice lead with the AWS business group at Accenture. Good, glad to have you both back and, um, you're welcome to the Cube any time, by the way. >> So don't be scared. >> Thanks, great to be back. Let's talk about >> Sure. >> What, what you folks have been up to. So, um, you are, as we were talking earlier, you are where a lot of your clients would like to be. You, you've begun this transformation. You have fully migrated to the cloud, you've learned, right? >> Yes. You've hit all the bumps along the way. So talk about your journey. >> Yeah. >> And then how you think that experience could be translated to what your clients are going through. >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll hit it from the lessons learned and working together with our business group partners. We, so Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. We have finished that journey, and as part of that journey, we have migrated all of the services it takes to run Accenture to the public cloud. So now that's done. That was complete. But now we are this, now it is this cloud continuum living in the cloud. And the, now, the thing we talk about, and I'd love to have Chris, you know, shine a little bit more, is we have built our digital core in a cloud, now. We're no longer dependent on data centers. And that has given us tremendous flexibility around how to enable the business as it has grown significantly since we started this journey a few years back. >> Yeah, you know, Merim, like you talk about, right? We talk about our client, we've talked to our clients about building this digital core, right? And, and we've been through that as Accenture, as a global IT organization, you know. Supporting well over 720,000 people. >> Yeah. >> Right? That growth over the last year has been tremendous. Right? So, without the strong digital core built on cloud, right? We couldn't do that, right? We couldn't add that number of people, right? We couldn't make the, the, the changes were needed during, uh, Covid to bring people home, working from home. You know, whether it being uh, the way we changed our business model or things like that, um, you know that was all enabled by cloud. It couldn't be done without that. And, you know, also the variable in our business, right? Is very tied now to our cloud consumption, right? So, you know, it goes up, it goes down, right? We've, you know, Merim and his team have completely built their, their their core with those, with those concepts uh, in mind. >> Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, you know, 700, 800,000 employees and how many countries did you say? >> 130 different countries, at least. >> 130 different countries. So, I mean, no small task, obviously, uh, to get everything done. When did you start? >> So our cloud journey, effectively, we started in 2015. And we were done, kind of right before Covid around 2019. We took a pause for a couple of different things but we could have probably done that faster. And if we were, if I was to do it again now, today we could probably do it in two to three years, flat. With everything that we've learned so far. >> So what's the application, then, to your clients' experiences that, I mean, been there, done that, right? >> You can, exactly right. I mean, you know, we always say that we want to be our best credential, right? And Merim and his team are our best credential in this space. Um, so, you know, a lot of our customers, you know, struggle making that commitment. A lot of 'em are past that struggle, now. They're committed, they're going. Uh, but I talk to a lot of my customers about, you know, do I, do I migrate? Do I modernize? You know, how do I do it? And, and it was interesting with Accenture, right? It, it started out very much as a migration program. >> Yeah. >> Right, so, we made the decision, Merim and his team made the decision to do a migration and now a modernization, right? And, and that's proven very effective. Uh, it, it's, it's, it's proven, you know, uh, we got that core in place, right? We were able to build off of that versus, you know, spending- it would've taken a lot more time just to start with a modernization approach. >> Yeah. Where, where do you draw the line between the two, between migration and modernization, then? Because just by migrating alone, you are modernizing, you know, some of your operations, so you're getting up to speed. But, but how do you draw that line and then how do you get people to jump over it? >> So I, I'll hit it from how our lessons learned. So, when we first started and we did the migrations it was literally lift and shift. And it was a lot of argument about lift and shift isn't worth it. But we found out it was, because it wasn't just about moving the work loads and keeping it like a data center. It was moving the work loads and then optimizing because everything in the cloud was significantly faster. So then I didn't have to consume all the services the same way I did in the data center. I can actually consume them smaller. But also as time went by, what we learned is, hey, now these services are working here. Which ones are actually costing us more money to run? And not that they were costing more than the data center, but it's relative to the cloud which ones cost more in the cloud? Then we looked at that and said, okay how do we want to modernize those? And then we modernized as container capabilities started the evolving, got much more mature. We shifted a lot of workloads to containers. But otherwise, the other principle we push very hard is big consumption of Lambda and uh, serverless capabilities on Amazon. So we have refactored multiple applications to give us that capability to say we no longer need the IAS capabilities, those servers, those VM's, and we run on, on serverless capability. And what's great about that is, now I don't have a server to patch, to scan, to remediate, to upgrade. I've moved away from that capability. And the teams can focus more on building the business capabilities the business wants. Um, like we did to our pricing team. I don't know if you knew this one, Chris, but all the pricing capability has been redone to be cloud native on, on AWS. >> And how, how do you deal with the folks that, that still kind of have a foot in the on-prem world that, um, that they're just not ready to give it up? You know, they, they like the control, they like the self-management. >> Yeah. >> They, they want to be in charge. >> Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of our customers, it's, there's a reason why they need on-prem still. And there is on-prem, let's be clear. I mean, it, it is a hybrid cloud world for most of our, our customers, right? Whether they got manufacturing, whether they've got, you know, datas that are, you know, SCADA systems or, or operational IT systems that have to be close to their, their execution or to their, to their factories and things like that. So that's going to happen. I think everyone, and I shouldn't say everyone, but you know, most of our customers know they need to get there, right? And are somewhere on their journey, right? Very few have not started at all. Uh, but it's about acceleration, right? And I, I do think, um, we're going to see more and more acceleration. We saw it with Covid, right? >> Mm-hm. >> And then, you know, obviously I think we're going to see it again, right? With you know, kind of what's going on with the economy and stuff like that. It, it's, you know, it's a great way to push that change through. >> Right. >> And I, I'm really excited, to be honest what I'm really excited about, if I look at what Merim and his team's doing, is they're just leveraging that digital core and truly taking the investments that the hyper scaler's are making, the AWS's are making, and leveraging 'em. So we're not making that investment, right? We're a capital white company, right? So we don't like making good capital investments, right? And we're taking advantage of the capital investments. And we couldn't do that of the, of the hyper scales. We couldn't do that without being there. Right? >> Right. >> We just couldn't do it. >> And maybe, John, if I can build on that. >> Sure. >> Like, one of, one of the things for me when I think about the cloud is, I'm not alone. You know, because when you're in a data center when you're running a data center, you're kind of on an island. And on that island, if you've got security issues, if you got stuff you're dealing with with attackers, you know, you're, you're kind of on an island and you're alone. Whereas in this world, I am where all the investment is, where all the security capabilities are being built, and I have partners that are there with us that help us when these situations come up. So for me, I'm very uh, grateful that we pushed very hard in the beginning to get here. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For us. >> So like, do you- do you want to live outside the fort? >> Yeah. >> No >> No. (laughs) >> You're exactly right. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to live outside the fort. >> Right. >> There are a lot of bad guys out there right now. >> Yeah. >> All right, so, the journey is over. >> Right. You can unpack your bags and get comfortable, right? (Merim laughs) >> No. >> Hardly. >> No. >> So, so what is the, what has this done in terms of setting you up for your future plans? And, and >> So I'll talk about a couple different things and maybe you can build on it, Chris, from what you're seeing, like for us, we, we got very good at, I hate the concept of just FinOps but it's the way of being in the cloud. It's different than running a data center and uh, the way we think about building services, consuming services, allocating services, provisioning services. There's just so much more flexibility there that we can completely fine tune the service that we want to provide. That helps us from when we think about 360 degree value, as we talk to our clients, for ourselves to say it also helps just simply on the sustainability agenda, right, because now, as Amazon builds their capabilities to be more sustainable, those SKUs are available to us, we can naturally consume those SKUs much more effectively. Um, and then uh, the next thing to me, what I'm, what I'm especially excited about is all the stuff we're doing around network. So, you know, pre-Covid, 95% of our traffic was just straight to the internet because we had already finished the journey. So now what do you need a wide area network for anymore? >> Right. >> If you're not routing traffic between data centers what do you need it for? So, we have been working with, with AWS especially, like building these cloud land type capabilities and consuming it. So think of consuming, uh, network same way as you do the cloud. So I'm excited about that one. >> Yeah. That, that, I'm super excited about that, right? Because you know, network's at the core of everything you do, right? And there's always a lot of concern, hey, when I go to the cloud, my network costs are going to go up, right? Um, but I think we've proven, right? >> Yes. >> Being able, that those costs can come down, right? And we can have a better experience, uh, deal with the ebbs and flows of our business whether it's people working from home, people working in the office, you know, or at the client sites. We, we've, you know, we've got that cloud-based backbone that we support. You know, I, I mean Merim, I agree a hundred percent. I think you and your team have done a great job of cost management, cloud cost management, optimization, right? You didn't stop, right? >> No. >> You didn't lo- you didn't just live after the migration on VMs. Right? You know, you went serverless, you went, you know, containerization. >> Yep. >> Uh, and that's kept our cloud bill going down. >> Yes. >> Right. Versus going up, right? >> Yes. >> And I hear from a lot of customers concerned about cloud costs and that type of stuff, but you've proven right, >> Yes. >> That you can keep it flat, if not going down because you're using those last minutes. Sustainability is the other thing that I truly am, I, I love, right? Is, you know, we're all trying to become a more sustainable, sustainable organization. We're trying to help our clients become more sustainable organizations. And you know, you know, your ability to take on Gravitant processors, right? Which use less power. >> Yes. >> Right? Overnight, right? >> Yes. >> Or, hey, I'm using a, you know a, uh, serverless lambda, whatever, right? And I'm not running that server. >> Right. >> You know, so, you're able to show that sustainability gains, um, you know, very quickly. Which you could not do, right? You know, in just doing cloud basic migrations. >> Well, I tell you what I think is impressive, is that you put your money where your mouth is, right? >> Yep. (laughs) >> Is that, that it's, and, and if I'm going to be a client, not to, you know, give you guys a pat on the back, you don't need it. You're doing great without me. But I'd say you've been there, you've done that. And, and so I can learn from you. You understand my pain. >> Yes. >> You understand my reservations, my challenges and uh, you could be my, my headlights here. (Merim laughs) >> So, I think great approach. Kudos to you and certainly wish you both success and to your fourth and fifth appearances on the Cube. (Merim and Chris laugh) Um, we have slots tomorrow if you're arou- available. So, maybe we'll fill it up >> There you go. >> and bring it back again. >> Awesome. >> Guys, thanks for being here. >> Sure. >> It was very nice. >> Appreciate the time. >> All right. >> That's great. >> I've been talking, uh, about Accenture. This is the, of course, executive summit being sponsored by Accenture here at AWS reInvent 22. I'm John Walls. You're watching the Cube, the leader in tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, wonderful Cloud community and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant John Furrier. John, how you doing this afternoon? >> Doing great, feeling good. We've got day three here, another day tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage we're already over a hundred something videos, live getting up. >> You're holding up well. >> And then Cloud show is just popping. It's back to pre-pandemic levels. The audience is here, what recession? But there is one coming but apparently doesn't seem to be an unnoticed with the Cloud community. >> I think, we'll be talking a little bit about that in our next interview in the state of the union. Not just our union, but the the general global economy and the climate there with some fabulous guests from Software One. Please welcome Neil and Bernd, welcome to the show, guys. How you doing? >> Great, thank you. >> Really good. >> Yeah, like you said, just getting over the jet lag. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty good today, yeah, (laughing loudly) glad we did it today. >> I love that Neil, set your smiling and I can feel your energy. Tell us a little bit about Software One and what you all do. >> Yeah, so Software One we're a software and Cloud solutions provider. We're in 90 countries. We have 65,000 customers. >> Savannah: Just a few. >> Yeah, and we really focus on being close to the customers and helping customers through their software and Cloud journey. So we transact, we sell software in Cloud, 10,000 different ISVs. And then on top of that we a lot of services around the spend optimization FinOps we'll talk about as well, and lots of other areas. But yeah, we're really a large scale partner in this space. >> That's awesome. FinOps, cost optimization, pretty much all we've been talking about here on the give. It's very much a hot topic. I'm actually excited about this and Bernd I'm going to throw this one to you first. We haven't actually done a proper definition of what FinOps is at the show yet. What is FinOps? >> Well, largely speaking it's Cloud cost optimization but for us it's a lot more than for others. That's our superpower. We do it all. We do the technology side but we also do the licensing side. So, we have a differentiated offering. If you would look at the six Rs of application migration we do it all, not even an Accenture as it all. And that is our differentiation. >> You know, yesterday Adams left was on the Keynote. He's like waving his hands around. It's like, "Hey, we got if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." I'm like, wait a minute. In 2008 when the last recession, Amazon wasn't a factor. They were small. Now they're massive, they're huge. They're a big part of the economic equation. What does belt tightening mean? Like what does that mean? Like do customers just go to the marketplace? Do they go, do you guys, so a lot of moving parts now on how they're buying software and they're fine tuning their Cloud too. It's not just eliminate budget, it's fine tune the machine if you will... >> 'make a smarter Cloud. >> Explain this phenomenon, how people are tackling this cost optimization, Cloud optimization. 'Cause they're not going to stop building. >> No. >> This is right sizing and tuning and cutting. >> Yeah, we see, of course with so many customers in so many countries, we have a lot of different views on maturity and we see customers taking the FinOps journey at different paces. But fundamentally what we see is that it's more of an afterthought and coming in at a panic stage rather than building it and engaging with it from the beginning and doing it continuously. And really that's the huge opportunity and AWS is a big believer in this of continued optimization of the Cloud is a confident Cloud. A confident Cloud means you'll do more with it. If you lose confidence in that bill in what how much it's costing you, you're going to retract. And so it's really about making sure all customers know exactly what's in there, how it's optimized, restocking, reformatting applications, getting more out of the microservices and getting more value out the Cloud and that will help them tighten that belt. >> So the euphoric enthusiasm of previous years of building water just fallen the pipes leaving the lights on when you go to bed. I mean that's kind of the mentality. People were not literally I won't say they weren't not paying attention but there was some just keep going we're all good now it's like whoa, whoa. We turn that service off and no one's using it or do automation. So there's a lot more of that mindset emerging. We're hearing that for the first time price performance being mindful of what's on and off common sense basically. >> Yeah, but it's not just that the lights are on and the faucets are open it's also the air condition is running. So the FinOps foundation is estimating that about a third of Cloud spend is waste and that's where FinOps comes in. We can help customers be more efficient in the Cloud and lower their Cloud spend while doing the same or more. >> So, let's dig in a little bit there. How do you apply FinOps when migrating to the Cloud? >> Well, you start with the business case and you're not just looking at infrastructure costs like most people do you ought look at software licensing costs. For example, if you run SQL on-premise you have an enterprise agreement. But if you move it to the Cloud you may actually take a different more favorable licensing agreement and save a lot of money. And these things are hidden. They're not to be seen but they need to be part of the business case. >> When you look at the modernization trend we had an analyst on our session with David Vellante and Zs (indistinct) from ZK Consulting. He had an interesting comment. He said, "Spend more in Cloud to save more." Which is a mindset that doesn't come across right. Wait a minute, spend more, save more. You can do bet right now with the Clouds kind of the the thesis of FinOps, you don't have to cut. Just kind of cut the waste out but still spend and build if you're smart, there's a lot more of that going on. What does that mean? >> I mean, yeah I've got a good example of this is, we're the largest Microsoft provider in the world. And when of course when you move Microsoft workloads to the Cloud, you don't... Maybe you don't want a server, you can go serverless, right? So you may not win a server. Bernd said SQL, right? So, it's not just about putting applications in the Cloud and workloads in the Cloud. It's about modernizing them and then really taking advantage of what you can really do in the Cloud. And I think that's where the customers are still pretty immature. They're still on that journey of throwing stuff in there and then realizing actually they can take way more advantage of what services are in there to reduce the amount and get even more in there. >> Yeah, and so the... You want to say, something? >> How much, just building on the stereotypical image of Cloud customer is the marketing person with a credit card, right? And there are many of them and they all buy their own Cloud and companies have a hard time consolidating the spend pulling it together, even within a country. But across countries across the globe, it's really, really hard. If you pull it all together, you get a better discount. You spend more to save more. >> Yeah, and also there's a human piece. We had an intern two summers ago playing with our Cloud. We're on a Cloud with our media plus stack left a service was playing around doing some tinkering and like, where's this bill? What is this extra $20,000 came from. It just, we left a service on... >> It's a really good point actually. It's something that we see almost every day right now which is customers also not understanding what they've put in the Cloud and what the implications of spikes are. And also therefore having really robust monitoring and processes and having a partner that can look after that for them. Otherwise we've got customers where they've been really shocked about not doing things the right way because they've empowered the business but also not with the maturity that the business needs to have that responsibility. >> And that's a great point. New people coming in and or people being platooned through new jobs are getting used to the Cloud. That's a great point. I got that brings up my security question 'cause this comes up a lot. So that's what's a lot of spend of people dialing up more security. Obviously people try everything with security, every tool, every platform, and throw everything at the problem. How does that impact the FinOps equation? 'Cause Dev SecOps is now part of everything. Okay, moving security at the CICD pipeline, that's cool. Check Cloud native applications, microservices event-based services check. But now you've got more security. How does that factor into the cost side? What you guys look at that can you share your thoughts on how your customers are managing their security posture without getting kind of over the barrel, if you will? >> Since we are at AWS re:Invent, right? We can talk about the well architected framework of AWS and there's six components to it. And there's reliability, there's security cost, performance quality, operational quality and sustainability. And so when we think about migrating apps to the Cloud or modernizing them in the Cloud security is always a table stakes. >> And it has to be, yeah, go ahead. >> I really like what AWS is doing with us on that. We partner very closely on that area. And to give you a parallel example of Microsoft I don't feel very good about that at the moment. We see a lot of customers right now that get hacked and normally it's... >> 'yeah that's such a topic. >> You mean on Azure? >> Yeah, and what happens is that they normally it's a crypto mining script that the customer comes in they come in as the customer get hacked and then they... We saw an incident the other day where we had 2,100 security incidents in a minute where it all like exploded on the customer side. And so that's also really important is that the customer's understanding that security element also who they're letting in and out of their organization and also the responsibility they have if things go bad. And that's also not aware, like when they get hacked, are they responsible for that? Are they not responsible? Is the provider... >> 'shared responsibility? >> Yeah. >> 'well that security data lake the open cybersecurity schema framework. That's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out to your point. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Yeah, it is fascinating and it does require a lot of collaboration. What other trends, what other big challenges are you seeing? You're obviously working with customers at incredible scale. What are some of the other problems you're helping them tackle? >> I think we work with customers from SMB all the way up to enterprise and public sector. But what we see is more in the enterprise space. So we see a lot of customers willing to commit a lot to the Cloud based on all the themes that we've set but not commit financially for all the PNLs that they run in all the business units of all the different companies that they may own in different countries. So it's like, how can I commit but not be responsible on the hook for the bill that comes in. And we see this all the time right now and we are working closely with AWS on this. And we see the ability for customers to commit centrally but decentralized billing, decentralized optimization and decentralized FinOps. So that's that educational layer within the business units who owns the PNL where they get that fitness and they own what they're spending but the company is alone can commit to AWS. And I think that's a big trend that we are seeing is centralized commitment but decentralized ownership in that model. >> And that's where the marketplaces kind of fit in as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah. Do you want to add some more on that? >> I mean the marketplace, if you're going to cut your bill you go to the marketplace right there you want single dashboard or your marketplace what's the customer going to do when they're going to tighten their belts? What do they do? What's their workflow, marketplace? What's the process? >> Well, on marketplaces, the larger companies will have a private marketplace with dedicated pricing managed service they can call off. But that's for the software of the shelf. They still have the data centers they still have all the legacy and they need to do the which ones are we going to keep which ones are we going to retire, we repurchase, we license, rehouse, relocate, all of those things. >> That's your wheelhouse. >> It's a three, yes is our wheelhouse. It's a three to five year process for most companies. >> This could be a tailwind for you guys. This is like a good time. >> I mean FinOps is super cool and super hot right now. >> Not that you're biased? (all laughing loudly) >> But look, it's great to see it because well we are the magic quadrant leader in software asset management, which is a pedigree of ours. But we always had to convince customers to do that because they're always worried, oh what you're going to find do I have an audit? Do I have to give Oracles some more money or SAP some more money? So there's always like, you know... >> 'don't, (indistinct). >> How compliant do I really want? >> Is anyone paying attention to this? >> Well FinOps it's all upside. Like it's all upside. And so it's completely flipped. And now we speak to most customers that are building FinOps internally and then they're like, hold on a minute I'm a bank. Why do I have hundred people doing FinOps? And so that's the trend that we've seen because they just get more and more value out of it all the time. >> Well also the key mindset is that the consumption based model of Cloud you mentioned Oracle 'cause they're stuck in that whoa, whoa, whoa, how many servers license and they're stuck in that extortion. And now they got Cloud once you're on a variable, what's the downside? >> Exactly and then you can look at all the applications, see where you can go serverless see where you can go native services all that sort of stuff is all upside. >> And for the major workloads like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft defined that customers save in the millions. >> Well just on that point, those VMware, SAP, these workloads they're being rolled and encapsulated into containers and Kubernetes run times moved into the Cloud, they're being refactored. So that's a whole nother ballgame. >> Yes. Lift and shift usually doesn't save you any money. So that's relocation with containers may save you money but in some cases you have to... >> 'it's more in the Cloud now than ever before. >> Yeah >> Yeah, yeah. >> Before we take him to the challenge portion we have a little quiz for you, or not a quiz, but a little prop for you in a second. I want to talk about your role. You have a very important role at the FinOps Foundation and why don't you tell me more about that? You, why don't you go. >> All right, so yeah I mean we are a founding member of the Finops organization. You can tell I'm super passionate about it as well. >> I wanted to keep that club like a poster boy for FinOps right now. It's great, I love the energy. >> You have some VA down that is going to go up on the table and dance, (all laughing loudly) >> We're ready for it. We're waiting for that performance here on theCUBE this week. I promise I would keep everyone up an alert... >> 'and it's on the post. And our value to the foundation is first of all the feedback we get from all our customers, right? We can bring that back as an organization to that also as one of the founding members. We're one of the only ones that really deliver services and platforms. So we'll work with Cloud health, Cloud ability our own platform as well, and we'll do that. And we have over 200 practitioners completely dedicated to FinOps as well. So, it's a great foundation, they're doing an amazing job and we're super proud to be part of that. >> Yeah, I love that you're contributing to the community as well as supporting it, looking after your customers. All right, so our new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent 'cause we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel hot take sizzle of thought leadership on the number one takeaway most important theme of the show this year Bernd do you want to go first? >> Of the re:Invent show or whatever? >> You can interpret that however you want. We've gotten some unique interpretations throughout the week, so we're probing. >> Everybody's looking for the superpower to do more with less in the Cloud. That will be the theme of 2023. >> Perfect, I love that. 10 seconds, your mic very efficient. You're clearly providing an efficient solution based on that answer. >> I won't that much. That's... (laughing loudly) >> It's the quiz. And what about you Neil? Give us your, (indistinct) >> I'm going to steal your comment. It's exactly what I was thinking earlier. Tech is super resilient and tech is there for customers when they want to invest and modernize and do fun stuff and they're also there for when they want to save money. So we are always like a constant and you see that here. It's like this is... It's always happening here, always happening. >> It is always happening. It really can feel the energy. I hope that the show is just as energetic and fun for you guys. As the last few minutes here on theCUBE has been thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about FinOps, Cloud confidence and all things AWS re:Invent. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier, my name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(calming music) >> Hello and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at AWS re:Invent day three of our scintillating coverage here on theCUBE. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier. John Day three energy's high. How you feeling? >> I dunno, it's day two, day three, day four. It feels like day four, but again, we're back. >> Who's counting? >> Three pandemic levels in terms of 50,000 plus people? Hallways are packed. I got pictures. People don't believe it. It's actually happening. Then people are back. So, you know, and then the economy is a big question too and it's still, people are here, they're still building on the cloud and cost is a big thing. This next segment's going to be really important. I'm looking forward to this next segment. >> Yeah, me too. Without further ado let's welcome our guests for this segment. We have Brad from AMD and we have Rahul from you are, well you do a variety of different things. We'll start with CloudFix for this segment, but we could we could talk about your multiple hats all day long. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How you doing? Brad how does it feel? We love seeing your logo above our stage here. >> Oh look, we love this. And talking about re:Invent last year, the energy this year compared to last year is so much bigger. We love it. We're excited to be here. >> Yeah, that's awesome. Rahul, how are you feeling? >> Excellent, I mean, I think this is my eighth or ninth re:Invent at this point and it's been fabulous. I think the, the crowd, the engagement, it's awesome. >> You wouldn't know there's a looming recession if you look at the activity but yet still the reality is here we had an analyst on yesterday, we were talking about spend more in the cloud, save more. So that you can still use the cloud and there's a lot of right sizing, I call you got to turn the lights off before you go to bed. Kind of be more efficient with your infrastructure as a theme. This re:Invent is a lot more about that now. Before it's about the glory days. Oh yeah, keep building, now with a little bit of pressure. This is the conversation. >> Exactly and I think most companies are looking to figure out how to innovate their way out of this uncertainty that's kind of on everyone's head. And the only way to do it is to be able to be more efficient with whatever your existing spend is, take those savings and then apply them to innovating on new stuff. And that's the way to go about it at this point. >> I think it's such a hot topic, for everyone that we're talking about. I mean, total cost optimization figuring out ways to be more efficient. I know that that's a big part of your mission at CloudFix. So just in case the audience isn't versed, give us the pitch. >> Okay, so a little bit of background on this. So the other hat I wear is CTO of ESW Capital. We have over 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio. And one of my jobs is also to manage and run about 40 to 45,000 AWS accounts of our own. >> Casual number, just a few, just a couple pocket change, no big deal. >> And like everyone else here in the audience, yeah we had a problem with our costs, just going out of control and as we were looking at a lot of the tools to help us kind of get more efficient one of the biggest issues was that while people give you a lot of recommendations recommendations are way too far from realized savings. And we were running through the challenge of how do you take recommendation and turn them into real savings and multiple different hurdles. The short story being, we had to create CloudFix to actually realize those savings. So we took AWS recommendations around cost, filtered them down to the ones that are completely non-disruptive in nature, implemented those as simple automations that everyone could just run and realize those savings right away. We then took those savings and then started applying them to innovating and doing new interesting things with that money. >> Is there a best practice in your mind that you see merging in this time? People start more focused on it. Is there a method or a purpose kind of best practice of how to approach cost optimization? >> I think one of the things that most people don't realize is that cost optimization is not a one and done thing. It is literally nonstop. Which means that, on one hand AWS is constantly creating new services. There are over a hundred thousand API at this point of time How to use them right, how to use them efficiently You also have a problem of choice. Developers are constantly discovering new services discovering new ways to utilize them. And they are behaving in ways that you had not anticipated before. So you have to stay on top of things all the time. And really the only way to kind of stay on top is to have automation that helps you stay on top of all of these things. So yeah, finding efficiencies, standardizing your practices about how you leverage these AWS services and then automating the governance and hygiene around how you utilize them is really the key >> Brad tell me what this means for AMD and what working with CloudFix and Rahul does for your customers. >> Well, the idea of efficiency and cost optimization is near and dear to our heart. We have the leading. >> It's near and dear to everyone's heart, right now. (group laughs) >> But we are the leaders in x86 price performance and density and power efficiency. So this is something that's actually part of our core culture. We've been doing this a long time and what's interesting is most companies don't understand how much more efficiency they can get out of their applications aside from just the choices they make in cloud. but that's the one thing, the message we're giving to everybody is choice matters very much when it comes to your cloud solutions and just deciding what type of instance types you choose can have a massive impact on your bottom line. And so we are excited to partner with CloudFix, they've got a great model for this and they make it very easier for our customers to help identify those areas. And then AMD can come in as well and then help provide additional insight into those applications what else they can squeeze out of it. So it's a great relationship. >> If I hear you correctly, then there's more choice for the customers, faster selection, so no bad choices means bad performance if they have a workload or an app that needs to run, is that where you you kind of get into the, is that where it is or more? >> Well, I mean from the AMD side right now, one of the things they do very quickly is they identify where the low hanging fruit is. So it's the thing about x86 compatibility, you can shift instance types instantly in most cases without any change to your environment at all. And CloudFix has an automated tool to do that. And that's one thing you can immediately have an impact on your cost without having to do any work at all. And customers love that. >> What's the alternative if this doesn't exist they have to go manually figure it out or it gets them in the face or they see the numbers don't work or what's the, if you don't have the tool to automate what's the customer's experience >> The alternative is that you actually have people look at every single instance of usage of resources and try and figure out how to do this. At cloud scale, that just doesn't make sense. You just can't. >> It's too many different options. >> Correct The reality is that your resources your human resources are literally your most expensive part of your budget. You want to leverage all the amazing people you have to do the amazing work. This is not amazing work. This is mundane. >> So you free up all the people time. >> Correct, you free up wasting their time and resources on doing something that's mundane, simple and should be automated, because that's the only way you scale. >> I think of you is like a little helper in the background helping me save money while I'm not thinking about it. It's like a good financial planner making you money since we're talking about the economy >> Pretty much, the other analogy that I give to all the technologists is this is like garbage collection. Like for most languages when you are coding, you have these new languages that do garbage collection for you. You don't do memory management and stuff where developers back in the day used to do that. Why do that when you can have technology do that in an automated manner for you in an optimal way. So just kind of freeing up your developer's time from doing this stuff that's mundane and it's a standard best practice. One of the things that we leverage AMD for, is they've helped us define the process of seamlessly migrating folks over to AMD based instances without any major disruptions or trying to minimize every aspect of disruption. So all the best practices are kind of borrowed from them, borrowed from AWS in most other cases. And we basically put them in the automation so that you don't ever have to worry about that stuff. >> Well you're getting so much data you have the opportunity to really streamline, I mean I love this, because you can look across industry, across verticals and behavior of what other folks are doing. Learn from that and apply that in the background to all your different customers. >> So how big is the company? How big is the team? >> So we have people in about 130 different countries. So we've completely been remote and global and actually the cloud has been one of the big enablers of that. >> That's awesome, 130 countries. >> And that's the best part of it. I was just telling Brad a short while ago that's allowed us to hire the best talent from across the world and they spend their time building new amazing products and new solutions instead of doing all this other mundane stuff. So we are big believers in automation not only for our world. And once our customers started asking us about or telling us about the same problem that they were having that's when we actually took what we had internally for our own purpose. We packaged it up as CloudFix and launched it last year at re:Invent. >> If the customers aren't thinking about automation then they're going to probably have struggle. They're going to probably struggle. I mean with more data coming in you see the data story here more data's coming in, more automation. And this year Brad price performance, I've heard the word price performance more this year at re:Invent than any other year I've heard it before, but this year, price performance not performance, price performance. So you're starting to hear that dialogue of squeeze, understand the use cases use the right specialized processor instance starting to see that evolve. >> Yeah and and there's so much to it. I mean, AMD right out of the box is any instance is 10% less expensive than the equivalent in the market right now on AWS. They do a great job of maximizing those products. We've got our Zen four core general processor family just released in November and it's going to be a beast. Yeah, we're very excited about it and AWS announced support for it so we're excited to see what they deliver there too. But price performance is so critical and again it's going back to the complexity of these environments. Giving some of these enterprises some help, to help them understand where they can get additional value. It goes well beyond the retail price. There's a lot more money to be shaved off the top just by spending time thinking about those applications. >> Yeah, absolutely. I love that you talked about collaboration we've been talking about community. I want to acknowledge the AWS super fans here, standing behind the stage. Rahul, I know that you are an AWS super fan. Can you tell us about that community and the program? >> Yeah, so I have been involved with AWS and building products with AWS since 2007. So it's kind of 15 years back when literally there were just a handful of API for launching EC2 instances and S3. >> Not the a hundred thousand that you mentioned earlier, my goodness, the scale. >> So I think I feel very privileged and honored that I have been part of that journey and have had to learn or have had the opportunity to learn both from successes and failures. And it's just my way of contributing back to that community. So we are part of the FinOps foundation as well, contributing through that. I run a podcast called AWS Insiders and a livestream called AWS Made Easy. So we are trying to make sure that people out there are able to understand how to leverage AWS in the best possible way. And yeah, we are there to help and hold their hand through it. >> Talk about the community, take a minute to explain to the audience watching the community around this cost optimization area. It's evolving, you mentioned FinOps. There's a whole large community developing, of practitioners and technologists coming together to look at this. What does this all mean? Talk about this community. >> So cost management within organizations is has evolved so drastically that organizations haven't really coped with it. Historically, you've had finance teams basically buy a lot of infrastructure, which is CapEx and the engineering teams had kind of an upper bound on what they would spend and where they would spend. Suddenly with cloud, that's kind of enabled so much innovation all of a sudden, everyone's realized it, five years was spent figuring out whether people should be on the cloud or not. That's no longer a question, right. Everyone needs to be in the cloud and I think that's a no-brainer. The problem there is that suddenly your operating model has moved from CapEx to OpEx. And organizations haven't really figured out how to deal with it. Finance now no longer has the controls to control and manage and forecast costs. Engineering has never had to deal with it in the past and suddenly now they have to figure out how to do all this finance stuff. And procurement finds itself in a very awkward way position because they are no longer doing these negotiations like they were doing in the past where it was okay right up front before you engage, you do these negotiations. Now it's kind of an ongoing thing and it's constantly changing. Like every day is different. >> And you got marketplace >> And you got marketplace. So it's a very complex situation and I think what we are trying to do with the FinOps foundation is try and take a lot of the best practices across organizations that have been doing this at least for the last 10, 15 years. Take all the learnings and failures and turn them into hopefully opinionated approaches that people can take organizations can take to navigate through this faster rather than kind of falter and then decide that oh, this is not for us. >> Yeah. It's a great model, it's a great model. >> I know it's time John, go ahead. >> All right so, we got a little bumper sticker exercise we used to say what's the bumper sticker for the show? We used to say that, now we're modernizing, we're saying if you had to do an Instagram reel right now, short hot take of what's going on at re:Invent this year with AMD or CloudFix or just in general what would be the sizzle reel, that would be on Instagram or TikTok, go. >> Look, I think when you're at re:Invent right now and number one the energy is fantastic. 23 is going to be a building year. We've got a lot of difficult times ahead financially but it's the time, the ones that come out of 23 stronger and more efficient, and cost optimize are going to survive the long run. So now's the time to build. >> Well done, Rahul let's go for it. >> Yeah, so like Brad said, cost and efficiencies at the top of everyone's mind. Stuff that's the low hanging fruit, easy, use automation. Apply your sources to do most of the innovation. Take the easiest part to realizing savings and operate as efficiently as you possibly can. I think that's got to be key. >> I think they nailed it. They both nailed it. Wow, well it was really good. >> I put you on our talent list of >> And alright, so we repeat them. Are you part of our host team? I love this, I absolutely love this Rahul we wish you the best at CloudFix and your 17 other jobs. And I am genuinely impressed. Do you sleep actually? Last question. >> I do, I do. I have an amazing team that really helps me with all of this. So yeah, thanks to them and thank you for having us here. >> It's been fantastic. >> It's our pleasure. And Brad, I'm delighted we get you both now and again on our next segment. Thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here at AWS re:Invent, in fabulous Sin City with John Furrier, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (calm music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, wonderful cloud community, and welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson, and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant gentlemen today. Please welcome Keith from Cockroach Labs and Jeff from AMD. Thank you both for tuning in, coming in from the East coast. How you doing? >> Not too bad. A little cold, but we're going >> Doing great. >> Love that and I love the enthusiasm Keith, you're definitely bringing the heat in the green room before we got on, so I'm going to open this up with you. Cockroach Labs puts out a pretty infamous and useful cloud report each year. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the approach and the data that you report on? >> Yeah, so Cockroach Labs builds a distributed SQL database that we are able to run across multiple cloud regions, multiple sites, multiple data centers. Frequently is running a hybrid kind of a use case and it's important for our customers to be able to compare the performance of configurations when they don't have exact the same hardware available to them in every single location. So since we were already doing this internally for ourselves and for our customers, we decided to turn it into something we shared with the greater community. And it's been a great experience for us. A lot of people come and ask us every year, "Hey, when's the new cloud report coming out?" Because they want to read it. It's been a great win for us. >> How many different things are you looking at? I mean, when you're comparing configurations I imagine there's a lot of different complex variables there. Just how much are you taking into consideration when you publish this report? >> Yeah, so we look at micro benchmarks around CPU network and storage. And then our flagship benchmark is we use the database itself where we have the most expertise to create a real world benchmark on across all of these instances. This year I think we tested over 150 different discrete configurations and it's a bit of a labor of love for us because we then not only do we consume it for best practices for our own as a service offering, but we share it with our customers. We use it internally to make all kinds of different decisions. >> Yeah, 150 different comparisons is not a small number. And Jeff, I know that AMD's position in this cloud report is really important. Where do you fit into all of this and what does it mean for you? >> Right, so what it means for us and for our customers is, there's a good breath and depth of testing that has gone of from the lab. And you look at this cloud report and it helps them traverse this landscape of, why to go on instance A, B, or C on certain workloads. And it really is very meaningful because they now have the real data across all those dimensional kinds of tests. So this definitely helps not only the customers but also for ourselves. So we can now look at ourselves more independently for feedback loops and say, "Hey, here's where we're doing well, here's where we're doing okay, here's where we need to improve on." All those things are important for us. So love seeing the lab present out such a great report as I've seen, very comprehensive, so I very much appreciate it. >> And specifically I love that you're both fans of each other, obviously, specifically digging in there, what does it mean that AMD had the best performance ratio tested on AWS instances? >> Yeah, so when we're looking at instances, we're not just looking at how fast something is, we're also looking at how much it costs to get that level of performance because CockroachDB as a distributed system has the opportunity to scale up and out. And so rather than necessarily wanting the fastest single instance performance, which is an important metric for certain use cases for sure, the comparison of price for performance when you can add notes to get more performance can be a much more economical thing for a lot of our customers. And so AMD has had a great showing on the price performance ratio for I think two years now. And it makes it hard to justify other instance types in a lot of circumstances simply because it's cheaper to get, for each transaction per second that you need, it's cheaper to use an AMD instance than it would be a competitive instance from another vendor. >> I mean, everyone I think no matter their sector wants to do things faster and cheaper and you're able to achieve both, it's easy to see why it's a choice that many folks would like to make. So what do these results mean for CIOs and CTOs? I can imagine there's a lot of value here in the FinOps world. >> Yep. Oh, I'll start a few of 'em. So from the C-suite when they're really looking at the problem statement, think of it as less granular, but higher level. So they're really looking at CapEx, OpEx, sustainability, security, sort of ecosystem on there. And then as Keith pointed out, hey, there's this TCO conversation that has to happen. In other words, as they're moving from sort of this lift and shift from their on-prem into the cloud, what does that mean to them for spend? So now if you're looking at the consistency around sort of the performance and the total cost of running this to their insights, to the conclusions, less time, more money in their pocket and maybe a reduction for their own customers so they can provide better for the customer side. What you're actually seeing is that's the challenge that they're facing in that landscape that they're driving towards that they need guidance and help with towards that. And we find AMD lends itself well to that scale out architecture that connects so well with how cloud microservices are run today. >> It's not surprising to hear that. Keith, what other tips and tricks do you have for CIOs and CTOs trying to reduce FinOps and continue to excel as they're building out? >> Yeah, so there were a couple of other insights that we learned this year. One of those two insights that I'd like to mention is that it's not always obvious what size and shape infrastructure you need to acquire to maximize your cost productions, right? So we found that smaller instance types were by and large had a better TCO than larger instances even across the exact same configurations, we kept everything else the same. Smaller instances had a better price performance ratio than the larger instances. The other thing that we discovered this year that was really interesting, we did a bit of a cost analysis on networking. And largely because we're distributed system, we can scan span across availability zones, we can span across regions, right? And one of the things we discovered this year is the amount of cost for transferring data between availability zones and the amount of cost for transferring data across regions at least in the United States was the same. So you could potentially get more resiliency by spanning your infrastructure across regions, then you would necessarily just spanning across availability zones. So you could be across multiple regions at the same cost as you were across availability zones, which for something like CockroachDB, we were designed to support those workloads is a really big and important thing for us. Now you have to be very particular about where you're purchasing your infrastructure and where those regions are. Because those data transfer rates change depending on what the source and the target is. But at least within the United States, we found that there was a strong correlation to being more survivable if you were in a multi-region deployment and the cost stayed pretty flat. >> That's interesting. So it's interesting to see what the correlation is between things and when you think there may be relationship between variables and when there maybe isn't. So on that note, since it seems like you're both always learning, I can imagine, what are you excited to test or learn about looking forward? Jeff, let's start with you actually. >> For sort of future testing. One of those things is certainly those more scale out sort of workloads with respect to showing scale. Meaning as I'm increasing the working set, as I'm increasing the number of connections, variability is another big thing of showing that minimization from run to run because performance is interesting but consistency is better. And as the lower side is from the instant sizes as I was talking about earlier, a (indistinct) architecture lends itself so well to it because they have the local caching and the CCDs that you can now put a number of vCPUs that will benefit from that delivery of the local caching and drive better performance at the lower side for that scale out sort of architecture, which is so consistent with the microservices. So I would be looking for more of those dimensional testings variability across a variety of workloads that you can go from memory intense workloads to database persistence store as well as a blend of the two, Kafka, et cetera. So there's a great breath and depth of testing that I am looking for and to more connect with sort of the CTOs and CIOs, the higher level that really show them that that CapEx, OpEx, sustainability and provide a bit more around that side of it because those are are the big things that they're focused on as well as security, the fact that based on working sets et cetera, AMD has the ability with confidential compute around those kind of offerings that can start to drive to those outcomes and help from what the CTOs and CIOs are looking for from compliance as well. So set them out (indistinct). >> So you're excited about a lot. No, that's great. That means you're very excited about the future. >> It's a journey that continues as Keith knows, there's always something new. >> Yeah, absolutely. What about you Keith? What is the most excited on the journey? >> Yeah, there are a couple of things I'd like to see us test next year. One of those is to test a multi-region CockroachDB config. We have a lot of customers running in that configuration and production but we haven't scaled that testing up to the same breadth that we we do with our single region testing which is what we've based the cloud report on for the past four years. The other thing that I'd really love to see us do,, I'm a Kubernetes SME, at least that's kind of my technical background. I would love to see us get to a spot where we're comparing the performance of raw EC2 instances to using that same infrastructure running CockroachDB via EKS and kind of see what the differences are there. The vast majority of CockroachDB customers are running at least a portion of their infrastructure in Kubernetes. So I feel like that would be a real great value add to the report for the next time that we go around but go about publishing it. >> If I don't mind adding to that just to volley it back for a moment. And also as I was saying about the ScaleOut and how it leverages our AMD architecture so well with EKS specifically around the spin up, spin down. So you think of a whole development life cycle. As they grow and shrink the resources over time, time of those spin ups to spin downs are expensive. So that has to be as reduced as much as possible. And I think they'll see a lot of benefits in AMD's architecture with EKS running on it as well. >> The future is bright. There's a lot of hype about many of the technologies that you both just mentioned, so I'm very curious to see what the next cloud report looks like. Thank you Keith, and the team for the labor of love that you put into that every year. And Jeff, I hope that you continue to be as well positioned as everyone's innovation journey continues. Keith and Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. As you know, this is a continuation of our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you for our next fascinating segment. (upbeat music)

>>Hello and welcome back to the live coverage of the Cube here. Live in Detroit, Michigan for Cub Con, our seventh year covering all seven years. The cube has been here. M John Fur, host of the Cube, co-founder of the Cube. I'm here with Lisa Mart, my co-host, and our new host, Savannah Peterson. Great to see you guys. We're wrapping up day one of three days of coverage, and our guest analyst is Sario Wall, who's the cube analyst who's gonna give us his report. He's been out all day, ear to the ground in the sessions, peeking in, sneaking in, crashing him, getting all the data. Great to see you, Sarvi. Lisa Savannah, let's wrap this puppy up. >>I am so excited to be here. My first coupon with the cube and being here with you and Lisa has just been a treat. I can't wait to hear what you have to say in on the report side. And I mean, I have just been reflecting, it was last year's coupon that brought me to you, so I feel so lucky. So much can change in a year, folks. You never know where you're be. Wherever you're sitting today, you could be living your dreams in just a few >>Months. Lisa, so much has changed. I mean, just look at the past this year. Events we're back in person. Yeah. Yep. This is a big team here. They're still wearing masks, although we can take 'em off with a cube. But mask requirement. Tech has changed. Conversations are upleveling, skill gaps still there. So much has changed. >>So much has changed. There's so much evolution and so much innovation that we've also seen. You know, we started out the keynote this morning, standing room. Only thousands of people are here. Even though there's a mass requirement, the community that is CNCF Co Con is stronger than I, stronger than I saw it last year. This is only my second co con. But the collaboration, what they've done, their devotion to the maintainers, their devotion to really finding mentors for mentees was really a strong message this morning. And we heard a >>Lot of that today. And it's going beyond Kubernetes, even though it's called co con. I also call it cloud native con, which I think we'll probably end up being the name because at the end of day, the cloud native scaling, you're starting to see the pressure points. You're start to see where things are breaking, where automation's coming in, breaking in a good way. And we're gonna break it all down Again. So much going on again, I've overs gonna be in charge. Digital is transformation. If you take it to its conclusion, then you will see that the developers are running the business. It isn't a department, it's not serving the business, it is the business. If that's the case, everything has to change. And we're, we're happy to have Sarib here with us Cube analysts on the badge. I saw that with the press pass. Well, >>Thank you. Thanks for getting me that badge. So I'm here with you guys and >>Well, you got a rapport. Let's get into it. You, I >>Know. Let's hear what you gotta say. I'm excited. >>Yeah. Went around, actually attend some sessions and, and with the analysts were sitting in, in the media slash press, and I spoke to some people at their booth and the, there are a few, few patterns, you know, which are, some are the exaggeration of existing patterns or some are kind of new patterns emerging. So things are getting complex in open source. The lawn more projects, right. They have, the CNCF has graduated some projects even after graduation, they're, they're exploring, right? Kubernetes is one of those projects which has graduated. And on that front, just a side note, the new projects where, which are entering the cncf, they're the, we, we gotta see that process and the three stages and all that stuff. I tweeted all day long, if you wanna know what it is, you can look at my tweets. But when I will look, actually write right on that actually after, after the show ends, what, what I saw there, these new projects need to be curated properly. >>I think they need to be weed. There's a lot of noise in these projects. There's a lot of overlap. So the, the work is cut out for CNCF folks, by the way. They're sort of managerial committee or whatever you call that. The, the people who are leading it, they're try, I think they're doing their best and they're doing a good job of that. And another thing actually, I really liked in the morning's keynote was that lot of women on the stage and minorities represented. I loved it, to be honest with you. So believe me, I'm a minority even though I'm Indian, but from India, I'm a minority. So people who have Punjab either know that I'm a minority, so I, I understand their pain and how hard it is to, to break through the ceiling and all that. So I love that part as well. Yeah, the >>Activity is clear. Yeah. From day one. It's in the, it's in the dna. I mean, they'll reject anything that the opposite >>Representation too. I mean, it's not just that everyone's invited, it's they're celebrated and that's a very big difference. Yeah. It's, you see conferences offer discounts for women for tickets or minorities, but you don't necessarily see them put them running where their mouth is actually recruit the right women to be on stage. Right. Something you know a little bit about John >>Diversity brings better outcomes, better product perspectives. The product is better with all the perspectives involved. Percent, it might go a little slower, maybe a little debates, but it's all good. I mean, it's, to me, the better product comes when everyone's in. >>I hope you didn't just imply that women would make society. So >>I think John men, like slower means a slower, >>More diversity, more debate, >>The worst. Bringing the diversity into picture >>Wine. That's, that's how good groups, which is, which is >>Great. I mean, yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. I, I take that mulligan back and say, hey, you knows >>That's >>Just, it's gonna go so much faster and better and cheaper, but that not diversity. Absolutely. >>Yes. Well, you make better products faster because you have a variety >>Of perspectives. The bigger the group, there's more debate. More debate is key. But the key to success is aligning and committing. Absolutely. Once you have that, and that's what open sources has been about for. Oh God, yeah. Generations >>Has been a huge theme in the >>Show generations. All right, so, so, >>So you have to add another, like another important, so observation if you will, is that the security is, is paramount right. Requirement, especially for open source. There was a stat which was presented in the morning that 60% of the projects in under CNCF have more vulnerabilities today than they had last year. So that was, That's shocking actually. It's a big jump. It's a big jump. Like big jump means jump, jump means like it can be from from 40 to 60 or or 50 or 60. But still that percentage is high. What, what that means is that lot more people are contributing. It's very sort of di carmic or ironic that we say like, Oh this project has 10,000 contributors. Is that a good thing? Right. We do. Do we know the quality of that, where they're coming from? Are there any back doors being, you know, open there? How stringent is the process of rolling those things, which are being checked in, into production? You know, who is doing that? I've >>Wondered about that. Yeah. The quantity, quality, efficacy game. Yes. And what a balance that must be for someone like CNCF putting in the structure to try and >>That's >>Hard. Curate and regulate and, and you know, provide some bumpers on the bowling lane, so to speak, of, of all of these projects. Yeah. >>Yeah. We thought if anybody thought that the innovation coming from, or the number of services coming from AWS or Google Cloud or likes of them is overwhelming, look at open source, it's even more >>Overwhelming. What's your take on the supply chain discussion? More code more happening. What are you hearing there? >>The supply chain from the software? Yeah. >>Supply chain software, supply chain security pays. Are people talking about that? What are you >>Seeing? Yeah, actually people are talking about that. The creation, the curation, not creation. Curation of suppliers of software I think is best done in the cloud. Marketplaces Ive call biased or what, you know, but curation of open source is hard. It's hard to know which project to pick. It's hard to know which project will pan out. Many of the good projects don't see the day light of the day, but some decent ones like it becomes >>A marketing problem. Exactly. The more you have out there. Exactly. The more you gotta get above the noise. Exactly. And the noise echo that. And you got, you got GitHub stars, you got contributors, you have vanity metrics now coming in to this that are influencing what's real. But sometimes the best project could have smaller groups. >>Yeah, exactly. And another controversial thing a little bit I will say that is that there's a economics of the practitioner, right? I usually talk about that and economics of the, the enterprise, right? So practitioners in our world, in software world especially right in systems world, practitioners are changing jobs every two to three years. And number of developers doubles every three years. That's the stat I've seen from Uncle Bob. He's authority on that software side of things. Wow. So that means there's a lot more new entrance that means a lot of churn. So who is watching out for the enterprise enterprises economics, You know, like are we creating stable enterprises? How stable are our operations? On a side note to that, most of us see the software as like one band, which is not true. When we talk about all these roles and personas, somebody's writing software for, for core layer, which is the infrastructure part. Somebody's writing business applications, somebody's writing, you know, systems of bracket, some somebody's writing systems of differentiation. We talk about those things. We need to distinguish between those and have principle based technology consumption, which I usually write about in our Oh, >>So bottom line in Europe about it, in your opinion. Yeah. What's the top story here at coupon? >>Top story is >>Headline. Yeah, >>The, the headline. Okay. The open source cannot be ignored. That's a headline. >>And what should people be paying attention to if there's a trend coming out? See any kind of trends coming out or any kind of signal, What, what do you see that people should pay attention to here? The put top >>Two, three things. The signal is that, that if you are a big shop, like you'd need to assess your like capacity to absorb open source. You need to be certain size to absorb the open source. If you are below that threshold, I mean we can talk about that at some other time. Like what is that threshold? I will suggest you to go with the managed services from somebody, whoever is providing those managed services around open source. So manage es, right? So from, take it from aws, Google Cloud or Azure or IBM or anybody, right? So use open source as managed offering rather than doing it yourself. Because doing it yourself is a lot more heavy lifting. >>I I, >>There's so many thoughts coming, right? >>Mind it's, >>So I gotta ask you, what's your rapport? You have some swag, What's the swag look >>Like to you? I do. Just as serious of a report as you do on the to floor, but I do, so you know, I come from a marketing background and as I, I know that Lisa does as well. And one of the things that I think about that we touched on in this is, is you know, canceling the noise or standing out from the noise and, and on a show floor, that's actually a huge challenge for these startups, especially when you're up against a rancher or companies or a Cisco with a very large budget. And let's say you've only got a couple grand for an activation here. Like most of my clients, that's how I ended up in the CU County ecosystem, was here with the A client before. So there actually was a booth over there and I, they didn't quite catch me enough, but they had noise canceling headphones. >>So if you just wanted to take a minute on the show floor and just not hear anything, which I thought was a little bit clever, but gonna take you through some of my favorite swag from today and to all the vendors, you know, this is why you should really put some thought into your swag. You never know when you're gonna end up on the cube. So since most swag is injection molded plastic that's gonna end up in the landfill, I really appreciate that garden has given all of us a potable plant. And even the packaging is plantable, which is very exciting. So most sustainable swag goes to garden. Well done >>Rep replicated, I believe is their name. They do a really good job every year. They had some very funny pins that say a word that, I'm not gonna say live on television, but they have created, they brought two things for us, yet it's replicated little etch sketch for your inner child, which is very nice. And given that we are in Detroit, we are in Motor City, we are in the home of Ford. We had Ford on the show. I love that they have done the custom K eight s key chains in the blue oval logo. Like >>Fords right behind us by the way, and are on you >>Interviewed, we had 'em on earlier GitLab taking it one level more personal and actually giving out digital portraits today. Nice. Cool. Which is quite fun. Get lap house multiple booths here. They actually IPOed while they were on the show floor at CubeCon 2021, which is fun to see that whole gang again. And then last but not least, really embracing the ship wheel logo of a Kubernetes is the robusta accrue that is giving out bucket hats. And if you check out my Twitter at sabba Savvy, you can see me holding the ship wheel that they're letting everyone pose with. So we are all in on Kubernetes. That cove gone 2022, that's for sure. Yeah. >>And this is something, day one guys, we've got three. >>I wanna get one of those >>Hats. We we need to, we need a group photo >>By the end of Friday we will have a beverage and hats on to sign off. That's, that's my word. If I can convince John, >>Don, what's your takeaway? You guys did a great kind of kickoff about last week or so about what you were excited about, what your thoughts were going to be. We're only on day one, There's been thousands of people here, we've had great conversations with contributors, the community. What's your take on day one? What's your, what's your tagline? >>Well, Savannah and I had at we up, we, we were talking about what we might see and I think we, we were right. I think we had it right. There's gonna be a lot more people than there were last year. Okay, check. That's definitely true. We're in >>Person, which >>Is refreshing. I was very surprised about the mask mandate that kind of caught me up guard. I was major. Yeah. Cause I've been comfortable without the mask. I'm not a mask person, but I had to wear it and I was like, ah, mask. But I understand I support that. But whatever. It's >>Corporate travel policy. So you know, that's what it is. >>And then, you know, they, I thought that they did an okay job with the gates, but they wasn't slow like last time. But on the content side, definitely Kubernetes security, top line headline, Kubernetes at scale security, that's, that's to me the bumper sticker top things to pay attention to the supply chain and the role of docker and the web assembly was a surprise. You're starting to see containers ecosystem coming back to, I won't say tension growth in the functionality of containers cuz they have to solve the security problem in the container images. Okay, you got scanning technology so it's a little bit in the weeds, but there's a huge movement going on to fix that problem to scale it so it's not a problem area contain. And then Dr sent a great job with productivity interviews. Scott Johnston over a hundred million in revenue so far. That's my number. They have not publicly said that. That's what I'm reporting from sources extremely well financially. And they, and they love their business model. They make productivity for developers. That's a scoop. That's new >>Information. That's a nice scoop we just dropped there on the co casually. >>You're watching that. Pay attention to that. But that, that's proof. But guess what, Red Hat's got developers too. Yes. Other people have to, So developers gonna go where it's the best. Yeah. Developers are voting with their code, they're voting with their feet. You will see the winners with the developers and that's what we've talked about. >>Well and the companies are catering to the developers. Savannah and I had a great conversation with Ford. Yeah. You saw, you showed their fantastic swag was an E for Ev right behind us. They were talking about the, all the cultural changes that they've really focused on to cater towards the developers. The developers becoming the influencers as you say. But to see a company that is as, as historied as Ford Motor Company and what they're doing to attract and retain developer talent was impressive. And honestly that surprised me. Yeah. >>And their head of deb relations has been working for, for, for 29 years. Which I mean first of all, most companies on the show floor haven't been around for 29 years. Right. But what I love is when you put community first, you get employees to stick around. And I think community is one of the biggest themes here at Cuco. >>Great. My, my favorite story that surprised me and was cool was the Red Hat Lockheed Martin interview where they had edge deployments with micro edge, >>Micro shift, >>Micro >>Shift, new projects under, there's, there are three new projects under, >>Under that was so, so cool because it was an edge story in deployment for the military where lives are on the line, they actually had it working. That is a real world example of Kubernetes and tech orchestrating to deploy the industrial edge. And I think that's proof in my mind that Kubernetes and this ecosystem is gonna move faster through this next wave of growth. Because once things start clicking, you get hybrid on premise to super cloud and edge. That was, that was my favorite cause it was real. That was real >>Story that it can make is literally life and death on the battlefield. Yeah, that was amazing. With what they're doing and what >>They're talking check out the Lockheed Martin Red Hat edge story on Silicon Angle and then a press release all pillar. >>Yeah. Another actually it's impressive, which we knew this which is happening, but I didn't know that it was happening at this scale is the finops. The finops is, I saw your is a discipline which most companies are adopting bigger companies, which are spending like hundreds of millions dollars in cloud average. Si a team size of finops for finops is seven people. And average number of tools is I think 3.5 or around 3.7 or something like that. Average number of tools they use to control the cost. So finops is a very generic term for years. It's not financial operations, it's the financial operations for the cloud cost, you know, containing the cloud costs. So that's a finops that is a very emerging sort of discipline >>To keep an eye on. And well, not only is that important, I talked to, well one of the principles over there, it's growing and they have real big players in that foundation. Their, their events are highly attended. It's super important. It's just, it's the cost side of cloud. And, and of course, you know, everyone wants to know what's going on. No one wants to leave there. Their Amazon on Yeah, you wanna leave the lights on the cloud, as we always say, you never know what the bill's gonna look like. >>The cloud is gonna reach $3 billion in next few years. So we might as well control the cost there. Yeah, >>It was, it was funny to get the reaction I found, I don't know if I was, how I react, I dunno how I felt. But we, we did introduce Super Cloud to a couple of guests and a, there were a couple reactions, a couple drawn. There was a couple, right. There was a couple, couple reactions. And what I love about the super cloud is that some people are like, oh, cringing. And some people are like, yeah, go. So it's a, it's a solid debate. It is solid. I saw more in the segments that I did with you together. People leaning in. Yeah. Super fun. We had a couple sum up, we had a couple, we had a couple cringes, I'll say their names, but I'll go back and make sure I, >>I think people >>Get 'em later. I think people, >>I think people cringe on the, on the term not on the idea. Yeah. You know, so the whole idea is that we are building top of the cloud >>And then so I mean you're gonna like this, I did successfully introduce here on the cube, a new term called architectural list. He did? That's right. Okay. And I wanna thank Charles Fitzgerald for that cuz he called super cloud architectural list. And that's exactly the point of super cloud. If you have a great coding environment, you shouldn't have to do an architecture to do. You should code and let the architecture of the Super cloud make it happen. And of course Brian Gracely, who will be on tomorrow at his cloud cast said Super Cloud enables super services. Super Cloud enables what Super services, super service. The microservices underneath the covers have to be different. High performing, automated. So again, the debate and Susan, the goal is to keep it open. And that's our, that's our goal. But we had a lot of fun with that. It was fun to poke the bear a little bit. So >>What is interesting to see just how people respond to it too, with you throwing it out there so consistently, >>You wanna poke the bear, get a conversation going, you know, let let it go. We'll see, it's been positive so far. >>There, there I had a discussion outside somebody who is from Ford but not attending this conference and they have been there for a while. I, I just some moment hit like me, like I said, people, okay, technologists are horizontal, the codes are horizontal. They will go from four to GM to Chrysler to Bank of America to, you know, GE whatever, you know, like cross vertical within vertical different vendors. So, but the culture of a company is local, right? Right. Ford has been building cars for forever. They sort of democratize it. They commercialize it, right? But they have some intense culture. It's hard to change those cultures. And how do we bring in the new thinking? What is, what approach that should be? Is it a sandbox approach for like putting new sensors on the car? They have to compete with te likes our Tesla, right? Yeah. But they cannot, if they are afraid of deluding their existing market or they're afraid of failure there, right? So it's very >>Tricky. Great stuff. Sorry. Great to have you on as our cube analyst breaking down the stories. We'll document that, that we'll roll out a post on it. Lisa Savannah, let's wrap up the show for day one. We got day two and three. We'll start with you. What's your summary? Quick bumper sticker. What's today's show all about? >>I'm a community first gal and this entire experience is about community and it's really nice to see the community come together, celebrate that, share ideas, and to have our community together on stage. >>Yeah. To me, to me it was all real. It's happening. Kubernetes cloud native at scale, it's happening, it's real. And we see proof points and we're gonna have faster time to value. It's gonna accelerate faster from here. >>The proof points, the impact is real. And we saw that in some amazing stories. And this is just a one of the cubes >>Coverage. Ib final word on this segment was well >>Said Lisa. Yeah, I, I think I, I would repeat what I said. I got eight, nine years back at a rack space conference. Open source is amazing for one biggest reason. It gives the ability to the developing nations to be at somewhat at par where the dev develop nations and, and those people to lift up their masses through the automation. Cuz when automation happens, the corruption goes down and the economy blossoms. And I think it's great and, and we need to do more in it, but we have to be careful about the supply chains around the software so that, so our systems are secure and they are robust. Yeah, >>That's it. Okay. To me for SAR B and my two great co-host, Lisa Martin, Savannah Peterson. I'm John Furry. You're watching the Cube Day one in, in the Books. We'll see you tomorrow, day two Cuban Cloud Native live in Detroit. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> The stampede to cloud and massive VC investments has led to the emergence of a new generation of object store based data lakes. And with them two important trends, actually three important trends. First, a new category that combines data lakes and data warehouses aka the lakehouse is emerged as a leading contender to be the data platform of the future. And this novelty touts the ability to address data engineering, data science, and data warehouse workloads on a single shared data platform. The other major trend we've seen is query engines and broader data fabric virtualization platforms have embraced NextGen data lakes as platforms for SQL centric business intelligence workloads, reducing, or somebody even claim eliminating the need for separate data warehouses. Pretty bold. However, cloud data warehouses have added complimentary technologies to bridge the gaps with lakehouses. And the third is many, if not most customers that are embracing the so-called data fabric or data mesh architectures. They're looking at data lakes as a fundamental component of their strategies, and they're trying to evolve them to be more capable, hence the interest in lakehouse, but at the same time, they don't want to, or can't abandon their data warehouse estate. As such we see a battle royale is brewing between cloud data warehouses and cloud lakehouses. Is it possible to do it all with one cloud center analytical data platform? Well, we're going to find out. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to the data platform's power panel on theCUBE. Our next episode in a series where we gather some of the industry's top analysts to talk about one of our favorite topics, data. In today's session, we'll discuss trends, emerging options, and the trade offs of various approaches and we'll name names. Joining us today are Sanjeev Mohan, who's the principal at SanjMo, Tony Baers, principal at dbInsight. And Doug Henschen is the vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So it's early June and we're gearing up with two major conferences, there's several database conferences, but two in particular that were very interested in, Snowflake Summit and Databricks Data and AI Summit. Doug let's start off with you and then Tony and Sanjeev, if you could kindly weigh in. Where did this all start, Doug? The notion of lakehouse. And let's talk about what exactly we mean by lakehouse. Go ahead. >> Yeah, well you nailed it in your intro. One platform to address BI data science, data engineering, fewer platforms, less cost, less complexity, very compelling. You can credit Databricks for coining the term lakehouse back in 2020, but it's really a much older idea. You can go back to Cloudera introducing their Impala database in 2012. That was a database on top of Hadoop. And indeed in that last decade, by the middle of that last decade, there were several SQL on Hadoop products, open standards like Apache Drill. And at the same time, the database vendors were trying to respond to this interest in machine learning and the data science. So they were adding SQL extensions, the likes Hudi and Vertical we're adding SQL extensions to support the data science. But then later in that decade with the shift to cloud and object storage, you saw the vendor shift to this whole cloud, and object storage idea. So you have in the database camp Snowflake introduce Snowpark to try to address the data science needs. They introduced that in 2020 and last year they announced support for Python. You also had Oracle, SAP jumped on this lakehouse idea last year, supporting both the lake and warehouse single vendor, not necessarily quite single platform. Google very recently also jumped on the bandwagon. And then you also mentioned, the SQL engine camp, the Dremios, the Ahanas, the Starbursts, really doing two things, a fabric for distributed access to many data sources, but also very firmly planning that idea that you can just have the lake and we'll help you do the BI workloads on that. And then of course, the data lake camp with the Databricks and Clouderas providing a warehouse style deployments on top of their lake platforms. >> Okay, thanks, Doug. I'd be remiss those of you who me know that I typically write my own intros. This time my colleagues fed me a lot of that material. So thank you. You guys make it easy. But Tony, give us your thoughts on this intro. >> Right. Well, I very much agree with both of you, which may not make for the most exciting television in terms of that it has been an evolution just like Doug said. I mean, for instance, just to give an example when Teradata bought AfterData was initially seen as a hardware platform play. In the end, it was basically, it was all those after functions that made a lot of sort of big data analytics accessible to SQL. (clears throat) And so what I really see just in a more simpler definition or functional definition, the data lakehouse is really an attempt by the data lake folks to make the data lake friendlier territory to the SQL folks, and also to get into friendly territory, to all the data stewards, who are basically concerned about the sprawl and the lack of control in governance in the data lake. So it's really kind of a continuing of an ongoing trend that being said, there's no action without counter action. And of course, at the other end of the spectrum, we also see a lot of the data warehouses starting to edit things like in database machine learning. So they're certainly not surrendering without a fight. Again, as Doug was mentioning, this has been part of a continual blending of platforms that we've seen over the years that we first saw in the Hadoop years with SQL on Hadoop and data warehouses starting to reach out to cloud storage or should say the HDFS and then with the cloud then going cloud native and therefore trying to break the silos down even further. >> Now, thank you. And Sanjeev, data lakes, when we first heard about them, there were such a compelling name, and then we realized all the problems associated with them. So pick it up from there. What would you add to Doug and Tony? >> I would say, these are excellent points that Doug and Tony have brought to light. The concept of lakehouse was going on to your point, Dave, a long time ago, long before the tone was invented. For example, in Uber, Uber was trying to do a mix of Hadoop and Vertical because what they really needed were transactional capabilities that Hadoop did not have. So they weren't calling it the lakehouse, they were using multiple technologies, but now they're able to collapse it into a single data store that we call lakehouse. Data lakes, excellent at batch processing large volumes of data, but they don't have the real time capabilities such as change data capture, doing inserts and updates. So this is why lakehouse has become so important because they give us these transactional capabilities. >> Great. So I'm interested, the name is great, lakehouse. The concept is powerful, but I get concerned that it's a lot of marketing hype behind it. So I want to examine that a bit deeper. How mature is the concept of lakehouse? Are there practical examples that really exist in the real world that are driving business results for practitioners? Tony, maybe you could kick that off. >> Well, put it this way. I think what's interesting is that both data lakes and data warehouse that each had to extend themselves. To believe the Databricks hype it's that this was just a natural extension of the data lake. In point of fact, Databricks had to go outside its core technology of Spark to make the lakehouse possible. And it's a very similar type of thing on the part with data warehouse folks, in terms of that they've had to go beyond SQL, In the case of Databricks. There have been a number of incremental improvements to Delta lake, to basically make the table format more performative, for instance. But the other thing, I think the most dramatic change in all that is in their SQL engine and they had to essentially pretty much abandon Spark SQL because it really, in off itself Spark SQL is essentially stop gap solution. And if they wanted to really address that crowd, they had to totally reinvent SQL or at least their SQL engine. And so Databricks SQL is not Spark SQL, it is not Spark, it's basically SQL that it's adapted to run in a Spark environment, but the underlying engine is C++, it's not scale or anything like that. So Databricks had to take a major detour outside of its core platform to do this. So to answer your question, this is not mature because these are all basically kind of, even though the idea of blending platforms has been going on for well over a decade, I would say that the current iteration is still fairly immature. And in the cloud, I could see a further evolution of this because if you think through cloud native architecture where you're essentially abstracting compute from data, there is no reason why, if let's say you are dealing with say, the same basically data targets say cloud storage, cloud object storage that you might not apportion the task to different compute engines. And so therefore you could have, for instance, let's say you're Google, you could have BigQuery, perform basically the types of the analytics, the SQL analytics that would be associated with the data warehouse and you could have BigQuery ML that does some in database machine learning, but at the same time for another part of the query, which might involve, let's say some deep learning, just for example, you might go out to let's say the serverless spark service or the data proc. And there's no reason why Google could not blend all those into a coherent offering that's basically all triggered through microservices. And I just gave Google as an example, if you could generalize that with all the other cloud or all the other third party vendors. So I think we're still very early in the game in terms of maturity of data lakehouses. >> Thanks, Tony. So Sanjeev, is this all hype? What are your thoughts? >> It's not hype, but completely agree. It's not mature yet. Lakehouses have still a lot of work to do, so what I'm now starting to see is that the world is dividing into two camps. On one hand, there are people who don't want to deal with the operational aspects of vast amounts of data. They are the ones who are going for BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Synapse, and so on because they want the platform to handle all the data modeling, access control, performance enhancements, but these are trade off. If you go with these platforms, then you are giving up on vendor neutrality. On the other side are those who have engineering skills. They want the independence. In other words, they don't want vendor lock in. They want to transform their data into any number of use cases, especially data science, machine learning use case. What they want is agility via open file formats using any compute engine. So why do I say lakehouses are not mature? Well, cloud data warehouses they provide you an excellent user experience. That is the main reason why Snowflake took off. If you have thousands of cables, it takes minutes to get them started, uploaded into your warehouse and start experimentation. Table formats are far more resonating with the community than file formats. But once the cost goes up of cloud data warehouse, then the organization start exploring lakehouses. But the problem is lakehouses still need to do a lot of work on metadata. Apache Hive was a fantastic first attempt at it. Even today Apache Hive is still very strong, but it's all technical metadata and it has so many different restrictions. That's why we see Databricks is investing into something called Unity Catalog. Hopefully we'll hear more about Unity Catalog at the end of the month. But there's a second problem. I just want to mention, and that is lack of standards. All these open source vendors, they're running, what I call ego projects. You see on LinkedIn, they're constantly battling with each other, but end user doesn't care. End user wants a problem to be solved. They want to use Trino, Dremio, Spark from EMR, Databricks, Ahana, DaaS, Frink, Athena. But the problem is that we don't have common standards. >> Right. Thanks. So Doug, I worry sometimes. I mean, I look at the space, we've debated for years, best of breed versus the full suite. You see AWS with whatever, 12 different plus data stores and different APIs and primitives. You got Oracle putting everything into its database. It's actually done some interesting things with MySQL HeatWave, so maybe there's proof points there, but Snowflake really good at data warehouse, simplifying data warehouse. Databricks, really good at making lakehouses actually more functional. Can one platform do it all? >> Well in a word, I can't be best at breed at all things. I think the upshot of and cogen analysis from Sanjeev there, the database, the vendors coming out of the database tradition, they excel at the SQL. They're extending it into data science, but when it comes to unstructured data, data science, ML AI often a compromise, the data lake crowd, the Databricks and such. They've struggled to completely displace the data warehouse when it really gets to the tough SLAs, they acknowledge that there's still a role for the warehouse. Maybe you can size down the warehouse and offload some of the BI workloads and maybe and some of these SQL engines, good for ad hoc, minimize data movement. But really when you get to the deep service level, a requirement, the high concurrency, the high query workloads, you end up creating something that's warehouse like. >> Where do you guys think this market is headed? What's going to take hold? Which projects are going to fade away? You got some things in Apache projects like Hudi and Iceberg, where do they fit Sanjeev? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> So thank you, Dave. So I feel that table formats are starting to mature. There is a lot of work that's being done. We will not have a single product or single platform. We'll have a mixture. So I see a lot of Apache Iceberg in the news. Apache Iceberg is really innovating. Their focus is on a table format, but then Delta and Apache Hudi are doing a lot of deep engineering work. For example, how do you handle high concurrency when there are multiple rights going on? Do you version your Parquet files or how do you do your upcerts basically? So different focus, at the end of the day, the end user will decide what is the right platform, but we are going to have multiple formats living with us for a long time. >> Doug is Iceberg in your view, something that's going to address some of those gaps in standards that Sanjeev was talking about earlier? >> Yeah, Delta lake, Hudi, Iceberg, they all address this need for consistency and scalability, Delta lake open technically, but open for access. I don't hear about Delta lakes in any worlds, but Databricks, hearing a lot of buzz about Apache Iceberg. End users want an open performance standard. And most recently Google embraced Iceberg for its recent a big lake, their stab at having supporting both lakes and warehouses on one conjoined platform. >> And Tony, of course, you remember the early days of the sort of big data movement you had MapR was the most closed. You had Horton works the most open. You had Cloudera in between. There was always this kind of contest as to who's the most open. Does that matter? Are we going to see a repeat of that here? >> I think it's spheres of influence, I think, and Doug very much was kind of referring to this. I would call it kind of like the MongoDB syndrome, which is that you have... and I'm talking about MongoDB before they changed their license, open source project, but very much associated with MongoDB, which basically, pretty much controlled most of the contributions made decisions. And I think Databricks has the same iron cloud hold on Delta lake, but still the market is pretty much associated Delta lake as the Databricks, open source project. I mean, Iceberg is probably further advanced than Hudi in terms of mind share. And so what I see that's breaking down to is essentially, basically the Databricks open source versus the everything else open source, the community open source. So I see it's a very similar type of breakdown that I see repeating itself here. >> So by the way, Mongo has a conference next week, another data platform is kind of not really relevant to this discussion totally. But in the sense it is because there's a lot of discussion on earnings calls these last couple of weeks about consumption and who's exposed, obviously people are concerned about Snowflake's consumption model. Mongo is maybe less exposed because Atlas is prominent in the portfolio, blah, blah, blah. But I wanted to bring up the little bit of controversy that we saw come out of the Snowflake earnings call, where the ever core analyst asked Frank Klutman about discretionary spend. And Frank basically said, look, we're not discretionary. We are deeply operationalized. Whereas he kind of poo-pooed the lakehouse or the data lake, et cetera, saying, oh yeah, data scientists will pull files out and play with them. That's really not our business. Do any of you have comments on that? Help us swing through that controversy. Who wants to take that one? >> Let's put it this way. The SQL folks are from Venus and the data scientists are from Mars. So it means it really comes down to it, sort that type of perception. The fact is, is that, traditionally with analytics, it was very SQL oriented and that basically the quants were kind of off in their corner, where they're using SaaS or where they're using Teradata. It's really a great leveler today, which is that, I mean basic Python it's become arguably one of the most popular programming languages, depending on what month you're looking at, at the title index. And of course, obviously SQL is, as I tell the MongoDB folks, SQL is not going away. You have a large skills base out there. And so basically I see this breaking down to essentially, you're going to have each group that's going to have its own natural preferences for its home turf. And the fact that basically, let's say the Python and scale of folks are using Databricks does not make them any less operational or machine critical than the SQL folks. >> Anybody else want to chime in on that one? >> Yeah, I totally agree with that. Python support in Snowflake is very nascent with all of Snowpark, all of the things outside of SQL, they're very much relying on partners too and make things possible and make data science possible. And it's very early days. I think the bottom line, what we're going to see is each of these camps is going to keep working on doing better at the thing that they don't do today, or they're new to, but they're not going to nail it. They're not going to be best of breed on both sides. So the SQL centric companies and shops are going to do more data science on their database centric platform. That data science driven companies might be doing more BI on their leagues with those vendors and the companies that have highly distributed data, they're going to add fabrics, and maybe offload more of their BI onto those engines, like Dremio and Starburst. >> So I've asked you this before, but I'll ask you Sanjeev. 'Cause Snowflake and Databricks are such great examples 'cause you have the data engineering crowd trying to go into data warehousing and you have the data warehousing guys trying to go into the lake territory. Snowflake has $5 billion in the balance sheet and I've asked you before, I ask you again, doesn't there has to be a semantic layer between these two worlds? Does Snowflake go out and do M&A and maybe buy ad scale or a data mirror? Or is that just sort of a bandaid? What are your thoughts on that Sanjeev? >> I think semantic layer is the metadata. The business metadata is extremely important. At the end of the day, the business folks, they'd rather go to the business metadata than have to figure out, for example, like let's say, I want to update somebody's email address and we have a lot of overhead with data residency laws and all that. I want my platform to give me the business metadata so I can write my business logic without having to worry about which database, which location. So having that semantic layer is extremely important. In fact, now we are taking it to the next level. Now we are saying that it's not just a semantic layer, it's all my KPIs, all my calculations. So how can I make those calculations independent of the compute engine, independent of the BI tool and make them fungible. So more disaggregation of the stack, but it gives us more best of breed products that the customers have to worry about. >> So I want to ask you about the stack, the modern data stack, if you will. And we always talk about injecting machine intelligence, AI into applications, making them more data driven. But when you look at the application development stack, it's separate, the database is tends to be separate from the data and analytics stack. Do those two worlds have to come together in the modern data world? And what does that look like organizationally? >> So organizationally even technically I think it is starting to happen. Microservices architecture was a first attempt to bring the application and the data world together, but they are fundamentally different things. For example, if an application crashes, that's horrible, but Kubernetes will self heal and it'll bring the application back up. But if a database crashes and corrupts your data, we have a huge problem. So that's why they have traditionally been two different stacks. They are starting to come together, especially with data ops, for instance, versioning of the way we write business logic. It used to be, a business logic was highly embedded into our database of choice, but now we are disaggregating that using GitHub, CICD the whole DevOps tool chain. So data is catching up to the way applications are. >> We also have databases, that trans analytical databases that's a little bit of what the story is with MongoDB next week with adding more analytical capabilities. But I think companies that talk about that are always careful to couch it as operational analytics, not the warehouse level workloads. So we're making progress, but I think there's always going to be, or there will long be a separate analytical data platform. >> Until data mesh takes over. (all laughing) Not opening a can of worms. >> Well, but wait, I know it's out of scope here, but wouldn't data mesh say, hey, do take your best of breed to Doug's earlier point. You can't be best of breed at everything, wouldn't data mesh advocate, data lakes do your data lake thing, data warehouse, do your data lake, then you're just a node on the mesh. (Tony laughs) Now you need separate data stores and you need separate teams. >> To my point. >> I think, I mean, put it this way. (laughs) Data mesh itself is a logical view of the world. The data mesh is not necessarily on the lake or on the warehouse. I think for me, the fear there is more in terms of, the silos of governance that could happen and the silo views of the world, how we redefine. And that's why and I want to go back to something what Sanjeev said, which is that it's going to be raising the importance of the semantic layer. Now does Snowflake that opens a couple of Pandora's boxes here, which is one, does Snowflake dare go into that space or do they risk basically alienating basically their partner ecosystem, which is a key part of their whole appeal, which is best of breed. They're kind of the same situation that Informatica was where in the early 2000s, when Informatica briefly flirted with analytic applications and realized that was not a good idea, need to redouble down on their core, which was data integration. The other thing though, that raises the importance of and this is where the best of breed comes in, is the data fabric. My contention is that and whether you use employee data mesh practice or not, if you do employee data mesh, you need data fabric. If you deploy data fabric, you don't necessarily need to practice data mesh. But data fabric at its core and admittedly it's a category that's still very poorly defined and evolving, but at its core, we're talking about a common meta data back plane, something that we used to talk about with master data management, this would be something that would be more what I would say basically, mutable, that would be more evolving, basically using, let's say, machine learning to kind of, so that we don't have to predefine rules or predefine what the world looks like. But so I think in the long run, what this really means is that whichever way we implement on whichever physical platform we implement, we need to all be speaking the same metadata language. And I think at the end of the day, regardless of whether it's a lake, warehouse or a lakehouse, we need common metadata. >> Doug, can I come back to something you pointed out? That those talking about bringing analytic and transaction databases together, you had talked about operationalizing those and the caution there. Educate me on MySQL HeatWave. I was surprised when Oracle put so much effort in that, and you may or may not be familiar with it, but a lot of folks have talked about that. Now it's got nowhere in the market, that no market share, but a lot of we've seen these benchmarks from Oracle. How real is that bringing together those two worlds and eliminating ETL? >> Yeah, I have to defer on that one. That's my colleague, Holger Mueller. He wrote the report on that. He's way deep on it and I'm not going to mock him. >> I wonder if that is something, how real that is or if it's just Oracle marketing, anybody have any thoughts on that? >> I'm pretty familiar with HeatWave. It's essentially Oracle doing what, I mean, there's kind of a parallel with what Google's doing with AlloyDB. It's an operational database that will have some embedded analytics. And it's also something which I expect to start seeing with MongoDB. And I think basically, Doug and Sanjeev were kind of referring to this before about basically kind of like the operational analytics, that are basically embedded within an operational database. The idea here is that the last thing you want to do with an operational database is slow it down. So you're not going to be doing very complex deep learning or anything like that, but you might be doing things like classification, you might be doing some predictives. In other words, we've just concluded a transaction with this customer, but was it less than what we were expecting? What does that mean in terms of, is this customer likely to turn? I think we're going to be seeing a lot of that. And I think that's what a lot of what MySQL HeatWave is all about. Whether Oracle has any presence in the market now it's still a pretty new announcement, but the other thing that kind of goes against Oracle, (laughs) that they had to battle against is that even though they own MySQL and run the open source project, everybody else, in terms of the actual commercial implementation it's associated with everybody else. And the popular perception has been that MySQL has been basically kind of like a sidelight for Oracle. And so it's on Oracles shoulders to prove that they're damn serious about it. >> There's no coincidence that MariaDB was launched the day that Oracle acquired Sun. Sanjeev, I wonder if we could come back to a topic that we discussed earlier, which is this notion of consumption, obviously Wall Street's very concerned about it. Snowflake dropped prices last week. I've always felt like, hey, the consumption model is the right model. I can dial it down in when I need to, of course, the street freaks out. What are your thoughts on just pricing, the consumption model? What's the right model for companies, for customers? >> Consumption model is here to stay. What I would like to see, and I think is an ideal situation and actually plays into the lakehouse concept is that, I have my data in some open format, maybe it's Parquet or CSV or JSON, Avro, and I can bring whatever engine is the best engine for my workloads, bring it on, pay for consumption, and then shut it down. And by the way, that could be Cloudera. We don't talk about Cloudera very much, but it could be one business unit wants to use Athena. Another business unit wants to use some other Trino let's say or Dremio. So every business unit is working on the same data set, see that's critical, but that data set is maybe in their VPC and they bring any compute engine, you pay for the use, shut it down. That then you're getting value and you're only paying for consumption. It's not like, I left a cluster running by mistake, so there have to be guardrails. The reason FinOps is so big is because it's very easy for me to run a Cartesian joint in the cloud and get a $10,000 bill. >> This looks like it's been a sort of a victim of its own success in some ways, they made it so easy to spin up single note instances, multi note instances. And back in the day when compute was scarce and costly, those database engines optimized every last bit so they could get as much workload as possible out of every instance. Today, it's really easy to spin up a new node, a new multi node cluster. So that freedom has meant many more nodes that aren't necessarily getting that utilization. So Snowflake has been doing a lot to add reporting, monitoring, dashboards around the utilization of all the nodes and multi node instances that have spun up. And meanwhile, we're seeing some of the traditional on-prem databases that are moving into the cloud, trying to offer that freedom. And I think they're going to have that same discovery that the cost surprises are going to follow as they make it easy to spin up new instances. >> Yeah, a lot of money went into this market over the last decade, separating compute from storage, moving to the cloud. I'm glad you mentioned Cloudera Sanjeev, 'cause they got it all started, the kind of big data movement. We don't talk about them that much. Sometimes I wonder if it's because when they merged Hortonworks and Cloudera, they dead ended both platforms, but then they did invest in a more modern platform. But what's the future of Cloudera? What are you seeing out there? >> Cloudera has a good product. I have to say the problem in our space is that there're way too many companies, there's way too much noise. We are expecting the end users to parse it out or we expecting analyst firms to boil it down. So I think marketing becomes a big problem. As far as technology is concerned, I think Cloudera did turn their selves around and Tony, I know you, you talked to them quite frequently. I think they have quite a comprehensive offering for a long time actually. They've created Kudu, so they got operational, they have Hadoop, they have an operational data warehouse, they're migrated to the cloud. They are in hybrid multi-cloud environment. Lot of cloud data warehouses are not hybrid. They're only in the cloud. >> Right. I think what Cloudera has done the most successful has been in the transition to the cloud and the fact that they're giving their customers more OnRamps to it, more hybrid OnRamps. So I give them a lot of credit there. They're also have been trying to position themselves as being the most price friendly in terms of that we will put more guardrails and governors on it. I mean, part of that could be spin. But on the other hand, they don't have the same vested interest in compute cycles as say, AWS would have with EMR. That being said, yes, Cloudera does it, I think its most powerful appeal so of that, it almost sounds in a way, I don't want to cast them as a legacy system. But the fact is they do have a huge landed legacy on-prem and still significant potential to land and expand that to the cloud. That being said, even though Cloudera is multifunction, I think it certainly has its strengths and weaknesses. And the fact this is that yes, Cloudera has an operational database or an operational data store with a kind of like the outgrowth of age base, but Cloudera is still based, primarily known for the deep analytics, the operational database nobody's going to buy Cloudera or Cloudera data platform strictly for the operational database. They may use it as an add-on, just in the same way that a lot of customers have used let's say Teradata basically to do some machine learning or let's say, Snowflake to parse through JSON. Again, it's not an indictment or anything like that, but the fact is obviously they do have their strengths and their weaknesses. I think their greatest opportunity is with their existing base because that base has a lot invested and vested. And the fact is they do have a hybrid path that a lot of the others lack. >> And of course being on the quarterly shock clock was not a good place to be under the microscope for Cloudera and now they at least can refactor the business accordingly. I'm glad you mentioned hybrid too. We saw Snowflake last month, did a deal with Dell whereby non-native Snowflake data could access on-prem object store from Dell. They announced a similar thing with pure storage. What do you guys make of that? Is that just... How significant will that be? Will customers actually do that? I think they're using either materialized views or extended tables. >> There are data rated and residency requirements. There are desires to have these platforms in your own data center. And finally they capitulated, I mean, Frank Klutman is famous for saying to be very focused and earlier, not many months ago, they called the going on-prem as a distraction, but clearly there's enough demand and certainly government contracts any company that has data residency requirements, it's a real need. So they finally addressed it. >> Yeah, I'll bet dollars to donuts, there was an EBC session and some big customer said, if you don't do this, we ain't doing business with you. And that was like, okay, we'll do it. >> So Dave, I have to say, earlier on you had brought this point, how Frank Klutman was poo-pooing data science workloads. On your show, about a year or so ago, he said, we are never going to on-prem. He burnt that bridge. (Tony laughs) That was on your show. >> I remember exactly the statement because it was interesting. He said, we're never going to do the halfway house. And I think what he meant is we're not going to bring the Snowflake architecture to run on-prem because it defeats the elasticity of the cloud. So this was kind of a capitulation in a way. But I think it still preserves his original intent sort of, I don't know. >> The point here is that every vendor will poo-poo whatever they don't have until they do have it. >> Yes. >> And then it'd be like, oh, we are all in, we've always been doing this. We have always supported this and now we are doing it better than others. >> Look, it was the same type of shock wave that we felt basically when AWS at the last moment at one of their reinvents, oh, by the way, we're going to introduce outposts. And the analyst group is typically pre briefed about a week or two ahead under NDA and that was not part of it. And when they dropped, they just casually dropped that in the analyst session. It's like, you could have heard the sound of lots of analysts changing their diapers at that point. >> (laughs) I remember that. And a props to Andy Jassy who once, many times actually told us, never say never when it comes to AWS. So guys, I know we got to run. We got some hard stops. Maybe you could each give us your final thoughts, Doug start us off and then-- >> Sure. Well, we've got the Snowflake Summit coming up. I'll be looking for customers that are really doing data science, that are really employing Python through Snowflake, through Snowpark. And then a couple weeks later, we've got Databricks with their Data and AI Summit in San Francisco. I'll be looking for customers that are really doing considerable BI workloads. Last year I did a market overview of this analytical data platform space, 14 vendors, eight of them claim to support lakehouse, both sides of the camp, Databricks customer had 32, their top customer that they could site was unnamed. It had 32 concurrent users doing 15,000 queries per hour. That's good but it's not up to the most demanding BI SQL workloads. And they acknowledged that and said, they need to keep working that. Snowflake asked for their biggest data science customer, they cited Kabura, 400 terabytes, 8,500 users, 400,000 data engineering jobs per day. I took the data engineering job to be probably SQL centric, ETL style transformation work. So I want to see the real use of the Python, how much Snowpark has grown as a way to support data science. >> Great. Tony. >> Actually of all things. And certainly, I'll also be looking for similar things in what Doug is saying, but I think sort of like, kind of out of left field, I'm interested to see what MongoDB is going to start to say about operational analytics, 'cause I mean, they're into this conquer the world strategy. We can be all things to all people. Okay, if that's the case, what's going to be a case with basically, putting in some inline analytics, what are you going to be doing with your query engine? So that's actually kind of an interesting thing we're looking for next week. >> Great. Sanjeev. >> So I'll be at MongoDB world, Snowflake and Databricks and very interested in seeing, but since Tony brought up MongoDB, I see that even the databases are shifting tremendously. They are addressing both the hashtag use case online, transactional and analytical. I'm also seeing that these databases started in, let's say in case of MySQL HeatWave, as relational or in MongoDB as document, but now they've added graph, they've added time series, they've added geospatial and they just keep adding more and more data structures and really making these databases multifunctional. So very interesting. >> It gets back to our discussion of best of breed, versus all in one. And it's likely Mongo's path or part of their strategy of course, is through developers. They're very developer focused. So we'll be looking for that. And guys, I'll be there as well. I'm hoping that we maybe have some extra time on theCUBE, so please stop by and we can maybe chat a little bit. Guys as always, fantastic. Thank you so much, Doug, Tony, Sanjeev, and let's do this again. >> It's been a pleasure. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and the excellent analyst. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon Europe, 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain. A coverage of KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon, Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend. Your host of theCUBE, along with Paul Gillum, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for Silicon Angle, Enrico, Senior IT Analyst for GigaOm . This has been a full day, 7,500 attendees. I might have seen them run out of food, this is just unexpected. I mean, it escalated from what I understand, it went from capping it off at 4,000 gold, 5,000 gold in it off finally at 7,500 people. I'm super excited for... Today's been a great dead coverage. I'm super excited for tomorrow's coverage from theCUBE, but first off, we'll let the the new person on stage take the first question of the wrap up of the day of coverage, Enrico, what's different about this year versus other KubeCons or Cloud Native conversations. >> I think in general, it's the maturity. So we talk a lot about day two operations, observability, monitoring, going deeper and deeper in the security aspects of the application. So this means that for many enterprises, Kubernetes is becoming real critical. They want to get more control of it. And of course you have the discussion around FinOps, around cost control, because we are deploying Kubernetes everywhere. And if you don't have everything optimized, control, monitored, costs go to the roof and think about deploying the Public Cloud . If your application is not optimized, you're paying more. But also in that, on-premises if you are not optimized, you don't have any clear idea what is going to happen. So capacity planning become the nightmare, that we know from the past. So there is a lot of going on around these topics, really exciting actually, less infrastructure, more application. That is what Kubernetes is in here. >> Paul help me separate some of the signal from the noise. There is a lot going on a lot of overlap. What are some of the big themes of takeaways for day one that Enterprise Architects, Executives, need to take home and really chew on? >> Well, the Kubernetes was a turning point. Docker was introduced nine years ago, and for the first three or four years it was an interesting technology that was not very widely adopted. Kubernetes came along and gave developers a reason to use containers. What strikes me about this conference is that this is a developer event, ordinarily you go to conferences and it's geared toward IT Managers, towards CIOs, this is very much geared toward developers. When you have the hearts and minds of developers the rest of the industry is sort of pulled along with it. So this is ground zero for the hottest area of the entire computing industry right now, is in this area building Distributed services, Microservices based, Cloud Native applications. And it's the developers who are leading the way. I think that's a significant shift. I don't see the Managers here, the CIOs here. These are the people who are pulling this industry into the next generation. >> One of the interesting things that I've seen when we've always said, Kubernetes is for the developers, but we talk with an icon from MoneyGram, who's a end user, he's an enterprise architect, and he brought Kubernetes to his front end developers, and they rejected it. They said, what is this? I just want to develop code. So when we say Kubernetes is for developers or the developers are here, how do we reconcile that mismatch of experience? We have Enterprise Architect here. I hear constantly that the Kubernetes is for developers, but is it a certain kind of developer that Kubernetes is for? >> Well, yes and no. I mean, so the paradigm is changing. Okay. So, and maybe a few years back, it was tough to understand how make your application different. So microservices, everything was new for everybody, but actually, everything has changed to a point and now the developer understands, is neural. So, going through the application, APIs, automation, because the complexity of this application is huge, and you have, 724 kind of development sort of deployment. So you have to stay always on, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, to the point of developers bringing this new generation of decision makers in there. So they are actually decision, they are adopting technology. Maybe it's a sort of shadow IT at the very beginning. So they're adopting it, they're using it. And they're starting to use a lot of open source stuff. And then somebody upper in the stack, the Executive, says what are... They discover that the technology is already in place is a critical component, and then it's transformed in something enterprise, meaning paying enterprise services on top of it to be sure support contract and so on. So it's a real journey. And these guys are the real decision makers, or they are at the base of the decision making process, at least >> Cloud Native is something we're going to learn to take for granted. When you remember back, remember the Fail Whale in the early days of Twitter, when periodically the service would just crash from traffic, or Amazon went through the same thing. Facebook went through the same thing. We don't see that anymore because we are now learning to take Cloud Native for granted. We assume applications are going to be available. They're going to be performant. They're going to scale. They're going to handle anything we throw at them. That is Cloud Native at work. And I think we forget sometimes how refreshing it is to have an internet that really works for you. >> Yeah, I think we're much earlier in the journey. We had Microsoft on, the Xbox team talked about 22,000 pods running Linkerd some of the initial problems and pain points around those challenges. Much of my hallway track conversation has been centered around as we talk about the decision makers, the platform teams. And this is what I'm getting excited to talk about in tomorrow's coverage. Who's on the ground doing this stuff. Is it developers as we see or hear or told? Or is it what we're seeing from the Microsoft example, the MoneyGram example, where central IT is getting it. And not only are they getting it, they're enabling developers to simply write code, build it, and Kubernetes is invisible. It seems like that's become the Holy Grail to make Kubernetes invisible and Cloud Native invisible, and the experience is much closer to Cloud. >> So I think that, it's an interesting, I mean, I had a lot of conversation in the past year is that it's not that the original traditional IT operations are disappearing. So it's just that traditional IT operation are giving resources to these new developers. Okay, so it's a sort of walled garden, you don't see the wall, but it's a walled garden. So they are giving you resources and you use these resources like an internal Cloud. So a few years back, we were talking about private Cloud, the private Cloud as let's say the same identical paradigm of the Public Cloud is not possible, because there are no infinite resources or well, whatever we think are infinite resources. So what you're doing today is giving these developers enough resources to think that they are unlimited and they can do automatic operationing and do all these kind of things. So they don't think about infrastructure at all, but actually it's there. So IT operation are still there providing resources to let developers be more free and agile and everything. So we are still in a, I think an interesting time for all of it. >> Kubernetes and Cloud Native in general, I think are blurring the lines, traditional lines development and operations always were separate entities. Obviously with DevOps, those two are emerging. But now we're moving when you add in shift left testing, shift right testing, DevSecOps, you see the developers become much more involved in the infrastructure and they want to be involved in infrastructure because that's what makes their applications perform. So this is going to cause, I think IT organizations to have to do some rethinking about what those traditional lines are, maybe break down those walls and have these teams work much closer together. And that should be a good thing because the people who are developing applications should also have intimate knowledge of the infrastructure they're going to run on. >> So Paul, another recurring theme that we've heard here is the impact of funding on resources. What have your discussions been around founders and creators when it comes to sourcing talent and the impact of the markets on just their day to day? >> Well, the sourcing talent has been a huge issue for the last year, of course, really, ever since the pandemic started. Interestingly, one of our guests earlier today said that with the meltdown in the tech stock market, actually talent has become more available, because people who were tied to their companies because of their stock options are now seeing those options are underwater and suddenly they're not as loyal to the companies they joined. So that's certainly for the startups, there are many small startups here, they're seeing a bit of a windfall now from the tech stock bust. Nevertheless, skills are a long term problem. The US educational system is turning out about 10% of the skilled people that the industry needs every year. And no one I know, sees an end to that issue anytime soon. >> So Enrico, last question to you. Let's talk about what that means to the practitioner. There's a lot of opportunity out there. 200 plus sponsors I hear, I think is worth the projects is 200 plus, where are the big opportunities as a practitioner, as I'm thinking about the next thing that I'm going to learn to help me survive the next 10 or 15 years of my career? Where you think the focus should be? Should it be that low level Cloud builder? Or should it be at those levels of extraction that we're seeing and reading about? >> I think that it's a good question. The answer is not that easy. I mean, being a developer today, for sure, grants you a salary at the end of the month. I mean, there is high demand, but actually there are a lot of other technical figures in the data center, in the Cloud, that could really find easily a job today. So, developers is the first in my mind also because they are more, they can serve multiple roles. It means you can be a developer, but actually you can be also with the new roles that we have, especially now with the DevOps, you can be somebody that supports operation because you know automation, you know a few other things. So you can be a sysadmin of the next generation even if you are a developer, even if when you start as a developer. >> KubeCon 2022, is exciting. I don't care if you're a developer, practitioner, a investor, IT decision maker, CIO, CXO, there's so much to learn and absorb here and we're going to be covering it for the next two days. Me and Paul will be shoulder to shoulder, I'm not going to say you're going to get sick of this because it's just, it's all great information, we'll help sort all of this. From Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host Enrico Signoretti, Paul Gillum, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> The adoption of container orchestration platforms is accelerating at a rate as fast or faster than any category in enterprise IT. Survey data from Enterprise Technology Research shows Kubernetes specifically leads the pack into both spending velocity and market share. Now like virtualization in its early days, containers bring many new performance and tuning challenges in particular insuring consistent and predictable application performance is tricky especially because containers, they're so flexible and they enable portability. Things are constantly changing. DevOps pros have to way through a sea of observability data and tuning the environment becomes a continuous exercise of trial and error. This endless cycle taxes resources and kills operational efficiency. So teams often just capitulate and simply dial up and throw unnecessary resources at the problem. StormForge is a company founded mid last decade that is attacking these issues with a combination of machine learning and data analysis. And with me to talk about a new offering that directly addresses these concerns is Matt Provo, founder and CEO of StormForge. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Good to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, so we saw you guys at a KubeCon sort of first introduce you to our community but add a little color to my intro there if you will. >> Yeah, well, Semi stole my thunder but I'm okay with that. Absolutely agree with everything you said in the intro. You know, the problem that we have set out to solve which is tailor made for the use of real machine learning not machine learning kind of as a marketing tag is connected to how workloads on Kubernetes are really managed from a resource efficiency standpoint. And so a number of years ago, we built the core machine learning engine and have now turned that into a platform around how Kubernetes resources are managed at scale. And so organizations today as they're moving more workloads over, sort of drink the Kool-Aid of the flexibility that comes with Kubernetes and how many knobs you can turn. And developers in many ways love it. Once they start to operationalize the use of Kubernetes and move workloads from pre-production into production, they run into a pretty significant complexity wall. And this is where StormForge comes in to try to help them manage those resources more effectively in ensuring and implementing the right kind of automation that empowers developers into the process ultimately does not automate them out of it. >> So you've got news. You had launch coming to further address these problems. Tell us about that. >> Yeah, so historically, you know, like any machine learning engine, we think about data inputs and what kind of data is going to feed our system to be able to draw the appropriate insights out for the user. And so historically we've kind of been single threaded on load and performance tests in a pre-production environment. And there's been a lot of adoption of that, a lot of excitement around it and frankly amazing results. My vision has been for us to be able to close the loop, however, between data coming out of pre-production and the associated optimizations and data coming out of production environment and our ability to optimize that. A lot of our users along the way have said these results in pre-production are fantastic. How do I know they reflect reality of what my application is going to experience in a production environment? And so we're super excited to announce kind of the a second core module for our platform called Optimize Live. The data input for that is observability and telemetry data coming out of APM platforms and other data sources. >> So this is like Nirvana. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the challenges that this addresses. I mean, I've been around a while and it really have observed... And I used to ask, you know, technology companies all the time. Okay, so you're telling me beforehand what the optimal configuration should be and resource allocation. What happens if something changes? >> Yeah. >> And then it's always, always a pause. >> Yeah. >> And Kubernetes is more of a rapidly changing environment than anything we've ever seen. So specifically the problem you're addressing. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so we view what happens in pre-production as sort of the experimentation phase. And our machine learning is allowing the user to experiment in scenario plan. What we're doing with Optimize Live and adding the the production piece is what we kind of also call kind of our observation phase. And so you need to be able to run the appropriate checks and balances between those two environments to ensure that what you're actually deploying and monitoring from an application performance, from a cost standpoint is with your SLOs and your SLAs as well as your business objectives. And so that's the entire point of this edition is to allow our users to experience hopefully the Nirvana associated with that because it's an exciting opportunity for them and really something that no else is doing from the standpoint of closing that loop. >> So you said front machine learning not as a marketing tag. So I want you to sort of double click on that. What's different than how other companies approach this problem? >> Yeah, I mean, part of it is a bias for me and a frustration as a founder of the reason I started the company in the first place. I think machine learning or AI gets tagged to a lot of stuff. It's very buzzwordy. It looks good. I'm fortunate to have found a number of folks from the outset of the company with, you know, PhDs in Applied Mathematics and a focus on actually building real AI at the core that is connected to solving the right kind of actual business problems. And so, you know, for the first three or four years of the company's history, we really operated as a lab. And that was our focus. We then decided, we're trying to connect a fantastic team with differentiated technology to the right market timing. And when we saw all these pain points around how fast the adoption of containers and Kubernetes have taken place but the pain that the developers are running into, we actually found for ourselves that this was the perfect use case. >> So how specifically does Optimize Live work? Can you add a little detail on that? >> Yes, so when you... Many organizations today have an existing monitoring APM observability suite really in place. They've also got a metric source. So this could be something like Datadog or Prometheus. And once that data starts flowing, there's an out of the box or kind of a piece of Kubernetes that ships with it called the VPA or the Vertical Pod Autoscaler. And less than, really than 1% of Kubernetes users take advantage of the VPA mostly because it's really challenging to configure and it's not super compatible with the the tool set or, you know, the ecosystem of tools in a Kubernetes environment. And so our biggest competitor is the VPA. And what's happening in this environment or in this world for developers is they're having to make decisions on a number of different metrics or resource elements typically things like memory and CPU. And they have to decide what are the requests I'm going to allow application and what are the limits? So what are those thresholds that I'm going to be okay with so that I can, again, try to hit my business objectives and keep in line with my SLAs? And to your earlier point in the intro, it's often guesswork. You know, they either have to rely on out of the box recommendations that ship with the databases and other services that they are using or it's a super manual process to go through and try to configure and tune this. And so with Optimize Live, we're making that one click. And so we're continuously and consistently observing and watching the data that's flowing through these tools and we're serving back recommendations for the user. They can choose to let those recommendations automatically patch and deploy or they can retain some semblance of control over are the recommendations and manually deploy them into their environment themselves. And we, again, really believe that the user knows their application. They know the goals that they have and we don't. But we have a system that's smart enough to align with the business objectives and ultimately provide the relevant recommendations at that point. >> So the business objectives are an input from the application team? >> Yep. >> And then your system is smart enough to adapt and address those. >> Application over application, right? And so the thresholds in any given organization across their different ecosystem of apps or environment could be different. The business objectives could be different. And so we don't want to predefine that for people. We want to give them the opportunity to build those thresholds in and then allow the machine learning to learn and to send recommendations within those bounds. >> And we're going to hear later from a customer who's hosting a Drupal, one of the largest Drupal hosts. So it's all do it yourself across thousands of customers so it's, you know, very unpredictable. I want to make something clear though as to where you fit in the ecosystem. You're not an observability platform, you leverage observability platforms, right? So talk about that and where you fit into the ecosystem. >> Yeah, so it's a great point. We're also, you know, a series B startup and growing. We've the choice to be very intentionally focused on the problems that we've solve. And we've chosen to partner or integrate otherwise. And so we do get put into the APM category from time to time. We are really an intelligence platform. And that intelligence and insights that we're able to draw is because of the core machine learning we've built over the years. And we also don't want organizations or users to have to switch from tools and investments that they've already made. And so we were never going to catch up to to Datadog or Dynatrace or Splunk or AppDynamics or some of the other. And we're totally fine with that. They've got great market share and penetration. They do solve real problems. Instead, we felt like users would want a seamless integration into the tools they're already using. And so we view ourselves as kind of the Intel inside for that kind of a scenario. And it takes observability and APM data and insights that were somewhat reactive. They're visualized and somewhat reactive. And we add that proactive nature onto it, the insights and ultimately the appropriate level of automation. >> So when I think, Matt, about cloud native and I go back to the sort of origins of CNCF who's a, you know, handful of companies. And now you look at the participants it'll, you know, make your eyes bleed. How do you address dealing with all those companies and what is the partnership strategy? >> Yeah, it's so interesting because it's just that even that CNCF landscape has exploded. It was not too long ago where it was as small or smaller than the FinOps landscape today which by the way, the FinOps piece is also on a a neck breaking, you know, growth curve. We, I do see, although there are a lot of companies and a lot of tools, we're starting to see a significant amount of consistency or hardening of the tool chain, you know, with our customers and users. And so we've made strategic and intentional decisions on deep partnerships in some cases like OEM uses of our technology and certainly, you know, intelligent and seamless integrations into a few. So, you know, we'll be announcing a really exciting partnership with AWS and that specifically what they're doing with EKS, their Kubernetes distribution and services. We've got a deep partnership and integration with Datadog and then with Prometheus and specifically a few other cloud providers that are operating, manage Prometheus environments. >> Okay, so where do you want to take this thing? You're not taking the observability guys head on, smart move. So many of those even entering the market now. But what is the vision? >> Yeah, so we've had this debate a lot as well 'cause it's super difficult to create a category. You know, on one hand, you know, I have a lot of respect for founders and companies that do that. On the other hand from a market timing standpoint, you know we fit into AIOps, that's really where we fit. You know, we've made a bet on the future of Kubernetes and what that's going to look like. And so from a containers and Kubernetes standpoint, that's our bet. But we're an AIOps platform. You know, we'll continue getting better at the problems we solve with machine learning and we'll continue adding data inputs. So we'll go, you know, we'll go beyond the application layer which is really where we play now. We'll add, you know, kind of whole cluster optimization capabilities across the full stack. And the way we will get there is by continuing to add different data inputs that make sense across the different layers of the stack. And it's exciting. We can stay vertically oriented on the problems that we're really good at solving but we can become more applicable and compatible over time. >> So that's your next concentric circle. As the observability vendors expand their observation space, you can just play right into that. >> Yeah. >> The more data you get because your purpose built to solving these types of problems. >> Yeah, so you can imagine a world right now out of observability, we're taking things like telemetry data pretty quickly. You can imagine a world where we take traces and logs and other data inputs as that ecosystem continues to grow, it just feeds our own, you know, we are reliant on data. >> Excellent, Matt, thank you so much. >> Thanks for having me. >> Appreciate for coming on. Okay, keep it right there in a moment. We're going to hear from a customer with a highly diverse and constantly changing environment that I mentioned earlier. They went through a major replatforming with Kubernetes on AWS. You're watching theCUBE, you are leader in enterprise tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)