the cube presents ignite 22. brought to you by Palo Alto Networks hey guys and girls welcome back to Las Vegas it's thecube we are live at Palo Alto networks ignite 22. this is day one of two days of cube coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante Dave we've had great conversations today talking with Executives the partner ecosystem is evolving it's growing at Palo Alto networks going to be digging into that next well we heard a lot of talk about you know Palo Alto you know the goal 100 billion dollar you know market cap company and to me a way and I think a critical way in which you get there is partner with the ecosystem because you can't do it alone the power of many versus the resources of one agree completely agree we've got Carl Sutherland with us SVP of North America ecosystem sales at Palo Alto networks welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me it's great being here so here we are the first full day of the conference actually started yesterday with the partner Summit give the audience a flavor of the partner Summit who was there what was talked about what's the current voice of the partner these days yeah great questions so we had a 150 Partners from around the globe representing all of our different routes to Market and for us our partner Community is expanding we work with system integrators we work with gsis we work with service providers Distributors traditional value-added resellers so it was a whole host of partners that were there it was a c-level audience and we really talked about the direction of where we're going as a company how they can continue to invest with us and have greater success long term and so from a voice of the partner standpoint what they're here to do is share with us where they want to engage more how we can enable them to be successful you talked about the Power of One Versus a community we're really looking at a segment of the marketplace right now for us to scale and hit our aspirational goals we can't do it with Palo Alto Network employees we have an employee base of 12 000 people if you take our ecosystem it's over a hundred thousand employees so if we can get them aligned and selling and motivated it's going to be a good day for all of us what so what are they telling you where do they want to spend their time where do they want to add value where are they winning yeah that's a great question so there's a transformation that's going on right now in the partner Community what's happening is a lot of Partners going that are transitioning from what would be traditional transactional Partners or resale Partners to being services-led and the Market's driving them there and what I mean by that is that customers are in a desperate dire State needing assistance figuring out and solving these very complex security problems so if there is a subset of Partners out there that have the skill set and capabilities that can come in from a consultative standpoint help them to develop the structure through deployment a full-blown management and do life cycle management that's a tremendous value I mean the numbers you hear thrown around in the industry right now is up to seven million uh security I.T jobs right now that are out there the open head count is tremendous people can't hire people fast enough all of us in the industry are going through and trying to find early in career or college graduates so we can train quickly or cross-train from other segments to get them into cyber security so if our part of the community can continue to get skilled and expand it's only going to help and the cloud is obviously where does the cloud fit in Carl because you know a lot of the partners when the clouds really start on the Steep part of the s-curve are like we have an opportunity here and by the way if we don't transition our business we could get commoditized yes so that you know that but you were talking about the transactional we can help people move to the cloud and a big part of that has got to be we can secure them in the cloud because it's a more in a lot of ways you know Cloud security is great but in a lot of ways it adds complexity what are you hearing from the party yeah so we are fortunate at Palo Alto networks when you look across the three loud largest cloud service provider from a Google AWS and Microsoft Azure we're either their number one isv or absolutely their number one security ISP so we've got a great uh relationships with them now our partners are coming along and saying how do we transact how do we add value a lot of times that value to your question is wrapping services around it to make sure it's a successful deployment because exactly what you stated the complexity is an all-time high so how do we make sure that we can solve a complex problem in a short term while increasing their security posture and that's really the goal and so where there there's sometimes complexity and mystery there's opportunity and partners can be profitable in doing that I wrote a piece once chaos is cash I have a security you know the criminals and vendors as well yes yes where there is is challenge and complexity there is great opportunity yeah talk about some of the partner program Evolution and some of the things that were announced with respect to the next wave program just yesterday yeah so at next wave um the program's been around for 12 years we constantly are looking to make enhancements and how we make those enhancements are by going out and speaking with these partners and listening to what they need so I have the honor to get to represent what their needs are and how we bring it to market for them so a couple interesting announcements that we made yesterday first of all we announced a new structural format for the program which is really going to allow our different route to markets to have a program that's fit for them because in the past when we were just traditionally a firewall company when the ecosystem just meant resale it was an easy model to have it's complex right now sometimes it's resale sometimes it's influence sometimes its services only we really need to be flexible and credible so we announced a Services only path so if you are a consulting company if you are a insurance company and you want to bring opportunities and leads to Palo Alto Network and you want to provide the services if you're not interested in the transaction you don't want to get involved in that we now have a pathway for you to support you to enable you and Kennedy to give you recognition within Palo Alto networks from an alignment standpoint so we're super excited about that uh as I know you guys speak quite a bit about the managed Services industry so it's a red hot area within Palo Alto networks one of the needs out there was that all not all managed Service Partners are created equally and so some have fantastic capabilities some have gaps we were calling it a P2P part of the partner program within managed services so our two managed Services Partners can actually work together to solve the problem that the end user has and give them a better outcome and fill each other's gaps so candidly it's been going on for a while the partnering but we've never really recognized it so we really built a program around it and now are sponsoring and supporting it versus people doing it on a sidebar so those guys were here in force yesterday yes sir right and and so obviously a lot of energy I'm sure do you see a day where they're here in force on the show floor yeah and and how do you see that evolving so they are here enforcement just right here you see a few of them I'm looking at AWS who's our you know we are their largest isv I'm looking at CDW we had them on the floor is our if not largest second largest partner globally right now and continuing to grow at a rate well they will probably be our first billion dollar partner to think about the size and scale of that relationship and where we've come from um their name CDW don't they never really thought of CDW right as a as a security firm wow what a transformation but please carry on and think about that let's talk about CDW saying think about reach that CDW has it's a 23 billion dollar organization and in a way an inside out sales model meaning there's a tremendous reach they have from their inside sales team and the relationships that they have traditionally historically they were procurement relationships in a way and I said this to the CDW team they were the easy button in the past now what they're doing is they made Seven Acquisitions over the last two years all of them Services oriented so now they're coming in as a consultative Viewpoint and solving a lot of complex problems and I see Google Cloud right here another great partner for us that we continue to invest in we have a great amount of integration and Technology integration with them and so and those are the three that I'm seeing just looking over my left shoulder right if I turn around I'll probably name five more so the majority of this room are the partners that fall within our ecosystem today fantastic so okay so what's your vision for where you want to take this ecosystem because as I said at the top I mean ecosystems are sort of the Hallmark of a I guess you're not a cloud company see I think you of you as a cloud company and so okay good so and I know you don't own your own public cloud and you know your history is you had your own data centers but yeah but you're the security Cloud yeah and so a security Cloud any Cloud needs a great ecosystem so what's your vision for the ecosystem let's go you know five plus years out sure you we start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is we always start with the end user what's the end user's needs the end user today needs flexibility with how they consume the technology they need help in how they support and deploy the technology they need guidance in how they plan out for their future and what their growth is so what we're doing is building a very diverse set of Partners in our ecosystem that all have special skills that they bring to the table so when nikesh sits up here and talks about being a 10 billion or a 20 billion or a 50 billion dollar company we absolutely cannot do it without our ecosystem and without having a very diverse ecosystem that all has different skills that can help us scale because again Palo Alto does not want to be a services company right let's work with the people who are the best at that when we think about the deloittees and accentures and the value they have within the end user base and our joint customer base what a fantastic time to to partner together and solve those boardroom challenges and that's where I really see the vision is that at the boardroom we're building out a plan that's three to five years that's going to continue to increase their security posture because we're not thinking if we're not forward thinking like that will be left behind because the Bad actors are thinking about how they find the different areas to penetrate they're getting so sophisticated the badocracy adversaries they are well funded they're motivated Grant the ransomware attack numbers in terms of the Velocity the complexity yes no longer are we going to get if it's when yeah uh big challenge for organizations Acro across I mean really across an organization regardless of Industry are you guys having any conversations with boards in the partner organization to help align the board with the executive level and really not just have security as a board level initiative but actually being able to execute a strategy yeah and you you nailed it it's not an initiative the initiative to me means there's a beginning and an end right a strategy means there's going to be a comprehensive approach how you continue to improve and we are very fortunate that a lot of our largest Partners around the globe have that position within the boards where they are the trusted advisor so what we're doing now is enabling them and giving them the skills so they can have a more comprehensive conversation around our platform approach around the challenges you know BJ I knew who was with you earlier today likes to say that the average customer he goes and sees has 50 to 70 disparate Technologies within their environment how do you manage that how do you maintain it how do you do renewals oh and by the way most likely the people who actually initially procured that aren't with you anymore they're in a different company so the need for a platform approach is there more so than ever but the decision for the platform quite often has to come from the most senior levels within the organization because again I'm going to go back to your what was your chaos line that you said chaos is Cash chaos is Cash well also chaos is job security so if you're at at the lower level within an organization that chaos and that magic gives you a little job security but that's a short term long term you really need to think about how you're protecting the environment holistically so it is a boardroom decision down that we need to have and you know that chaos the the motivation for that piece that I wrote was from the criminals standpoint right and then I was like okay but there's great opportunities for the technology industry but but I think that you know where we're headed I wonder if I get your thoughts on thoughts on this Carlos we always talk about the Board Room I think we're going now Beyond it here I am you know I'm hypersensitive about my security I got password managers two-factor authentication I don't want SMS based two-factor authentication I want my own authenticator and that's still not enough yeah I got air gaps yeah you know for my crypto you know and I'm super paranoid my point is I think the the individuals are getting much more Savvy about security why because we've all been hacked you know it's like when you lost your data in the because you weren't backed up you know that never happens anymore it's in the cloud or you know some people have multiple backups so it's it's becoming a cultural Trend beyond the board and it's because of the board lord said hey this is really important and so I think it's not only top down I think you're going to see bottom up and middle out and the exciting part for Palo Alto networks is and maybe for you as well is there any more exciting environment to talk about that's rapidly changing and constantly changing you could come back next week and our conversation is going to change as far as what we're doing we constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead of where we're going to move and be flexible and dynamic enough to change and that's what's going to keep us ahead of the economy yeah there's no segment as Dynamic I mean data is dynamic but not as fast changing as cyber I mean because of the adversary as you mentioned I mean so smart so now now they have open adversary ecosystems I mean the adversaries are building ecosystems right absolutely insane I've got peers that are bad guys yeah right right chaos is Cash what's your favorite partner story that you think really demonstrates the value of the ecosystem that Palo Alto networks has built yeah so without sharing names I'll talk about a large U.S national partner that was very uh that was founded on a networking business and partnered with a very large networking company and built that business and was successful doing that they wanted to Pivot into the security space and very early on they made a commitment to Paulo and Ulta networks to say we're going to learn we're going to invest we're going to align with your sales force and we're going to work together and right now they are our largest partner globally and they grew 70 year over year wow so think about that this is not on a small base we're talking about a half a billion dollars in Revenue growing at 70 year over year because to your point earlier it wasn't an initiative it was a strategy and they're executing on the strategy so I tell a lot of we call War Stories like that to other partners that are looking to invest from different markets it could be a large service provider that's you know trying to transform themselves into a security player and talk about the potential of what it could be in for their Marketplace and by the way I say publicly quite often Palo Alto networks will be your most profitable relationship that you have because of the total addressable Market that we're going after because of the solutions that we bring to Market and because of the opportunity within the end users right now and we're excited I want to come back to the mssp in that in its context so we've seen the rise of the mssp and particularly you know we were talking earlier I think it was with Wendy that uh no it was with CDW like 50 of the organizations in North America don't even have a sock yeah right so they need a service provider to come out so you said we you don't want to be in the services business right you're a product company right and that's from a financial standpoint that's phenomenal you're roughly 50 billion dollar market cap company let's let's call it six billion in Revenue so that's a nice Revenue multiple 8X you know and and and the Market's down so you're a 10x Revenue multiple company typically services companies are a 1x or a 2X are you seeing a change there where technology is giving these service providers operating leverage where they're able to scale whether it's because of the cloud because of the Partnerships the Eco would you call it before the the peer-to-peer ecosystem yes like the Gap fillers yes are you do you see the economics of services changing yeah from a baseline economic standpoint not looking at the valuations but let's look at it from a an opportunity to be profitable with Palo Alto networks we know if you are just doing the transaction you have a certain range of margin that you're going to make in the opportunity we know if you wrap services around it you're going to get 3x to 4X that margin we know that if it's managed services and there's life cycle management you're talking 5x to 8X that initial transaction and by the way it's recurring revenue for them so when you think about it if you just do a transaction you're only recurring revenue is a renewal that's predictable but it's not extremely profitable now we're saying the operating leverage you get is if you wrap that services and you're going to have an increased opportunity for a greater margin and it's sticky it's hard to replace a partner who's adding value to your team and A lot of times you walk in the end user you can't tell who the partner is and who the end user is because they are one team that's value yes and that's going to drive ebit yep for your partners and that's going to drive valuation you know you know I want to come back to valuation not that I'm not you can do that okay but because I was I predicted I do my prediction post every year and I predicted last year that we're going to see you know a Spate of MSS mssps I predicted you're going to see someone go public nobody's going public these days but I still think it's a great business yeah that's an untapped opportunity it's not an 8X or it's not a software marginal economics or but it's really sticky super high value yeah and I think it has you know long-term potential yeah to your point if you want to talk valuations for a second let's look at what's happened to the marketplace over the last 12 to 18 months the large majority of the non-public partners that we work with have taken on Capital from private Equity the private Equity that has come in has challenged them to go through a transformation that transformation is you we need you to be Services LED and that service is value because they believe there's going to is going to be a great greater evaluation from that end and they'll be able to scale and grow and stay ahead of the market doing that so when we have conversations when I have conversations yes I'm talking about the technology and the direction of the company but I'm also in there as a consultant saying where's the direction of your company and how do we have this great platform and how do we build it into your business and you wrap services around it and those are the conversations that CEOs want to have when I'm sitting down with our partner CEOs I bet they don't want to talk about our product being better than someone else's product they want to talk about the direction and health of their business yeah it's their business that's a business discussion business decision and they're thinking about okay what's my five-year strategic plan because they got to make bets yeah they're going to bet on a platform that they can add value to that creates that flywheel effect and they get a bet on your ecosystem as well correct oh correct absolutely good to be the leader it's good to be a leader and you know I'm sure as you've heard a few times we believe that economic headwinds are going to favor the market leaders and economic headwinds are going to favor the platform approach so we're going in more aggressive with our partner Community than ever before and there's just so much energy and excitement I feel like I keep on using that term over and over again but that's really what we walk away with last question for you is we have about 30 seconds left a lot of momentum in the partner ecosystem as you've described eloquently what's next what's next what's next yeah so when I I rolled out the strategy for what's next and what it is is a foundational platform that is going to allow flexibility for the partners and for them to decide where they want to invest and it can be in new areas it can be I went online closer with the cloud service providers it could be I want to build a managed Services business can you help us do this it could be I want to go through and I want to drive greater penetration into geographical areas we haven't been before so again we're almost acting as a consultant looking at what they're going from the direction and building a program and a platform where we can grow and work with them it's exciting it's fun it's great highly collaborative highly collaborative highly collaborative thank you for joining us on the program on the partner program the ecosystem Better Together what you guys are doing and ultimately how it benefits the end user customer we really appreciate your insights excellent thank you thank you so much appreciate it all right our pleasure for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube the leader in live Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey guys, welcome back to the show floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22 North America from Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day one, John at theCUBE's coverage. >> CUBE's coverage. >> theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon. Try saying that five times fast. Day one, we have three wall-to-wall days. We've been talking about Kubernetes, containers, adoption, cloud adoption, app modernization all morning. We can't talk about those things without addressing security. >> Yeah, this segment we're going to hear container and Kubernetes security for modern application 'cause the enterprise are moving there. And this segment with Red Hat's going to be important because they are the leader in the enterprise when it comes to open source in Linux. So this is going to be a very fun segment. >> Very fun segment. Two guests from Red Hat join us. Please welcome Doron Caspin, Senior Principal Product Manager at Red Hat. Michael Foster joins us as well, Principal Product Marketing Manager and StackRox Community Lead at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's awesome. So Michael StackRox acquisition's been about a year. You got some news? >> Yeah, 18 months. >> Unpack that for us. >> It's been 18 months, yeah. So StackRox in 2017, originally we shifted to be the Kubernetes-native security platform. That was our goal, that was our vision. Red Hat obviously saw a lot of powerful, let's say, mission statement in that, and they bought us in 2021. Pre-acquisition we were looking to create a cloud service. Originally we ran on Kubernetes platforms, we had an operator and things like that. Now we are looking to basically bring customers in into our service preview for ACS as a cloud service. That's very exciting. Security conversation is top notch right now. It's an all time high. You can't go with anywhere without talking about security. And specifically in the code, we were talking before we came on camera, the software supply chain is real. It's not just about verification. Where do you guys see the challenges right now? Containers having, even scanning them is not good enough. First of all, you got to scan them and that may not be good enough. Where's the security challenges and where's the opportunity? >> I think a little bit of it is a new way of thinking. The speed of security is actually does make you secure. We want to keep our images up and fresh and updated and we also want to make sure that we're keeping the open source and the different images that we're bringing in secure. Doron, I know you have some things to say about that too. He's been working tirelessly on the cloud service. >> Yeah, I think that one thing, you need to trust your sources. Even if in the open source world, you don't want to copy paste libraries from the web. And most of our customers using third party vendors and getting images from different location, we need to trust our sources and we have a really good, even if you have really good scanning solution, you not always can trust it. You need to have a good solution for that. >> And you guys are having news, you're announcing the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. >> Yes. >> What is that? >> So we took StackRox and we took the opportunity to make it as a cloud services so customer can consume the product as a cloud services as a start offering and customer can buy it through for Amazon Marketplace and in the future Azure Marketplace. So customer can use it for the AKS and EKS and AKS and also of course OpenShift. So we are not specifically for OpenShift. We're not just OpenShift. We also provide support for EKS and AKS. So we provided the capability to secure the whole cloud posture. We know customer are not only OpenShift or not only EKS. We have both. We have free cloud or full cloud. So we have open. >> So it's not just OpenShift, it's Kubernetes, environments, all together. >> Doron: All together, yeah. >> Lisa: Meeting customers where they are. >> Yeah, exactly. And we focus on, we are not trying to boil the ocean or solve the whole cloud security posture. We try to solve the Kubernetes security cluster. It's very unique and very need unique solution for that. It's not just added value in our cloud security solution. We think it's something special for Kubernetes and this is what Red that is aiming to. To solve this issue. >> And the ACS platform really doesn't change at all. It's just how they're consuming it. It's a lot quicker in the cloud. Time to value is right there. As soon as you start up a Kubernetes cluster, you can get started with ACS cloud service and get going really quickly. >> I'm going to ask you guys a very simple question, but I heard it in the bar in the lobby last night. Practitioners talking and they were excited about the Red Hat opportunity. They actually asked a question, where do I go and get some free Red Hat to test some Kubernetes out and run helm or whatever. They want to play around. And do you guys have a program for someone to get start for free? >> Yeah, so the cloud service specifically, we're going to service preview. So if people sign up, they'll be able to test it out and give us feedback. That's what we're looking for. >> John: Is that a Sandbox or is that going to be in the cloud? >> They can run it in their own environment. So they can sign up. >> John: Free. >> Doron: Yeah, free. >> For the service preview. All we're asking for is for customer feedback. And I know it's actually getting busy there. It's starting December. So the quicker people are, the better. >> So my friend at the lobby I was talking to, I told you it was free. I gave you the sandbox, but check out your cloud too. >> And we also have the open source version so you can download it and use it. >> Yeah, people want to know how to get involved. I'm getting a lot more folks coming to Red Hat from the open source side that want to get their feet wet. That's been a lot of people rarely interested. That's a real testament to the product leadership. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So what are the key challenges that you have on your roadmap right now? You got the products out there, what's the current stake? Can you scope the adoption? Can you share where we're at? What people are doing specifically and the real challenges? >> I think one of the biggest challenges is talking with customers with a slightly, I don't want to say outdated, but an older approach to security. You hear things like malware pop up and it's like, well, really what we should be doing is keeping things into low and medium vulnerabilities, looking at the configuration, managing risk accordingly. Having disparate security tools or different teams doing various things, it's really hard to get a security picture of what's going on in the cluster. That's some of the biggest challenges that we talk with customers about. >> And in terms of resolving those challenges, you mentioned malware, we talk about ransomware. It's a household word these days. It's no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when? It's what's the severity? It's how often? How are you guys helping customers to dial down some of the risk that's inherent and only growing these days? >> Yeah, risk, it's a tough word to generalize, but our whole goal is to give you as much security information in a way that's consumable so that you can evaluate your risk, set policies, and then enforce them early on in the cluster or early on in the development pipeline so that your developers get the security information they need, hopefully asynchronously. That's the best way to do it. It's nice and quick, but yeah. I don't know if Doron you want to add to that? >> Yeah, so I think, yeah, we know that ransomware, again, it's a big world for everyone and we understand the area of the boundaries where we want to, what we want to protect. And we think it's about policies and where we enforce it. So, and if you can enforce it on, we know that as we discussed before that you can scan the image, but we never know what is in it until you really run it. So one of the thing that we we provide is runtime scanning. So you can scan and you can have policy in runtime. So enforce things in runtime. But even if one image got in a way and get to your cluster and run on somewhere, we can stop it in runtime. >> Yeah. And even with the runtime enforcement, the biggest thing we have to educate customers on is that's the last-ditch effort. We want to get these security controls as early as possible. That's where the value's going to be. So we don't want to be blocking things from getting to staging six weeks after developers have been working on a project. >> I want to get you guys thoughts on developer productivity. Had Docker CEO on earlier and since then I had a couple people messaging me. Love the vision of Docker, but Docker Hub has some legacy and it might not, has does something kind of adoption that some people think it does. Are people moving 'cause there times they want to have these their own places? No one place or maybe there is, or how do you guys see the movement of say Docker Hub to just using containers? I don't need to be Docker Hub. What's the vis-a-vis competition? >> I mean working with open source with Red Hat, you have to meet the developers where they are. If your tool isn't cutting it for developers, they're going to find a new tool and really they're the engine, the growth engine of a lot of these technologies. So again, if Docker, I don't want to speak about Docker or what they're doing specifically, but I know that they pretty much kicked off the container revolution and got this whole thing started. >> A lot of people are using your environment too. We're hearing a lot of uptake on the Red Hat side too. So, this is open source help, it all sorts stuff out in the end, like you said, but you guys are getting a lot of traction there. Can you share what's happening there? >> I think one of the biggest things from a developer experience that I've seen is the universal base image that people are using. I can speak from a security standpoint, it's awesome that you have a base image where you can make one change or one issue and it can impact a lot of different applications. That's one of the big benefits that I see in adoption. >> What are some of the business, I'm curious what some of the business outcomes are. You talked about faster time to value obviously being able to get security shifted left and from a control perspective. but what are some of the, if I'm a business, if I'm a telco or a healthcare organization or a financial organization, what are some of the top line benefits that this can bubble up to impact? >> I mean for me, with those two providers, compliance is a massive one. And just having an overall look at what's going on in your clusters, in your environments so that when audit time comes, you're prepared. You can get through that extremely quickly. And then as well, when something inevitably does happen, you can get a good image of all of like, let's say a Log4Shell happens, you know exactly what clusters are affected. The triage time is a lot quicker. Developers can get back to developing and then yeah, you can get through it. >> One thing that we see that customers compliance is huge. >> Yes. And we don't want to, the old way was that, okay, I will provision a cluster and I will do scans and find things, but I need to do for PCI DSS for example. Today the customer want to provision in advance a PCI DSS cluster. So you need to do the compliance before you provision the cluster and make all the configuration already baked for PCI DSS or HIPAA compliance or FedRAMP. And this is where we try to use our compliance, we have tools for compliance today on OpenShift and other clusters and other distribution, but you can do this in advance before you even provision the cluster. And we also have tools to enforce it after that, after your provision, but you have to do it again before and after to make it more feasible. >> Advanced cluster management and the compliance operator really help with that. That's why OpenShift Platform Plus as a bundle is so popular. Just being able to know that when a cluster gets provision, it's going to be in compliance with whatever the healthcare provider is using. And then you can automatically have ACS as well pop up so you know exactly what applications are running, you know it's in compliance. I mean that's the speed. >> You mentioned the word operator, I get triggering word now for me because operator role is changing significantly on this next wave coming because of the automation. They're operating, but they're also devs too. They're developing and composing. It's almost like a dashboard, Lego blocks. The operator's not just manually racking and stacking like the old days, I'm oversimplifying it, but the new operators running stuff, they got observability, they got coding, their servicing policy. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of knobs. Is it going to get simpler? How do you guys see the org structures changing to fill the gap on what should be a very simple, turn some knobs, operate at scale? >> Well, when StackRox originally got acquired, one of the first things we did was put ACS into an operator and it actually made the application life cycle so much easier. It was very easy in the console to go and say, Hey yeah, I want ACS my cluster, click it. It would get provisioned. New clusters would get provisioned automatically. So underneath it might get more complicated. But in terms of the application lifecycle, operators make things so much easier. >> And of course I saw, I was lucky enough with Lisa to see Project Wisdom in AnsibleFest. You going to say, Hey, Red Hat, spin up the clusters and just magically will be voice activated. Starting to see AI come in. So again, operations operator is got to dev vibe and an SRE vibe, but it's not that direct. Something's happening there. We're trying to put our finger on. What do you guys think is happening? What's the real? What's the action? What's transforming? >> That's a good question. I think in general, things just move to the developers all the time. I mean, we talk about shift left security, everything's always going that way. Developers how they're handing everything. I'm not sure exactly. Doron, do you have any thoughts on that. >> Doron, what's your reaction? You can just, it's okay, say what you want. >> So I spoke with one of our customers yesterday and they say that in the last years, we developed tons of code just to operate their infrastructure. That if developers, so five or six years ago when a developer wanted VM, it will take him a week to get a VM because they need all their approval and someone need to actually provision this VM on VMware. And today they automate all the way end-to-end and it take two minutes to get a VM for developer. So operators are becoming developers as you said, and they develop code and they make the infrastructure as code and infrastructure as operator to make it more easy for the business to run. >> And then also if you add in DataOps, AIOps, DataOps, Security Ops, that's the new IT. It seems to be the new IT is the stuff that's scaling, a lot of data's coming in, you got security. So all that's got to be brought in. How do you guys view that into the equation? >> Oh, I mean you become big generalists. I think there's a reason why those cloud security or cloud professional certificates are becoming so popular. You have to know a lot about all the different applications, be able to code it, automate it, like you said, hopefully everything as code. And then it also makes it easy for security tools to come in and look and examine where the vulnerabilities are when those things are as code. So because you're going and developing all this automation, you do become, let's say a generalist. >> We've been hearing on theCUBE here and we've been hearing the industry, burnout, associated with security professionals and some DataOps because the tsunami of data, tsunami of breaches, a lot of engineers getting called in the middle of the night. So that's not automated. So this got to get solved quickly, scaled up quickly. >> Yes. There's two part question there. I think in terms of the burnout aspect, you better send some love to your security team because they only get called when things get broken and when they're doing a great job you never hear about them. So I think that's one of the things, it's a thankless profession. From the second part, if you have the right tools in place so that when something does hit the fan and does break, then you can make an automated or a specific decision upstream to change that, then things become easy. It's when the tools aren't in place and you have desperate environments so that when a Log4Shell or something like that comes in, you're scrambling trying to figure out what clusters are where and where you're impacted. >> Point of attack, remediate fast. That seems to be the new move. >> Yeah. And you do need to know exactly what's going on in your clusters and how to remediate it quickly, how to get the most impact with one change. >> And that makes sense. The service area is expanding. More things are being pushed. So things will, whether it's a zero day vulnerability or just attack. >> Just mix, yeah. Customer automate their all of things, but it's good and bad. Some customer told us they, I think Spotify lost the whole a full zone because of one mistake of a customer because they automate everything and you make one mistake. >> It scale the failure really. >> Exactly. Scaled the failure really fast. >> That was actually few contact I think four years ago. They talked about it. It was a great learning experience. >> It worked double edge sword there. >> Yeah. So definitely we need to, again, scale automation, test automation way too, you need to hold the drills around data. >> Yeah, you have to know the impact. There's a lot of talk in the security space about what you can and can't automate. And by default when you install ACS, everything is non-enforced. You have to have an admission control. >> How are you guys seeing your customers? Obviously Red Hat's got a great customer base. How are they adopting to the managed service wave that's coming? People are liking the managed services now because they maybe have skills gap issues. So managed service is becoming a big part of the portfolio. What's your guys' take on the managed services piece? >> It's just time to value. You're developing a new application, you need to get it out there quick. If somebody, your competitor gets out there a month before you do, that's a huge market advantage. >> So you care how you got there. >> Exactly. And so we've had so much Kubernetes expertise over the last 10 or so, 10 plus year or well, Kubernetes for seven plus years at Red Hat, that why wouldn't you leverage that knowledge internally so you can get your application. >> Why change your toolchain and your workflows go faster and take advantage of the managed service because it's just about getting from point A to point B. >> Exactly. >> Well, in time to value is, you mentioned that it's not a trivial term, it's not a marketing term. There's a lot of impact that can be made. Organizations that can move faster, that can iterate faster, develop what their customers are looking for so that they have that competitive advantage. It's definitely not something that's trivial. >> Yeah. And working in marketing, whenever you get that new feature out and I can go and chat about it online, it's always awesome. You always get customers interests. >> Pushing new code, being secure. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? What's around the corner? We'll see a lot of Red Hat at re:Invent. Obviously your relationship with AWS as strong as a company. Multi-cloud is here. Supercloud as we've been saying. Supercloud is a thing. What's next for you guys? >> So we launch the cloud services and the idea that we will get feedback from customers. We are not going GA. We're not going to sell it for now. We want to get customers, we want to get feedback to make the product as best what we can sell and best we can give for our customers and get feedback. And when we go GA and we start selling this product, we will get the best product in the market. So this is our goal. We want to get the customer in the loop and get as much as feedback as we can. And also we working very closely with our customers, our existing customers to announce the product to add more and more features what the customer needs. It's all about supply chain. I don't like it, but we have to say, it's all about making things more automated and make things more easy for our customer to use to have security in the Kubernetes environment. >> So where can your customers go? Clearly, you've made a big impact on our viewers with your conversation today. Where are they going to be able to go to get their hands on the release? >> So you can find it on online. We have a website to sign up for this program. It's on my blog. We have a blog out there for ACS cloud services. You can just go there, sign up, and we will contact the customer. >> Yeah. And there's another way, if you ever want to get your hands on it and you can do it for free, Open Source StackRox. The product is open source completely. And I would love feedback in Slack channel. It's one of the, we also get a ton of feedback from people who aren't actually paying customers and they contribute upstream. So that's an awesome way to get started. But like you said, you go to, if you search ACS cloud service and service preview. Don't have to be a Red Hat customer. Just if you're running a CNCF compliant Kubernetes version. we'd love to hear from you. >> All open source, all out in the open. >> Yep. >> Getting it available to the customers, the non-customers, they hopefully pending customers. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me talking about the new release, the evolution of StackRox in the last season of 18 months. Lot of good stuff here. I think you've done a great job of getting the audience excited about what you're releasing. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For our guest and for John Furrier, Lisa Martin here in Detroit, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. Coming to you live, we'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (gentle music)

(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

>>Everyone wants a cloud operating model. Since the introduction of the modern cloud. Last decade, the entire technology landscape has changed. We've learned a lot from the hyperscalers, especially from AWS. Now, one thing is certain in the technology business. It's so competitive. Then if a faster, better, cheaper idea comes along, the industry will move quickly to adopt it. They'll add their unique value and then they'll bring solutions to the market. And that's precisely what's happening throughout the technology industry because of cloud. And one of the best examples is Amazon's nitro. That's AWS has custom built hypervisor that delivers on the promise of more efficiently using resources and expanding things like processor, optionality for customers. It's a secret weapon for Amazon. As, as we, as we wrote last year, every infrastructure company needs something like nitro to compete. Why do we say this? Well, Wiki Bon our research arm estimates that nearly 30% of CPU cores in the data center are wasted. >>They're doing work that they weren't designed to do well, specifically offloading networking, storage, and security tasks. So if you can eliminate that waste, you can recapture dollars that drop right to the bottom line. That's why every company needs a nitro like solution. As a result of these developments, customers are rethinking networks and how they utilize precious compute resources. They can't, or won't put everything into the public cloud for many reasons. That's one of the tailwinds for tier two cloud service providers and why they're growing so fast. They give options to customers that don't want to keep investing in building out their own data centers, and they don't want to migrate all their workloads to the public cloud. So these providers and on-prem customers, they want to be more like hyperscalers, right? They want to be more agile and they do that. They're distributing, networking and security functions and pushing them closer to the applications. >>Now, at the same time, they're unifying their view of the network. So it can be less fragmented, manage more efficiently with more automation and better visibility. How are they doing this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to changing the game for cloud networking made possible by pluribus networks. My name is Dave Vellante and today on this special cube presentation, John furrier, and I are going to explore these issues in detail. We'll dig into new solutions being created by pluribus and Nvidia to specifically address offloading, wasted resources, accelerating performance, isolating data, and making networks more secure all while unifying the network experience. We're going to start on the west coast and our Palo Alto studios, where John will talk to Mike of pluribus and AMI, but Donnie of Nvidia, then we'll bring on Alessandra Bobby airy of pluribus and Pete Lummus from Nvidia to take a deeper dive into the technology. And then we're gonna bring it back here to our east coast studio and get the independent analyst perspective from Bob Liberte of the enterprise strategy group. We hope you enjoy the program. Okay, let's do this over to John >>Okay. Let's kick things off. We're here at my cafe. One of the TMO and pluribus networks and NAMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing, and developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. >>Thank you. Thanks. >>So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into it. >>Yeah, it really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, um, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies. And second, they need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Um, really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. Um, we're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. Um, it's, it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah. So, um, basically what we see is, uh, that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, um, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. >>You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all of these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cube a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. Um, the first is a unified cloud networking vision, and that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. Um, and that is about, uh, deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds. Um, and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server, um, hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. Um, the first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. Um, and what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have a, a, an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. Um, and in particular, uh, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade, uh, networking infrastructure, what we're doing now, um, to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We know there's a, >>Hold that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And, um, uh, you know, what we're doing, uh, fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision. >>I mean, Nvidia has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DPU networking and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and, uh, what pluribus is trying to build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads that is, uh, accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engines. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric, uh, is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have, um, isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>You know, what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the customer? >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield. Um, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, um, what Bluefields, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to, uh, last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, four X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, uh, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. Um, so that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the, you know, faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, what's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say, custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be, um, deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have DPS right away, some servers will have use and a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. Um, so that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right. >>Um, and by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open. Um, and that drives, uh, cost efficiencies. And then, um, uh, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can, uh, create tremendous cost efficiencies and, and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oppor, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer guy, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively, um, that, so there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is, um, I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating. Uh CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. Um, the next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor, penetrates a perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want and wreak havoc. Right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. Um, and the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having, uh, uh, uh, an operating model across switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single villain, for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge. Um, new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. >>Right. >>That seems to be the killer feature here, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with, uh, allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>This is super exciting. This is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I gotta ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. Um, I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership, obviously we're here together. Um, we think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. Um, uh, you know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open. Um, that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the, in the future, but right now, um, we're, we feel like we're partnered with the number one, uh, provider of DPS in the world and, uh, super excited about, uh, making a splash with it. >>I'm in get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, uh, well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, uh, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. Uh, so that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, uh, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are Doka one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three, uh, in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, um, security libraries, that's all packed into this STK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows, um, Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once, and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, um, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So, uh, later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers, uh, releasing Bluefield enabled servers. So, um, more to come >>Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. >>Yeah. And, and, and, uh, one thing I'll add is, um, we are, um, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment, um, that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our, uh, early field trial starting late April early may. Um, we are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T a. If you're interested in signing up for, um, uh, being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to look deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage, >>Cloud networking is complex and fragmented slowing down your business. How can you simplify and unify your cloud networks to increase agility and business velocity? >>Pluribus unified cloud networking provides a unified simplify and agile network fabric across all clouds. It brings the simplicity of a public cloud operation model to private clouds, dramatically reducing complexity and improving agility, availability, and security. Now enterprises and service providers can increase their business philosophy and delight customers in the distributed multi-cloud era. We achieve this with a new approach to cloud networking, pluribus unified cloud fabric. This open vendor, independent network fabric, unifies, networking, and security across distributed clouds. The first step is extending the fabric to servers equipped with data processing units, unifying the fabric across switches and servers, and it doesn't stop there. The fabric is unified across underlay and overlay networks and across all workloads and virtualization environments. The unified cloud fabric is optimized for seamless migration to this new distributed architecture, leveraging the power of the DPU for application level micro-segmentation distributed fireball and encryption while still supporting those servers and devices that are not equipped with a DPU. Ultimately the unified cloud fabric extends seamlessly across distributed clouds, including central regional at edge private clouds and public clouds. The unified cloud fabric is a comprehensive network solution. That includes everything you need for clouds, networking built in SDN automation, distributed security without compromises, pervasive wire speed, visibility and application insight available on your choice of open networking switches and DP use all at the lowest total cost of ownership. The end result is a dramatically simplified unified cloud networking architecture that unifies your distributed clouds and frees your business to move at cloud speed, >>To learn more, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. >>Okay. We're back I'm John ferry with the cube, and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Clovis and Nvidia. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandra Burberry, VP of product management and pullovers networks and Pete Bloomberg who's director of technical marketing and video remotely guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Yeah. >>So deep dive, let's get into the what and how Alexandra we heard earlier about the pluribus Nvidia partnership and the solution you're working together on what is it? >>Yeah. First let's talk about the water. What are we really integrating with the Nvidia Bluefield, the DPO technology, uh, plugable says, um, uh, there's been shipping, uh, in, uh, in volume, uh, in multiple mission critical networks. So this advisor one network operating systems, it runs today on a merchant silicone switches and effectively it's a standard open network operating system for data center. Um, and the novelty about this system that integrates a distributed control plane for, at water made effective in SDN overlay. This automation is a completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds is not enclosed them. And this is actually what we're now porting to the Nvidia DPO. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into Nvidia hardware and specifically how has pluribus integrating its software with the Nvidia hardware? >>Yeah, I think, uh, we leverage some of the interesting properties of the Bluefield, the DPO hardware, which allows actually to integrate, uh, um, uh, our software, our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card that is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OSTP layer running on, uh, on the host even more, um, uh, we can also independently manage this network, know that the switch on a Neek effectively, um, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system, running on x86 to control this network node. So you throw yet the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for, uh, Kubernetes bots, where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with the analogy instead of connecting a server knee directly to a switchboard, now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an ache. >>And, uh, also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in, uh, accelerating the entire, uh, data plane for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, Nvidia DACA API to program the accelerators. And these accomplished two things with that. Number one, uh, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance. They're running the same network services on an x86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up, I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to, uh, additional workloads to run your cloud applications, or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20%, if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach, >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero code from running on the x86, and this is what we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So Pete, I gotta get, I gotta get you in here. We heard that, uh, the DPU is enabled cleaner separation of dev ops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps right now, you've got net ops, net, net sec ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little, a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the dev ops stuff and that, uh, mentality and philosophy, there's a natural fit there. Right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we, we in the networking industry have gotten closer together, but there's still a gap there's still some distance. And I think in that distance, isn't going to be closed. And so, you know, again, it comes down to pragmatism and I think, you know, one of my favorite phrases is look good fences, make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >>Yeah. That's a great point because dev ops has become kind of the calling card for cloud, right. But dev ops is as simply infrastructure as code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will, this is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where, um, one from, from the policy, the security that the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you, you can totally open up that those capabilities. And so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage at scale becomes absolutely critical. >>I'll Sandra, this is really the why we're talking about here, and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up, you know what you know, so this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, dev ops, net ops, all coming together, clean separation, um, help us understand how this joint solution with Nvidia fits into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision, because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One is, uh, operation of, uh, cloud networking. And the second is a distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about the first water. We really unifying. If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or this jointed and the, what is this joint that is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically, how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers, you'll build your IP clause fabric leaf in spine typologies. This is actually a well understood the problem. I, I would say, um, there are multiple vendors, uh, uh, with, uh, um, uh, let's say similar technologies, um, very well standardized, whether you will understood, um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint, two services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called builders, have to instrument the, a separate, uh, network virtualization layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. >>And this is where the complication arise. These high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other. And they are very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API to be between an GSXI environment or an hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And when, and then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this, in this, in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs, which is a prevalent approach, you actually just stacking up multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the nights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any workloads, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch, which can be con connected to a bare metal workload, or can span all the way inside the DPU, uh, where, um, you have, uh, your multi hypervisor compute environment. >>It's one API, one common network control plane, and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably the number one, >>You know, it's interesting you, man, I hear you talking, I hear one network month, different operating models reminds me of the old serverless days. You know, there's still servers, but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the day, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This, this is a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not, I'm just joking server listen network list, but the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we are trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operation, across physical networking and server networking server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the, uh, as much as you have standardized the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that kind of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, um, um, uh, operational efficiency, uh, at the server layer. And, uh, this is what we're trying to attack first. The, with this technology, the second aspect we're trying to attack is are we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure, more efficiently, whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services, or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field, uh, uh, the Butte technology and, uh, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the nettle Fabrica, uh, limiting dramatically, at least for east-west traffic, the sprawl of, uh, security appliances, whether virtual or physical, that is typically the way the people today, uh, segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >>Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network lists and serverless kind of fun, fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think what's, what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings. That's new to this model is a completely isolated compute environment inside. So, you know, it's the, uh, yo dog, I heard you like a server, so I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, uh, you know, armed CPU's memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the, the actual x86 host just thinks it has a regular Nick in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch, and we're just shooting them now. >>And, you know, as time has gone on we've, we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that of aliens good enough, or we hope that if the excellent tunnel is good enough and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, you know, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer. I real quick, cause I think this is interesting point. You mentioned policy, everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing and it adds, you hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot, all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility, relative to security policies and application enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement. >>It comes down to, uh, taking again the capabilities that were in that top of rack switch and asserting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller blast radiuses for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks, and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So just as in say, a VX land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer. And so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. Um, you know, to me, the, the possibilities are endless. Yes, >>It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key. And, and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandra, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customers has been, uh, the most, uh, encouraging and, uh, exciting, uh, for, uh, for us to, uh, to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to tier two tier three cloud providers. Uh, we talked to, uh, SP um, software Tyco type of networks, uh, as well as a large enterprise customers, um, in, uh, one particular case. Um, uh, one, uh, I think, um, let me, let me call out a couple of examples here, just to give you a flavor. Uh, there is a service provider, a cloud provider, uh, in Asia who is actually managing a cloud, uh, where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also are on ramp into the cloud, uh, workloads based on, uh, ESI and, uh, uh, and KVM, depending on what the customer picks from the piece on the menu. >>And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with the Zen center with vSphere, uh, with, uh, open stack to coordinate these multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of costs, complication, and eats up into the server CPU. The problem is that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity of in a single network and distribute the micro-segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it, uh, uh, tremendous, uh, um, opics, uh, benefit and overall, um, uh, operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one potent a use case. Uh, another, uh, large enterprise customer global enterprise customer, uh, is running, uh, both ESI and hyper V in that environment. And they don't have a solution to do micro-segmentation consistently across hypervisors. >>So again, micro-segmentation is a huge driver security looks like it's a recurring theme, uh, talking to most of these customers and in the Tyco space, um, uh, we're working with a few types of customers on the CFT program, uh, where the main goal is actually to our Monet's network operation. They typically handle all the VNF search with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also as low and inefficient, and then they have a physical network to manage the, the idea of having again, one network, uh, to coordinate the provision in our cloud services between the, the take of VNF, uh, and, uh, the rest of the infrastructure, uh, is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability of the, by the bluefin DPOs. Those are just some examples. >>That was a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, feed, shout out to you guys at Nvidia had been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and pluribus here with the unified networking, kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff. Great to have you guys on. And again, software keeps driving the innovation again, networking is just a part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in, in this, uh, new architecture and solution, uh, learn more because this is an architectural shift. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds of trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility, uh, to their teams. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so, uh, all Sandra and I have a talk at the upcoming Nvidia GTC conference. Um, so that's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video.com/at GTC. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you ended up watching us on YouTube a little bit after the fact. Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >>Alexandra, how can people learn more? >>Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the pluribus, a website, www boost networks.com/eft, and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact durables to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program, which starts at the end of April. >>Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You both for joining. Appreciate it up next. You're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John ferry with the >>Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Okay. We've heard from the folks at networks and Nvidia about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now let's get the perspective from an independent analyst and to do so. We welcome in ESG, senior analysts, Bob LA Liberte, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming into our east coast studios. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be >>Here. Yeah. So this, this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's what's driving it. >>Yeah, there's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the, it pendulum tends to swing back and forth. And we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it and all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked in one of our last surveys and last year about network complexity, more than half 54% came out and said, Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be. >>And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and, you know, really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, you know, nine out of 10 organizations today are either beginning in process or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, it probably shouldn't be a surprise. The number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility, but I've created a lot of complexity. So now I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experience. >>I mean, I love how you bring in the data yesterday. Does a great job with that. Uh, questions is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink kind of a do-over network, how networks are built? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point because certainly unifying networks helps right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers are driving a lot more east west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier in north south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now you've got hundreds, if not thousands of microservices communicating with each other users communicating to them. So there's a lot more traffic and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you starting to see as well from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter based legacy, you know, castle and moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. >>When everything's spread out that that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing, um, organizations trying to, trying to make a shift. And, and I think much, like if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers and the sassy framework to enable a secure framework there, this it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're, they're fully protected. Uh, and that's really driving a lot of the, you know, the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is, is, is really secure micro-segmentation is another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're, they're fully segmented out. And that's again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >>You know, you mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword, and now it's like become a mandate. And I love the mode analogy. You know, you build a moat to protect the queen and the castle, the Queens left the castles, it's just distributed. So how should we think about this, this pluribus and Nvidia solution. There's a spectrum, help us understand that you've got appliances, you've got pure software solutions. You've got what pluribus is doing with Nvidia, help us understand that. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services to closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, you know, from a security perspective, they've got these centralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server up through the rack, usually to in different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers. Okay. So that's a, it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications, but the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility, which they >>Don't want to >>Do, they don't want to do right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Um, plus when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there, isn't going to, isn't going to do it. So, you know, when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly the other side effects of that is the impact of the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers because your CPU's are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what, what Nvidia and pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a smart Nick, right? >>To be able to deploy the DPU based smart SMARTNICK into the servers themselves. And then pluribus has come in and said, we're going to unify create that unified fabric across the networking space, into those networking services all the way down to the server. So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPU's are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every trip round trip to the, to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important. Plus the fact that you're going to see from a, an organizational aspect, we talked about the dev ops and net ops teams. The network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies. So that they've dev ops teams. Don't have to worry about that. So essentially they just create the guardrails and let the dev op team run. Cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >>Yeah. Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or, or networking or security offload. And, you know, I've said many times everybody needs a nitro like Amazon nugget, but you can't go, you can only buy Amazon nitro if you go into AWS. Right. Everybody needs a nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >>Yeah. That's a great analogy to think about this. Um, and I think I would take it a step further because it's, it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum because pluribus and video are doing this in a very open way. And so pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So leverage working with Nvidia, who's also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations can not only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric across that environment from the server across the switches, the other key piece of what pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now, and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, um, you know, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications supported by a unified cloud fabric from pluribus. >>So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure, right? >>Yeah. Well, think what it does for, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications. Okay. >>So your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right. I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >>So yeah, I think obviously with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said, at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right in different cloud environments is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency. It's going to help them save money for visibility, for security and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers who are trying to build that hyperscaler like environment. You mentioned the nitro card, right? This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >>Bob, thanks so much for, for coming in and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>You're welcome. Thanks. >>Thanks for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available on demand@thekey.net. You can check out all the news from today@siliconangle.com and of course, pluribus networks.com many thanks diplomas for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Dave Volante. Thanks for watching. Be well, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hey, welcome to this "CUBE Conversation". I'm Lisa Martin today talking to a CUBE alumni who's been on many times talking about data, all things data. Please welcome Satyen Sangani the Co-Founder and CEO of Alation. Satyen, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hi Lisa, it's great to see you too. It's been a while. >> It has been a while. And of course in the last year we've been living in this virtual world. So, I know you've gotten to be on theCUBE during this virtual world. Hopefully someday soon, we'll get to actually sit down together again. There's some exciting news that's coming out of Alation. Talk to us about what's going on. What are you announcing? >> So we're announcing that we are releasing our Alation Cloud Service which actually comes out today, and is available to all of our customers. And as a consequence are going to be the fastest, easiest deploy and easiest to use data catalog on the Marketplace, and using this release to really double down on that core differentiation. >> So the value prop for Alation has always been about speed to deployment, time to value. Those have really been, what you've talked about as the fundamental strengths of the platform. How does the cloud service double down on that value prop? >> Well, if you think about data, our basic premise and the reason that we exist is that, people could use data with so many of their different decisions. People could use data to inform their thinking. People can use data in order to figure out what decision is the best decision at any given point in time. But often they don't. Often gut instinct, or whatever's most fast or easy to access is the basis off of which people decide to do what they do. And so if you want to get people to use data more often you've got to make sure that the data is available that the data is correct, and that the data is easy to find and leverage. And so everything that we can do at Alation to make data more accessible, to allow people to be more curious, is what we get excited about. Because unlike, paying your payables or unlike, figuring out whether or not you want to be able to have greater or lesser inventory, those are all things that a business absolutely has to do but people don't have to use data. And to get people to use data, the best thing you can do is to make it easy and to make it fast. >> And speaking of fast, that's one of the things I think the last year has taught us is that, real-time access to data is no longer a nice to have. It's really a competitive differentiator. Talk to me about how you enable customers to get access to the right data fast enough, to be able to do what so many companies say, and that is actually make data-driven decisions. >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, it really is a entire continuum. The first and most obvious thing that we do is we start with the user. So, if you're a user of data, you might have to hunt through a myriad of reports, thousands of tables in a database, hundreds of thousands of files in a data lake, and you might not know where to find your answer and you might have the best of intentions but if you don't have the time to go through all of those sources, the first thing you might do is, go ask your buddy down the hall. Now, if your buddy down the hall or your colleague over Zoom can't give you the time of day or can't answer your question quickly enough then you're not going to be able to use that data. So the first thing, and the most obvious thing that we do is we have the industry's best search experience and the industry's best browse experience. And if you think about that search experience, that's really fueled by our understanding of all of the data patterns in your data environment. We basically look at every search. We look at every log within a company's data environment to understand what it is that people are actually doing with the data. And that knowledge just like Google has page rank to help it inform which are the best results for a given webpage. We do the exact same thing with data. And so great search is the basis of what we do. Now, above and beyond that, there's a couple of other things that we do, but they all get to the point of getting to that end search experience and making that perfect so that people can then curate the data and leverage the data as easily as possible. >> Sounds like that's really kind of personalized based on the business, in terms of the search, looking at what's going on. Talk to me a little bit more about that, and how does that context help fuel innovation? >> Yeah. So, to build that context, you can't just do, historically and traditionally what's been done in the data management space. Lots of companies come to the data management world and they say, "Well, what we're going to do is we're going to hire... "We've got this great software. "But setting the software up is a journey. "It takes two to three to four years to set it up "and we're going to get an army of consultants "and everybody's going to go and assert quality of data assets "and measure what the data assets do "and figure out how the data assets are used. "And once we do all of that work, "then in four years we're going to get you to a response." The real key is not to have that context to be built, sort of through an army of consultants and an army of labor that frankly nine times out of 10 never gets to the end of the road. But to actually generate that context day one, by understanding what's going on inside of those systems and learning that by just observing what's happening inside of the company. And we can do that. >> Excellent. And as we've seen the acceleration in the last year of digital transformation, how much of that accelerant was an accelerator revelation putting this service forward and what are customers saying so far? >> Yeah, it's been incredible. I mean, what we've seen in our existing accounts is that, our expansions have gone up by over 100% year over year with the kind of crisis in place. Obviously, you would hypothesize that these catalogs, these, sort of accessibility and search tools and data in general, would be leveraged more when all of us are virtual and all of us can't talk to each other. But, it's been amazing to see that we've found that that's actually what's happening. People are actually using data more. People are actually searching for data more. And that experience and bringing that to our customers has been a huge focus of what we're trying to do. So we've seen the pandemic, in many cases obviously been bad for many people but for us it's been a huge accelerant of customers using our product. >> Talk to me about Alation with AWS. What does that enable your customers to achieve that they maybe couldn't necessarily do On-Prem? >> Yeah, so, customers obviously don't really care anymore, or as much as they used to, about managing the software internally. They just want to be able to, get whatever they need to get done and move forward with their business. And so by leveraging our partnership with AWS, one, we've got elastic compute capability. I think that's obviously, something that they bring to the table, better than perhaps any other in the market. But much more fundamentally, the ability to stand up Alation and get it going, now means that all you have to do is go to the AWS Marketplace or call up an Alation rep. And you can, within a matter of minutes, get an Alation instance that's up and running and fit for purpose for what you need. And that capability is really quite powerful because, now that we have that elasticity and the speed of deployment, customers can realize the value, so much more quickly than they otherwise might've. >> And that speed is absolutely critical as we saw a lot last year that was the difference between the winners and those that were not going to make it. Talk to me a little bit about creating a data culture. We talk about that a lot. It's one thing to talk about it, it's a whole other thing to put it in place, especially for legacy institutions that have been around for a while. How do you help facilitate the actual birth of a data culture? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we view ourselves as a technology, as a catalyst, to our best customers and our best customer champions. And when we talk to chief data officers and when we talk to data leaders within various organizations that we service, organizations like Pfizer, organizations like Salesforce, organizations like Cisco, what they often tell me is, "Look, we've got to build products faster. "We've got to move at the speed and the scale "of all of the startups that are nipping at our heels. "And how do we do that? "Well, we've got to empower our people "and the way that we empower our people "is by giving them context. "And we need to give them the data "to make the right decisions, "so that they can build those products "and move faster than they ever might've." Now those are amazing intentions but those same leaders also come and say, "I've just been mired in risk "and I've been mired in compliance, "and I've been mired in "doing all of these data janitorial projects. "And it's really hard for me to get "on the offense with data. "It's really hard for me to get proactive with data." And so the biggest thing that we do, is we just help companies be more proactive, much more easily, because what they're able to do, is they're able to leave a lot of that janitorial work, lead a lot of that discovery work, lead a lot of that curation work to the software. And so what they get to focus on is, how is it that I can then drive change and drive behavioral change within my organizations so that people have the right data at their disposal. And that's really the magic of the technology. >> So I was reading the "Alation State of Data Culture Report" that was just published a few weeks ago. This is this quarterly assessment that Alation does, looking at the progress that enterprises have made in creating this data culture. And the number that really struck out at me was 87% of respondents say, data quality issues are a barrier to successful implementation of AI in their organizations. How can Alation help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, I think the first is, whenever you've got a problem, the first thing you've got to do is acknowledge that you've got a problem. And a lot of the time people, leaders will often jump to AI and say, "well, hey, everybody's talking about AI. "The board level conversation is AI. "McKinsey is talking about AI, let's go do some AI." And that sounds great in theory. And of course we all want to do that more, but the reality is that many of these projects are stymied by the basic plumbing. You don't necessarily know where the data's coming from. You don't know if people have entered it properly in the source systems or in the systems that are online. Those data often get corrupted in the transformation processes or the processes themselves don't run appropriately. And so you don't have transparency. You don't have any awareness of what people are doing, what people are using, how the data is actually being manipulated from step to step, what that data lineage is. And so that's really where we certainly help many of our customers by giving them transparency and an understanding of their data landscape. Ironically, what we find is that, data leaders are super excited to get data to the business but they often don't themselves have the data to understand how to manage the data itself. >> Wow, that's a conundrum. Let's talk about customers because I was looking on the website and there's some pretty big metrics-based business outcomes that Alation is helping customers drive. I wanted to kind of pick through some examples from your perspective. First one is 364% ROI. Second one is 70% less time for analysts to complete projects. Workforce productivity is huge. Talk to me about how Alation is helping customers achieve business outcomes like that. >> Yeah, so if you think about a typical analytical project you would think that most of the time is spent inside of the analytical tool, inside of your Excel, inside of your Tableau, that where you're thinking about the data and you're analyzing it, you're thinking deep thoughts. And you're trying to hypothesize you're trying to understand. But the reality is going back to the data quality issue that most of the time is spent with figuring out which are the right datasets. Because at one of our customers, for example, there were 4,000 different types of customer transaction datasets, that spoke to the exact same data. Which data set do I actually use out of a particular database? And then once I figured out which ones to use, how do I construct the appropriate query and assumptions in order to be able to get the data into a format that makes sense to me. Those are the kinds of things that most analysts and data scientists struggle with. And what we do is we help them by not having them reinvent the wheel. We allow them to figure out what the right dataset is fast, how to manipulate it fast, so that they can focus most of their time on doing that end analytical work. And that's where all the ROI or a lot of the ROI is coming from because they don't know how to reinvent the wheel. They can do the work and they can move on with the much faster business decision which means that that business moves significantly faster. And so what we find is that for these very highly priced resources, some data scientists who make 200, 300, $400,000 fully load it for a company, those people can do their job 74% faster which means they can get not only the answer faster but they can get many more tasks done, for over a given period of time. >> Well, that just opens up a potential suite of benefits that the organization will achieve, not just getting the analyst productivity cranked up in a big way, but also allowing your organization to be more agile which many organizations are striving to be. to be able to identify new products, new services, what's happening, especially, in a changing chaotic environment like we've been living in the last year. >> Yeah, absolutely. And they also can learn... Not only can they help themselves figure out what new products to launch, but they can also help themselves figure out where their risks happen to be, and where they need to comply, because it could be the case that analysts are using datasets that they ought not to be using or the businesses using the data incorrectly. And so you can find both the patterns but also the anti-patterns, which means that you're not only moving faster, but you're moving forward with less risk. And so we've seen so many failures with data governance, regimes, where people have tried to assert the quality of data and figure out the key data elements and develop a business glossary. And there's that great quote, "I wanted data governance but all I got is a data glossary." That all happens because, they just don't have enough time in the day to do the value added work. They only have enough time in the day to start doing the data cleaning and all of the janitorial work that we, as a company, really strive to allow them to completely eliminate. >> So wrapping things up here, Alation Cloud Service. Tell me about when it's available, how can customers get it? >> So it's available today, which is super exciting. Customers can get it either through the AWS Marketplace or by calling your Alation representative. You can do that coming to our website. And that's super easy to do and getting a demo and moving forward. But we try to make it as easy as possible. And we really want to get out of the way, of allowing people to have a seamless frictionless experience and are super excited to have this cloud service that allows them to do that, even faster than they were able to do before. >> And we all know how important that speed is. Well, Satyen, congratulations on the announcement of Alation Cloud Service. We appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us the news and really what's in it for the customers. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's been phenomenal catch up and great seeing you. >> Likewise. For Satyen Sangani, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this "CUBE Conversation." (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of AWS Reinvent Amazon Web services Annual conference theme. Cuba's normally there in person. This year we can't be. It's a virtual event. This is the Cube virtual. I'm your host for the Cube. John Ferrier Tresh Damn Kroger, VP of G M and G m of the high performance computing team at Intel is here in the Cube until a big part of the cube every year. Trish, thank you for coming on Were remote. We can't be in person. Um, good to see you. >>Good to see you. >>I'm really impressed with Reinvent Has grown from kind of small show eight years ago to now kind of a bellwether. And and every year it's the same story. More scale, more performance, lower prices. This is kind of the intel cadence that we've seen of Intel over the years. But high performance computing, which >>has been >>around for a while, has gotten much more mainstream thinking because it's applying now to scale. So I want to get your thoughts and and just set the table real quick. What is high performance computing mean these days from Intel? And has that relate to what people are experiencing >>e high performance computing? Um, yes, it's been traditionally known as something that's, you know, in the in the labs and the government, you know, not used widely. But high performance computing is truly just changing the world is what you can dio Cove. It is a great example of where they've taken high performance computing to speed up the discovery of drugs and vaccines for or cova 19. They use it every day. You know, whether it's making Pampers or Clorox boxes. So they are those bottles so that they, when you drop them, they don't break, um, to designing airplanes and designing, um, Caterpillar tractors. So it is pervasive throughout. And, um, sometimes people don't realize that high performance computing infrastructure is kind of that basics that you use whenever you need to do something with dense compute. >>So what some examples of workloads can you just share? I mean, obviously Xeon processor. We've covered that many times, but I mean from a workload standpoint, what kind of workloads are high performance computing kind of related or unable or ideal for that's out there, >>right? Z on scalable processors are the foundation for high performance computing. If you look at what most people run high performance computing on its see on, and I think that it's so broad. So if you look at seismic processing or molecular dynamics for the drug discovery type work or if you think about, um, open foam for fluid dynamics or, um, you know, different financial trade service, you know, frequency, fats, frequency trading or low. I can't even think of that word. But anyway, trading is very common using high performance computing. I mean, it's just used pervasively throughout. >>Yeah, and you're seeing you're seeing the cloud of clarification of that. I want to get your thoughts. The next question is, you know it's not just Intel hardware. You mentioned Zeon, but HBC in AWS were here. It reinvent. Can you share how that plays out? What's your what's your What's your take on that? Because it's not just hard work and you just take them into explain relationship, >>right? So we definitely have seen the growth of high performance computing in the cloud over the last couple of years. We've talked about this for, you know, probably a decade, and we've definitely seen that shift. And with AWS, we have this wonderful partnership where Intel is not only bringing the hardware like you say, the Z on scalable processors, but we're also having accelerators and then on that whole software ecosystem where we work closely with our I s V and O S v partners. And when we bring, um, not only compilers but also analyzers in our full to tool suite so people can move between an on Prem situation Thio Public cloud like aws. Um, seamlessly. >>So talk about the developer impact. As I say, it's that learning show reinvent. There's a lot of developers here. I'll see mainstream you're seeing, you know, obviously the born in the cloud. But now you're seeing large scale enterprises and big businesses. You mentioned financial services from high frequency trading to oil and gas. Every vertical has a need for cloud and and what, you should be traditionally on premises compute. So you have. You're kind of connecting those dots here with AWS. Um, what is some of the developer angle here? Because they're in the cloud to they want to develop. How does how does the developer, um, engage with you guys on HPC in Amazon, >>Right? Well, there's there's a couple ways. I mean, so we do work with some of our partners eso that they could help move those workloads to the cloud. So an example is 69 which recently helped a customer successfully port a customized version of the in car models for prediction across scales. So they chose the C 59 18 x large instance type because this is what really deliver the highest performance and the lowest price for compute ratio. Another great example is P. K. I, which is a partner out of the UK, has worked with our customers to implement AI in retail and other segments running on Intel Instances of the EEC too. So I think these air just so you could have people help you migrate your workloads into the cloud. But then also, one of the great things I would like to talk about is, um a ws has come out with the parallel cluster, which is an Intel select solution, which really helps, um, ease that transition from on Prem to cloud. >>That's awesome. Um, let's get into that parallel cluster and you mentioned Intel Select Solution program. There's been some buzz on that. Can you take a minute to explain what that is? I >>mean, the HBC has, AH reputation of being hard, and the whole philosophy between behind the Intel Select solution is to make it easier for our customers to run HBC workloads in the cloud or on Prem and with E Intel Select Solution. It's also about scaling your job across a large number of notes, so we've made it a significant investment into the full stack. So this is from the silicon level all the way up to the application level so that we ensure that your application runs best on Intel and we bring together all the everything that you need into. Basically, it's a reference design. So it's a recipe where we jointly created it with our I, C, P and O S V partners and our open source environment for all the different relevant workloads. And so Amazon Web Services is the first cloud service provider to actually verify a service such as Intel Select Solution and this is this is amazing because this truly means that somebody can say it works today on Prem, and I know it will work exactly the same in AWS Cloud. >>That's huge. And I wanna just call that out because I think it's worth noting. You guys just don't throw this around like in the industry like doing these kind of partnerships. Intel's been pretty hard core on the quality, and so having a cloud service provider kind of go through the thing, it's really notable you mentioned parallel cluster um, deal. What is Can you just tie that together? Because if I get this right, the Intel, uh, select solution with the cloud service provider Amazon is a reference designed for how to go on premise or edge or revenue. It is to cloud in and out of cloud. How does this parallel cluster project fit into all this? Can you just unpack that a little bit? >>Right. So the parallel cluster basically, um, it's a parallel cluster until select solution. And there's three instances that we're featuring with the Intel Xeon Scalable processor, which gives you a variety of compute characteristics. So the select solution gives you the compute, the storage, the memory the networking that you need. You know, it says the specifications for what you need to run a non optimal way. And then a WS has allowed us to take some of the C five or some of the instances, and we are on. Three different instances were on the C five, in instance. But that's for your compute optimize work clothes. We're on the in five instance and that's really for a balanced between higher memory per core ratio. And then you have your are five and instance at a W s that's really targeted for that memory intensive workloads. And so all of these are accessible within the single A. W s parallel cholesterol environment on bits at scale. And it's really you're choosing of what you want to take and do. And then on top of that, the they're enabled with the next generation AWS Nitro system, which delivers 100 gigabits of networking for the HBC workloads. So that is huge for HPC. >>I was gonna get to the Nitro is my one of my top questions. Thanks >>for >>thanks for clarifying that. You know, I'm old enough to remember the old days when you have the intel inside the PC a shell of, ah box and create all that great productivity value. But with cloud, it's almost like we're seeing that again. You just hit on some key points you have. Yeah, this is HPC is like memory storage. You've got networking a compute. All these things kind of all kind of working together. If I get that right, you just kind of laid that out there. And it's not an intel Has to be intel. Everything. Your intel inside the cloud now and on premise, which is the There is no on premise anymore. It's cloud operations. If I get this right because you're essentially bridging the two worlds with the chips, you bring on premise which could be edge a big edge or small legend in cloud. Is that right? I mean, this is kind of where this is >>going. Yeah, so I mean, what I think about so a lot of them. The usages for HBC in the cloud is burst capacity. Most HBC centers are 100% not 100% because they have to do maintenance, but 95% utilized, so there is no more space. And so when you have a need to do a larger run or you need thio, you know, have something done quickly you burst to the cloud. That's just what you need to do now. I mean, or you want to try out different instances. So you want to see whether maybe that memory intensive workload would work better? Maybe in kind of that are five in instance, and that gives you that opportunity to see and also, you know, maybe what you want to purchase. So truly, we're entering this hybrid cloud bottle where you can't, um the demand for high performance computing is so large that you've got to be able to burst to the cloud. >>I think you guys got it right. I'm really impressed. And I like what I'm seeing. And I think you talked about earlier the top of the interview, government labs and whatnot. I think those are the early adopters because when they need more power and they usually don't have a lot of big budgets, a little max out and then go to the cloud Whether it's, you know, computing, you know what's going on in the ocean and climate change are all these things that they work on that need massive compute and power. That's a a pretext to enterprise. So if you can't connect the dots, you're kind of right in line with what we're seeing. So super impressive. Thanks for sharing that. Final thoughts on this is that performance. So Okay, the next question is, OK, all great. You're looking good off the tee or looking down the road. Clear path to success in the future. How does the performance compare in the cloud versus on premise? >>It could be well, and that's one of the great things about the Intel select solution because we have optimized that reference designed so that you can get the performance you're used to on Prem in the AWS Cloud. And so that is what's so cool honestly, about this opportunity So we can help you know, that small and medium business that doesn't maybe have this resource is or even those industries that do. And they know they're already a reference using that modeling SIM reference design, and they can now just burst to the cloud and it will work. But the performance they expect >>Trish, great to have you on great insight. Thanks for sharing all the great goodness from Intel and the A W s final thoughts on the on the partnership. We're not in person. And by the way, Intel usually has a huge presence. The booth is usually right behind the cube stage, which you guys sponsor. Thank you very much greater. Always partner with you. Great party. You sponsor the replay, which is always great, and it's always great party and great partnership. Good content. We're not there this year. What's the relationship like? And you take a minute to explain your final thoughts on a Amazon Web services and intel. >>Yeah, I know we have, Ah, Long term partnership 14 plus year partnership with AWS. And I mean, I think it's with the your, um taking Intel Select solution. It's going to be even a richer partnership we're gonna have in the future. So I'm thrilled that I have the opportunity to talk about it and really talk about how excited I am to be able Thio bring Mawr HBC into the world. It's all about the democratization of HBC because HBC changes the world >>well. Tricia, congratulations on the select program with AWS and the first cloud service provider really is a nice directional indicator of what's gonna happen. Futures laid out. Of course. Intel's in front. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. >>Oh, thank you, John. >>Okay, that's the cubes. Virtual coverage Cube. Virtual. We're not in person. Aws reinvent 2020 is virtual. Three weeks were over the next three weeks, we're gonna bring you coverage. Of course. Cube Live in studio in Palo Alto will be covering a lot of the news. Stay with us from or coverage after this short break. Thank you.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to You by spunk >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's two cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for spunk dot com. 19 dot com 19. This is slugs. 10th year doing dot Com Cube seventh year of coverage. We've watched the progression have security data market log files. Getting the data data exhaust turned into gold nuggets now is the centerpiece of data security, data protection and a variety of other great things and important things going on. And we're here to great guests from slug i n songs. Vice president and general manager of security markets and Friedrichs, a VP of security automation. Guys, great to see you again. We just saw you and there's reinforce. Thanks for coming back. >>Thank you for having us. >>So you guys announced security operation Sweet last year. Okay, now it's being discussed here. What's the update? What our customers doing? How are they embracing the security piece of it? >>Wow. Well, it's being a very busy year for us. Way really updated the entire suite. More innovation going in. Yes, six. Tato got announce and phantom and you be a every product is getting some major enhancement for concealing scale. For example, years now way have customers running in the cloud like 15 terabytes, and that's like three X and from It's like 50 terrifies 50 with Search has classes. So that's one example and fend him throughout the years is just lots of capabilities. We're adding a case. Management was a major theme, and that's actually the release before the current one. So we'll be, really, you know, 80 and focusing on that just to summarize sort of sweet right. You be a continue to be machine learning driven, and there's a lot of maturity that's that's going into the product, and there's a lot of more scale and backup. Restore was like one of the major features, because become more mission critical. But what's really, really, really exciting? It's how we're using a new product called Mission Control to bring everything all together. >>I want to get into the Mission control because I love that announcement. Just love The name was behind it, but staying on the sweet when they're talking about it's a portfolio. One of the things that's been consistent every year at dot com of our coverage and reporting has been wth e evolution of a platform on enabling platform. So has that evolves? What does the guiding principles remain? The same. How you guys sing because now you're shipping it. It's available. It's not just a point. Product is a portfolio and an ecosystem falling behind it. You know the APP, showcase, developer, Security and Compliance Foundation and platforms on Just I T ops and A I ops are having. So you have a variety of things coming out of for what's the guiding principle these days is continuing to push the security. You share the vision >>guiding principle and division. It's really way believe the world. As we digitize more as everything's happening, machines speed as people really need to go to analytics to bring insides into things and bring data into doing that's that's really turning that into doing so. It's the security nerve center vision that continue guide what we do, and we believe Security nerve center needs really data analytics and operations to come together and again, I'm gonna tell you, Mission Control is one of the first examples that we bring all of the entire stack together and you talk about ecosystem. It takes a village is a team sport. And I'm so excited to see everybody here. And we've done a lot of integrations as part of sweets to continue to mature more than 1900 AP I integrations more than 300 APS. Justice Phantom alone. That's a lot of automated actions. People can take >>the response from the people in the hallways and also the interviews have been very positive. I gotta get to Mission Control. Phantom was a huge success. You're a big part of building taking that into the world now. Part was flung. Mission Control. Love the name Mission Control. This is the headline, by the way, Splunk Mission Control takes off super sharp itching security operations. So I think Mission Control, I think NASA launching rockets Space X Really new innovation. Really big story behind his unification. You share where this came from, what it is what's in the announcement? >>Yeah. So this is all about optimizing how sock analysts actually work. So if you think about it, a sock typically is made up of literally a dozen different products and technologies that are all different consuls, different vendors, different tabs in your Web browser, so it for an analyst to do their job literally pivoting between all of these consoles. We call it swivel chair syndrome, like you're literally are frantically moving between different products. Mission Control ties those together, and we started by tying slugs products together. So we allow you to take our sin, which is enterprise security, or you be a product's monkey. Be a and phantom, which is our automation and orchestration platformer sore platform and manage them and integrate them into one single presentation layer to be able to provide that unified sock experience for the analyst So it it's an industry first, but it also boosts productivity. Leading analysts do their job more effectively to reduce the time it takes. So now you're able to both automate, investigate and detect in one unified presentation, layer or work surface. >>You know, the name evokes, you know, dashboards, NASA. But what that really was wasn't an accumulation, an extraction of data into service air, where people who were analysts do their job and managed launching rockets. But I want to ask you a question. Because of this, all is based on the underpinnings of massive amounts of volume of data and the old expression Rising tide floats all boats also is rising tide floats, Maur adversaries ransomware attacks is data attacks are everywhere. But also there's value in that data. So as the data volume grows, this is a big deal. How does mission Control help me manage to take advantage of that all you How do you guys see that playing out? >>Yes, Emission control really optimizes the time it takes to resolving incident. Ultimately, because you're able to now orient all of your investigation around a single notable event eso It provides a kn optimal work surface where an analyst can see the event interrogated, investigated triage, they can collaborate with others. So if I want to pull you into my investigation, we can use a chat ops that capability, whether it's directly in mission control or slack integration waken manage a case like you would with a normal case management toe be ableto drive your incident to closure, leveraging a case template. So if I want to pull in crisis communications team my legal team, my external forensics team, and help them work together as well. Case management lets me do that in triage that event. It also does something really powerful. High end mentioned. The operations layer the analytics in the data layer. Mission Control ties together the operational layer where you and I are doing work to the data layer underneath. So we're able to now run worries directly from our operational layer into the data layer like SPL quarries, which spunk is built on from the cloud where Mission Control is delivered from two on premise Face Plunk installations So you could have Michigan still running in the Cloud Splunk running on premise, and you could have multiple Splunk on premise installs. You could have won in one city, another one in another city or even another country. You could have a Splunk instance in the Cloud, and Mission Control will connect all of those tying them together for investigative purposes. So it's very powerful. >>That's a first huge, powerful when this comes back to the the new branding data to everywhere, and I see the themes everywhere, the new colors, new brake congratulations. But it's about things. What do ours doing stuff, thinking and making things happen. Connecting these layers not easy, okay? And diverse data is hard. Thio get access to, but diverse data creates great machine learning. Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay creates great business value. So way see a flywheel development and you guys got going on here. Can you elaborate on that? Dated everywhere And why this connective tissue that you're talking about is so important? Is it access to the war data? Is that flywheel happening? How do you see that playing out? >>I'll start with that because they were so excited where data to everything company or new tagline is turning data into doing. And this wouldn't be possible without technologies like Phantom coming in right way have traditionally been doing really great with enterprise was data platforms. And with an Alex now was phantom. We can turn that into doing now with some of the new solutions around data stream processing. Now we're able to do a lot of things in real time. On you mentioned about the scale, right scales changes everything. So for us, I think we're uniquely positioned in this new age of data, and it's exploding. But we have the technology to help your payment, and it's representing your business way. Have the analytics to help you understand the insights, and it's really the ones gonna impact day today enabling your business. And we have two engine to help you take actions. That's the exciting part. >>Is that what this flywheel, because diverse data is sounds great, makes sense more data way, see better? The machines can respond, and hopefully there's no blind spots that creates good eye. That kind of knows that if they're in data, but customers may not have the ability to do that. I think that's where the connecting these platforms together is important, because if you guys could bring on the data, it could be ugly data on his Chuck's data data, data, data. But it's not always in the form you need. Things has always been a challenge in the industry. How do you see that Flywheel? Yeah, developing. >>Yeah, I think one of the challenges is the normalization of the data. How do you normalize it across vendors or devices, you know. So if I have firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Checkpoint Jennifer alive, that day is not the same. But a lot of it is firewall blocked data, for example, that I want to feed into my SIM or my data platform and analyze similarly across endpoint vendors. You know you have semantic McAfee crowdstrike in all of these >>vendors, so normalization >>is really key and normalizing that data effectively so that you can look me in at the entire environment as a single from a single pane of glass. Essentially, that's response does really well is both our scheme on reed ability to be able to quarry that data without having a scheme in place. But then also, the normalization of that data eyes really key. And then it comes down to writing the correlation searches our analytics stories to find the attacks in that data. Next, right. And that's where we provide E s content updates, for example, that provide out of the box examples on how to look for threats in that data. >>So I'm gonna get you guys reaction to some observations that we've made on the Q. In the spirit of our cube observe ability we talked to people are CEOs is si sos about how they cloud security from collecting laws and workloads, tracking cloud APS and on premise infrastructure. And we ask them who's protecting this? Who is your go to security vendors? It was interesting because Cloud was in their cloud is number one if it's cloud are not number one, but they used to clear rely on tools in the cloud. But then, when asked on premise, Who's the number one? Splunk clearly comes up and pretty much every conversation. Xanatos. Not a scientific survey, it's more of it handpicks. But that means it's funk is essentially the number one provider with customers in terms of managing those workloads logs across ABS. But the cloud is now a new equation because now you've got Amazon, Azur and Google all upping their game on cloud security. You guys partner with it? So how do you guys see that? How do you talk cutters? Because with an enabling platform and you guys are offering you're enabling applications. Clouds have Apple case. So how do you guys tell that story with customers? Is your number one right now? How do you thread that needle into this explosive data in the cloud data on premise. What's the story? >>So I wish you were part of our security super session. We actually spent a lot of energy talking about how the cloud is shifting the paradigm paradigm of how software gets billed, deployed and consumed. How security needs to really sort of rethink where we start, right? We need to shift left. We need to make sure that I think you use the word observe ability, right? T you got to start from there. That's why as a company we bought, you know, signal effects and all the others. So the story for us is start from our ability to work with all the partners. You know, they're all like great partners of ours AWS and G, C, P and Microsoft. In many ways, because ecosystem for cloud it's important. We're taking cloud data. We're building cloud security models. Actually, a research team just released that today. Check that out and we'll be working with customers and building more and more use cases. Way also spend a lot of time with her. See, So customer advisory council just happened yesterday talking about how they would like us to help them, and part of that they were super super excited. The other part is what we didn't understand how complicated this is. So I think the story have to start in the cloudy world. You've gotto do security by design. You gotta think about automation because automation is everywhere. How deployment happens. I think we're really sit in a very interesting intersection off that we bring the cloud and on prime together >>the mission, See says, I want to get cameras in that room. I'm sure they don't want any cameras in the sea. So room Oliver taking that to the next level. It's a complexity is not necessarily a bad thing, because software contract away complexity is from the history of the computer industry that that's where innovation could happen, taking away complexity. How do you see that? Because Cloud is a benefit, it shouldn't be a hindrance. So you guys were right in the middle of this big wave. What? You're taking all this? >>Yeah. Look, I think Cloud is inevitable. I would say all of our customers in some form or another, are moving to the cloud, so our goal is to be not only deliver solutions from the cloud, but to protect them when they're in the cloud. So being able to work with cloud data source types, whether it's a jury, w s, G, C P and so on, is essential across our entire portfolio, whether it's enterprise security but also phantom. You know, one exciting announcement that we made today is we're open sourcing 300 phantom maps and making making him available with the Apache to get a license on get hubs so you'll be able to take integrations for Cloud Service is, like many eight of US service is, for example, extend them, share them in the community, and it allows our customers to leverage that ecosystem to be able to benefit from each other. So cloud is something that we work with not only from detection getting data in, but then also taking action on the cloud to be. Will it protect yourself? Whether it's you, I want to suspend an Amazon on your instance right to be able to stop it when it's when it's infected. For example, right those air it's finishing that whole Oodle Ooh and the investigate monitor, analyze act cycle for the cloud as we do with on from it. >>I think you guys in a really good position again citizen 2013. But I think my adjustment today would be talking to Andy Jackson, CEO of AWS. He and I always talk all the time around question he gets every year. Is Amazon going to kill the ecosystem? Runs afraid Amazon, he says. John. No, we rely on third party. Our ecosystem is super important. And I think as on premises and hybrid cloud becomes so critical. And certainly the Io ti equations with industrial really makes you guys really in a good position. So I think Amazon would agree. Having third party if you wanna call it that. I mean, a supplier is a critical linchpin today that needs to be scalable, >>and we need equal system for security way. You know, you one of the things I shared is really an asymmetric warfare. Where's the anniversary? You talk about a I and machine learning data at the end of the day is the oxygen for really powering that arm race. And for us, if we don't collaborate as ecosystem, we're not gonna have a apprehend because the other site has always say there's no regulations. There's no lawyers they can share. They can do whatever. So I think as a call to action for our industry way, gotta work together. Way got to really sort of share and events or industry together. >>Congratulations on all the new shipping General availability of E s six point. Oh, Phantoms continue to be a great success. You guys on the open source got an APB out there? You got Mission Control. Guys, keep on evolving Splunk platform. You got ABS showcase here. Good stuff. >>Beginning of the new date. Excited. >>We're riding the waves together with Splunk. Been there from day one, actually 30 year in but their 10th year dot com our seventh year covering Splunk. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more live coverage. Three days of cube coverage here in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon. And welcome back to San Francisco. Where Mosconi north along with David Dante, John Wall's You're watching our coverage here. Live on the Cuba Veum world. 2019 days. I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going. All right for you >> so far. Yeah, A lot of action going on over here. We had a pact Hellsing on this morning, Michael Dell, with this VM wear hat, we get Sanjay Putin downtown later. >> Yeah, yeah. Good light up. And that lineup continues. Great. Use the CEO Veritas. >> Great to be here. Very John, >> actually, just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored the this area. This is the meadow set. That >> nice to be here? Yeah, I didn't know >> that. All right, just first off, just give me your your idea of the vibe here. What you are. You're feeling >> what? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here Obviously VM was talking about this hybrid multi cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, eight of us. Google. Microsoft is or we share thousands of customers with the M, where some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world, where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers has always >> been the ethos of veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially, it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. >> That sounds. You >> know, years ago there was no cloud, but there were different platforms, and so that that that that culture has really migrated now into this multi cloud work world. Your thoughts on that >> absolutely look, you know, I'll give an example of a customer that we worked with closely with VM wear on, and that is Renault. America's Renault is Ah, big joint venture. They've got a huge ASAP installation 8000 users 40 terabytes, Big Net backup customer. They also use their products in for a scale and V. R P for availability and D r. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors, and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that where we came in its 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So we that hardware agnostic approach works really well. You were >> Just touch it on this great little bit when you said, You know whether Tiger, whether it's multi, whether it's private, whatever it is, you know we're here to provide solutions. The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of boggle the mind a bit, it's very complex. Um, how much of an inhibitor is that? In terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and and their decision making >> well, let me explain where we sit. And we are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most high route, highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 tell coast 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers, so we learn a lot. And here the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast, Gardner estimates will be 175 Zita bytes of data in 2025. If you cram that in, iPhones will take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about Ransomware. It's not a question off if you'll be attacked. It's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You wanna be terrible to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi cloud world, just like Pak Gil Singer has been talking about. That's what customers want, but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in the data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the enterprise. Data Service is platform, and that's why we're here. VM world Talking >> about Greg. Let's unpack some of those, Asai said. Veritas kind of created a market way back when and now you see come full circle, you got multi cloud. You have a lot of new entrance talking about data management. That's it's always been your play, but you came to the king of the Hell's. Everybody wants a piece of your hide, so that's kind of interesting, But but data growth. So let's let's start there. So it used to be data was, ah, liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what? What your customers saying about sort of data is something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data. And what's Veritas is sort of perspective. >> They're really trying to get insights in their data. Okay. And, uh, that's why we acquired a company called Apt Are. So when I This is my second time of Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010 rejoined the company of 2018. I talked to a lot of customers. I've found that their infrastructure was so complex that storage infrastructure so complex the companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat. Is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected and customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data 678 times wasting storage. What apt are does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of that. If you get a chance, it pulls information from Santa raise network file systems, virtual machines, uh, san networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example off what customers really want. >> Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware now. Part of part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransom. Where is the last couple of years? We've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does apt our play a role there? >> Well, Veritas, it just helps it. Cos address that problem because veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in spear. Phishing works. You know, you you are going to find some employees were gonna click on a link, and the malware is going to get in so all you can do to protect you ultimately have tohave a good backup copies so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after ransom or attack, it's you're not beholden. You can't be extorted by the ransom or >> the third piece was hybrid. And of course, that leads to a kind of hybrid multi cloud. Let's let's put that category out there now. I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi cloud from an application perspective in other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having a retest Rica pile. I've been skeptical that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and the courage with is data protection because I think actually, you can have a consistent data protection model across your on Prem different on prams, different clouds, because you know you're partnering with all the different cloud cos you obviously have expertise in on premise. So so talk about your approach, their philosophy and maybe any offering. >> Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers, you know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers, and they only they will only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also can't compete with the conglomerates, Okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gardner M Q 13 times and where the market share leader also absolutely >> touch me. Someone Dave was saying about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns the day raises. I mean, it is not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here, right about whether that that'll fly. What do you think? In terms, >> I think the vision is spot on and like, oh, visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VM wears done recently in the acquisition, there've been basically trying to make the control plane for compute okay, and their acquisition of carbon, black and pivotal add to that control plane we're gonna be We are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's that's the way our customers rely on, >> but that makes sense to me. So I think I feel like the multi cloud vision is very aspirational today, and I think it's gonna be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost to see the Oracle has clouded customer. You've got Azure Stack. So and I think it's gonna be a multi vendor world. However I do think is it relates the data protection you can set a standard and safe. We were going to standardize on Veritas. So one of us So I think that it's it's achievable. So that was my point there. The last one was was regulations. Do you think GDP are will be a sort of a framework globally body of customers seeing there? >> Well, they're dealing with more than GDP are like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments and the challenge there is. How do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data, the 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about right, so you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data, and that's what we can help >> our customers. But howdy, howdy, dildo. In that environment, I mean, I mean, a day raises the point. This is obvious. A swell that mean you cite California right, which is somewhat infamous for its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist? What? The United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it, and various federal agencies could do the same Europe. Obviously we talked about now Australia. Now here. Now there you get this Balkan I system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? >> A. Mentally. It relies on classifying that data right. Understanding what's where and what do you have is a P I. I personally identifiable information. Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory Is that compliance? >> Star I P. Is that Veritas i p. A blender? >> It's a blend of avatar and veritas I p. We have a product called Info Studio that helps toe provide that now Remember one of the things that are net backup product has is a catalogue of data. So we know where the data is primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems. Right? So we're out of band to the primary systems, and that turns out to be very valuable in the state's a >> question. The catalog. I can't do this without a catalogue in the enough to geek out here a little bit, but but you've got a little bit when you bring in multi clouds. Other clouds. How do you incorporate you know that knowledge into your catalog? >> Yeah. Art, art, technology work Idol of works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different Cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today. Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three, and >> that's because you do the engineering at the A P. I level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, um, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The markets heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in. Everybody I said wants a piece of your hide. Why Veritas? >> Well, I explained that, you know, we are the leader in enterprise, data protection, availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If your large complicated enterprise you have layers of technology, we support all that with VIN amount for 25 years against, the big conglomerates were completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the Leader's Quadrant 13 years >> now. And just as we close up you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas, about 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work states, federal government ever. It's just what is the difference of different animal between public and private and and what you need to do in terms of providing that >> we're struggling with the same challenge. In fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world, and they're struggling with exactly the same challenge. They also want leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransom where you know they're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, uh So these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data >> 18 months in. You seem pumped up. Does having a great time team fired up >> way. Get that right. Great. But you're okay with big geeking out to write a very good thanks for the time You've run out of time. 40 Niners next time. All right. Greg Hughes joining us from Veritas. Back with more Veum, World 2019 right here on the Cube. >> Thank you.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco, our exclusive coverage, day four, four days of coverage events winding down, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest, Eric Herzog, CUBE alumni, CMO of IBM storage and VP of storage channels, Eric great to see you wearing the Hawaiian shirt as usual. >> Great, I can't come to theCUBE and not wear the Hawaiian shirt. You guys give me too much of a heart attack. >> Love getting you on to get down and dirty on storage and the impact of Cloud and infrastructure. First, you gave a great talk yesterday to a packed house, I saw that on social media, great response, what's going on for you at the show, tell us. >> So the big focuses for us are around four key initiatives. One is multi-cloud particularly from a hybrid perspective and in fact, I had three presenters with me, panelists and users, all of them were using multiple public cloud providers and all of them had a private cloud. One of them also was a software as a service vendor, so clearly they're really monetizing it. So that's one, the second one is around AI, both AI that we use inside of our storage to make it more efficient and more cost effective for the end user, but also as the platform for AI work loads and applications. Cyber resiliency is our other big theme, we've got all kinds of security, yes everyone is used to of course the Great Wall of China protecting you and then of course chasing the bad guy down when they breach you, but when they breach you it'd sure be nice if everything had data at rest encryption, or when you tiered out to the cloud you knew that it was being backed up or tiered out fully encrypted or how about something that can help you with ransomware and malware. So we have that, and that's a storage product not a regular, you know what you think of from a security vendor. So those are the big things that we've been harking on at the show. >> One of the things that I've observed, you've been very active out in the field, we've seen you at a lot of different events, Cisco Live, others, you guys have had an interesting storage product portfolio, very broad and specific leadership categories, but you also have the ability to work with other partners. This has been a big part of your strategy, you get the channels. What is, how would you summarize the current story around IBM storage and systems, because it's now an ingredient part of other people's infrastructure with cloud storage then becomes a key equation, how would you describe the IBM storage posture, product portfolio, what are the key things? >> So I think the key thing from a portfolio perspective, while it looks broad it's really four things. Software defined storage which we also happened to have bet on on array so theoretically that's one product line, same exact software. Other vendors don't do that, they have an array pack and you buy the array but if you buy their software defined storage it's actually different software, for us it's the same software. Then we have modern data protection and then we have management playing. That's kind of it. I do think one of the big differentiator for us, is even though we're part of IBM, we have already been working with everyone any way. So as we talked about at Cisco Live, for Spectrum Protect alone, our modern data protection platform, we have 400 small and medium cloud service providers all over the world that their back up service is based on it, so even though IBM Cloud has their own cloud division theoretically, we're enabling the competition but we've had that story at IBM storage now for four years. >> So storage anywhere basically is the theme here, AI anywhere storage anywhere, I mean it's not the official tagline but that's the philosophy with software. >> And that's yeah, so even if you think look at AI. We have an AI reference architecture with the power product line, we also have an AI reference architecture with the Nvidia product line, and we're working on a third one right now with another major server vendor because we want our storage to be anywhere there's AI and anywhere there's a cloud, big medium or small. >> Alright, Eric let's tease that out a little bit because I had a great conversation with an IBM fellow yesterday and we think back ten years ago, when you talked about hybrid and multi cloud, when you talked about an application it's "Am I spanning between environments? "Am I bursting between environments?" And architectures just didn't work that way. Today microservices architecture, there's pieces of the solution that can live in lots of environments, Compute I can spin up almost anywhere at any time, data doesn't move and I need to worry about my data, I need to worry about security so there's certain things that multi cloud like data protection, cyber resiliency, those kind of ones need to live everywhere, but when I talk about storage, I'm not moving my storage and my persistent database all over the place. So help us kind of tease out as to what is the multi everywhere and what is the you know the data that the Compute's going to actually move to that data, help us squint through that a little bit. >> So let's do the storage part first. So most applications, workloads, and use cases that are either business critical or mission critical are going to stay on prem, doesn't mean you can't use a public cloud provider for overflow whether that be IBM or Amazon or Microsoft or like I said the 400 cloud providers that we sell to that are not IBM, so but you're still going to have this hybridness where the data is partially on prem and off prem, in that case you're going to be using the public cloud provider, and by the way we did a survey, IBM did, and when you're looking enterprise, so let's say companies that are three or four billion US and up, anywhere in the world, you're seeing that most of them are using five or six different public clouds, whether that be salesforce.com which really is sales enablement software as a service. We have a startup that we work with who uses IBM's flash system and they do cyber security as a service, that's their whole business. So all of this software vendors that now deliver not on prem but you know over the cloud. Then you've got regular public cloud providers for file, block, and object for example we not only support IBM Cloud object storage protocol, but S3. So we have customers that put data out in S3, we have customers that put it out on other clouds because as you know S3's become the de facto standard so all the mid to small cloud providers use it. So I think what you've got is hybrid cloud is a sort of a subset of multi cloud and then multi cloud what you're seeing is because of software as service could even be geographic issues, we have a lot of data centers at IBM Cloud so do the three major cloud providers, but we are not in all 212 countries so if you have the law like in Canada where the data has to physically stay within the premises of Canada, now we all happen to have data centers that are big enough, but that doesn't mean we have data centers in every country, so you have legal issues, you have applications what applications are good, that make sense, what about pricing, and as you know some big companies still buy regionally. >> Eric, one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is the SAS providers because if we look at the storage market in many ways, you know there was like the threat of public cloud, but really you got to follow the application, follow the data and as SAS proliferation happens, your data is going to go with that, you know you have them as customers in a lot of environments, what are you seeing from the SAS providers, how do they choose what offerings they have and how do they look at their data center versus public cloud mix? >> So when you look at a SAS provider, they've got a couple of different parameters that they look at which is why we've been very successful. One is performance, they already know their subject to the vicissitudes of the cloud so you can't have any bottle neck in your core data center because you're serving that app up, and if it's too slow or it doesn't work right, then of course the end user will go buy a different piece of software from another SAS provider. Second one is availability, because you have no idea when wiki bomb theCUBE is going to turn on that service, it could be the middle of the night right? If you guys expand to Asia, you guys will be asleep but your guy in Australia will be using that software, so it can't ever go down, so availability. Resiliency, can it handle pounding. If CUBE wiki bomb becomes ginormous, and you buy all these other analyst firms and the next thing you know the biggest analyst firm in the world, if you have thousands of people guess what now you're hammering on that software, so it's got to be able to take that workload abuse, right? And that's the kind of thing, so they look for that. >> That's scale basically, scale is critical. >> Right, they cannot have any issues of resiliency or availability and performance so A: they're usually going all flash, some of them will buy like a tape or the older all hard drive arrays as a backup store, ideal for IBM cloud object storage but again the main thing they focus on is flash because they're serving up that software. >> Let me ask you a question, so I know you've been in this business for a long time, storage you know everything about the speeds and fees but also you've been a historian too, you're on the front edge. IBM has got a killer strategy with cloud private, doing very well with Openshift and Redhat acquisition, you're now poised to essentially bring cloud scale across multiple clouds and with AI, it really puts storage at the center of the action. How is storage now positioned and how should customers think about storage, because scale is table stakes, enabling developers to program infrastructure as code, how does storage and how has it changed and how are you guys positioned to take advantage of that? How would you kind of explain that to a customer? >> Yeah so I think there's a couple of changes, first of all you're looking for a storage vendor which should be us, but you're looking for a storage vendor that is always making sure, for example when micro services first came out and containers, okay great except when containers came out and it's still a problem, you don't have storage consistency whereas in a VM ware or a hyper V or you know KVM environment, you do. So when you move things around, you don't lose the dataset, well we have persistency storage. So the key thing that you want to look for is a storage vendor that will stay on that leading edge as you move. Our copy data manager has an API so the developers can spit up their own environments but use real data, so as you guys know well from your pasts that the last thing you want to do is have the dev ops guy be developing things on faux datasets, try to put it in production, and then the real dataset doesn't work, at the same time if they put it out to a public cloud provider you could have a legal or security breach, right? So by being able to take modern data protection, as an example, and not just to have grandfather, father son back up, we all remember that I remember it better than you guys since I'm older, but that's back up right? It's not back up any more, it's modern data protection. You need to be able to take the snapshot, the replica or the back up dataset and use it for development, so you want a storage vendor that's going to be on the leading edge of that. We've done that at IBM on the Kenner side, the modern data protection side, and we'll continue to the do that. The whole multi cloud thing, IBM as you know is now all about multi cloud, what Redhat's been in, the storage division of IBM has been working with Redhat for 15 years. Going to the Redhat summit every year, I know you guys do theCUBE from there sometimes. >> You're on, but this is software defined so at the end of the day a software defined bet with arrays have paid off. >> Yes. >> You'd say that would be kind of a key linchpin. >> I would argue that, while there's some hardware aspects to it, so for example our flash core modules give us a big differentiator from a flash perspective, in general the number one differentiator for a strong, powerful array vendor is actually the underlying software code. The RAID stack, what you can wrap around it, file block and object support, what could you enhance, our Spectrum discover, allowing you to use metadata about unstructured data whether that be in the file space of the object store. That allows the data scientist to dramatically reduce the time it takes to prep the data when they're doing either AI or an analytic workload, so we just saved them money but we're really a storage company that came up with something that a data scientist could use because we understand how storage is at the central foundation and how you could literally use the metadata for something actually valuable, not to a storage person because a data scientist is not the storage guy of course. >> Yeah and Eric I would love to get your feedback, what are some of those key discussions you're having with customers here at the show? We've been talking a lot this week digital transformation, AI into everything there, are those some of the themes? What are the struggles that really the enterprises of today are facing and how your group's helping them? >> So one of the big things is understanding that it's going to be multi cloud and so because we've already been the Switzerland of the storage industry and working with every cloud provider, all the big ones, including ones that compete with our own sister division, but all the little small ones too, right? And all the software as service vendors we work with that we're the safe bet, you don't have to worry about it. Because whoever you pick, or for a big enterprise, in fact I had Aetna on stage with me and he said he's using seven different clouds, one of which is their private cloud and then six different cloud providers they use, and he said not counting salesforce.com and I forgot the other name, so really if you count the softwares there, she really got like nine clouds. She said I use IBM cause I know it's going to work with whoever, and you're not going to say oh I don't work with this one or that one. So that's been obviously making sure everyone realizes that, the whole company is embracing it as you saw and what we're going to do obviously with Redhat and continue for them to participate with all of their existing customer base that they've been doing for years. >> So you see multi cloud and sweet spot, that highlights your value proposition, would you say that to be true? >> I would say that and then the second one is around AI. All the storage vendors including us have had AI sort of inside, what I'll call inside of the box, inside of the array and use that to make the array better, but now with AI being ubiquitous from a work load perspective, you have to have the right foundation underneath that, again performance resiliency availability, if you're going to use AI in a giant car factory, and it's going to run all of those machines, you better make sure the thing never fails because then the assembly line goes down and those things are hundreds of millions of dollars of build every day. So that's the kind of thing you got to look for, so AI's got to have the right platform underneath it as well. >> Eric you have some reporting from the field as you're out in the, doing a lot of talks a lot of customers, give it a couple of anecdotal examples of where the leading edge is in storage and where are use cases that would be a good tell sign of where this kind of multi cloud is going. Can you just give some examples of the use cases, situation, and kind of why is that relevant for where everyone will be going? Where is the puck going to be, so I can skate to where the puck is, as they say. >> So from a multi cloud perspective, A: you've got to deal with how your company is structured, if you have a divisionalized company or one that really lets the regions make their own buy decisions, then you may have NTT Cloud in Japan, you may have Ali Baba in China, you may have IBM Cloud Australia, and then you might have Amazon in Latin America. And as IT guys you got to make sure you're dealing with that, and embrace it. One of the things I think from an IT perspective is why I'm wearing the Hawaiian shirt, you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. And that's what everyone's got to realize so, they're going to use multi cloud, and remember the cloud was the web was the internet, it's actually all the same stuff from a long time ago, the mid 90's, which also means now procurement's involved and when procurement's involved, what are they going to say to you? Did you get a bid from IBM Cloud, did you see that bid from Amazon and Microsoft? So it's changed the whole thing of, I can just go to any cloud I want to, now procurement's involved that even mid-size companies procurement says you did get another bid right, did you not? Which for server, storage, and network vendors that's been the way it's been for 35, 40 years. >> The bids are changing too, so what are the requirements now? Amazon has a cloud, they have storage, you have storage, but people have on premise they have multiple environments. If the world is one big data center, with multiple regions and locations, this is the resilience you spoke of, what's the new requirements as procurement gets involved because procurement isn't dictating the requirements, they're getting the requirements from the application work loads and the infrastructure, so what are the new requirements that you see? >> So I think the thing you're seeing is if you take cloud just a couple years ago, I'm going to put my storage out there, okay great, I need this kind of availability, ooh that's extra money, sorry Mr. Wikibomb, Mr. CUBE we got to charge you a little extra for that. Oh we need a certain amount of performance, oh that's a little extra. And then for heavy transactional work loads the data's constantly moving back and forth, oh we forgot to tell you that we're charging you every time you move the data in and every time you move the data out. So as you're putting together these RFPs you needs to be aware of that. >> Those are hidden costs. >> Those are hidden costs that are, I think the reason you're seeing such the ride of the hybrid is people went to public cloud and then someone in finance, or maybe even in the IT group sat down with a spread sheet and said "Oh my god, we could've just bought an IBM array "or someone else's array" and actually had less money even counting support, because all every time we're moving the data, but for archive, for back up we don't move the data around a lot, it's a great solution for anything. Then you have the whole factoring of software as a service, so part of that is the software itself, if you're going to go up against salesforce.com then whoever does, they better make sure the software's good, then on top of that again you negotiate with the software vendor, I need it globally, okay what's the fee for that? So I think the IT guys need to understand that with the ubiquity of the cloud, you've got to ask way more questions, in the storage array business, everyone's got five nines and almost everybody's got six nines, well way back when it was four nines then it was five and now it's six, so you don't ask anymore because you know it just changes right? And the cloud is still new enough and the whole software as a service is a different angle, and a lot of people don't even realize software as a service is cloud, but when you say that they go, what are you talking about, it's just I'm getting it over a service. Where do you think it comes from? A cloud data center. >> Well the trend is software defined, you guys are on that early. Congratulations, and don't forget the hardware, the high performance hardware as well, arrays and what not. So great job. Eric thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Great, thank you very much. >> CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day four of our live coverage here in Moscone North, in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. Great packed house here at IBM Think, back for more coverage after this short break. (electronic outro music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and, their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent, 2018. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our sixth year covering this event. We've been to all the re:Invents, except for the original one, watched the progress of cloud computing. And it's a lot of new things happening, more compute, more power. We're here with our special guest, RaeJeanne Skillern, who's also known as RJ inside Intel. Vice-President of Data Center Group and the General Manager of the Cloud Service Provider Platform Group at Intel. Good to see you again. >> Nice to see you again. >> The headline on silkenangle dot com right now, "In a blockbuster move, "Amazon jumps into data center with both feet". Which really validates kind of some of the commentary we've been seeing in the queue for many, many years. And our analysts and you guys are involved in the Data Center. Data Center's still going to be a big part of computing. It's not going away. That's your business. >> Yes. >> And the cloud service provider, which is also growing. So, take a minute. >> It is growing, I've been personally covering the public cloud at Intel for a decade. And, when I started I'm not sure I had any concept how big this was going to be. And the one thing that I'm positive about, is we're just still at the beginning. Because every use case you see, all the development, all the IOT, all the business transformation, we're just starting, right. This is a good place to be, but there's more coming. And, if I look at just 2018, I'm a little competitive at work, but we were to proud to announce earlier this year, the end of the summer, that the cloud is now 43% of the Data Center Group's revenue. So, coming from when I started, 10% or something like that little, now to be the number one contributor. And, we, in the first half of the year, had a 43% a year revenue growth. This industry is booming. And I wish I could say it was my hard doing, but I mean, if you come to an event like this, you know why it's growing. >> And the cham is increasing in the total market availability with the cloud, is requiring more and more horsepower. >> Yes. >> You've got IOT Edge, you've got the Data Center, you got the cloud, and software is being written, specifically to take advantage of something. So, huge market opportunity, still. >> Yes. >> What are some of the innovations? Take us through a little bit of your mindset on how you guys are attacking this growth, surface area of the market, starting to see specialized things, general purpose, compute is not going away, storage, networking, still very important. You've got FTGAs out there. I mean, amazing amount of opportunities, with innovations. >> You know, you hit so much of it, and I really agree with some of the comments you made. It started off for us, with silicon technology. But, what a lot of people don't know is, we have core computes, network, storage, FPGAs, purpose built accelerators, and we can create custom aesics for any one of our customers. We also have a unique ability to not only just customize, uniquely, but you talked about the many different use cases from Edge to Data Center, it's because every workload demands a different set of technology capability. If you want true optimization at the TCO, per TCO level. And so that's why it's so important for us to work with customers like Amazon, not just to customize one SKU, but many SKUs. We are, and I was surprised at this number, out of our latest Xeon processor, the Intel Xeon scalable processors, there's actually 54 instances, on just that one CPU generation alone, and 51 of those, are from a custom CPU, that were tailored for unique workloads and instance types. So, that's part of it, but you also talked about the software. And, that's another thing, I think people think Intel's the hardware company. OK, we make hardware, we're a huge software company, thousands of engineers. And, what I love about my job, is I built a team and call them the Cloud Ninjas, but they're software and hardware engineers, that go onsite with customers. They, whether it's performance tuning and optimization, or we are co-creating cloud services. New cloud services, with our customers, that innovation, up and down the stack, that's where real innovation can happen. Two heads together, not just one. (laughs) >> So the cloud is now the number one consumer of your technologies. >> Yes. >> There are a lot of misconceptions early on about the cloud. Everybody thought, okay, the cloud is going to be just one big cloud. It's actually quite diverse. It's global in scale, it's a services business, which has always been sort of fragmented and global, despite Amazon's dominance in infrastructure service. The Data Center itself, the players are kind of consolidating, which is kind of interesting. So, how has cloud affected the way in which you guys look at the market, go to market, everybody else thought everything was going to be standard off the shelf components, in the early days of cloud. >> No. >> Now you're driving towards customization. >> No. >> So what's happening there, what are the big ideas. >> I think we've learned a lot along the way, you're right. One of the things, I mean, these cloud service providers are pushing me off the road map. They want more than we can deliver, so that's where we bring so much at hand to do about it. But, I'd say while a lot of big players are getting bigger, the market is still really in a healthy way diversified. The Super Seven, as we call them, the world's largest, they're growing fast, about 35% around the world. The next wave around the world are growing almost as fast, about 25, 27%. Consumer SAS, has been, Twitters, and Facebooks, and Ubers, right, has been a large part of the cloud. It's now 50/50 with business. And they're both growing at the same categories going forwards, so you're going to see the diversity. Not just big players, but also small. Not just consumers, but business services. And then that's spanning a lot of global growth, and a lot of, if you see the wall of logos in any Amazon presentation, it's because they have partners all over the world. >> RaeJeanne, I want to get your perspective. I talked about this a couple years ago on theCUBE, about the power law of distribution of cloud providers, the top of the head is the big guys, then kind of narrows down. But then I was predicting a cloud service provider market was going to expand and I want to get your thoughts cause that's kind of happening now, you're kind of saying. But I want to get specific on this. You got core cloud, Amazon's of the world. Then you've got hybrid cloud, kind of Data Center. Then you've got the business cloud, business SAS. >> Business SAS. >> Sales force, Twitter, you mentioned those guys. >> Uh huh. >> They run clouds. Enterprises are now going to be cloudified, with commonality. >> Multi-cloud road. >> This is changing the nature of the business. Do you see it that way, talk about this business cloud, it's not competing with core cloud, it's just an expansionary. >> It's so interesting because there is certainly some competition or cannibalization within the cloud. But what I tend to see is, whichever part of this, because you'll hear a Business SAS company, some of it's running in the cloud, some of it's running on their own premises. They're doing that for a reason and both are growing. And then you talk about infrastructure service, but what really happens, especially we another rise moves their business into the cloud, there is just some part of it, just moved A to B, but what we're finding is about 30% of it is TAM expansive, because there are things when you move to an Amazon, or you move to another cloud service provider, take a mature SAS provider, they're just things that they can do that you never would have been able to do in your own IT shop. So, that's driving TAM expansion on top of it. That's also creating a lot of new market entry points, for new businesses to come in and innovate around. Security offerings, verticalized offerings, geo-based specialized offerings. So, yes, there's some friendly competition, but even when I ask somebody who would say, they might be the little challenger to a big infrastructure service player, they say but you know what, we actually get so much business by working with them too, it's hard for me to say, are they competition or a partner, right. That's the industry we live in. >> Co-creation, you mentioned that earlier, a big part of it. >> And the other big TAM expander is you've got the data, you've got AI, machine learning. >> Yes. >> You've got the cloud for scale and then you've got Edge. >> Yeah. >> These are not, it's not a zero sum game, where you're moving stuff from the Data Center into the cloud, these are all incremental. >> New. All new. >> So what are you seeing there? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about the Edge. For me, it kind of feels like that next, uncharted frontier, everybody's investing, everybody's doing amazing things. We're getting the 5G out, we're getting better technologies, we're learning how to store data, and move it faster, quicker, and cheaper. We're getting set up, but the use cases are just yet to be really fully defined. And I'll be honest, when I look at my market modeling, over the next five to 10 years, I always put a little disclaimer, this does not comprehend what's going to happen when billions of devices come online, when we activate. So I think when people say, it's a cloud, it's been going so fast it's going to just slow down. Why? Because innovation's not stopping. >> I think you hit the nail on a point we try to clarify on theCUBE here, is that a lot of people are misunderstanding what a cloud is, and about cloud service providers. As it grows, it's a rising tide floats all boats, so everyone tries to squint through, they're winning and a market share there. It's a different game changing, so that's a great point. I want to, as we get ready to end this segment here, give you a chance to talk about the relationship with Intel. You guys, again, cloud service provider is growing. Big part of your business. But you guys have been working with Amazon, for a long time, talk about the relationship between Intel and AWS. >> Yeah it is, it's a privilege, to be able to. The folks at a company like Amazon, and specifically the ones at Amazon I work with, they have the ability, obviously, to track some of the most amazing talent in the industry. And these people move fast. And, they have a lot of choice. You can either be there with them, ahead of them, and do the customization and differentiate them, and give them what they need. Or, they're going to leave you in the dust. So, I'd like to say we have a great partnership, because they've given us the honor over 12 years. We have so many, from the Data Center, to the Edge, the car, the racer car, deep lines. So many things we're doing together, Stage Maker, Machine and Deep Learning. But it's a, if we slow down, even for a bit, we're going to get left behind. So my job is to just keep running and trying to get ahead of them. And every time I think I get there, they come and poof. But, we're working together. It's a great, challenging partnership. But one that I can guarantee there's better innovation, from Intel, coming out of it, because of getting the opportunity to work with Amazon. >> And you guys are contributing to them too. It's a good win, win scenario. >> I believe so. They've said some really nice things about us, so, about our processing technologies. Our products, seven generations of our products, we're in every availability zone, every instance frame. We've got a great position. >> Well, congratulations on the business performance, I love the Cloud Service Provider expansion, love the Data Center focus, that's really relevant. And acknowledging by Amazon, that's good news to see. And, just stuff. Thank you guys for your partnership with theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Here at theCUBE, Intel Cube. Intel is a big sponsor of theCUBE, we really appreciate that. I'm John with Dave Vallante. Stay with us for more AWS coverage re:Invent, our sixth year in a row, covering all the action. All the value being created. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Serices, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Good to have you back here on The Cube as we continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent day one. We're here for all three days so we have probably about three dozen guests lined up here in this particular Cube set and really a delight to be here once again. Our seventh time at this show. I'm John Walls with Justin Warren. We're now joined by Milos Marjanovic who is vice president of product management at Zayo. Milos, good to see you sir. >> Good to see you too, thanks for having us. >> You bet, and Kevin Sheehan, who's the chief technology officer at Ciena. Kevin, how are you sir? >> Very good, thank you. >> Good. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk about your respective companies first. Just to let folks who are watching know what you do and then what do you do together? So Milos, first off tell us a little bit about Zayo. >> Sure, so Zayo is a communications infrastructure provider. Primarily we own and operate fiber-optic networks. Now, we're here to exhibit a product called CloudLink which specializes in getting people into the cloud by bypassing the public internet. So there's some inherent values associated with that. Because we operate at the infrastructure layer, as you get up the stack and you add on software and other solutions on top of that, partners like Ciena are important for us to have more holistic solutions for our customers that want to go into AWS. >> And so, Kevin, yeah when do you come into the picture? >> Yeah, so Ciena, our DNA, we're about 20 years old as a public company. And we've become known as being the best at moving bits across the globe in terms of whether it's for your mobile phone, your iPad, whatever data is moving around the world. And then over the past five or six years we've dove in in a big way into automating the movement of those bits with software, open software, open software platforms. And that's really, with Zayo we're partnered both on moving bits and at automating the movement of the bits as well. >> Interesting. Yeah 'cause moving data around is actually really, really hard and getting that data where you need it to be, when you need it to be there is one of the really intractable problems of the multi-cloud era. So explain a bit more about how it is that you are actually helping customers to do that 'cause everyone's been struggling with this for quite some time. What's the secret? >> So yeah, I can take the first part of that anyway. So you kind of hit it, it is difficult. And I think ubiquity is key. So having a presence where our customers are. So with our fiber-optic network we have over a thousand data centers on our network. So customers that might have had a private cloud solution within a data center that are either in a hybrid model or looking to move holistically into the public cloud, it's kind of like, who are they looking to to help solve for them for their connectivity needs? And that's where Zayo I think is uniquely positioned. Their expectations and being in the public cloud is such that automation, efficiency, things like scalability is also very critical. So that's not just within the cloud environment, it has to extend to on-prem services as well. And that's really where we come in. So we want to maintain that user experience end-to-end for customers where they can log into a portal on our end, configure a connection in real-time and have that turn up, all the way up into their VPC environment with AWS. >> Right. >> Yeah and I think it's fairly complex to tie network services to cloud-based services. And then if you look at enterprise customers that have cloud services today, about 60% of them that have services now have services from more than one cloud service provider. And that's where it gets exponentially more complex and really where automation has a big play. So if you're an enterprise customer of Zayo for example, and you want to have certain types of cloud services from one service provider, maybe AWS and other types of cloud services from a different cloud service provider, you want the ability to move as, in an agile way as possible between service providers and ideally without having people involved in the middle and having it be a very slow and cumbersome process. So software automation really enables the multi-cloud experience for enterprise customers. >> Doing that at scale, as you say, any kind of complex environment or at any kind of scale, it needs to be automated for it to be repeatable and reliable and make sure that it actually works every time. So as a lot of engineering goes into making that work seamlessly, could you give us a bit of a flavor for what it is about the technology that you've created here that actually makes that work nicely and neatly across all these different environments? >> Yeah, so this is where Zayo, as I said, you know, we're an infrastructure provider and we rely on partners like Ciena to deliver some of that automation, at least parts of it. So one of the demos we recently did, we did a proof of concept where a user could log in to our e-commerce platform, it's called Tranzact with Zayo, they can configure a service, a solution end-to-end. So that's the e-commerce, the quote standpoint, and then we have open APIs between that platform and our SDN layer which is powered by Blue Planet with Ciena. And that rides across our infrastructure and so connectivity is configured on the network layer and then open APIs are on the back end with AWS to help provision it into the actual hyperscale environment as well. >> Yeah, so Milos mentioned the open API, so really to be successful at automating multiple platforms like this between multiple service providers, the foundation is open APIs that have to be able to talk to everything in an open way and in a predictable way, especially when things go wrong. So it's one thing to provision when everything's okay but when things start to go wrong you have to be able to adapt the network and adapt the services to things as they go wrong. So we have that built into our platform and fortunately events like this continue to promote openness of APIs. And then on top of Blue Planet, in addition to working with open APIs, we've become very good at creating an open dev-ops environment. So that in a true partnership with Zayo and Ciena, Zayo can go in and actually participate in the journey and actually create the software inside of our scalable infrastructure in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors. >> So what kind of an impact are you having on your customers if you're providing this multi-cloud connectivity or at least giving them confidence, I assume, to make different kinds of decisions, right? Now all of a sudden they have an opportunity to expand an operation or take on something new because you're giving them confidence that you can pull this off. Is that, are you seeing that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we were recently announced, we were awarded rather, a Direct Connect Network Competency Partnership with AWS and so I think that award isn't necessarily just given out at random, if you will. So us being able to earn the trust of AWS and that being visible to our customers is certainly a value prop in gaining users' trust. That also opens the door for us to springboard in other value-ad solutions for our customers to have more of a turnkey approach. We talk a lot about automation, security, ease of use. That needs to continue to extend. That's a value that AWS holds dear and they expect their partners to have that same approach to the solutions as well. >> So what are you looking for at this show as a signal for where the industry is heading? You mentioned open APIs. We're seeing a lot of conversation about more openness and accepting the idea that there might be other possibilities for deployment other than just one cloud. What else are you expecting to see at this show that will signal where the industry is moving? >> Well of course huge movement to the cloud. Enterprise customers moving more and more to the cloud. You know, if you came here a few years ago things were centered around certain singular applications. And now when you walk around this show floor, pretty much anything under the sun is tied directly into the cloud and some things you never really imagined to be there this quickly. So I think, you know, openness absolutely, but then more and more movement to the cloud and then having the multi-cloud choice, multi-cloud service provider choice for the end customers. >> Yeah, and just to add to that, it's all underpinned by massive workloads as AI, ML, 5G kind of take hold and really are more broadly adopted, that is a lot of data that is moving around. So having that underpinned by a strong network backbone that has high throughput performance, things of that nature, is going to be critical to get data from the cloud to where the eyeballs are, where the users are. >> Do you think enterprises are moving everything truly into the cloud, or are they doing more of a hybrid approach? Where they're having some stuff go to the cloud, some things stay on their own premises, some things actually move out to the edge? Where do you see the enterprises moving? >> Yeah I think it depends on the application. So there's certainly some applications, depending on the type of enterprise, that are best if they're kept inside the four walls of the enterprise, and then they'll go with a hybrid approach. But you know, I think whenever possible the scale and the economics that can be reached if it's truly put into the cloud, you know, definitely pays for itself very quickly. >> Yeah I completely agree with that. I think a hybrid approach is probably going to exist into the future. Now, how that's split 70/30, 80/20, whatever that might be is yet to be determined. But as Kevin mentioned, the scalability in the public cloud ecosystem, and frankly, the immense resources that AWS is putting into some of their products that you can bolt on to kind of vanilla solutions that customers are coming in with, is very difficult to replicate. So I think the scale within the public sphere is going to be quicker, but hybrid will always exist I think. >> Before we cut you loose, what do you want to take away from here? From AWS re:Invent, from the show itself? Go back to Raleigh, head back to Denver, what is it that you take in your hip pocket that you think you can put to practice? >> I think for me it's seeing real time the rate of change that's going on inside of the industry. The thing that we've learned over the past five years or so is that, it's very hard to predict the rate of change that we're living in, right? And we're not even in, for example, a 5G world yet. But we're right on the precipice of it and I think what we're learning and what we're taking away and putting into practice is that the network really has to be as adaptive as possible because it's so hard to predict the amount of change that's coming and when the change is coming. You just know it is coming and you will have to adapt to the change. >> Yeah, and keying off the open APIs, I mean, we're not here to be vendors only. We're not here to be just partners or customers. We want to be all three. And I think the lines that used to divide that I think are now blurring. And the folks that are exhibiting here, including ourselves, I think fall into probably all three categories. And just seeing that ecosystem evolve over time, those lines will continue to blur. >> Well gentlemen, thank you both for taking the time to be here. I know you've got a lot of activity going on this week. Good luck with that, and again, we appreciate the time. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Milos and Kevin. Good deal. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent. We are live on The Cube. (futuristic music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE We are taking a short break from the madness of the conference season to do some CUBE Conversations here in the Palo Alto studio, which we always like to do and meet new people, and hear new stories, learn about new companies. And today we've got a new company, we've never had 'em on theCUBE before, it's Evan Kaplan, he's the CEO of InluxData. Evan, great to see you. >> Yeah, hey thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So for people that aren't familiar with the company, give 'em kind of the 101 on Influx. >> Yeah so, InfluxData is an opensource platform for collecting metrics and events at scale. The company is about almost four years old, has a large selection of tier one customers, is broadly accepted by developers as the number one time-series platform out there, so. >> So a lot of people talk about collecting data, so we've been doing Splunk since 2012, and, they really found something interesting on log files, and took it a whole 'nother level, so there's a lot of people that are capturing events. So what do you guys do that's a little bit different, how are you slicing and dicing this opportunity? >> Yeah, to put this is even in the broader context of what we're looking at is the 20 year break-up of the Oracle, DB2 and Formex franchise that dominated and relational databases were the answer to all problems and so if you look at a company like Splunk working on logs, they optimized a platform for those logs, for that data set, Elastic also, really interesting space. I think our innovation has been in saying "Hey, where the world's going, where all of these complex systems are going?" Particularly IoT, is to real-time view of the data and so, rather than collect verbose logs, historical views of the data and things like that, real system operators, real developers and builders want to instrument their applications, their infrastructure, so you can view 'em in real time. The place where the rubber hits the road is IoT. Sensors spit out metrics and events, period, full stop. And so if you want to be performant in how you handle, your instrumentation of the physical world, and how you do your machine learning, and how you want to manage these systems, you use a fundamentally time-series based database. As opposed to Splunk or Elastic or, which are primarily search-based databases. >> And are you primarily capturing and standardizing the data to feed other analytics tools, or do you have the whole suite, where you're doing some of the analytics as well? >> Yeah, such a great question. So, the fundamental platform is called the TICK Stack, and it stands for Telegraf which is a collector, which has about 200 different collectors that sit out there in the world and collect everything from SNMP data, to Oracle data, to application, to micro-service data, to Kubernetes, to that sort of stuff. There's Influx, which is the DB, which is highly optimized for millions and millions of writes a second, so collecting data points and samples. There's Chronograf which is the visualization engine and so, it allows you as soon as the data comes input you can see how it's graphed, see it on time-series oriented graphing, and then there's Kapacitor which takes action on the data. What we don't do is the super high sophisticated analytics. There are lots of companies in Silicon Valley who take our data, pump it up, and then we put it back on the platform to build a control loop for it. >> Right. So when the Kapacitor, does your application then take action on those things? >> Yes. Yeah, so, it'd do everything from alerting, to sending out another machine request, to spinning up a new Kubernetes pod, to basically scaling the application, self healing. >> Right. So does it fit in between a lot of those other types of applications that are sending off notifications, and those types of things? >> Yes, yeah. so you're in between? >> And usually, we're instrumented the way a standard developer, or an architect or CTO does is they look at a complex application, or a complex set of sensors, they instrument with Influx and Telegraf, and collect that data, they view it in real time, and then they build control loops, automation loops, to make that easier so when you see a problem, it's got a tolerance you can self adjust for. So it's the beginning of kind of the self-healing system. >> Okay, and I know that Telegraf is definitely opensource, are the other three? >> All four are open-source All four are open-source. >> Everything, in our world, everything for a developer is free, so, and a single note of Influx can handle a couple million writes a second, which is really really performant to run in production. Where our business model is, where we make money is, our closed source clustering, sharding, distributing the database, if you decide you want to run highly available in the production environment, you would buy our closed-source stuff. We have about 430 customers who run our closed source stuff on top of the opensource. >> So, it is kind of like a MapR to Hadoop if you will, where, you know, it's built on, built on the opensource, and then they've got their proprietary stuff kind of wrapped around it, almost like an open core? Or is that a? >> Yeah, it's a little It's a little different than the normal Hadoop stuff. One is, our stuff doesn't have any external dependencies. It can work with other third party projects, but just, it's a platform onto itself, there aren't 25 projects. There are four different projects, we own them all, they come across as a single binary, and it's not part of Apache. >> So they're integrated So the TICK is the full TICK >> Yes, and then you put the clustering on top. So there's some similarity, but not being part of Apache, we can control and keep clean what that experience is. And we're about, the thing that's been most successful for us is, well Paul our founder who is my partner, it's called time to awesome, the idea that a developer in 10 minutes can very quickly be up and instrumenting an application or a set of sensors, and see that data pouring in within 10 minutes from going to the site and downloading the opensource. >> So it's interesting, the giant opportunity is really around IoT, just in terms of the explosion of the sensor data, and we see that coming, and we were at AT&T show a couple weeks ago, talking about 5G which is, slowly, slowly coming down the road, (Evan laughs) they've got the standards fixed. But in terms of the, you said the shorter term, nobody has budget, I always like to joke, nobody has budget for a new platform, they do have budget for new applications, because they've got real problems. So you said you're seeing, your main success now, your go to market application, is around application monitoring? Would that be accurate, or what is kind of your? >> Yeah, there are two broad things, and they're both very similar technology as a service. One is the central monitoring stuff so, Tesla's Power Wall, Seimens' Windmills, a variety of solar companies build Telegraf into their platforms and then use InluxData to collect and store that information and analyze it. On the software side, people like IBM's Cloud Service running their network and their fabric, SAP with Ariba, Cisco with all their collaboration stuff, they instrument their software applications. And that's the idea is it's a general purpose platform for collecting and instrumenting instrumenting the applications or the sensors, either one, or both. >> Okay, and so what are you guys working on now, what's next, kind of raise the profile, get some new stuff >> Yeah, so we are-- before the whole IoT thing completely explodes, we're not quite there yet but it's coming down the pike. >> But we're starting to see it really happen, so that's really exciting for us. And this is just a really, really big market, it's certainly a super set of the log market, it should be. As you think about just the instrumentation of the physical world, how much instrumentation is going on, your clothes, your cars, your homes, your industrial devices, my watch, how much sensor data there is. We think this is a tremendously large market, so we're doing a couple of things. One is, we're about to introduce a new language for querying these kinds of time-series data that's going to be opensource, that a bunch of other people can use with their data stores. We're rolling out a new API-driven service, so that people can store these things directly in the could natively, so all they have to do is know our API. So we're really trying to push from the technology limit we're a product-driven company, and so, and an opensource-driven company, so we're trying to push that, that community is super important to us. >> It's so wild to me, the opportunity to have a closed feedback loop between someone's product back to the barn, you're barely starting to see it, Tesla obviously, is a good example, they're slowly seeing it in other places. But what a fundamental change in manufacturing, from building a product, making some assumptions about use, shipping that product to your distribution, and then, maybe you get some feedback now an then, versus actually monitoring the way that that thing is actually used by your end user, whether it's a product like a car, or even a software application, as you're rolling out all these different apps and features in the apps, how are people using it, are they using it? Where do you double down, where do you back off? And that loop has not really been >> That's pretty insightful. >> opened up very wide. Yeah, no it's just starting to open up, and that whole notion of product telemetry, my prediction is is that, as development teams grow and things like that, you're going to have telemetry experts, people are going to be specializing. How do you instrument these products so you get maximum engagement, and usage, and things like that? So I think that's pretty insightful on your part. If you think about it from a systems point of view, right? Instrumentation is first. You can't do anything 'til you instrument, whether it's telemetry from a product, it's the engagement or this. So instrumentation is first, visibility in real time is second. So observability is the big thought in systems application and building now, this notion of observing your system in real time, because you don't know, apriori, it's impossible to know a complex system, how it's going to behave, then it's automation, right? So like, okay now I can see these behaviors, how do I automate something that makes the experience for you, the user, better? But lastly, we can see this with self-driving cars, it's autonomy. It's the idea that the system becomes self-healing, and AI, and those sorts of things, but that's kind of the last step. There's a lot of learning in that process to get there. >> And it has to be automated because at scale there's no way for people to keep up with this stuff, and then how do you separate signal from noise and how do you know what to do? So you've got to automate a whole bunch of this. >> And you know if we had an aspiration it would be we're not going to write the applications that do these things but what we want to do is be that system of record so that people have a really efficient, effective metrics and events store so they can really track and keep track of all that engagement. Time-stamped data, for lack of a better way to say it. >> It sounds like you're in a pretty good space, Evan. >> Pretty excited (chuckles), thank you. Thanks for saying that, but yeah, we're pretty excited. >> Alright, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing the story, we look forward to watching the journey. >> Yeah. Thanks man. Alright, take care. >> Alright, thanks. He's Evan, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, who is the CTO advisor, and this is the CTO segment. Happy to welcome back to the program, we have Binny Gill and Rajiv Mirani. Both of them are CTOs. Binny, you've got cloud services, and Rajiv, you have cloud platforms. Let's start there, when we talk about, you know, there was a survey when you registered for the event and said, what do you think of Nutanix as? Am I your server vendor, am I your HCI vendor, am I your cloud vendor, am I your mega, uber platform of everything? You've got platforms and services, help us understand a little bit how this fits and how you look at the portfolio, and we'll arm wrestle if you guys can't agree. >> Rajiv: That sounds good. >> Binny: Yeah, go ahead. >> You want to go ahead? So both of us obviously work very closely together, but broadly speaking, I look after the core stack, the storage, networking, hypervisor, including Prism, and then Binny looks more at the services we're building on top, Era, Calm, things like that, so Binny, can you explain that a bit? >> Given the breadth of the ambition that we have, right, I mean, it's good to focus on the two layers separately in some sense, build a platform that is capable of hosting a whole bunch of services. As you can see in what Amazon and others have evolved, they've spent a lot of time building platform, and if you think about it, even Nutanix, for the last seven, eight years, has done a really good job. And once you have a solid foundation, and building cloud requires some new capabilities as well, as Rajiv has said, networking and security on top, now you can start building services, and services themselves have a stack, right? Because there will be higher-level services that use some lower-level services and this. So that's, you know, that's a long journey ahead of us. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, 'cause every time, it seems like we have, you know, oh, this next-generation thing, I'm not going to have to worry about the underlying thing. Virtualization's going to totally abstract it. We've spent a decade fixing the storage and networking challenges there. Containerization, once again, it's like the application done there. Serverless, of course, will take care of all this, but you know, everything underneath it, it still needs work. How do you balance and give us some of that, you know, what's the glue versus abstracting and going to developers? Maybe let's start with platform. >> Well, the platform's always going to be there, right, and as we look at things like containers, that's actually where things get messy. How do containers work with storage, is one of the bigger issues right now with Kubernetes and other frameworks. So we have to start with a platform, we build on top of that and hopefully abstract enough that, you know, the services themselves don't have to deal with the messiness of the platform. >> Yeah, if you look at how technology is evolving, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The platform used to be Linux, Windows, I mean, that's the operating system on which I build my applications, right? Now, the new platform is cloud. AWS is a platform, is an OS, and Azure is one OS, and how do you build applications that can run on these new, next-generation platforms? But the kind of problems to solve are still the same. I want to snapshot my application, back it up, I want to move my application one place to the other, I want to scale it out, scale it in. So the problems are identical to what we had, but it's just that solving it with the new tools that we have, Kubernetes, containers, and so on. >> Yeah, and sometimes birds just fly right through our studio. >> Yeah, I mean, we worry about bugs, and now we have birds flying in. >> So, Rajiv, talk to us about, you basically have two different types of cloud clusters. You have to serve Binny's organization, you also have to serve your external clients. Storage, network, compute, has to have APIs, has to have capabilities, basic capabilities that both your customers who want to build their own overlay, and then Nutanix services on top. Talk to me about, how do you make sure that you're building the best cloud platform to be consumed by cloud services, whether they're Nutanix cloud services or someone else's. >> I think, just comes out of the core principles that we have built the company around, right, that we will always build things around web-scale design, so it has to scale to very large deployments, it has to be completely distributed, it has to go through a certain amount of vetting, in terms of having APIs exposed. Nothing we do internally is through secret APIs, everything is public APIs, so you're pretty stringent on some of these things. And then of course, layering on the simplicity of Nutanix is another thing that we take very, very seriously, so when we do all that, nice patterns emerge. I think it lends itself to an elegance that the platform provides for the rest of the stack. >> So, then we get to a confusing abstraction, which is, you mentioned it earlier, containers. Who gets containers? Is that your organization, is that your organization? Is it a fundamental part of the foundation, or is it a cloud service? >> I think the trick is to not necessarily worry too much about the boundary here, because frankly, this is something that the industry is still figuring out, you know, what layer is this new Kubernetes thing at? And is it just at containers, but actually, now it's going into all the way, application provisioning, load balancing, distributed routing, all sorts of things, so that's, I mean, we work as a team essentially, and there's a whole bunch of engineers that are looking at the whole picture, it's always very important to look at the entire picture and then figure out what are the right layers to go solve the problem, and when you're looking at containers, the bigger problem that our customers are talking about is, how do you deal with the legacy plus the containers in one environment? Now, I have my application, it's a three-tier application. The database, I still want to run in a VM, right? But I want to start tasting this Kubernetes thing, so I want to go with my app, the web tier with containers, but it needs to be in one view, and that's what Calm demonstrated. Through Calm, you can orchestrate an application that's part VM, part containers with Kubernetes and help our customers transition. So which layer these things are, it's going to be an evolving answer. >> So Binny, I love that you started the conversation around Calm. Is Calm the first interaction that most customers will experience when it comes to Nutanix cloud services, or is there a different, one of the other services, the more likely first experience of cloud services versus the trivial compute, storage, network. >> Right, so the first cloud service that we have announced, that we'll deliver, is DR, right? I mean, that's the first one with Xi. Once DR is available, very quickly we'll add more services. Beam is another one that has to fold in to the Xi cloud services. When I say fold in, it essentially means you have the same identity, and you have the same billing mechanisms, and the same experience. You know, similar to when you go to a public cloud, you'll see, there's a host of services, and they're sort of equals, and you can pick whichever one you want to use. What we want to provide with Xi cloud services is that, the same experience, except that these services are now hybrid. You can have them on-prem, you can have it in the cloud. And our teams are building this hybrid view, some of which, the preview of it, what you already saw in the demo there, you saw availability zones on both sides, shown on one screen, now you'll see the service footprint on both sides, on one screen. >> Stu: Yeah, Rajiv-- >> From an experience point of view, I think, Calm will be how people who see this for the first time, that's going to be the center marketplace that we will have, that's where people will launch services from. >> Right, so when you, where's the portal for cloud services, and as I understand, Calm is that portal. >> Calm is a lot more than that, it'll have not just services but applications and workloads as well. But yes, the experience will start with Calm. >> When you talk about a hybrid cloud world in the platform, people are trying to understand what exactly lives where. When we hear kind of Xi, wonder if you might be able to give us kind of a compare-contrast of, say, that you look at VMware, and VMware and Amazon is kind of an easy one to understand, as it's relatively the same stack, just living in a different data center. >> So we're doing things a little bit differently. While we are building our own cloud data centers today, we're architecting it in a way that we're not tying it down to any single stack, that it has to be only a Nutanix-oriented stack. We absolutely intend to scale this out by partnering with service providers, with cloud vendors, and so on. You saw something in the keynote yesterday about running nested on GCP. You can imagine where that will go in the future, but the cloud's also on the radar. Much like we did with our HCI stack, we ship them Supermicro, but we're conscious of the fact that it's software that we can move anywhere. We are building Xi exactly the same. >> Yeah, and what I'd add is, while we are doing it in our own data centers right now, we are learning a lot, and as we are learning the things that are truly needed to make running a cloud easy, from an operational perspective, that allows us to build a product that is an honest product to give to our partners and service providers, say, now you go run it, and you won't be spending too much. For example, the experience that they've had with OpenStack, it cannot be repeated again, right? So that's what we want to do. >> So let's talk about the relationship with Google as a model going forward. Is that prototypical of what you're looking to do with other public cloud providers? And first, give us some color around that announcement, we have anyone on theCUBE talk about Xi and Google, and then kind of the strategy moving forward. >> A lot of the public cloud vendors are actually realizing that hybrid cloud is important, and as part of that, they're providing bare-metal services, and Google has its nested service, to enable others to bring their own stack, you know, virtualization stack, to run there. Amazon has done it VMware, Amazon has also announced their intention to gear bare-metal services. So we see a future where a lot of these public cloud vendors will offer bare metal, and that's where our Xi stack will run, and also giving customers choice to go from one cloud to the other seamlessly. Today, we know that Nutanix can move from public Xi cloud to on-prem and back, but once you have Xi cloud running on multiple cloud vendors and you can move between cloud vendors seamlessly as well. And that's a really compelling message for our customers. >> Great. One of the challenges for some of us watching is, you've got a pretty big portfolio now, and some of the things out in the future, it's like, okay, where does Nutanix fit, how do they have the right to participate in this? Wonder if you can talk a little bit about Era, and maybe Sherlock is a little bit further out. >> Era is about managing copies of your databases. Again, if you look at where a lot of cost is sunk in enterprises, running my database, a production database, for every single production database, there'll be maybe tens of test copies of it. What Era does is minimizes the cost of managing the copies, and also, it's thinly-provisioned copies. That's something that our customers have said that's a real pain point for them that nobody solves really well. So we decided to work on that, that's just a starting point of what we can do in this PaaS layer and also, helps us learn this space as well. We are reaching out to not the infrastructure admin, but actually to the database admin. It gives us a new audience to talk to as well. So from an audience perspective, we are broadening the scope, we are reaching closer to their lines of businesses and the decision-makers, which is good. Now, going to Sherlock-- >> Actually, if I could just, one quick followup on the database piece. Database migration's really hard. You know, talk to any customer and you say database migration, it's one of the things that strikes fear in them. Talk just for a second if you could about the expertise that your team has and why you believe you can really deliver that push-bus and simplicity that Nutanix is known for. >> Oh, so yeah, the team that's building Era are hardcore Oracle folks who have decades of experience doing those kind of hard problems, and they've come here with a mission, into Nutanix, that we are going to solve it. Using the Nutanix platform that we have built, there are so many things that can be done in a better way, and since we have a clean slate, we can start afresh and do it the right way. From our capability to do it in the right way, making it simple for our customers, we don't have a doubt. In fact, a lot of customers who have tested this in alpha, they have raving reviews on that, and they just want it as soon as possible. >> And on the database migration subject, we also have a group called SQL Xtract that we've been shipping for some time that helps you migrate your databases from existing three-tier or even hyperconverged stacks, onto Nutanix. So we have some expertise in the area already. >> So, a little bit on the, I heard the term copy data management. Is this mainly copy data management, or is this actually database migration to a new, to ability to move from one database to another one, or is it all of the above? >> So, it's doing management of copies, it's also allowing you to clone databases. So you can go to a snapshot and clone another one. Migration is not yet there, but it's a natural consequence of the capabilities that we have, because once you have snapshots, we have the capability of moving snapshots from one data center to the other using our DR capabilities. So that's on the roadmap. Further down the roadmap is database provisioning itself. If you want to provision a brand-new database, you can also do that, so these are the natural transitions of work, but what we wanted to do, just like what we did with Xi, start with the hardest, thorniest problem, and then work backwards into the simple things. >> Alright, so unfortunately, we're running short on time. Give us a closing word, I want, Rajiv and Binny, maybe you can talk a quick second about project Sherlock and give us some things that we should look for down the road from Nutanix. >> Yeah, so we believe that the world needs an enterprise cloud operating system. What that means is it can run on the private cloud, in the public cloud, and on the edge, and Sherlock comes there, I mean, it's taking our stack and creating a mini-PaaS version, as you saw in the demo, and running it at the edge in a way that all of your footprint appears like one dispersed cloud. And that's a pretty exciting space, and we think that is the key differentiator that we'll have going forward. >> Any final words, Rajiv? >> I think he covered quite a fair amount of ground, so yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Alright, well, it goes back to really that distributed architecture, the core. Appreciate having the conversation, the CTO roundtable, as it were. Binny, Rajiv, always a pleasure to catch up. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)