(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Supercloud presentation here. I'm theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. What a great segment here. We're going to unpack the networking aspect of the cloud, how that translates into what Supercloud architecture and platform deployment scenarios look like. And demystify multi-cloud, hybridcloud. We've got two great experts. Amir Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alkira, Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira. These guys been around since 2018 with the startup, but before that story, history in the tech industry. I mean, routing early days, multiple waves, multiple cycles. >> Welcome three decades. >> Welcome to Supercloud. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So, let's get your take on Supercloud because it's been one of those conversations that really galvanized the industry because it kind of highlights almost this next wave, this next side of the street that everyone's going to be on that's going to be successful. The laggards on the legacy seem to be stuck on the old model. SaaS is growing up, it's ISVs, it's ecosystems, hyperscale, full hybrid. And then multi-cloud around the corners cause all this confusion, everyone's hand waving. You know, this is a solution, that solution, where are we? What do you guys see as this supercloud dynamic? >> So where we start from is always focusing on the customer problem. And in 2018 when we identified the problem, we saw that there were multiple clouds with many diverse ways of doing things from the network perspective, and customers were struggling with that. So we delved deeper into that and looked at each one of the cloud architectures completely independent. And there was no common solution and customers were struggling with that from the perspective. They wanted to be in multiple clouds, either through mergers and acquisitions or running an application which may be more cost effective to run in something or maybe optimized for certain reasons to run in a different cloud. But from the networking perspective, everything needed to come together. So that's, we are starting to define it as a supercloud now, but basically, it's a common infrastructure across all clouds. And then integration of high lift services like, you know, security or IPAM services or many other types of services like inter-partner routing and stuff like that. So, Amir, you agree then that multi-cloud is simply a default result of having whatever outcomes, either M&A, some productivity software, maybe Azure. >> Yes. >> Amazon has this and then I've got on-premise application, so it's kinds mishmash. >> So, I would qualify it with hybrid multi-cloud because everything is going to be interconnected. >> John: Got it. >> Whether it's on-premise, remote users or clouds. >> But have CTO perspective, obviously, you got developers, multiple stacks, got AWS, Azure and GCP, other. Not everyone wants to kind of like go all in, but yet they don't want to hedge too much because it's a resource issue. And I got to learn this stack, I got to learn that stack. So then now, you have this default multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, then it's like, okay, what do I do? How do you spread that around? Is it dangerous? What's the the approach technically? What's some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, certainly. John, first, thanks for having us here. So, before I get to that, I'll just add a little bit to what Amir was saying, like how we started, what we were seeing and how it, you know, correlates with the supercloud. So, as you know, before this company, Alkira, we were doing, we did the SD-WAN company, which was Viptela. So there, we started seeing when people started deploying SD-WAN at like a larger scale. We started like, you know, customers coming to us and saying they needed connectivity into the cloud from the SD-WAN. They wanted to extend the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud. So we came up with an architecture, which was like later we started calling them Cloud onRamps, where we built, you know, a transit VPC and put like the virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances extended from there to the cloud. But before we knew, like it started becoming very complicated for the customers because it wasn't just connectivity, it also required, you know, other use cases. You had to instantiate or bring in security appliances in there. You had to secure all of that stuff. There were requirements for, you know, different regions. So you had to bring up the same thing in different regions. Then multiple clouds, what did you do? You had to replicate the same thing in multiple clouds. And now if there was was requirement between clouds, how were you going to do it? You had to route traffic from somewhere, and come up with all those routing controls and stuff. So, it was very complicated. >> Like spaghetti code, but on network. >> The games begin, in fact, one of our customers called it spaghetti mess. And so, that's where like we thought about where was the industry going and which direction the industry was going into? And we came up with the Alkira where what we are doing is building a common infrastructure across multiple clouds, across in, you know, on-prem locations, be it data centers or physical sites, branches sites, et cetera, with integrated security and network networking services inside. And, you know, nowadays, networking is not only about connectivity, you have to secure everything. So, security has to be built in. Redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery. So all of that needs to be built in. So that's like, you know, kind of a definition of like what we thought at that time, what is turning into supercloud now. >> Yeah. It's interesting too, you mentioned, you know, VPCs is not, configuration of loans a hassle. Nevermind the manual mistakes could be made, but as you decide to do something you got to, "Oh, we got to get these other things." A lot of the hyper scales and a lot of the alpha cloud players now, and cloud native folks, they're kind of in that mode of, "Wow, look at what we've built." Now, they're got to maintain, how do I refresh it? Like, how do I keep the talent? So they got this similar chaotic environment where it's like, okay, now they're already already through, so I think they're going to be okay. But then some people want to bypass it completely. So there's a lot of customers that we see out there that fit the makeup of, I'm cloud first, I've lifted and shifted, I move some stuff to the cloud. But I want to bypass all that learnings from all the people that are gone through the past three years. Can I just skip that and go to a multi-cloud or coherent infrastructure? What do you think about that? What's your view? >> So yeah, so if you look at these enterprises, you know, many of them just to find like the talent, which for one cloud as far as the IT staff is concerned, it's hard enough. And now, when you have multiple clouds, it's hard to find people the talent which is, you know, which has expertise across different clouds. So that's where we come into the picture. So our vision was always to simplify all of this stuff. And simplification, it cannot be just simplification because you cannot just automate the workflows of the cloud providers underneath. So you have to, you know, provide your full data plane on top of it, fed full control plane, management plane, policy and management on top of it. And coming back to like your question, so these nowadays, those people who are working on networking, you know, before it used to be like CLI. You used to learn about Cisco CLI or Juniper CLI, and you used to work on it. Nowadays, it's very different. So automation, programmability, all of that stuff is the key. So now, you know, Ops guys, the DevOps guys, so these are the people who are in high demand. >> So what do you think about the folks out there that are saying, okay, you got a lot of fragmentation. I got the stacks, I got a lot of stove pipes, if you will, out there on the stack. I got to learn this from Azure. Can you guys have with your product abstract the way that's so developers don't need to know the ins and outs of stack's, almost like a gateway, if you will, the old days. But like I'm a developer or team develop, why should I have to learn the management layer of Azure? >> That's exactly what we started, you know, out with to solve. So it's, what we have built is a platform and the platform sits inside the cloud. And customers are able to build their own network or a virtual network on top using that platform. So the platform has its own data plane, own control plane and management plane with a policy layer on top of it. So now, it's the platform which is sitting in different clouds, but from a customer's point of view, it's one way of doing networking. One way of instantiating or bringing in services or security services in the middle. Whether those are our security services or whether those are like services from our partners, like Palo Alto or Checkpoint or Cisco. >> So you guys brought the SD-WAN mojo and refactored it for the cloud it sounds like. >> No. >> No? (chuckles) >> We cannot said. >> All right, explain. >> It's way more than that. >> I mean, SD-WAN was wan. I mean, you're talking about wide area networks, talking about connected, so explain the difference. >> SD-WAN was primarily done for one major reason. MPLS was expensive, very strong SLAs, but very low speed. Internet, on the other hand, you sat at home and you could access your applications much faster. No SLA, very low cost, right? So we wanted to marry the two together so you could have a purely private infrastructure and a public infrastructure and secure both of them by creating a common secure fabric across all those environments. And then seamlessly tying it into your internal branch and data center and cloud network. So, it merely brought you to the edge of the cloud. It didn't do anything inside the cloud. Now, the major problem resides inside the clouds where you have to optimize the clouds themselves. Take a step back. How were the clouds built? Basically, the cloud providers went to the Ciscos and Junipers and the rest of the world, built the network in the data centers or across wide area infrastructure, and brought it all together and tried to create a virtualized layer on top of that. But there were many limitations of this underlying infrastructure that they had built. So number of routes per region, how inter region connectivity worked, or how many routes you could carry to the VPCs of V nets? That all those were becoming no common policy across, you know, these environments, no segmentation across these environments, right? So the networking constructs that the enterprise customers were used to as enterprise class carry class capabilities, they did not exist in the cloud. So what did the customer do? They ended up stitching it together all manually. And that's why Atif was alluding to earlier that it became a spaghetti mess for the customers. And then what happens is, as a result, day two operations, you know, troubleshooting, everything becomes a nightmare. So what do you do? You have to build an infrastructure inside the cloud. Cloud has enough raw capabilities to build the solutions inside there. Netflix's of the world. And many different companies have been born in the cloud and evolved from there. So why could we not take the raw capabilities of the clouds and build a network cloud or a supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connecting it into the on-premise and remote user locations, right? So that's your, you know, hybrid multi-cloud solution. >> Well, great call out on the SD-WAN in common versus cloud. 'Cause I think this is important because you're building a network layer in the cloud that spans out so the customers don't have to get into the, there's a gap in the system that I'm used to, my operating environment, of having lockdown security and network. >> So yeah. So what you do is you use the raw capabilities like bandwidth or virtual machines, or you know, containers, or, you know, different types of serverless capabilities. And you bring it all together in a way to solve the networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud, which is an abstraction layer which hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer, right? And it provides a common infrastructure across all environments to that customer, right? That's the beauty of it. And it does it in a way that it looks like, if they have the networking knowledge, they can apply it to this new environment and carry it forward. One way of doing security across all clouds and hybrid environments. One way of doing routing. One way of doing large-scale network address translation. One way of doing IPAM services. So people are tired of doing individual things and individual clouds and on-premise locations, right? So now they're getting something common. >> You guys brought that, you brought all that to bear and flexible for the customer to essentially self-serve their network cloud. >> Yes, yeah. Is that the wave? >> And nowadays, from business perspective, agility is the key, right? You have to move at the pace of the business. If you don't, you are losing. >> So, would it be safe to say that you guys have a network supercloud? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> We, pretty much, yeah. Absolutely. >> What does that mean to our customer? What's in it for them? What's the benefit to the customer? I got a network supercloud, it connects, provides SLA, all the capabilities I need. What do they get? What's the end point for them? What's the end? >> Atif, maybe you can talk some examples. >> The IT infrastructure is all like distributed now, right? So you have applications running in data centers. You have applications running in one cloud. Other cloud, public clouds, enterprises are depending on so many SaaS applications. So now, these are, you can call these endpoints. So a supercloud or a network cloud, from our perspective, it's a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle, which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint. So, you are able to connect to the supercloud or network cloud in one way no matter where you are. So now, whichever cloud you are in, whichever cloud you need to connect to. And also, it's not just connecting to the cloud. So you need to do a lot of stuff, a lot of networking inside the cloud also. So now, as Amir was saying, every cloud has its own from a networking, you know, the concept perspective or the construct, they are different. There are limitations in there also. So this supercloud, which is sitting on top, basically, your platform is sitting into the cloud, but the supercloud is built on top of using your platform. So that abstracts all those complexities, all those limitations. So now your limitations are whatever the limitations of that platform are. So now your platform, that platform is in our control. So we can keep building it, we can keep scaling it horizontally. Because one of the things is that, you know, in this cloud era, one of the things is autoscaling these services. So why can't the network now autoscale also, just like your other services. >> Network autoscaling is a genius idea, and I think that's a killer. I want to ask the the follow on question because I think, first of all, I love what you guys are doing. So, I think it's a great example of this new innovation. It's not obvious until you see it, right? Geographical is huge. So, you know, single instance, global instances, multiple instances, you're seeing global. How do you guys look at that global equation? Because as companies expand their clouds into geos, and then ultimately, you know, it's obviously continent, region and locales. You're going to have geographic issues. So, this is an extension of your network cloud? >> Amir: It is the extension of the network cloud because if you look at this hyperscalers, they're sitting pretty much everywhere in the globe. So, wherever their regions are, the beauty of building a supercloud is that you can by definition, be available in those regions. It literally takes a day or two of testing for our stack to run in those regions, to make sure there are no nuances that we run into, you know, for that region. The moment we bring it up in that region, all customers can onboard into that solution. So literally, what used to take months or years to build a global infrastructure, now, you can configure it in 10 minutes basically, and bring it up in less than one hour. Since when did we see any solution- >> And by the way, >> that can come up with. >> when the edge comes out too, you're going to start to see more clouds get bolted on. >> Exactly. And you can expand to the edge of the network. That's why we call cloud the new edge, right? >> John: Yeah, it is. Now, I think you guys got a good solutions, network clouds, superclouds, good. So the question on the premise side, so I get the cloud play. It's very cool. You can expand out. It's a nice layer. I'm sure you manage the SLAs between latency and all kinds of things. Knowing when not to do things. Physics or physics. Okay. Now, you've got the on-premise. What's the on-premise equation look like? >> So on-premise, the kind of customers, we are working with large enterprises, mid-size enterprises. So they have on-prem networks, they have deployed, in many cases, they have deployed SD-WAN. In many cases, they have MPLS. They have data centers also. And a lot of these companies are, you know, moving the applications from the data center into the cloud. But we still have large enterprise- >> But for you guys, you can sit there too with non server or is it a box or what is it? >> It's a software stack, right? So, we are a software company. >> Okay, so no box. >> No box. >> Okay, got it. >> No box. >> It's even better. So, we can connect any, as I mentioned, any endpoint, whether it's data centers. So, what happens is usually these enterprises from the data centers- >> John: It's a cloud endpoint for you. >> Cloud endpoint for us. And they need highspeed connectivity into the cloud. And our network cloud is sitting inside the or supercloud is sitting inside the cloud. So we need highspeed connectivity from the data centers. This is like multi-gig type of connectivity. So we enable that connectivity as a service. And as Amir was saying, you are able to bring it up in minutes, pretty much. >> John: Well, you guys have a great handle on supercloud. I really appreciate you guys coming on. I have to ask you guys, since you have so much experience in the industry, multiple inflection points you've guys lived through and we're all old, and we can remember those glory days. What's the big deal going on right now? Because you can connect the dots and you can imagine, okay, like a Lambda function spinning up some connectivity. I need instant access to a new route, throw some, I need to send compute to an edge point for process data. A lot of these kind of ad hoc services are going to start flying around, which used to be manually configured as you guys remember. >> Amir: And that's been the problem, right? The shadow IT, that was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment. So that's what we are trying to get the customers away from. Cloud teams came in, individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-premise environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. So, how do you bring it together? And that's what we are trying to solve for, right? At a large scale, in a carrier cloud center (indistinct). >> What do you call that? Shift right or shift left? Shift left is in the cloud native world security. >> Amir: Yes. >> Networking and security, the two hottest areas. What are you shifting? Up or down? I mean, the network's moving up the stack. I mean, you're seeing the run times at Kubernetes later' >> Amir: Right, right. It's true we're end-to-end virtualization. So you have plumbing, which is the physical infrastructure. Then on top of that, now for the first time, you have true end-to-end virtualization, which the cloud-like constructs are providing to us. We tried to virtualize the routers, we try to virtualize instances at the server level. Now, we are bringing it all together in a truly end-to-end virtualized manner to connect any endpoint anywhere across the globe. Whether it's on-premise, home, multiple clouds, or SaaS type environments. >> Yeah. If you talk about the technical benefits beyond virtualizations, you kind of see in virtualization be abstracted away. So you got end-to-end virtualization, but you don't need to know virtualization to take advantage of it. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> What are some of the tech involved where, what's the trend around on top of virtual? What's the easy button for that? >> So there are many, many use cases from the customers and they're, you know, some of those use cases, they used to deliver out of their data centers before. So now, because you, know, it takes a long time to spend something up in the data center and stuff. So the trend is and what enterprises are looking for is agility. And to achieve that agility, they are moving those services or those use cases into the cloud. So another technical benefit of like something like a supercloud and what we are doing is we allow customers to, you know, move their services from existing data centers into the cloud as well. And I'll give you some examples. You know, these enterprises have, you know, tons of partners. They provide connectivity to their partners, to select resources. It used to happen inside the data center. You would bring in connectivity into the data center and apply like tons of ACLs and whatnot to make sure that you are able to only connect. And now those use cases are, they need to be enabled inside the cloud. And the customer's customers are also, it's not just coming from the on-prem, they're coming from the cloud as well. So, if they're coming from the cloud as well as from on-prem, so you need like an infrastructure like supercloud, which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle all these use cases. So all of these use cases have to be, so that requires like moving those services from the data center into the cloud or into the supercloud. So, they're, oh, as we started building this service over the last four years, we have come across so many use cases. And to deliver those use cases, you have to have a platform. So you have to have your own platform because otherwise you are depending on somebody else's, you know, capabilities. And every time their capabilities change, you have to change. >> John: I'm glad you brought up the platform 'cause I want to get your both reaction to this. So Bob Muglia just said on theCUBE here at Supercloud, that supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question is, is supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> That's an interesting view on things, you know? I mean, if you think of it, you have to design or architect a solution before we turn it into a platform. >> John: It's a trick question actually. >> So it's a, you know, so we look at it as that you have to have an architectural approach end to end, right? And then you build a solution based on that approach. So, I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I think they go hand in hand. It's an architecture that you turn into a solution and provide that agility and high availability and disaster recovery capability that it built into that. >> It's interesting that these definitions might be actually redefined with this new configuration. >> Amir: Yes. >> Because architecture and platform used to mean something, like, aight here's a platform, you buy this platform. >> And then you architecture solution. >> Architect it via vendor. >> Right, right, right. >> Okay. And they have to deal with that architecture in the place of multiple superclouds. If you have too many stove pipes, then what's the purpose of supercloud? >> Right, right, right. And because, you know, historically, you built a router and you sold it to the customer. And the poor customer was supposed to install it all, you know, and interconnect all those things. And if you have 40, 50,000 router network, which we saw in our lifetime, 'cause there used to be many more branches when we were growing up in the networking industry, right? You had to create hierarchy and all kinds of things to figure out how to solve that problem. We are no longer living in that world anymore. You cannot deploy individual virtual instances. And that's what approach a lot of people are taking, which is a pure overly network. You cannot take that approach anymore. You have to evolve the architecture and then build the solution based on that architecture so that it becomes a platform which is readily available, highly scalable, and available. And at the same time, it's very, very easy to deploy. It's a SaaS type solution, right? >> So you're saying, do the architecture to get the solution for the platform that the customer has. >> Amir: Yes. >> They're not buying a platform, they end up with a platform- >> With the platform. >> as a result of Supercloud path. All right. So that's what's, so you mentioned, that's a great point. I want to double click on what you just said. 'Cause I like that what you said. What's the deployment strategy in your mind for supercloud? I'm an architect. I'm at an enterprise in the Midwest. I'm an insurance company, got some cloud action going on. I'm mostly on-premise. I've got the mandate to transform the company. We have apps. We'll be fully transformed in five years. What's my strategy? What do I do? >> Amir: The resources. >> What's the deployment strategy? Single global instance, code in every region, on every cloud? >> It needs to be a solution which is available as a SaaS service, right? So from the customer's perspective, they are onboarding into the supercloud. And then the supercloud is allowing them to do whatever they used to do, you know, historically and in the new world, right? That needs to come together. And that's what we have built is that, we have brought everything together in a way that what used to take months or years, and now taking an hour or two hours, and then people test it for a week or so and deploy it in production. >> I want to bring up something we were talking about before we were on camera about the TCP/IP, the OSI model. That was a concept that destroyed the proprietary narcissist. Work operating systems of the mini computers, which brought in an era of tech prosperity for generations. TCP/IP was kind of the magical moment that allowed for that kind of super networking connection. Inter networking is what's called as a category. It feels like something's going on here with supercloud. The way you describe it, it feels like there's this unification idea. Like the reality is we've got multiple stuff sitting around by default, you either clean it up or get rid of it, right? Or it's almost a, it's either a nuance, a new nuisance or chaos. >> Yeah. And we live in the new world now. We don't have the luxury of time. So we need to move as fast as possible to solve the business problems. And that's what we are running into. If we don't have automated solutions which scale, which solve our problems, then it's going to be a problem. And that's why SaaS is so important in today's world. Why should we have to deploy the network piecemeal? Why can't we have a solution? We solve our problem as we move forward and we accomplish what we need to accomplish and move forward. >> And we don't really need standards here, dude. It's not that we need a standards body if you have unification. >> So because things move so fast, there's no time to create a standards body. And that's why you see companies like ours popping up, which are trying to create a common infrastructure across all clouds. Otherwise if we vent the standardization path may take long. Eventually, we should be going in that direction. But we don't have the luxury of time. That's what I was trying to get to. >> Well, what's interesting is, is that to your point about standards and ratification, what ratifies a defacto anything? In the old days there was some technical bodies involved, but here, I think developers drive everything. So if you look at the developers and how they're voting with their code. They're instantly, organically defining everything as a collective intelligence. >> And just like you're putting out the paper and making it available, everybody's contributing to that. That's why you need to have APIs and terra form type constructs, which are available so that the customers can continue to improve upon that. And that's the Net DevOps, right? So that you need to have. >> What was once sacrilege, just sayin', in business school, back in the days when I got my business degree after my CS degree was, you know, no one wants to have a better mousetrap, a bad business model to have a better mouse trap. In this case, the better mouse trap, the better solution actually could be that thing. >> It is that thing. >> I mean, that can trigger, tips over the industry. >> And that that's where we are seeing our customers. You know, I mean, we have some publicly referenceable customers like Coke or Warner Music Group or, you know, multiple others and chart industries. The way we are solving the problem. They have some of the largest environments in the industry from the cloud perspective. And their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure. And they're able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and then figure out how to manage it and operate it. It's available as a service. >> John: And we've heard from your customer, Warner, they were just on the program. >> Amir: Yes. Okay, okay. >> So they're building a supercloud. So superclouds aren't just for tech companies. >> Amir: No. >> You guys build a supercloud for networking. >> Amir: It is. >> But people are building their own superclouds on top of all this new stuff. Talk about that dynamic. >> Healthcare providers, financials, high-tech companies, even startups. One of our startup customers, Tekion, right? They have these dealerships that they provide sales and support services to across the globe. And for them to be able to onboard those dealerships, it is 80% less time to production. That is real money, right? So, maybe Atif can give you a lot more examples of customers who are deploying. >> Talk about some of the customer activity. What are they like? Are they laggards, they innovators? Are they trying to hit the easy button? Are they coming in late or are you got some high customers? >> Actually most of our customers, all of our customers or customers in general. I don't think they have a choice but to move in this direction because, you know, the cloud has, like everything is quick now. So the cloud teams are moving faster in these enterprises. So now that they cannot afford the network nor to keep up pace with the cloud teams. So, they don't have a choice but to go with something similar where you can, you know, build your network on demand and bring up your network as quickly as possible to meet all those use cases. So, I'll give you an example. >> John: So the demand's high for what you guys do. >> Demand is very high because the cloud teams have- >> John: Yeah. They're going fast. >> They're going fast and there's no stopping. And then network teams, they have to keep up with them. And you cannot keep deploying, you know, networks the way you used to deploy back in the day. And as far as the use cases are concerned, there are so many use cases which our customers are using our platform for. One of the use cases, I'll give you an example of these financial customers. Some of the financial customers, they have their customers who they provide data, like stock exchanges, that provide like market data information to their customers out of data centers part. But now, their customers are moving into the cloud as well. So they need to come in from the cloud. So when they're coming in from the cloud, you cannot be giving them data from your data center because that takes time, and your hair pinning everything back. >> Moving data is like moving, moving money, someone said. >> Exactly. >> Exactly. And the other thing is like you have to optimize your traffic flows in the cloud as well because every time you leave the cloud, you get charged a lot. So, you don't want to leave the cloud unless you have to leave the cloud, your traffic. So, you have to come up or use a service which allows you to optimize all those traffic flows as well, you know? >> My final question to you guys, first of all, thanks for coming on Supercloud Program. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And you guys have a great positioning and I'm a big fan. And I have to ask, you guys are agile, nimble startup, smart on the cutting edge. Supercloud concept seems to resonate with people who are kind of on the front range of this major wave. While all the incumbents like Cisco, Microsoft, even AWS, they're like, I think they're looking at it, like what is that? I think it's coming up really fast, this trend. Because I know people talk about multi-cloud, I get that. But like, this whole supercloud is not just SaaS, it's more going on there. What do you think is going on between the folks who get it, supercloud, get the concept, and some are who are scratching their heads, whether it's the Ciscos or someone, like I don't get it. Why is supercloud important for the folks that aren't really seeing it? >> So first of all, I mean, the customers, what we saw about six months, 12 months ago, were a little slower to adopt the supercloud kind of concept. And there were leading edge customers who were coming and adopting it. Now, all of a sudden, over the last six to nine months, we've seen a flurry of customers coming in and they are from all disciplines or all very diverse set of customers. And they're starting to see the value of that because of the practical implications of what they're doing. You know, these shadow IT type environments are no longer working and there's a lot of pressure from the management to move faster. And then that's where they're coming in. And perhaps, Atif, if you can give a few examples of. >> Yeah. And I'll also just add to your point earlier about the network needing to be there 'cause the cloud teams are like, let's go faster. And the network's always been slow because, but now, it's been almost turbocharged. >> Atif: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, like there was no choice here. You had to move in this industry. And the other thing I would add a little bit is now if you look at all these enterprises, most of their traffic is from, even from which is coming from the on-prem, it's going to the cloud SaaS applications or public clouds. And it's more than 50% of traffic, which is leaving your, you know, what you used to call, your network or the private network. So now it's like, you know, before it used to just connect sites to data centers and sites together. Now, it's a cloud as well as the SaaS application. So it's either internet bound or the public cloud bound. So now you have to build a network quickly, which caters to all these use cases. And that's where like something- >> And you guys, your solution to me is you eliminate all that work for the customer. Now, they can treat the cloud like a bag of Legos. And do their thing. Well, I oversimplify. Well, you know I'm talking about. >> Atif: Right, exactly. >> And to answer your question earlier about what about the big companies coming in and, you know, now they slow to adopt? And, you know, what normally happens is when Cisco came up, right? There used to be 16 different protocols suites. And then we finally settled on TCP/IP and DECnet or AppleTalk or X&S or, you know, you name it, right? Those companies did not adapt to the networking the way it was supposed to be done. And guess what happened, right? So if the companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time. >> Well, I think the force and function too is the cloud teams as well. So you got two evolutions. You got architectural relevance. That's real as impact. >> It's very important. >> Cost, speed. >> And I look at it as a very similar disruption to what Cisco's the world, very early days did to, you know, bring the networking out, right? And it became the internet. But now we are going through the cloud. It's the cloud era, right? How does the cloud evolve over the next 10, 15, 20 years? Everything's is going to be offered as a service, right? So slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing. Very, you know, simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in the cloud-like manners. >> And that makes the networks hardened and more secure. >> More secure. >> It's a great way to be secure. You remember the glory days, we'll go back 15 years. The Cisco conversation was, we got to move up to stack. All the manager would fight each other. Now, what does that actually mean? Stay where we are. Stay in your lane. This is kind of like the network's version of moving up the stack because not so much up the stack, but the cloud is everywhere. It's almost horizontally scaled. >> It's extending into the on-premise. It is already moving towards the edge, right? So, you will see a lot- >> So, programmability is a big program. So you guys are hitting programmability, compatibility, getting people into an environment they're comfortable operating. So the Ops people love it. >> Exactly. >> Spans the clouds to a level of SLA management. It might not be perfectly spanning applications, but you can actually know latencies between clouds, measure that. And then so you're basically managing your network now as the overall infrastructure. >> Right. And it needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward, right? Because customers do not want to wait to be able to troubleshoot. They don't want to be able to wait to deploy something, right? So, it needs to be a level of automation. >> Okay. So the question for you guys both on we'll end on is what is the enablement that, because you guys are a disruptive enabler, right? You create this fabric. You're going to enable companies to do stuff. What are some of the things that you see and your customers might be seeing as things that they're going to do as a result of having this enablement? So what are some of those things? >> Amir: Atif, perhaps you can talk through the some of the customer experience on that. >> It's agility. And we are allowing these customers to move very, very quickly and build these networks which meet all these requirements inside the cloud. Because as Amir was saying, in the cloud era, networking is changing. And if you look at, you know, going back to your comment about the existing networking vendors. Some of them still think that, you know, just connecting to the cloud using some concepts like Cloud OnRamp is cloud networking, but it's changing now. >> John: 'Cause there's apps that are depending upon. >> Exactly. And it's all distributed. Like IT infrastructure, as I said earlier, is all distributed. And at the end of the day, you have to make sure that wherever your user is, wherever your app is, you are able to connect them securely. >> Historically, it used to be about building a router bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, and then interconnecting those routers. Now, it's all about horizontal scale. You don't need to build big, you need to scale it, right? And that's what cloud brings to the customer. >> It's a cultural change for Cisco and Juniper because they have to understand that they're still could be in the game and still win. >> Exactly. >> The question I have for you, what are your customers telling you that, what's some of the anecdotal, like, 'cause you guys have a good solution, is it, "Oh my god, you guys saved my butt." Or what are some of the commentary that you hear from the customers in terms of praise and and glory from your solution? >> Oh, some even say, when we do our demo and stuff, they say it's too hard to believe. >> Believe. >> Like, too hard. It's hard, you know, it's >> I dont believe you. They're skeptics. >> I don't believe you that because now you're able to bring up a global network within minutes. With networking services, like let's say you have APAC, you know, on-prem users, cloud also there, cloud here, users here, you can bring up a global network with full routed connectivity between all these endpoints with security services. You can bring up like a firewall from a third party or our services in the middle. This is a matter of minutes now. And this is all high speed connectivity with SLAs. Imagine like before connecting, you know, Singapore to U.S. East or Hong Kong to Frankfurt, you know, if you were putting your infrastructure in columns like E-connects, you would have to go, you know, figure out like, how am I going to- >> Seal line In, connect to it? Yeah. A lot of hassles, >> If you had to put like firewalls in the middle, segmentation, you had to, you know, isolate different entities. >> That's called heavy lifting. >> So what you're seeing is, you know, it's like customer comes in, there's a disbelief, can you really do that? And then they try it out, they go, "Wow, this works." Right? It's deployed in a small environment. And then all of a sudden they start taking off, right? And literally we have seen customers go from few thousand dollars a month or year type deployments to multi-million dollars a year type deployments in very, very short amount of time, in a few months. >> And you guys are pay as you go? >> Pay as you go. >> Pay as go usage cloud-based compatibility. >> Exactly. And it's amazing once they get to deploy the solution. >> What's the variable on the cost? >> On the cost? >> Is it traffic or is it. >> It's multiple different things. It's packaged into the overall solution. And as a matter of fact, we end up saving a lot of money to the customers. And not only in one way, in multiple different ways. And we do a complete TOI analysis for the customers. So it's bandwidth, it's number of connections, it's the amount of compute power that we are using. >> John: Similar things that they're used to. >> Just like the cloud constructs. Yeah. >> All right. Networking supercloud. Great. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on Supercloud. >> Atif: Thank you. >> And looking forward to seeing more of the demand. Translate, instant networking. I'm sure it's going to be huge with the edge exploding. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. So this is Supercloud 2 event here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. The network Supercloud is here. Checkout Alkira. I'm John Furry, the host. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The unraveling of market enthusiasm continued in Q4 of 2022 with the earnings reports from the US hyperscalers, the big three now all in. As we said earlier this year, even the cloud is an immune from the macro headwinds and the cracks in the armor that we saw from the data that we shared last summer, they're playing out into 2023. For the most part actuals are disappointing beyond expectations including our own. It turns out that our estimates for the big three hyperscaler's revenue missed by 1.2 billion or 2.7% lower than we had forecast from even our most recent November estimates. And we expect continued decelerating growth rates for the hyperscalers through the summer of 2023 and we don't think that's going to abate until comparisons get easier. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we share our view of what's happening in cloud markets not just for the hyperscalers but other firms that have hitched a ride on the cloud. And we'll share new ETR data that shows why these trends are playing out tactics that customers are employing to deal with their cost challenges and how long the pain is likely to last. You know, riding the cloud wave, it's a two-edged sword. Let's look at the players that have gone all in on or are exposed to both the positive and negative trends of cloud. Look the cloud has been a huge tailwind for so many companies like Snowflake and Databricks, Workday, Salesforce, Mongo's move with Atlas, Red Hats Cloud strategy with OpenShift and so forth. And you know, the flip side is because cloud is elastic what comes up can also go down very easily. Here's an XY graphic from ETR that shows spending momentum or net score on the vertical axis and market presence in the dataset on the horizontal axis provision or called overlap. This is data from the January 2023 survey and that the red dotted lines show the positions of several companies that we've highlighted going back to January 2021. So let's unpack this for a bit starting with the big three hyperscalers. The first point is AWS and Azure continue to solidify their moat relative to Google Cloud platform. And we're going to get into this in a moment, but Azure and AWS revenues are five to six times that of GCP for IaaS. And at those deltas, Google should be gaining ground much faster than the big two. The second point on Google is notice the red line on GCP relative to its starting point. While it appears to be gaining ground on the horizontal axis, its net score is now below that of AWS and Azure in the survey. So despite its significantly smaller size it's just not keeping pace with the leaders in terms of market momentum. Now looking at AWS and Microsoft, what we see is basically AWS is holding serve. As we know both Google and Microsoft benefit from including SaaS in their cloud numbers. So the fact that AWS hasn't seen a huge downward momentum relative to a January 2021 position is one positive in the data. And both companies are well above that magic 40% line on the Y-axis, anything above 40% we consider to be highly elevated. But the fact remains that they're down as are most of the names on this chart. So let's take a closer look. I want to start with Snowflake and Databricks. Snowflake, as we reported from several quarters back came down to Earth, it was up in the 80% range in the Y-axis here. And it's still highly elevated in the 60% range and it continues to move to the right, which is positive but as we'll address in a moment it's customers can dial down consumption just as in any cloud. Now, Databricks is really interesting. It's not a public company, it never made it to IPO during the sort of tech bubble. So we don't have the same level of transparency that we do with other companies that did make it through. But look at how much more prominent it is on the X-axis relative to January 2021. And it's net score is basically held up over that period of time. So that's a real positive for Databricks. Next, look at Workday and Salesforce. They've held up relatively well, both inching to the right and generally holding their net scores. Same from Mongo, which is the brown dot above its name that says Elastic, it says a little gets a little crowded which Elastic's actually the blue dot above it. But generally, SaaS is harder to dial down, Workday, Salesforce, Oracles, SaaS and others. So it's harder to dial down because commitments have been made in advance, they're kind of locked in. Now, one of the discussions from last summer was as Mongo, less discretionary than analytics i.e. Snowflake. And it's an interesting debate but maybe Snowflake customers, you know, they're also generally committed to a dollar amount. So over time the spending is going to be there. But in the short term, yeah maybe Snowflake customers can dial down. Now that highlighted dotted red line, that bolded one is Datadog and you can see it's made major strides on the X-axis but its net score has decelerated quite dramatically. Openshift's momentum in the survey has dropped although IBM just announced that OpenShift has a a billion dollar ARR and I suspect what's happening there is IBM consulting is bundling OpenShift into its modernization projects. It's got a, that sort of captive base if you will. And as such it's probably not as top of mind to the respondents but I'll bet you the developers are certainly aware of it. Now the other really notable call out here is CloudFlare, We've reported on them earlier. Cloudflare's net score has held up really well since January of 2021. It really hasn't seen the downdraft of some of these others, but it's making major major moves to the right gaining market presence. We really like how CloudFlare is performing. And the last comment is on Oracle which as you can see, despite its much, much lower net score continues to gain ground in the market and thrive from a profitability standpoint. But the data pretty clearly shows that there's a downdraft in the market. Okay, so what's happening here? Let's dig deeper into this data. Here's a graphic from the most recent ETR drill down asking customers that said they were going to cut spending what technique they're using to do so. Now, as we've previously reported, consolidating redundant vendors is by far the most cited approach but there's two key points we want to make here. One is reducing excess cloud resources. As you can see in the bars is the second most cited technique and it's up from the previous polling period. The second we're not showing, you know directly but we've got some red call outs there. Reducing cloud costs jumps to 29% and 28% respectively in financial services and tech telco. And it's much closer to second. It's basically neck and neck with consolidating redundant vendors in those two industries. So they're being really aggressive about optimizing cloud cost. Okay, so as we said, cloud is great 'cause you can dial it up but it's just as easy to dial down. We've identified six factors that customers tell us are affecting their cloud consumption and there are probably more, if you got more we'd love to hear them but these are the ones that are fairly prominent that have hit our radar. First, rising mortgage rates mean banks are processing fewer loans means less cloud. The crypto crash means less trading activity and that means less cloud resources. Third lower ad spend has led companies to reduce not only you know, their ad buying but also their frequency of running their analytics and their calculations. And they're also often using less data, maybe compressing the timeframe of the corpus down to a shorter time period. Also very prominent is down to the bottom left, using lower cost compute instances. For example, Graviton from AWS or AMD chips and tiering storage to cheaper S3 or deep archived tiers. And finally, optimizing based on better pricing plans. So customers are moving from, you know, smaller companies in particular moving maybe from on demand or other larger companies that are experimenting using on demand or they're moving to spot pricing or reserved instances or optimized savings plans. That all lowers cost and that means less cloud resource consumption and less cloud revenue. Now in the days when everything was on prem CFOs, what would they do? They would freeze CapEx and IT Pros would have to try to do more with less and often that meant a lot of manual tasks. With the cloud it's much easier to move things around. It still takes some thinking and some effort but it's dramatically simpler to do so. So you can get those savings a lot faster. Now of course the other huge factor is you can cut or you can freeze. And this graphic shows data from a recent ETR survey with 159 respondents and you can see the meaningful uptick in hiring freezes, freezing new IT deployments and layoffs. And as we've been reporting, this has been trending up since earlier last year. And note the call out, this is especially prominent in retail sectors, all three of these techniques jump up in retail and that's a bit of a concern because oftentimes consumer spending helps the economy make a softer landing out of a pullback. But this is a potential canary in the coal mine. If retail firms are pulling back it's because consumers aren't spending as much. And so we're keeping a close eye on that. So let's boil this down to the market data and what this all means. So in this graphic we show our estimates for Q4 IaaS revenues compared to the "actual" IaaS revenues. And we say quote because AWS is the only one that reports, you know clean revenue and IaaS, Azure and GCP don't report actuals. Why would they? Because it would make them look even, you know smaller relative to AWS. Rather, they bury the figures in overall cloud which includes their, you know G-Suite for Google and all the Microsoft SaaS. And then they give us little tidbits about in Microsoft's case, Azure, they give growth rates. Google gives kind of relative growth of GCP. So, and we use survey data and you know, other data to try to really pinpoint and we've been covering this for, I don't know, five or six years ever since the cloud really became a thing. But looking at the data, we had AWS growing at 25% this quarter and it came in at 20%. So a significant decline relative to our expectations. AWS announced that it exited December, actually, sorry it's January data showed about a 15% mid-teens growth rate. So that's, you know, something we're watching. Azure was two points off our forecast coming in at 38% growth. It said it exited December in the 35% growth range and it said that it's expecting five points of deceleration off of that. So think 30% for Azure. GCP came in three points off our expectation coming in 35% and Alibaba has yet to report but we've shaved a bid off that forecast based on some survey data and you know what maybe 9% is even still not enough. Now for the year, the big four hyperscalers generated almost 160 billion of revenue, but that was 7 billion lower than what what we expected coming into 2022. For 2023, we're expecting 21% growth for a total of 193.3 billion. And while it's, you know, lower, you know, significantly lower than historical expectations it's still four to five times the overall spending forecast that we just shared with you in our predictions post of between 4 and 5% for the overall market. We think AWS is going to come in in around 93 billion this year with Azure closing in at over 71 billion. This is, again, we're talking IaaS here. Now, despite Amazon focusing investors on the fact that AWS's absolute dollar growth is still larger than its competitors. By our estimates Azure will come in at more than 75% of AWS's forecasted revenue. That's a significant milestone. AWS is operating margins by the way declined significantly this past quarter, dropping from 30% of revenue to 24%, 30% the year earlier to 24%. Now that's still extremely healthy and we've seen wild fluctuations like this before so I don't get too freaked out about that. But I'll say this, Microsoft has a marginal cost advantage relative to AWS because one, it has a captive cloud on which to run its massive software estate. So it can just throw software at its own cloud and two software marginal costs. Marginal economics despite AWS's awesomeness in high degrees of automation, software is just a better business. Now the upshot for AWS is the ecosystem. AWS is essentially in our view positioning very smartly as a platform for data partners like Snowflake and Databricks, security partners like CrowdStrike and Okta and Palo Alto and many others and SaaS companies. You know, Microsoft is more competitive even though AWS does have competitive products. Now of course Amazon's competitive to retail companies so that's another factor but generally speaking for tech players, Amazon is a really thriving ecosystem that is a secret weapon in our view. AWS happy to spin the meter with its partners even though it sells competitive products, you know, more so in our view than other cloud players. Microsoft, of course is, don't forget is hyping now, we're hearing a lot OpenAI and ChatGPT we reported last week in our predictions post. How OpenAI is shot up in terms of market sentiment in ETR's emerging technology company surveys and people are moving to Azure to get OpenAI and get ChatGPT that is a an interesting lever. Amazon in our view has to have a response. They have lots of AI and they're going to have to make some moves there. Meanwhile, Google is emphasizing itself as an AI first company. In fact, Google spent at least five minutes of continuous dialogue, nonstop on its AI chops during its latest earnings call. So that's an area that we're watching very closely as the buzz around large language models continues. All right, let's wrap up with some assumptions for 2023. We think SaaS players are going to continue to be sticky. They're going to be somewhat insulated from all these downdrafts because they're so tied in and customers, you know they make the commitment up front, you've got the lock in. Now having said that, we do expect some backlash over time on the onerous and generally customer unfriendly pricing models of most large SaaS companies. But that's going to play out over a longer period of time. Now for cloud generally and the hyperscalers specifically we do expect accelerating growth rates into Q3 but the amplitude of the demand swings from this rubber band economy, we expect to continue to compress and become more predictable throughout the year. Estimates are coming down, CEOs we think are going to be more cautious when the market snaps back more cautious about hiring and spending and as such a perhaps we expect a more orderly return to growth which we think will slightly accelerate in Q4 as comps get easier. Now of course the big risk to these scenarios is of course the economy, the FED, consumer spending, inflation, supply chain, energy prices, wars, geopolitics, China relations, you know, all the usual stuff. But as always with our partners at ETR and the Cube community, we're here for you. We have the data and we'll be the first to report when we see a change at the margin. Okay, that's a wrap for today. I want to thank Alex Morrison who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our Boston studio getting this up on LinkedIn Live. Thank you for that. Kristen Martin also and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our Editor-in-Chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcast. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com, at siliconangle.com where you can see all the data and you want to get in touch. Just all you can do is email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante if you if you got something interesting, I'll respond. If you don't, it's either 'cause I'm swamped or it's just not tickling me. You can comment on our LinkedIn post as well. And please check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Ignite 2022. Dave we're just talking about how many times we're in Vegas. And we were here two weeks ago with our guest who's back in Alumni. And it's a blur, right? >> It's true, I lost count. Luckily I'm not flying red eye tonight. So that's good. >> I'm impressed. >> Excited about that. >> Yeah >> I'm actually going to enjoy the, nightlife here for a period of time. And, you know, we were at re-Invent. >> Yeah. >> And what a difference. This is nice and relaxed. You have time. You're not getting bumped in the hallway. >> Right. >> A lot of time for learning. So it's been great show. >> It's been great. And one of the things that we've been talking about is the supply chain. Securing the modern software supply chain is really complicated. We've got an Alumni back with us, to talk about what Palo Alto is doing in that respect. Ankur Shah joins us. The SVP and GM of Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back. >> Yeah, happy to be back. Good to see you again. Dave and Lisa. >> It's been two long weeks. >> Ankur: I know. It's been two weeks, yeah >> Dave: It's kind of crazy. I mean, ReInvent really was a blur. And it's like you had everything coming at you. And there was obviously a big chunk of security, but you. It was just so much to absorb. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Yeah, and I couldn't get into any of the sessions versus at Ignite. I mean, you could, you could learn a lot. To your point Dave. And 70,000 people versus 3000 in change. Big difference. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. So we touched on the Cider acquisition. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Which was announced the intent to acquire last month. Let's dig into a little bit more of that, and then some of the great things that had been announced. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> In the last couple of days. >> Oh, absolutely. So, this is something that we have been marinating for last nine months. Thinking about how best to secure supply chain. And this is software supply chain. The modern application software is fairly complex. You know, back in the days when I was a developer, it was a simple three tier application. Ship the code once a year, et cetera. But now with microservices, new architectures, Kubernetes Public Cloud, we talked about this. It's getting super complicated, and the customers are really worried about securing their entire supply chain. Which is nothing but the software pipeline. And so we started looking at a whole bunch of companies and Cider really stood out. I mean, they had, they were the innovators in this space. Very early days, we've seen supply chain attack. But there hasn't been a really good and strong solution in that space. And Cider just delivered that incredible team. Great technology, super excited about what that integration will look like. in the coming quarters. >> What do we need to know about them? I mean, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't familiar with Cider until I saw you guys made the announcement of the intent to acquire them. What, what should we know about them? Why Cider? What was it that attracted you to them? >> Ankur: Yeah, so, you know, we have a history of technology acquisitions as you know, over the last four years, just in the public cloud. We acquire over half a a dozen companies, small and large. And typically we are always looking for companies who have the next gen technology available. Technology that is more in tune with how application software is going to look like in future. So we're not always going after companies that are making you know, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in a year and all. We're looking for the right tech. The future. And that's what we found in Cider. Like they have a really strong application security background. And AppSec just broadly speaking, supply chain is part of it. But application security, just broadly speaking, is right for disruption. You've got a lot of vendors, who have been around for like last two decades. Old school stuff, lots and lots of false positives. So we've been bolstering, beefing up our portfolio in the application security space. And Cider really fits right nicely into it. Because it can like I said, secure a lot of technology and tooling, that software developers use as part of their software supply chain. So, great founding team, great technology. It was a perfect fit. >> Talk about integration. We spoke with Nikesh yesterday, with Nir, with a whole bunch of folks. Lee this morning. BJ yesterday as well. And one of the things that seems to stick out at me. With all the shows that we do, is the focus that Palo Alto has on ensuring that it's making the right acquisitions. But that it's the integration, is really seems to be like leading part of the strategy. That seems to be a little bit of a differentiator to me. >> Yeah, it absolutely is. There are two ways to integrate a technology into an existing platform. And Prisma Cloud is a platform as you know. Code-to-cloud, CNAPP platform as we call it. One is just kind of slotted in, put the whole thing in a box. And that's basically making one plus one equal to two. We're looking for high leverage in integrations, whereby once that integration comes along. It makes the rest of the platform even better and superior. It makes that technology look even better. So that's why there's a lot of focus on ensuring that we're delivering the right type of integration, that delivers instant customer value. And that makes the overall platform even superior. So customers don't feel like hey, like there's just one more add-on, on top of the other thing. >> Lisa: Right, not a bolt on. >> So that's why there's a lot of focus on that. Getting the strategy nailed. Because the founding teams generally have a preconceived notion about how the world looks like. Then they understand how Prisma cloud and Palo Alto Networks think about it. And then, we sort of merge the two ideas, and build something that's incredible. So I am, we're spending a lot of time in integration. That honeymoon phase of like, let's high five acquisitions done, that's over. Now it's the grinding work of actually getting this right. And you know, getting hundreds and thousands of customers. >> Well I like how you don't have the private equity mentality. It's not about EBITDA and cashflow. We'll take care of that. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, it's about getting that integration. Getting that flywheel effect, inside the platform. You know, we said one plus one equals, maybe even more than two. Can you explain Prisma Cloud Secrets Security? What is that all about? What do we need to know about that? >> Ankur: Absolutely. So, the developers, you know generally store some stuff in the code repo for their automation work to build application. And that thing, the API keys or as Secrets are stored in code repo. It shouldn't be. Or even if they are, they should be encrypted, or locked down and things of that nature. But, you know, the need for speed trumps everything else. Developers want to go fast. And sometimes they're like, okay well. I guess my application needs this particular, you know API access token or secret. I'm just going to stick it in the code. Now the challenge with that is that, if somebody gets hold of your code repo. Now not only is your code repo, which has all your sensitive data. Your code is the life and blood of a technology company. That's in trouble. But also those secrets and API access keys can be used to log into your cloud accounts. And there you may have sensitive customer data. Everything that you have as a technology company stored in that public cloud accounts. So that's the worry. It's usually the initial access for the kill chain. Because that's where the attacks start. Let me get the secret, let me get the API access key. And let me see what I can do in public cloud. So we are now giving customers the visibility into where the secrets are stored. More importantly, it just right there on developer's face. In the code repo as they're checking in the code. They say why, hey, there's a secret here. Are you sure you want to, you want to keep it like this, no? Okay, well then you can either encrypt it, or just get rid of it. So we're making, we're bringing security where the developers are in their code repo, et cetera. >> So I can see a lot of developers saying, yeah, go ahead, encrypt it. So I don't have to do anything else, you know, extra. It's almost, the analogy is a very small you know, version of this. Its like, use a password manager. You store all your passwords in your contacts on your phone, right? I mean, somebody gets a hold of your contacts, you're screwed. >> Ankur: That's exactly right. >> And so, but I could still see a lot of developers say, check in the box. Say, yeah just encrypt it, leave it there. But you're saying best practice is to not to do that, right? >> Yeah, usually you're not supposed to, you know, store all your secrets, et cetera in code repo to begin with. But if you do, you know, you use a key wall like technology to really encrypt it and store it in a secret manner, yeah. >> Dave: There's an old saying, bad user behavior trump's great security every time. >> Ankur: Every time. >> But this is an example where, we know you're going to have bad behavior. So we're going to protect the bad behavior. >> Yeah, and actually, sorry Lisa, just to that point. The bad user behavior trumps good security. The classic example, this happened three weeks ago. Three, four weeks ago, where Dropbox, one of the file sharing companies there. 120 plus code repos were exposed. And the way their attack started, was a simple social engineering attack. Bad user behavior. There was an email, hey, like your passwords are updated for your, you know, this code plugin. Can you enter the password? And boom, now you have access to the code repo. And now if you have secrets inside of it, now, you know all bets are off. >> Are there hard-coded secrets versus like, I mean, like I think like, like you were saying, Dave. Like usernames and passwords and tokens, versus like soft coded secrets. >> Ankur: It's, I think it, this is more so two forms of it, you know. The most primary one is what we call the API access keys. And this keys are used to access cloud accounts, workloads and things of that nature. But there are actually secret secrets. Could be database login passwords, et cetera. The application is using it to spin up databases. Now, you know, you have access to the data stores. Any other application, there's a login password, all of that stuff. So it's less about the user password, but more the application and databases and things of that nature. >> Dave: So again, and, again, everybody should be using password managers. But when you use a password manager, it's going to give you a long list of passwords, that are either been compromised or are weak. And you just go uh, okay. So can you help? How do you help customers identify what the high risk? You know, API, you know, access are versus those ones that they may not have to worry about. >> Ankur: Yeah, look. You know, secrets aside. Risk prioritization is one of the biggest topics that our customers have across the board, in cloud security. All the security vendors are really, really good at one thing, generating alerts. Everybody does it. They generate an alert. You know, your ring camera, if you've got one. I mean this pop up every day, like every minute rather. Well like can you prioritize it for me? What should I really look at it? So that's a number one thing. What Prisma Cloud does is, you know, contextualize it. What the real risk is? They can tell you like, hey, here's the kill chain. If this thing, you know, goes to public internet. These are the potential exposures that you have. So we provide a prioritized risk of critical alerts that customers have to take care of before they can start taking care of more hygiene type of stuff, right? So that's how we do it. Like we leverage a lot of technology. We apply a lot of context. We tell you like, hey, this code repo is not protected by multifactor authentication. And then there's a secret inside. Are you sure, you know, you don't want to fix it? So that's what we do. But it's a great question. Top of mind for all our customers. And that's how we think about it across the board. Versus generating just alerts all the time. >> Dave: Is the strategy, Because we all know phishing is the sort of most, you know obvious way to. It's the top way in which people get hacked. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Is your strategy essentially to say. Okay we know that's going to happen, so we're going to try to protect it at the back end. How much of the, maybe it's an industry question. more so than just a Palo Alto specifically, How much emphasis is do you think the industry is taking or should be taking on stopping that, you know that those phishing attacks? Because if that's the number one problem you know, maybe that's where we should be starting. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's typically the initial vector, for a lot of attacks to your point. But there is one thing that technology and AI cannot solve. Which is the user behavior, to your point. Like we can't get into the heads of the user. I mean, you can train them, you can do everything. You can't prevent somebody from clicking a button. Of course there's technology out there for email security that does that. But your point is, right, it's going to happen. Now what do you do? How do you protect your applications, your crown jewel? You know, whether it's in the cloud or it's in the code repo. So a lot of what we are trying to do in code security, or cloud security, or in general at Palo Alto Networks. is to protect those crown jewel. Because we can't prevent somebody from doing something. User behavior is hard to change. >> Dave: So it's almost like, okay, you left your front door open. Somebody's going to walk in, but oh, they walk into a vault. And they don't know where to go. And there's nowhere they can- >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, nothing they can take. They can't get to the silverware or the jewelry. >> I think that's it, yeah. >> What are some of the things, like as we look at, we're wrapping up calendar year '22 heading into '23. That customers can look to Palo Alto Networks to help them achieve? One of the things that we talked about with Nikesh and Niri yesterday, is consolidation. Like, and you guys just did a recent, survey. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> About the state of Cyber, and organizations on average have 366 apps in their environment. 31 security tools, 30 to 50 security tools. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Consolidation is really key there. What are some of the things that you are excited about to deliver to customers where consolidation is concerned? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Where software supply chain security is concerned in the next year? >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are over 3000 security vendors. And this can be, I mean you talked about average customer having 300. I was talking to a CSO, this was last year for one of the largest financial institution I go, "How many security tools do you have?" He got 120. I said, why? He goes, we have a no vendor left behind policy. >> Wow. >> It's crazy. >> Dave: What? >> Obviously he was joking, but it's crazy, right? Like that's how the CSO's are. >> Dave: I mean, he was kidding. >> Yeah. >> Dave: But recognized that. Wow. >> Yeah, and, this is the state the security industry is in. And our mission has been, and Lee and Nikesh and Niri talked about it. Is just platforms, will platforms take moonshots, things long term. And especially the, macro headwinds that we're seeing. We're hearing more and more from the customers that, look we're not going to buy point product. Then we got to buy another product that stitches it all together. We need platforms, whether it's for zero trust, Prisma SaaS, whether it's cloud. Prisma cloud or for your sock transformation. You know XIM and Cortex line of products. So I think you're going to see more and more of that in 2023. I'm confident in that. >> We heard from Lee today, the world record's 400. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> That's crazy. >> He's going for it. He's got a ways to go. 120 He's got to... >> Maybe he wasn't, that guy wasn't kidding about his no vendor left behind policy. (laughing) Do you have Ankur, a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Palo Alto delivers and continues to. You know, 'cause one of the things that Nikesh said in his keynote was that you know, security's a data problem. Well every company these days, in every industry has to be a data company. But really what they need to be able to be is a secured data company. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> How are you guys enabling that? >> Oh, absolutely. Look, many customer examples come to mind, but speaking of data. You know, one of, some of our largest customers who are protecting their PCI workers where they have sensitive data. They're using for example, Prisma Cloud, to ensure that malicious attacks don't happen. And those workloads are used for credit card processing. They're processing tens of thousands of credit card transactions a second. And make sure that nobody gets hold of that. And that's why they have to make sure that nobody is. No attacker is trying to get hold of the sensitive data, to your point, So we have customers across financial services, media and entertainment technology company. Where we are helping them go as fast as possible in public cloud. Go through digital transformation, by securing their applications. >> Dave: What's the T-shirt say? I see code. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: Secure from Code to Cloud. >> Lisa: Shift Happens. >> Shift Happens, Secrets from Code to Cloud. >> I love that. I was looking at that, going back to that, what's next in cyber survey? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> It said 74% of respondents, and I believe there was 1300 CIO's, CXO's that were surveyed globally. Where they said security is slowing down DevOps. Can customers look to Palo Alto Networks to help them? >> Ankur: Be enablers? >> Yes. >> Yeah, hundred percent. Look, the conversation over the last few years have changed now. Security used to say like, oh, I don't know about these people who are building applications. The DevOps is like security slowing down. I think there's an opportunity for companies like Palo Alto Networks, to build the bridge between the two. And the way we do it is make the securities easy, simple and not super intrusive. Where developers have to do a natural thing. And one part of it, and I talked about it earlier, is bring security where the developers are. In their code repo, in their IDE. Make it super simple. Don't make them do unnatural things. And it just, this is no different from changing the behavior of our kids. Right? Like you make them do unnatural things, they're not going to do it. But if it is part of their regular, you know, day-to-day operating procedures. I think they're going to be more open to change. Yeah. So I think it's possible. And Palo Alto has a huge responsibility to bridge the divide between the apps team, or the DevOps and the security organization. >> Lisa: Lots of great stuff to come. We thank you so much for coming back, two weeks. Only being on two weeks ago. We appreciate your insights, learning more information. It's great to see you at Palo Alto Ignite. And we'll have to have you back on. 'Cause we know that there's so much more to follow with respect to what you're doing. And shifting left, shift happens. >> Awesome. Lisa, Dave, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. For Ankur Shah and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live and emerging tech coverage.

>>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) >> Good morning, fellow cloud nerds, and welcome back to day four of AWS re:Invent. We are here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my cohost Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're on theCUBE. Paul, how you doing? You doing well? >> We're staggering to the conclusion. >> (laughing) It's almost the end then. >> And I say that only talking about my feet. This event is still going strong. The great keynote this morning by Werner Vogels about system architecture and really teaching 70,000 people how to design systems. AWS really taking advantage of this event to educate its customer base and- >> So much education here. >> Yeah, and that was a fantastic sort of cap to the keynotes we've seen this week. >> Yeah, I'm impressed Paul, our first AWS re:Invent. I think we're doing pretty good all things considered. >> Well, we're still alive. >> And our next guest actually looks like he's been sleeping this week, which is remarkable. Please welcome Ayal to the show. Ayal, how you doing today? >> I'm good, I'm good. Thank you for having me. >> It's our pleasure. You're with Anjuna. >> Yes. >> Just in case the audience isn't familiar, what's Anjuna? >> Anjuna is an enterprise security company. We focus in the space of confidential computing. And essentially we enable people to run anything they want in any environment with complete security and privacy. >> Which is a top priority for pretty much every single person here. >> Ayal: That is true. >> Now, confidential computing, I keep hearing that term. >> Yeah, let's go there. >> Is it, I mean, is there a trademark associated with it? Is there a certification? Is the concept or is it actually a set of principles and frameworks? >> Savannah: Give us the scoop. >> Yeah, so confidential computing is essentially a set of technologies that were added to the hardware itself, to the CPU, and now to GPUs by the hardware vendors. So Intel, AMD, Arm, Nvidia AWS with their own hardware solution for this. And essentially what it allows you to do is to run workloads on top of the CPU and the GPU in a way that even if somebody gets full access to the infrastructure, you know, root access, physical access, they're not going to have any access to the data and the code running on top of it. And as you can imagine in cloud environments, this is extremely, extremely (indistinct). >> And this done through encryption? >> It involves encryption. If you go one step deeper, it involves protecting the data while it's running, data and memory, when the application is processing it. Which is always been the missing piece in terms of where you protect data. >> So I got excited when I looked at the show notes because you are serving some of the most notoriously security strict customers in the market. Can you tell us about the Israeli Ministry of Defense? >> Sure. So essentially what we do with the Israel Ministry of Defense and other customers, especially on the on the government side, one of the challenges government has is that they have to, if they want security and privacy in the cloud, they have to use something like a gov cloud. And sometimes that makes sense, but sometimes either the gov cloud is not ready because of legal battles or just it takes time to set it up. In some countries, it's just not going to make financial sense for the clouds to create a gov cloud. So what we do is we enable them to run in the commercial cloud with the security and privacy of a gov cloud. >> Was that, I can imagine, so you took them to the public cloud, correct? >> Ayal: Yes. >> Was that a challenging process? When I think of national security, I can imagine a business transformation like that would be a little nerve-wracking. >> Oh, definitely. It was a long process and they went like, "This is probably one of the best security experts on the planet." And they went extremely deep in making sure that this aligns with what they would be able to do to actually move sensitive data to the commercial cloud. Which, obviously, that the requirements are higher than anything I've ever seen from anybody else. And the fact that they were willing to publicly talk about this and be a public reference for us shows the level of confidence that they have in the underlying technology, in the security and privacy that this allows them to achieve. >> We still hear reservations, particularly from heavily regulated industries, about moving into the cloud. Concerns about security, data ownership, shared responsibility. >> Ayal: Yes. >> Are those real, are those valid? Or is the technology foundation now strong enough that they should not be worried about those things? >> Yeah, this is an excellent question, because the the shared responsibility model, is exactly sort of the core of what this is about. The shared responsibility model essentially means the cloud's, sort of by definition, the cloud is somebody else managing the infrastructure for you, right? And if somebody's managing the infrastructure for you they have full access to what you do on top of that infrastructure. That's almost the definition. And that's always been sort of one of the core security problems that was never solved. Confidential computing solves this. It means that you can use the cloud without the clouds having any access to what you do on top of their infrastructure. And that means that if the clouds get hacked, your data is safe. If an employee of the cloud decides to get access to your data, they can't. They just don't have any access. Or if the government comes to the cloud with a subpoena, the clouds can't give them access to your data, which is obviously very important for European customers and other customers outside of the US. So this is essentially what confidential computing does and it allows to break that shared responsibility model, where you as the customer get full control of your data back. >> Now, do you need the hardware foundation to do that? Or are you solving this problem in software? >> No. So we do need a hardware foundation for this which is now available in every cloud. And it's part of every server CPU that Intel ship, that AMD ship. This is part of almost every data center in AWS. But what we bring to the table at Anjuna, is every time there was a fundamental shift in computer architecture, you needed a software stack on top of it to essentially make it usable. And I think the best last example was VMware, right? But virtualization was extremely powerful technology that nobody was using until VMware built a software stack to make it super simple to virtualize anything. And to some extent that was the birth of the public cloud. We would never have a public cloud without virtualization. We're seeing the same level of shift now with confidential computing on the hardware side. And all the large players are behind this. They're all part of the confidential computing consortium that pushes this. But the challenge customers are running into, is for them to go use this they have to go refactor and rebuild every application. >> Why? >> And nobody's going to go do that. And that's exactly what we help them with. >> Yeah. >> In terms of why, as part of confidential computing, what it essentially means is that the operating system is outside the cross cycle. You, you don't want to cross the operating system because you don't want somebody with root access to have any access to your data. And what this means is every application obviously communicates with the operating system pretty often, right? To send something to the network or some, you know, save something to the file system, which means you have to re-architect your application and break it into two: a confidential piece and a piece that's communicating with the operating system and build some channel for the two sides to communicate. Nobody's going to go do that for every application. We allow you to essentially do something like Anjuna run application and it just runs in a confidential computing environment. No changes. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that. So when we're thinking about, I think we've talked a little bit about it, but I think there's a myth of control when we're talking about on-prem. Everybody thinks that things are more secure. >> Right. >> It's not the case. Tell us how enterprise security changes once when a customer has adopted Anjuna. >> Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. I think the clouds can put a lot more effort and expertise into bringing security than the data center. But you definitely have this sort of more sense of security in your data center because you own the full stack, right? It's your people, it's your servers, it's your networks in the cloud >> Savannah: It's in your house, so to speak. Yeah. >> Exactly. And the cloud is the third party managing all that for you. And people get very concerned about that, and to some extent for a good reason. Because if a breach happens regardless of whose fault it is, the customer's going to be the one sort of left holding the bag and dealing with the aftermath of the breach. So they're right to be concerned. In terms of what we do, once you run things in confidential computing, you sort of solve the core problem of security. One of the core problems of security has always been when somebody gets access to the infrastructure especially root access to the infrastructure, it's game over. They have access to everything. And a lot of how security's been built is almost like these bandaid solutions to try to solve. Like perimeter security is how do I make sure nobody gets access to the infrastructure if they don't need to, right? All these detection solutions is once they're in the infrastructure, how do I detect that they've done something they shouldn't have? A lot of the vulnerability management is how do I make sure everything is patched? Because if somebody gets access how do I make sure they don't get root access? And then they really get access to everything. And conversation computing solves all of that. It solves the root cause, the root problem. So even if somebody gets root access, even if somebody has full access to the infrastructure, they don't have access to anything, which allows you to one, essentially move anything you want to the public cloud regardless, of the sensitivity of it, but also get rid of a lot of these other sort of bandaid solutions that you use today to try to stop people from getting that access because it doesn't matter anymore. >> Okay. So cyber security is a one and a half trillion dollar industry, growing at over 10% a year. Are you saying that if organizations were to adopt confidential computing universally that industry would not be necessary? >> No, I think a lot of it will have to change with confidential computing. Exactly, like the computer industry changed with virtualization. If you had asked when VMware just got started if the data centers are going to like, "Oh, this is going to happen," I don't think anybody could have foreseen this. But this is exactly what virtualization did. Confidential computing will change the the security industry in a massive way, but it doesn't solve every security problem. What it essentially does is it moves the perimeter from the machine itself, which used to be sort of the smallest atom, to be around the workload. And what happens in the machine doesn't matter anymore. You still need to make sure that your workload is protected. So companies that make sure that you write secure code are still going to be needed. Plus you're going to need security for things like denial of service. Because if somebody runs, you know, gets access to their infrastructure, they can stop you from running but your data is going to be protected. You're not going to need any of these data protection solutions around the box anymore. >> Let's hang out there for a second. Where do you see, I mean what an exciting time to be you, quite frankly, and congratulations on all of your success so far. Where are we going in the next two to five years? >> Yeah, I think with confidential computing the first thing that this is going to enable is essentially moving everything to the public cloud. I think the number one concern with the cloud kind of like you mentioned, is security and privacy. >> Savannah: Right. >> And this essentially eliminates that need. And that's why the clouds are so excited about this. That's why AWS talks about it. And I think Steve Schmidt, the of CISO of Amazon, used to be the CISO of AWS, talks about confidential computing as the future of data security and privacy. And there's a reason why he does that. We've seen other clouds talk about this and push this. That's why the clouds are so excited about this. But even more so again, I think over time this will allow you to essentially remove a lot of the security tools that exist there, kind of reimagine security in a better way. >> Savannah: Clean it up a little bit. Yeah. >> Exactly. And over time, I think it's going to change the world of compute even more because one of the things this allows you to do is the closer you get to the edge, the more security and privacy problems you have. >> Savannah: Right. And so many variables. >> Exactly. And it's basically out there in the wild, and people can get physical access. >> Quite literally a lot of the time, yeah. >> Exactly. And what confidential computing does, it provides that complete security and privacy regardless of even if somebody has physical access, which will allow you to move workloads much closer to the edge or to the edge itself instead of sending everything back to your backend to process things. >> We have interviewed a number of security companies here during this event, and I have to say, confidential computing has never come up. They don't talk about it. Why is that? Is there an awareness problem? >> Savannah: Are they threatened? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest, and to some extent, this is exactly like I kept bringing up VMware. Like VMware's, you can think of Salesforce, when they talked about SaaS, they sort of embedded the concept of SaaS. No other company on the planet was talking about SaaS. They created a new category and now almost everything is SaaS. VMware with virtualization, right? Nobody was using it, and now, almost everything is virtualized. Confidential computing is a new way of doing things. It's basically a kind have to shift the way of how you think about security and how you think about privacy. And this is exactly what we're seeing. I don't expect other security companies to talk about this. And to some extent, one of the things I've realized that we're almost more of an infrastructure company than a security company, because we bake security to be part of the infrastructure. But we're seeing more and more the clouds talk about this. The CPU vendors talk about this. We talk to customers more and more. Like almost every large bank I talk to now has a confidential computing strategy for 2023. This is now becoming part of the mainstream. And yeah, security companies will have to adopt or die if they don't fit into that new world that it is going to create >> This is the new world order, baby, get on the train or get left behind. >> Ayal: Exactly. >> I love it. This is a really fascinating conversation and honestly what you're doing makes so much sense. Yeah, you don't need me to validate your business model, but I will, just for the sake of that. >> Thank you. >> We have a new challenge here at re:Invent on theCUBE where we are looking for your 30 second Instagram reel hot take, thought leadership. What's the biggest theme, key takeaway from the show or experience this year for you? >> Yeah, so for me, obviously focusing on confidential computing. I think this is just going to be similar to how no network was encrypted 10 years ago and today every network is encrypted with TLS and HTTPS. And how five years ago no disc was encrypted, and today every disc is encrypted with disc encryption. The one missing piece is memory. Memory is where data is exposed now. I think within a few years all memory is going to be encrypted and it's just going to change two industries: the security industry as well as the computer industry. >> Paul: Does that include cache memory? >> What's that? >> Does that include cache memory? >> That is encrypting the RAM essentially. So everything, this is the one last place where data is not encrypted, and that's exactly what confidential computing brings to the table. >> Are there any performance concerns with encrypting memory? >> That's a phenomenal question. One of the really nice things about confidential computing is that the heavy lifting is done by the hardware vendors themselves as part of the hardware and not part of the critical path in the CPU. It's very similar to the TLS acceleration cards, if you remember those, which allows us to be extremely, extremely performant. And that's why I think this is going to be for everything. Because every time we had a security solution that had no performance impact and was super simple to use it just became the default, because why wouldn't you use it for everything? >> Ayal, this has been absolutely fascinating. We could talk to you all day. Unfortunately, we're out of time. But really thank you so much for coming on the show. Now, we feel more confident in terms of our confidential computing knowledge and definitely learned a lot. Thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic four day live stream at AWS re:Invent here in Sin City with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. This is day one, I should say evening one of three and a half days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Ante. Dave, we love talking about data, but the most important thing about data is if there's a breach, which are happening more and more frequently, that you can get it back. So data backup, data protection, data resiliency, hugely >>Important. Well, it used to be you got snake bit and then you closed the barn door after the horse ran away. Now I think people are a lot more aware that they gotta protect their data and be proactive about it. It can't just be an afterthought. >>It can't be an afterthought. We've got the CTO of own backup here. We're gonna be talking about that Adrian Consul. Adrian, welcome to the Cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>Talk a little bit about own backup. The what is unique about it? >>So we are the leading SaaS data protection vendor. We've built a business based on the fact that SAS has become a center of gravity for a lot of companies. Now, a lot of people have moved with digital transformation and more recently with the covid effects to digitize their business. Our platform is powered by aws. We've got 5,000 plus customers that trust what we do and to look after their data. We help them with resiliency, compliance, security, and we do it for people who are using Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 people >>Are gonna say, wait a minute, my data in the cloud isn't already backed up. Why do I Right. That's what they're gonna say. So how do you >>Respond? Yes. Lots of people say that. That is exactly right. So what people are beginning to realize much more is that there's actually a shared responsibility model between your SaaS provider and yourselves. And you know, the SaaS providers do a phenomenal job of giving you disaster recovery, a database copy, networking infrastructure, a bunch of security controls at that level. But they're pretty frank about the data you put in there is your data, right? And just that it's up to you to put the data in there. It's also up to you to keep it in there. And that's not so easy when you've got lots of integrations. You've got users running around in the applications, et cetera. So yeah, the heart of it is, it's your data, you put it in there, you better be looking after it too. >>That's so important for customers to understand what is Salesforce's responsibility? What's my responsibility to the really nail that? What are some of the main challenges as we see the cybersecurity landscape has changed so much in the last couple of years? Ransomware is now a, when it's gonna happen to us. How often, what's gonna be the significance? What are some of the main challenges that you're talking with customers about these days? >>So really on the data side, it definitely hinges around ransomware. But I would also say when you think about what digital transformation has done for customers, moved you to a world where you've gotta be on 24 7, right? You can't afford to have systems down, whether that's your public website or even things your salespeople are using. And so on the, on the data side, we talk a lot with our customers about really recovery. Not so much about backup. Backup is in our name, but our product is called Recover. And there's a reason for that. We're trying to focus on how can we help customers quickly get back to a good state when they've had an incident. So that's kind of the data side of it. On the security side of it, it's really about how do they manage all the controls that SaaS providers now give them. >>Make sure the right people in their organization can see the right data and the data. They should not be able to see the data they shouldn't be able to see. And that's just getting increasingly complex, really anchored around the fact that the volume of the data is growing, the complexity of that data is growing and really the sensitivity of that data is growing, right? When you think about all the data privacy rules, 10 years ago we didn't care about keeping a whole bunch of data around. Now you've kind of gotta get rid of it. So you've actually gotta manage it through its lifecycle. >>So the shared responsibility model has applied to data protection is, is kind of an interesting topic cuz you always think about it for security and I know security and data protection are these adjacencies, but it's a complicated situation cuz you've got shared responsibility models now across multiple clouds. It's gotta be way more complicated across SaaS because you've got different policies, you've got a lot more SaaS than you have. There's three clouds, four, if you put in Alibaba, you know, and yeah, I know this hosting and Oracle and IBM, et cetera, but hyperscalers and so, but there's dozens if not hundreds of SaaS products at a company. So are you able to create a consistent experience and, and for your customers across all those, now of course, I know you're not doing hundreds and thousands of SaaS products, but you got, you know, pretty big ones here. ServiceNow, Salesforce, right? 365. Let's start >>There. So, so consistency we are hoping will come honestly where the industry is right now. It's getting, getting each one in a state where you are comfortable with it, >>Right? Get it protected. >>Yeah. Take a sales force. A typical sales force environment right now has a survey we did recently, about 2000 fields that have sensitive data in it in some way, shape or form. You've couple that with about 80, 85% of the users can see some fields that are sensitive. How you manage that matrix is, is just really hard. And that's part of what our secure product brings to the table, helps you understand who can see what and why they can see it. >>So where are your customer conversations these days? Are you talking to CIOs and CISOs? Is this, is this at that level >>It for some of our customers? Yes, it absolutely gets there. The, the real core of our discussion is the guy who owns and runs the sales technology, for example, right? Or the ServiceNow technology or typically a center of excellence. Those have been, those have been a key way for us to help an organization understand what the risks are, what's necessary, what they're having to do given that they don't have a backup now and have those, those shared responsibility model conversations. That's kind of where >>It starts. Are you finding that most customers are not backing up Salesforce, for example, or ServiceNow? Or are they switching from a competitor over to own back? >>Sad to say that it's mostly not. Yeah, it's, it's predominantly, I thought my cloud provider had me covered for that. >>So the market is huge. Yes. Massive opportunity. Yeah. >>Yeah. If you think of the number of Salesforce instances, not ignoring ServiceNow and Dynamics for a moment, Salesforce talks about, I don't know, 150,000 customers somewhere in that mark and we have 500 of them. >>So how do you get the first penguin off the iceberg? What's the sort of customer conversation like just in terms of, you know, educating them and sending them and, and kind of pushing 'em over the edge so that they actually do start protecting their data? >>Yeah, so, so sadly it sometimes starts with, I had a data loss, I spent weeks working at it, I got 75% of my data back, but not all of it. And that's a real customer quote. And in other cases it's, sorry. In other cases it's how do we, you know, how are you thinking about your sales source environment, particularly customers that have a lot of them, how sensitive is the data? How critical is the data in there? What are you doing to protect it? Today we have some people doing, doing weekly exports, which Salesforce provides. It's a manual step. The first penguin off the iceberg, as you say, it's kind of to say, Hey, well why didn't you automate that? Right? Don't have to rely on somebody on a Tuesday pulling the data down. So that's, those are places where it starts. >>Yeah. So, you know, Lisa, I was saying earlier that, you know, it closed the barn door, right? And that's, that's essentially what Adrian's saying is you've, you've got, you basically gotta look for that customer that's been snake bitten. Yeah. But generally speaking, I feel like there's more awareness. I was gonna ask you, you know, in this economic climate is, is data protection recession proof? And I think it's, it's not right. People sort of, but at the same time, if you're not proactive about it, you really could hurt your business. Absolutely. So what, what are your thoughts on customers getting more efficient with regard to their, their data estate, their data protection? Can you turn it into a positive? >>I think, I think it absolutely is a positive. Obviously we're in an environment where CIOs are having to look at every penny they're spending. But if you think about what you're using the data for, you're making business decisions based on this data every day. Your, your entire organization is making business decisions. So if you've got missing data or inaccurate data, you're making suboptimal decisions, right? So that comes back to data protection, comes back to brand reputation. Yes. And it comes back to how quickly can you get the data back into the shape you need it to be. And that again, is why we focus on the recovery side of the equation, not just the backup side. Right. Sorry. I would also say that in these recession bit times you've got fewer people doing as much work as you had before that raises the chance of errors. And we see across our customer base 50% of the data corruption or or data loss occurrences happen cause a human did something by mistake. Yeah, sure. And if you up the, the stress of those humans, you're gonna get more errors. >>Should you, when you're talking with IT professionals or maybe sales leaders, should it be thinking differently about spend for data protection versus general spend? Given that the whole point is to be able to recover data when something happens? >>I think you have to think about it from a kind of a risk and a business continuity perspective, right? Data protection tangibly reduces your business risk, right? It gets you back up faster. It, it helps you stay running. It helps ensure that the right people have access to the right data and from a secure standpoint and, and all of those just lower your risk. And if you're having discussions as CIOs should be with their business counterparts around business continuity, with the criticality of the data that's in Salesforce and these other SaaS applications today, I think it's pretty obvious that, that you should have a strong data protection strategy around >>It. Absolutely. >>Your business is at >>Risk, right? And nobody wants to be the next headline. No. My last question for you, Adrian, is if there was a billboard near your headquarters, what's that? What would it say? What's that tagline about own backup that really nails it home? >>I think it's, nobody operating in the cloud should ever lose data and that's what we're here to do. >>Excellent. Adrian, it's been a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for talking with David, me, great talking to you about and back up what you guys are doing and really how organizations need to be very aware of that shared responsibility model. It sounds like you guys are well on your way to helping them understand that. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you both. Thank you. Best of luck. >>Appreciate it. Thank our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro music)

(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro music)

>>Okay, we're back. I'm Dave Valante with The Cube and you're watching Evolving Influx DB into the smart data platform made possible by influx data. Anna East Otis Georgio is here. She's a developer advocate for influx data and we're gonna dig into the rationale and value contribution behind several open source technologies that Influx DB is leveraging to increase the granularity of time series analysis analysis and bring the world of data into realtime analytics. Anna is welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, so IO X is being touted as this next gen open source core for Influx db. And my understanding is that it leverages in memory, of course for speed. It's a kilo store, so it gives you compression efficiency, it's gonna give you faster query speeds, it gonna use store files and object storages. So you got very cost effective approach. Are these the salient points on the platform? I know there are probably dozens of other features, but what are the high level value points that people should understand? >>Sure, that's a great question. So some of the main requirements that IOCs is trying to achieve and some of the most impressive ones to me, the first one is that it aims to have no limits on cardinality and also allow you to write any kind of event data that you want, whether that's lift tag or a field. It also wants to deliver the best in class performance on analytics queries. In addition to our already well served metrics queries, we also wanna have operator control over memory usage. So you should be able to define how much memory is used for buffering caching and query processing. Some other really important parts is the ability to have bulk data export and import, super useful. Also, broader ecosystem compatibility where possible we aim to use and embrace emerging standards in the data analytics ecosystem and have compatibility with things like sql, Python, and maybe even pandas in the future. >>Okay, so a lot there. Now we talked to Brian about how you're using Rust and and which is not a new programming language and of course we had some drama around Russ during the pandemic with the Mozilla layoffs, but the formation of the Russ Foundation really addressed any of those concerns. You got big guns like Amazon and Google and Microsoft throwing their collective weights behind it. It's really, adoption is really starting to get steep on the S-curve. So lots of platforms, lots of adoption with rust, but why rust as an alternative to say c plus plus for example? >>Sure, that's a great question. So Rust was chosen because of his exceptional performance and rebi reliability. So while rust is synt tactically similar to c c plus plus and it has similar performance, it also compiles to a native code like c plus plus. But unlike c plus plus, it also has much better memory safety. So memory safety is protection against bugs or security vulnerabilities that lead to excessive memory usage or memory leaks. And rust achieves this memory safety due to its like innovative type system. Additionally, it doesn't allow for dangling pointers and dangling pointers are the main classes of errors that lead to exploitable security vulnerabilities in languages like c plus plus. So Russ like helps meet that requirement of having no limits on card for example, because it's, we're also using the Russ implementation of Apache Arrow and this control over memory and also Russ, Russ Russ's packaging system called crates IO offers everything that you need out of the box to have features like AY and a weight to fixed race conditions to protect against buffering overflows and to ensure thread safe ay caching structures as well. So essentially it's just like has all the control, all the fine grain control, you need to take advantage of memory and all your resources as well as possible so that you can handle those really, really high ity use cases. >>Yeah, and the more I learned about the the new engine and the, and the platform IOCs et cetera, you know, you, you see things like, you know, the old days not even to even today you do a lot of garbage collection in these, in these systems and there's an inverse, you know, impact relative to performance. So it looks like you're really, you know, the community is modernizing the platform, but I wanna talk about Apache Arrow for a moment. It's designed to address the constraints that are associated with analyzing large data sets. We, we know that, but please explain why, what, what is Arrow and and what does it bring to Influx db? >>Sure, yeah. So Arrow is a, a framework for defining in memory calmer data and so much of the efficiency and performance of IOCs comes from taking advantage of calmer data structures. And I will, if you don't mind, take a moment to kind of illustrate why calmer data structures are so valuable. Let's pretend that we are gathering field data about the temperature in our room and also maybe the temperature of our stove. And in our table we have those two temperature values as well as maybe a measurement value, timestamp value, maybe some other tag values that describe what room and what house, et cetera we're getting this data from. And so you can picture this table where we have like two rows with the two temperature values for both our room and the stove. Well usually our room temperature is regulated so those values don't change very often. >>So when you have calm oriented st calm oriented storage, essentially you take each row, each column and group it together. And so if that's the case and you're just taking temperature values from the room and a lot of those temperature values are the same, then you'll, you might be able to imagine how equal values will then neighbor each other and when they neighbor each other in the storage format. This provides a really perfect opportunity for cheap compression. And then this cheap compression enables high cardinality use cases. It also enables for faster scan rates. So if you wanna define like the min and max value of the temperature in the room across a thousand different points, you only have to get those a thousand different points in order to answer that question and you have those immediately available to you. But let's contrast this with a row oriented storage solution instead so that we can understand better the benefits of calmer oriented storage. >>So if you had a row oriented storage, you'd first have to look at every field like the temperature in, in the room and the temperature of the stove. You'd have to go across every tag value that maybe describes where the room is located or what model the stove is. And every timestamp you'd then have to pluck out that one temperature value that you want at that one times stamp and do that for every single row. So you're scanning across a ton more data and that's why row oriented doesn't provide the same efficiency as calmer and Apache Arrow is in memory calmer data, calmer data fit framework. So that's where a lot of the advantages come >>From. Okay. So you've basically described like a traditional database, a row approach, but I've seen like a lot of traditional databases say, okay, now we've got, we can handle colo format versus what you're talking about is really, you know, kind of native it, is it not as effective as the, is the form not as effective because it's largely a, a bolt on? Can you, can you like elucidate on that front? >>Yeah, it's, it's not as effective because you have more expensive compression and because you can't scan across the values as quickly. And so those are, that's pretty much the main reasons why, why RO row oriented storage isn't as efficient as calm, calmer oriented storage. >>Yeah. Got it. So let's talk about Arrow data fusion. What is data fusion? I know it's written in rust, but what does it bring to to the table here? >>Sure. So it's an extensible query execution framework and it uses Arrow as its in memory format. So the way that it helps influx DB IOx is that okay, it's great if you can write unlimited amount of cardinality into influx cbis, but if you don't have a query engine that can successfully query that data, then I don't know how much value it is for you. So data fusion helps enable the, the query process and transformation of that data. It also has a PANDAS API so that you could take advantage of PDA's data frames as well and all of the machine learning tools associated with pandas. >>Okay. You're also leveraging par K in the platform course. We heard a lot about Par K in the middle of the last decade cuz as a storage format to improve on Hadoop column stores. What are you doing with Par K and why is it important? >>Sure. So Par K is the calm oriented durable file format. So it's important because it'll enable bulk import and bulk export. It has compatibility with Python and pandas so it supports a broader ecosystem. Parque files also take very little disc disc space and they're faster to scan because again they're column oriented in particular, I think PAR K files are like 16 times cheaper than CSV files, just as kind of a point of reference. And so that's essentially a lot of the, the benefits of par k. >>Got it. Very popular. So and these, what exactly is influx data focusing on as a committer to these projects? What is your focus? What's the value that you're bringing to the community? >>Sure. So Influx DB first has contributed a lot of different, different things to the Apache ecosystem. For example, they contribute an implementation of Apache Arrow and go and that will support clearing with flux. Also, there has been a quite a few contributions to data fusion for things like memory optimization and supportive additional SQL features like support for timestamp, arithmetic and support for exist clauses and support for memory control. So yeah, Influx has contributed a a lot to the Apache ecosystem and continues to do so. And I think kind of the idea here is that if you can improve these upstream projects and then the long term strategy here is that the more you contribute and build those up, then the more you will perpetuate that cycle of improvement and the more we will invest in our own project as well. So it's just that kind of symbiotic relationship and appreciation of the open source community. >>Yeah. Got it. You got that virtuous cycle going, the people call it the flywheel. Give us your last thoughts and kind of summarize, you know, where what, what the big takeaways are from your perspective. >>So I think the big takeaway is that influx data is doing a lot of really exciting things with Influx DB IOCs and I really encourage if you are interested in learning more about the technologies that Influx is leveraging to produce IOCs, the challenges associated with it and all of the hard work questions and I just wanna learn more, then I would encourage you to go to the monthly tech talks and community office hours and they are on every second Wednesday of the month at 8:30 AM Pacific time. There's also a community forums and a community Slack channel. Look for the influx D DB underscore IAC channel specifically to learn more about how to join those office hours and those monthly tech tech talks as well as ask any questions they have about IOCs, what to expect and what you'd like to learn more about. I as a developer advocate, I wanna answer your questions. So if there's a particular technology or stack that you wanna dive deeper into and want more explanation about how influx TB leverages it to build IOCs, I will be really excited to produce content on that topic for you. >>Yeah, that's awesome. You guys have a really rich community, collaborate with your peers, solve problems, and you guys super responsive, so really appreciate that. All right, thank you so much and East for explaining all this open source stuff to the audience and why it's important to the future of data. >>Thank you. I really appreciate it. >>All right, you're very welcome. Okay, stay right there and in a moment I'll be back with Tim Yokum. He's the director of engineering for Influx Data and we're gonna talk about how you update a SaaS engine while the plane is flying at 30,000 feet. You don't wanna miss this.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube, here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud-native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or SuperCloud for modern application cloud-native developers. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. My pleasure to have here Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud-native at scale conversation. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, cloud-native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native developers, basically DevOps in the CICD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the SuperCloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on SuperCloud as it fits to cloud-native as scales up? >> Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why SuperCloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud-native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where, instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right, where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private, on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think SuperCloud is an appropriate term for that. >> So, you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. What even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IOT, OT and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share, because you got to have edge. So, hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the SuperCloud or across multiple edges and regions? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think, you know, in the context of this, this term of SuperCloud, I think, it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axes, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then, on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axes you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it. Right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when your scale is not at the level. >> Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We're seeing cloud-native becomes successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because about at scale, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Challenges here. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I like to call it, you know, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one problem, one way to think about it is you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right. Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. And the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right. Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right. And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster right. But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you got to make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So, I think that's another example of problems that occur. >> Okay. So, I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say, it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, okay, we got this, we configure it. And then, they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you got to scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about start expanding. I think, one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with P zeros and P ones from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage. Right. And so, in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. And so, as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like (indistinct) hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. >> So, this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >> Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for a complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So, what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >> So, what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the bumper sticker? >> Yeah. >> What would it do? >> There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that assembly line brings, right? Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot, and it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like deliver the pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those. >> So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, CICD, pipelining. >> Madhura: Exactly. >> So, that's what you're trying to simplify that OPS piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really OPS, it's their OPS, it's coding. >> Yeah. Not just developer, the OPS, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middle layer of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated. And so, it solves problems for both those teams. >> Yeah, it's DevOps. So, the DevOps is the cloud-needed developer. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >> Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are, or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source, well-known solutions. >> And, I want get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer, developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, Platform9, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial. Can you explain the open-source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, people want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but you know, maybe want to buy the commercial. So, I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Open source and commercial relationship. >> Yeah. I think, you know, starting with why open source, I think, it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies components, and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open-source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that, we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source and also open source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind a block box. >> Well, and that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with SuperCloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. >> Madhura: That's right. >> And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way is, well, but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards and open source growing so fast, you have that confluence of, you know, a way for us to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian (indistinct) uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, you know, I want to check it out first before I get married. >> Madhura: Right. >> And that's what open source. So, this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in, you know, two things, I think one is just, you know, this cloud-native space is so vast that if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so. Right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a Saas-hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open-source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production environment. >> I have to ask you. Now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlon? What's in it for me? You know. 'Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlon? I'm a customer. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public cloud-native Kubernetes, and then, we have our CICD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then, there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can, your CICD pipelines can deploy the apps, somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah, you know, properly configuring them. And as these things start by being done hand grown. And then, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their homegrown DIY solutions for this. I mean, a number of folks that I talk to that have built Terraform automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So, it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course, technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think, (indistinct) would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on EKS Amazon, and we want to scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability to, >> Yeah, I think, people are scared. I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think, this is going to come up at (indistinct) this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record, I want to see other companies that have used it. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How would you answer that question to, or challenge, you know, hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLA, I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, two parts to that, right? One is Arlon leverages existing open-source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlon uses ArgoCD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open-source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Arlon also makes use of cluster API (indistinct), which is a Kubernetes' sub-component, right? For life cycle management of clusters. So, there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or open-source projects that will find Arlon to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with ArgoCD. Now, Arlon just extends the scope of what ArgoCD can do. And so, that's one. And then, the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arlon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your (indistinct) test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. >> And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform9 customers with, that are familiar with Argo and then Arlon? What's been some of the feedback? >> Yeah, I think, the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlon, and we talk about the fact that it uses ArgoCD they start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So, we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlon before we even wrote a single line of code saying, this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would've purchased it. So, it's been really great validation. >> All right. So, next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look at, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap, I don't need another project that's so I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenants of Platform9 has always been that, we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS-hosted manner for our customers, right? So, our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so, from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so, they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today, and, you know, give you an inventory. And then, >> So, customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign, >> Correct. >> Call you guys. >> Absolutely. Either they have massive large clusters. Right. That they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now, they have management challenges. >> So, especially, operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And or scale out. >> That's right. Exactly. >> And you provide that layer of policy. >> Absolutely. Yes. >> That's the key value here. >> That's right. >> So, policy-based configuration for cluster scale up. >> Profile and policy-based, declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >> If I asked you how this enables SuperCloud, what would you say to that? >> I think, this is one of the key ingredients to SuperCloud, right? If you think about a SuperCloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life-saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale. You know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So, that Arlon solves, then you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen and you're going to have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And Arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then, especially if you're running at on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make SuperCloud successful. And you know, Arlon flows in one, >> Okay, so now, the next level is, okay, that makes sense. It's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How does that impact the app developers of the cloud-native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact, if you do all those things as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >> Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my OPS counterpart to do their part, right? And so, this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >> So, this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full-stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlon solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to be (indistinct), they're designed to do, the question is, what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlon, Argo, and on all the other goodness to automate, what does some of the signals, is it downtime? Is it failed apps, is it latency? What are some of the things that, >> Madhura: Yeah, absolutely. >> Would be indications of things are F'ed up a little bit. >> Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners, and they're extremely interested in this because the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own scripts. So, these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your mean time to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble OPS team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So, those are the signals. >> This is the cloud-native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that, if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the (indistinct) terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology's running, the business is the business. >> Yeah. >> Company is the application. >> Yeah. >> So, it can't be down. So, there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top-line revenue? That's the number one conversation. >> Yeah. >> Do you see the same thing? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO, CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the technology that's, you know, that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially, when you're talking about, let's say, retailers or those kinds of large-scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So, I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >> Final question. What does cloud-native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want them to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >> What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee, production is running absolutely smooth. And he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. >> John: And the CIO doesn't exist and there's no CISO, there at the beach. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud-native at scale here on The Cube. Thank you for your time. >> Fantastic. Thanks for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier here, for special program presentation, special programming cloud-native at scale, enabling SuperCloud modern applications with Platform9. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. I'm Dave Vellante with The Cube and you're watching Evolving InfluxDB into the smart data platform made possible by influx data. Anais Dotis-Georgiou is here. She's a developer advocate for influx data and we're going to dig into the rationale and value contribution behind several open source technologies that InfluxDB is leveraging to increase the granularity of time series analysis and bring the world of data into realtime analytics. Anais welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, so IOx is being touted as this next gen open source core for InfluxDB. And my understanding is that it leverages in memory, of course for speed. It's a kilometer store, so it gives you compression efficiency it's going to give you faster query speeds, it's going to see you store files and object storages so you got very cost effective approach. Are these the salient points on the platform? I know there are probably dozens of other features but what are the high level value points that people should understand? >> Sure, that's a great question. So some of the main requirements that IOx is trying to achieve and some of the most impressive ones to me the first one is that it aims to have no limits on cardinality and also allow you to write any kind of event data that you want whether that's lift tag or a field. It also wants to deliver the best in class performance on analytics queries. In addition to our already well served metric queries we also want to have operator control over memory usage. So you should be able to define how much memory is used for buffering caching and query processing. Some other really important parts is the ability to have bulk data export and import, super useful. Also, broader ecosystem compatibility where possible we aim to use and embrace emerging standards in the data analytics ecosystem and have compatibility with things like SQL, Python and maybe even Pandas in the future. >> Okay, so a lot there. Now we talked to Brian about how you're using Rust and which is not a new programming language and of course we had some drama around Rust during the pandemic with the Mozilla layoffs but the formation of the Rust Foundation really addressed any of those concerns and you got big guns like Amazon and Google and Microsoft throwing their collective weights behind it. It's really adoption is really starting to get steep on the S-curve. So lots of platforms, lots of adoption with Rust but why Rust as an alternative to say C++ for example? >> Sure, that's a great question. So Rust was chosen because of his exceptional performance and reliability. So while Rust is syntactically similar to C++ and it has similar performance it also compiles to a native code like C++ But unlike C++ it also has much better memory safety. So memory safety is protection against bugs or security vulnerabilities that lead to excessive memory usage or memory leaks. And Rust achieves this memory safety due to its like innovative type system. Additionally, it doesn't allow for dangling pointers and dangling pointers are the main classes of errors that lead to exploitable security vulnerabilities in languages like C++. So Rust like helps meet that requirement of having no limits on cardinality, for example, because it's we're also using the Rust implementation of Apache Arrow and this control over memory and also Rust's packaging system called Crates IO offers everything that you need out of the box to have features like async and await to fix race conditions to protect against buffering overflows and to ensure thread safe async caching structures as well. So essentially it's just like has all the control all the fine grain control, you need to take advantage of memory and all your resources as well as possible so that you can handle those really, really high cardinality use cases. >> Yeah, and the more I learn about the new engine and the platform IOx et cetera, you see things like the old days not even to even today you do a lot of garbage collection in these systems and there's an inverse, impact relative to performance. So it looks like you're really, the community is modernizing the platform but I want to talk about Apache Arrow for a moment. It's designed to address the constraints that are associated with analyzing large data sets. We know that, but please explain why, what is Arrow and what does it bring to InfluxDB? >> Sure. Yeah. So Arrow is a a framework for defining in memory column data. And so much of the efficiency and performance of IOx comes from taking advantage of column data structures. And I will, if you don't mind, take a moment to kind of illustrate why column data structures are so valuable. Let's pretend that we are gathering field data about the temperature in our room and also maybe the temperature of our store. And in our table we have those two temperature values as well as maybe a measurement value, timestamp value maybe some other tag values that describe what room and what house, et cetera we're getting this data from. And so you can picture this table where we have like two rows with the two temperature values for both our room and the store. Well, usually our room temperature is regulated so those values don't change very often. So when you have calm oriented storage essentially you take each row each column and group it together. And so if that's the case and you're just taking temperature values from the room and a lot of those temperature values are the same then you'll, you might be able to imagine how equal values will then enable each other and when they neighbor each other in the storage format this provides a really perfect opportunity for cheap compression. And then this cheap compression enables high cardinality use cases. It also enables for faster scan rates. So if you want to define like the min and max value of the temperature in the room across a thousand different points you only have to get those a thousand different points in order to answer that question and you have those immediately available to you. But let's contrast this with a row oriented storage solution instead so that we can understand better the benefits of column oriented storage. So if you had a row oriented storage, you'd first have to look at every field like the temperature in the room and the temperature of the store. You'd have to go across every tag value that maybe describes where the room is located or what model the store is. And every timestamp you then have to pluck out that one temperature value that you want at that one time stamp and do that for every single row. So you're scanning across a ton more data and that's why row oriented doesn't provide the same efficiency as column and Apache Arrow is in memory column data column data fit framework. So that's where a lot of the advantages come from. >> Okay. So you've basically described like a traditional database a row approach, but I've seen like a lot of traditional databases say, okay, now we've got we can handle Column format versus what you're talking about is really kind of native is it not as effective as the former not as effective because it's largely a bolt on? Can you like elucidate on that front? >> Yeah, it's not as effective because you have more expensive compression and because you can't scan across the values as quickly. And so those are, that's pretty much the main reasons why row oriented storage isn't as efficient as column oriented storage. >> Yeah. Got it. So let's talk about Arrow data fusion. What is data fusion? I know it's written in Rust but what does it bring to to the table here? >> Sure. So it's an extensible query execution framework and it uses Arrow as its in memory format. So the way that it helps InfluxDB IOx is that okay it's great if you can write unlimited amount of cardinality into InfluxDB, but if you don't have a query engine that can successfully query that data then I don't know how much value it is for you. So data fusion helps enable the query process and transformation of that data. It also has a Pandas API so that you could take advantage of Pandas data frames as well and all of the machine learning tools associated with Pandas. >> Okay. You're also leveraging Par-K in the platform course. We heard a lot about Par-K in the middle of the last decade cuz as a storage format to improve on Hadoop column stores. What are you doing with Par-K and why is it important? >> Sure. So Par-K is the column oriented durable file format. So it's important because it'll enable bulk import and bulk export. It has compatibility with Python and Pandas so it supports a broader ecosystem. Par-K files also take very little disc space and they're faster to scan because again they're column oriented, in particular I think Par-K files are like 16 times cheaper than CSV files, just as kind of a point of reference. And so that's essentially a lot of the benefits of Par-K. >> Got it. Very popular. So and these, what exactly is Influx data focusing on as a committer to these projects? What is your focus? What's the value that you're bringing to the community? >> Sure. So InfluxDB first has contributed a lot of different things to the Apache ecosystem. For example, they contribute an implementation of Apache Arrow and go and that will support clearing Influx. Also, there has been a quite a few contributions to data fusion for things like memory optimization and supportive additional SQL features like support for timestamp, arithmetic and support for exist clauses and support for memory control. So yeah, Influx has contributed a lot to the Apache ecosystem and continues to do so. And I think kind of the idea here is that if you can improve these upstream projects and then the long term strategy here is that the more you contribute and build those up then the more you will perpetuate that cycle of improvement and the more we will invest in our own project as well. So it's just that kind of symbiotic relationship and appreciation of the open source community. >> Yeah. Got it. You got that virtuous cycle going people call it the flywheel. Give us your last thoughts and kind of summarize, what the big takeaways are from your perspective. >> So I think the big takeaway is that, Influx data is doing a lot of really exciting things with InfluxDB IOx and I really encourage if you are interested in learning more about the technologies that Influx is leveraging to produce IOx the challenges associated with it and all of the hard work questions and I just want to learn more then I would encourage you to go to the monthly Tech talks and community office hours and they are on every second Wednesday of the month at 8:30 AM Pacific time. There's also a community forums and a community Slack channel. Look for the InfluxDB underscore IOx channel specifically to learn more about how to join those office hours and those monthly tech talks as well as ask any questions they have about IOx what to expect and what you'd like to learn more about. I as a developer advocate, I want to answer your questions. So if there's a particular technology or stack that you want to dive deeper into and want more explanation about how InfluxDB leverages it to build IOx, I will be really excited to produce content on that topic for you. >> Yeah, that's awesome. You guys have a really rich community collaborate with your peers, solve problems and you guys super responsive, so really appreciate that. All right, thank you so much Anais for explaining all this open source stuff to the audience and why it's important to the future of data. >> Thank you. I really appreciate it. >> All right, you're very welcome. Okay, stay right there and in a moment I'll be back with Tim Yoakam. He's the director of engineering for Influx Data and we're going to talk about how you update a SaaS engine while the plane is flying at 30,000 feet. You don't want to miss this. (upbeat music)

>> All right, we'll be back in a moment. We'll have Stephen Manly, the CTO, and Anjan Srinivas, the GM and VP of Product Management will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Ransomware is top of mind for everyone. The attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. It's a problem you can't solve alone anymore. Ransomware is built to exploit weaknesses in your backup solution, destroying data and your last line of defense. With many vendors, it can take a lot of effort and configuration to ensure your backup environment is secure. Criminals also know that it's easy to fall behind on best practices like vulnerability scans, patches and updates. In fact, 42% of vulnerabilities are exploited after a patch has been released. After an attack, recovery can be a long and manual process that still may not restore clean or complete data. The good news is that you can keep your data safe and recover faster with the Druva data resiliency cloud on your side. The Druva platform functions completely in the cloud with no hardware, software, operating system, or complex configurations. Which means there are none of the weaknesses that ransomware commonly uses to attack backups. Our software is a service model delivers 24/7 365 fully managed security operations for your backup environment. We handle all the vulnerability scans, patches and upgrades for you. Druva also makes zero trust security easy with built in multi-factor authentication, single sign on and roll based access controls. In the event of an attack, Druva helps you stop the spread of ransomware and quickly understand what went wrong with built in access insights and anomaly detection. Then you can use industry first tools and services to automate the recovery of clean unencrypted data from the entire timeframe of the attack. Cyber attacks are a major threat, but you can make protection and recovery easy with Druva. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE special presentation with Druva on Why Ransomware Isn't Your Only Problem. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guest are Stephen Manly's, Chief Technology Officer of Druva and Anjan Srinivas, who is the general manager and Vice President of Product Management at Druva. Gentleman, you got the keys to the kingdom, the technology, ransomware, data resilience. This is the topic the IDC white paper that you guys put together with IDC really kind of nails it out. I want to get into it right away. Welcome to this segment, I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here John. >> So what's your thoughts on the survey's conclusion, obviously, the resilience is huge. Ransomware continues to thunder away at businesses and causes a lot of problems. Disruption, I mean, it's endless ransomware problems. What's your thoughts on the conclusion? >> So I'll say the thing that pops out to me is on the one hand everybody who sees the survey, who reads it's is going to say, well, that's obvious. Of course, ransomware continues to be a problem. Cyber resilience is an issue that's plaguing everybody. But I think when you dig deeper and there's a lot of subtleties to look into. But one of the things that I hear on a daily basis from the customers is it's because the problem keeps evolving. It's not as if the threat was a static thing to just be solved and you're done. Because the threat keeps evolving, it remains top of mind for everybody because it's so hard to keep up with what's happening in terms of the attacks. >> And I think the other important thing to note, John, is that people are grappling with this ransomware attack all of a sudden where they were still grappling with a lot of legacy in their own environment. So they were not prepared for the advanced techniques that these ransomware attackers were bringing to market. It's almost like these ransomware attackers had a huge leg up in terms of technology that they had in their favor while keeping the lights on was keeping it ideally from all the tooling that needed to do. A lot of people are even still wondering when that happens next time what do I even do? So clearly not very surprising. Clearly I think it's here to stay. And I think as long as people don't retool for a modern era of data management, this is going to stay this way. >> Yeah, I mean, I hear this whole time in our CUBE conversations with practitioners. It's kind of like the security program, give me more tools I'll buy anything that comes in the market, I'm desperate. There's definitely attention, but it doesn't seem like people are satisfied with the tooling that they have. Can you guys share kind of your insights into what's going on in the product side because people claim that they have tools at fine points of recovery opportunities but they can't get there. So it seems to be that there's a confidence problem here in the market. How do you guys see that? Because I think this is where the rubber meets the road with ransomware 'cause it is a moving train, it's always changing but it doesn't seem as confidence. Can you guys talk about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, let me jump in first and Stephen can add to it. What happens is I think this is a panic buying and they have accumulated this tooling now just because somebody said it could solve your problem. But they haven't had a chance to take a relook from a ground up perspective to see where are the bottlenecks, where are the vulnerabilities and which tooling set needs to lie where, where does the logic need to reside. And what at Druva of we are watching people do and people do it successfully, is that as they have adopted Druva technology which is ground up built for the cloud, and really built in a way which is driven at a data insight level where we have people even monitoring our service for anomalies and activities that are suspicious. We know where we need to play a role in really kind of mitigating this ransomware. And then there is a whole plethora of ecosystem players that kind of combine to really really finish the story so to say, right? So I think this has been a panic buying situation. This is like, get me any help you can give me. And I think as this settles down and people really understand that longer term as they really build out a true defense mechanism, they need to think really ground up. They will start to really see the value of technologies like Druva and try to identify the right set of ecosystem to really bring together to solve it meaningfully. >> I was going to say I mean, one of the really interesting things in this survey for me and for a moment, little more than a moment it made me think was the large number of respondents who said, I've got a really efficient well run back up environment. Who then on basically the next question said, and I have no confidence that I can recover from a ransomware attack. And you scratch your head and you think, well, if your backup environment is so good, why do you have such low confidence? And I think that's the moment when we dug deeper and we realized, if you've got a traditional architecture and let's face it, the disbase architecture has been around for almost two decades now in terms of disbased backup. You can have that tune to the help, that can be running as efficiently as you want it. But it was built before the ransomware attacks, before all these cyber issues really started hitting companies. And so I have this really well run traditional backup environment that is not at all built for these modern threat vectors. And so that's really why customers are saying, I'm doing the best I can, but as Anjan pointed out, the architecture, the tooling isn't there to support what problems I need to solve today. >> Well, that's a great point. And before we get into the customer side I want to get to in second. I interviewed Jaspreet, the founded and CEO many years ago even before the pandemic and you mentioned modern. You guys have always had the cloud with Druva, this is huge. Now that you're past the pandemic, what is that modern cloud edge that you guys have? Because that's a great point. A lot of stuff was built kind of back up and recovery bolted on, not really kind of designed into the current state of the infrastructure and the cloud native application modern environment we're seeing right now is a huge issue. >> I think to me there's three things that come up over and over and over again as we talk to people in terms of being built in cloud, being cloud native, why isn't an advantage? The first one is security and ransomware. And we can go deeper but the most obvious one that always comes up is every single backup you do with Druva is air gapped, offsite, managed under a separate administrative domain so that you're not retrofitting any sort of air gap network and buying another appliance or setting up your own cloud environment to manage this. Every backup is ransomware protected, guaranteed. I think the second advantage is the scalability. And this certainly plays into account as your business grows or in some cases as you shrink or repurpose workloads you're only paying for what you use. But it also plays a big role again when you start thinking of ransomware recoveries because we can scale your recovery in cloud on premises as much or as little as you want. And then I think the third one is we're seeing basically things evolving, new workloads, data sprawl, new threat vectors. And one of the nice parts of being SaaS service in the cloud is you're able to roll out new functionality every two weeks and there's no upgrade cycle, there's no waiting. The customer doesn't have to say, wow, I need it six months in the lab before I upgrade it and it's an 18 month, 24 month cycle before the functionality releases. You're getting it every two weeks and it's backed by Druva to make sure it works. >> That says it. Anjan, you got the product side, it's a challenging job 'cause you have so many customers asking for things probably on the roadmap you probably go hour for that one. But I want to get your thoughts on what you're hearing and seeing from customers. we just reviewed the IDC with Phil. How are you guys responding to your customer's needs? Because it seems that it's highly accelerated probably on the feature request, but also structurally as as ransomware continues to evolve. What are you hearing, what's the key customer need? How are you guys responding? >> Yeah, actually I have two things that I hear very clearly when I talk to customers. One, I think after listening to their security problems and their vulnerability challenges because we see customers and help customers who are getting challenged by ransomware on a weekly basis. And what I find that this problem is not just a technology problem, it's an operating model problem. So in order to really secure themselves, they need a security operating model and a lot of them haven't figured out that security operating model in totality. Now, where we come in as Druva is that we are providing them the cloud operating model and a data protection operating model combined with a data insights operating model which all fit into their overall security operating model that they are really owning and they need to manage and operate. Because this is just not about a piece of technology. On top of that, I think our customers are getting challenged by all the same challenges of not just spending time on keeping the lights on, but innovating faster with less. And that has been this age old problem, do more with less. But in this whole, they're like trying to innovate we're in the middle of the war so to say, right? The war is happening, they're getting attacked, but there's also net new shadow IT challenges that's forcing them to make sure that they can manage all the new applications that are getting developed in the cloud. There is thousands of SaaS applications that they're consuming not knowing which data is critical to their success and which ones to protect and govern and secure. So all of these things are coming at them at 100 miles per hour while they're just trying to live one day at a time. And unless they really develop this overall security operating model helped by cloud native technologies like Druva that is really providing them a true cloud native model of really giving like a touchless and an invisible protection infrastructure not just beyond backups, beyond just the data protection that we all know of into this kind of this mindset of kind of being able to look at where each of those functionalities need to lie. That's where I think they're grappling with. Now Druva is clearly helping them with keep up to pace with the public cloud innovations that they need to do and how to protect data. We just launched our EC2 offering to protect EC2 virtual machines back in AWS. And we are going to be continuing to evolve that to further many services that public cloud software 'cause our customers are really kind of consuming them at breakneck speed. >> So the new workloads, the new security capabilities. Love that, good call out there. Stephen there's still the issue of the disruption side of it. You guys have a guarantee, there's a cost to ownership as you get more tools. Can you talk about that angle of it? Because you got new workloads, you got the new security needs, what's the disruption impact? Because you won't avoid that, how much is it going to cost you? And you guys have this guarantee, can you explain that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Druva launched our $10 million data resiliency guarantee. And for us, there were really two key parts to this. The first obviously is $10 million means that, again, we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and that's a big deal, right? That we're willing to back this with the guarantee. But then the second part and this is the part that I think reflects that sort of model that Anjan was talking about. We sort of look at this and we say, the goal of Druva is to do the job of protecting and securing your data for you. So that you as a customer don't have to do it anymore. And so the guarantee actually protects you against multiple types of risks all with SLAs. So everything from your data is going to be recoverable in the case of a ransomware attack. Okay, that's good. Of course, for it to be recoverable we're also guaranteeing your backup success rate. We're also guaranteeing the availability of the service. We're guaranteeing that the data that we're storing for you can't be compromised or leaked externally. And we're guaranteeing the long term durability of the data so that if you back up with us today and you need to recover it 30 years from now, that data is going to be recovered. So we wanted to really attack the end to end risks that affect our customers. Cybersecurity is a big deal but it is not the only problem out there. And the only way for this to work is to have a service that can provide you SLAs across all of the risks because that means, again, as a SaaS vendor, we're doing the job for you so you're buying results as opposed to technology. >> That's great point. Ransomware isn't the only problem, that's the title of this presentation. But it's a big one and people concerned about it so great stuff. And the last five minutes guys if you don't mind, I'd love to have you share what's on the horizon for Druva. You mentioned the new workloads Anjan, you mentioned this new security hearing shift left, DevOps is now the developer model, they're running IT. Yet data and security teams now stepping in and trying to be as high velocity as possible for the developers and enterprises. What's on the horizon for Druva? What trends is the company watching and how are you guys putting that together to stay ahead in the marketplace and the competition? >> I think listening to our customers, what we realize is they need help with the public cloud number one. I think that's a big wave of consumption. People are consolidating their data centers moving to the public cloud. They need help in expanding data protection which becomes the basis of a lot of the security operating model that I talked about. They need that first from Druva before they can start to get into much more advanced level of insights and analytics on that data to protect themselves and secure themselves and do interesting things with that data. So we are expanding our coverage on multiple fronts there. The second key thing is to really bring together a very insightful presentation layer which I think is very unique to Druva because only we can look at multiple tenants, multiple customers because we are a SaaS vendor. And look at insights and give them best practices and guidances and analytics that nobody else can give. There's no silo anymore because we are able to take a good big vision view and now help our customers with insights that otherwise that information map is completely missing. So we are able to guide them down a path where they can optimize which workloads need what kind of protection and then how to secure them. So that is the second level of insights and analytics that we are building. And there's a whole plethora of security offerings that we are going to build all the way from a feature level where we have things like recycle bin that's already available to our customers today to prevent any anomalous behavior and attacks that would delete their backups and then they still have a way to recover from it. But also things to curate and get back to that point in time where it is safe to recover and help them with a sandbox which they can recover confidently knowing it's not going to jeopardize them again and reinfect the whole environment again. So there's a whole bunch of things coming, but the key themes are public cloud, data insights and security. And that's where my focus is to go and get those features delivered. And Stephen can add a few more things around services that Stephen is looking to build and launch. >> Sure. So John, I think one of the other areas that we see just an enormous groundswell of interest. So public cloud is important, but there are more and more organizations that are running hundreds if not thousands of SaaS applications. And a lot of those SaaS applications have data. So there's the obvious things like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, but we're also seeing a lot of interest in protecting Salesforce. Because if you think about it, if someone deletes some really important records in Salesforce, that's actually kind of the record of your business. And so we're looking at one more SaaS application protection and really getting deep in that application awareness. It's not just about backup and recovery. When you look at something like a Salesforce or something like a Microsoft 365, you do want to look into sandboxing, you want to look into long term archival. Because this is the new record of the business, what used to be in your on-premises databases that all lives in cloud and SaaS applications now. So that's a really big area of investment for us. The second one, just to echo what Anjan said is, one of the great things of being a SaaS provider is I have metadata that spans across thousands of customers and tens of billions of backups a year. And I'm tracking all sorts of interesting information that is going to enable us to do things like make backups more autonomous. So that customers, again, I want to do the job for them, we'll do all the tuning, we'll do all the management for them. To be able to better detect ransomware attacks, better respond to ransomware attacks because we're seeing across the globe. And then of course, being able to give them more insight into what's happening in their data environment so they can get a better security posture before any attack happens. Because let's face it, if you can set your data up more cleanly, you're going to be a lot less worried and a lot less exposed when that attack happens. So we want to be able to again, cover those SaaS applications in addition to the public cloud. And then we want to be able to use our metadata and use our analytics and use this massive pipeline we've got to deliver value to our customers. Not just charts and graphs, but actual services that enable them to focus their attention on other parts of the business. >> That's great stuff, Anjan. >> And remember John, I think all this while keeping things really easy to consume, consumer grade UI, APIs. And during the power of SaaS as a service simplicity to kind of continue on amongst kind of keeping these complex technologies together. >> Anjan, that's a great call out. I was going to mention ease of use and self-service, big part of the developer and IT experience expected it's a table stakes, love the analytic angle. I think that brings the scale to the table and faster time to value to get to learn best practices. But at the end of the day, automation, cross cloud protection and security to protect and recover. This is huge and this is a big part of not only just protecting against ransomware and other things, but really being fast and being agile. So really appreciate the insights. Thanks for sharing on this segment, really under the hood and really kind of the value of the product. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, there it is. You got the experts talk about the hood, the product, the value, the future of what's going on with Druva and the future of cloud native protecting and recovering. This is what it's all about. It's not just ransomware they have to worry about. In a moment, Dave Allante will give you some closing thoughts on the subject here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> As organizations migrate their business processes to multi-cloud environments, they still face numerous threats and risks of data loss. With a growing number of cloud platforms and fragmented applications, it leads to an increase in data silos, sprawl and management complexity. As workloads become more diverse, it's challenging to effectively manage data growth, infrastructure, and resource costs across multiple cloud deployments. Using numerous backup vendor solutions for multiple cloud platforms can lead to management complexity. More importantly, the lack of centralized visibility and control can leave you exposed to security vulnerabilities, including ransomware that can cripple your business. The Druva data resiliency cloud is the only 100% SaaS data resiliency platform that provides centralized, secure air gapped and immutable backup and recovery. With Druva, your data is safe with multiple layers of protection and is ready for fast recovery from cyber attacks, data corruption, or accidental data loss. Through a simple, easy to manage platform, you can seamlessly protect fragmented, diverse data at scale, across public clouds and your business critical SaaS applications. Druva is the only 100% SaaS vendor that can manage, govern, and protect data across multiple clouds and business critical SaaS applications. It supports not just backup up and recovery, but also data resiliency across high value use cases such as e-discovery, sensitive data governance, ransomware and security. No other vendor can match Druva for customer experience, infinite scale, storage optimization, data immutability and ransomware protection. The Druva data resiliency cloud, your data always safe, always ready. Visit druva.com today to schedule a free demo. (upbeat music) >> One of the big takeaways from today's program is that in the scramble to keep business flowing over the past two plus years, a lot of good technology practices have been put into place. But there's much more work to be done, specifically because the frequency of attacks is on the rise and the severity of lost, stolen or inaccessible data is so much higher today. Business resilience must be designed into architectures and solutions from the start. It cannot be an afterthought. Well, actually it can be, but you won't be happy with the results. Now, part of the answer is finding the right partners, of course, but it also means taking a systems view of your business, understanding the vulnerabilities and deploying solutions that can balance cost efficiency with appropriately high levels of protection, flexibility, and speed/accuracy of recovery. We hope you found today's program useful and informative. Remember, this session is available on demand in both its full format and the individual guest segments. All you got to do is go to thecube.net and you'll see all the content. Or you can go to druva.com. There are tons of resources available including analyst reports, customer stories. There's this cool TCO calculator. You can find out what pricing looks like and lots more. Thanks for watching Why Ransomware Isn't Your Only Problem made possible by Druva. A collaboration with IDC and presented by theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)