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

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS Direct Connect, Transit Gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >> That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >> Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customers. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud. They can have their own supercloud, as we call it, if you take advantage of all the CapEx and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options in the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered. What are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >> Yeah. I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion. Right from day one we were the early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software-defined data center, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. And this was somewhat new to VMware. But we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying, we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks. Many other customers around the world were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end-to-end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >> You had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.metal. It's isolate based. It's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex Storage. VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better faster, networking more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. What does that mean? >> Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware-defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software-defined data centers. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. That's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other. They can go back to that host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production-grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology. And the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B. The lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> It's great to see. I mean, the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. Congratulations. >> One of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> It's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and at that time people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on-premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >> And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. We're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're so much more beyond that's happening in industry and I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware Cloud on AWS. Jointly engineered solution bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

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

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

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

>> Viewers of our breaking analysis series know that we've been following the developments in cybersecurity for a number of years and of course, throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the permanent shifts that we see in cyber from remote work, distributed computing and technology advancements. We've reported how the adversaries are highly capable they're well-funded and they're motivated. And how they're constantly upping their game on defenders, island hopping, stealthily living off the land, planting self forming malware at various points in the digital supply chain, offering advanced ransomware as a service of the dark web to any disreputable individual with or without a high school diploma that may have access to a server and is brazen enough to steal from their company. We've also shared this chart from Optiv many, many times, it's a taxonomy of the cybersecurity landscape, and it is meant to make your eyes bleed, ask any CSO and they'll tell you they're drowning in fragmented tooling, technical debt, and their number one challenge is lack of talent. Not that their people aren't capable, they are, but CSOs just don't have enough of them. They can't hire fast enough or they can't retain qualified people with the talent war that's going on. Or they can't train people fast enough, or they just don't have the budget. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video exclusive with Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, Nick, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> That's our pleasure. So Arctic Wolf networks, let's talk about the company, the problem, you heard my little narrative upfront. What are you guys all about? >> Yeah, so at its core, we're a cybersecurity technology company. You know, it's our belief that we've really pioneered the first full scale cloud native security operations platform and at its core, what we're trying to do as a business is make security operations something that's fast, easy and economical for really a company of any size and scale to implement with really two key components, one we're agnostic to the technology and the landscape of the technology that they have already implemented within their environment, and two, we can feather into really any organization, regardless of the skill set they have from a cybersecurity standpoint in house. And really the problem that we're setting out to solve, I think you illustrated well at the beginning of the show here is that it's our belief that the cybersecurity industry in a sense has failed the end user or failed the customer by throwing, you know, a myriad of different tools at them. And it's really, you know, our mission here as a company to end cyber risk. And it's our belief that through the cloud native platform that we've bought in the cybersecurity security operations cloud that we've built, that we can deliver the outcomes that have been promised over time to these customers, which at the end of the day, is really just to be safe and have their customer and have their business protected. >> So you guys are the experts. You can kind of provide a white glove service that essentially plugs in to my business. Is that right? And how easy is that to do, what do I have to do to, to set it up? How complicated is that for me, the customer? >> Yeah, so it's, it's very straightforward. We can implement our security operations platform, you know, in as short as a week and generally speaking, you know, about a month and we plug in really to the infrastructure that the customer has in place. And for some of our customers, that's very little and for some of our customers, most of our customers, that's quite a bit of technology. And the beauty of the way that we've built the platform is that we're really agnostic to that tech. So, we can take feeds from kind of any technology that are in place, that helps to augment the platform that we've built. And then we feather in kind of the technologies that we've built within the platform, into their existing infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is give the customer visibility, you know, into the tools that they have, the gaps that they might have as a result of the tools, you know, in some cases, the duplication of efforts that they have, you know, between these tools and then deliver a security outcome or a protection that maybe they haven't otherwise felt as a business. And then outside of kind of the technology platform, we add what we call our concierge security team as a layer to the deliverable that we give to the customer. And why that's important is that not all customers are created equal and with regard to the skillset that they have in house, in that that concierge security platform allows us to kind of work with a customer at any kind of, you know, point along their security journey, regardless of the in-house technology talent that they have. >> Now, so I got to ask you, our largest footprint for the cube is in the heart of Silicon Valley. We love the valley, but I also love stories of high growth companies that are outside of Silicon Valley. You guys are in the Midwest in Minnesota, it's got some Compellent DNA in there. And I remember my, so my business friends, Phil Soren, and Larry Yasmin, you know them, Phil used to tell me, Dave, this is actually an advantage for us to be in the middle of the part of the country. There's a talent war going on, which back then was a lot less than it is today, even. So how do you see that? Are there advantages to you and being in that part of the country, or does it not matter because you're so distributed around the world? >> Yeah, I mean, I would follow a similar tune to Phil, right. I, you know, obviously worked at Compellent early and, you know, historically I've worked at other Minneapolis based technology companies and the reality is there's a really strong technology ecosystem in Minneapolis. And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, is not just in sales and marketing or just on the technical side, but it's in building high growth technology companies kind of from the ground up into, you know, large scale. And now we've seen not only the fortune 500 kind of base that we have here in Minneapolis, but also a growing contingency of larger technology companies using Minneapolis as at least, you know, one of the spokes against their hub, if not the hub themselves. And clearly my pedigree in history was out of Minneapolis based tech, you know, and I've moved to other locations throughout the country, but as we started to build out, you know, Arctic Wolf and what we wanted Artic Wolf's culture to look like, and as we started to lay out the foundation for what we wanted our growth to look like, it became very clear to myself, you know, our chairman and co-founder Brian Nesmith, that Minneapolis would be a great home for us as Arctic Wolf. And then we would continue to invest in some of the locations that we have, you know, both across the country and now across the globe. >> So there are a lot of companies that are doing managed security services, but if I got it right, you guys specifically target smaller and midsize companies, is that correct? And why is that? >> Yeah, so I would say that that would be correct as of a few years ago, the dynamic has changed quite a bit. And I think it's a result of the dynamic of the market. First and foremost, we are a technology company. We have this concierge layer on top, which is really what the customers are looking for, but it's all powered by the platform. So the platform kind of allows us to do what we've done as a business, into both small organizations, which is, you know, where we probably got our start, but over the last few years, we've seen tremendous growth up market, you know, so for example, we as a business have grown, you know, over a hundred percent now for eight years in a row and now on a much larger denominator, but our upmarket business is growing at four to 500%. And I think that's a result of really two things. I think, A, customers of that size and scale have realized that cyber security and cybersecurity operations as a problem is something that's really hard to accomplish in-house regardless of your size and complexity. And then two, I think what happened over the past year, year and a half is that we saw a lot of organizations move from a centralized I.T or a centralized, you know, security function where they could all operate within an office and all operate in a centralized environment, all of a sudden becoming very disparate in their geography. And that led to a lot more interest in what we did with larger customers, because we could deploy a security operation effectively, remotely in a really short amount of time. And we could do it more effectively and economically than, than they could do on their own. And then we also solve for a component of the human aspect of what a security operation means, right. And what I mean by that is these larger organizations can take their highly skilled cybersecurity talent and focus them on the strategic initiatives within the company. Whereas a lot of the security work or risk is in kind of the day to day, right? The dieting that takes place within an organization. And that's where a lot of the breaches take place is in making sure that you're actually paying attention to, you know, the alerts that you're getting and paying attention to the telemetry and the tools that you've made investments in. And we augment that portion of a cybersecurity operation really, really well for larger organizations and for smaller organizations, we are that security operation. So it's kind of dependent on the way in which they're set up. >> Okay. So it's a mix of both well augmenting, and basically you take the whole thing and so, so your ideal customer profile, your ICP is anybody with a security problem. I mean, that's everybody, well, maybe you could describe paint a picture of your perfect customer, if you would. >> Yeah, so, and you, I know you said that somewhat jokingly, but it, but it is true. We have customers of all sizes, you know, so I, I bet our smallest customer is under 10 employees. Our largest customer is over 50,000 employees. We have customers in every vertical of the market, you know, mostly centralized in healthcare, financial organizations, manufacturing, but, you know, the largest swath of customers by industry would probably not top 10%. So, we service really any account that's looking to develop and invest in a security operation and has the support of their organization and the support of their board and their leadership teams to make that investment. And then where we, where we fall within the account is really dependent on the way in which their current operation is set up. And certainly, you know, the massive organizations that have, you know, 50 people within their cybersecurity team, and they have a hundred different tools. They're probably not the best target for us, but if they have security awareness, if they have a security as a top need or a top priority within their business, and they're looking for a way to build out a true security operation within their account, whether that be wholesale through a third-party or in part through a third-party, we're a perfect fit for all those accounts, which makes our addressable market massive. >> Yeah, so what's unique about you guys, I mean, this may be not the right analogy, but you're kind of like the easy button for cyber. I mean, there's nothing easy about cyber., I get that, but you, you do make it easy, especially for companies that don't have any cyber expertise to engage and get up to speed fast, and certainly be more protected. That's one aspect of your uniqueness. The other is, I think, is your tech stack. I'm hearing, you've got a platform. I know you're focused on network detection and fast response. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's unique about Arctic Wolf. >> Yeah, so the platform itself is really what we founded the company on. So we spent the first few years of our organization in really building out this cloud scale, multitenant cloud, native platform, understanding that the volume of data and the amount of sophistication that we would need to deliver the security operation in the long run was going to be massive. So the platforms really kind of, you know, set on a few different founding principles. One, the platform needs to work for any organization regardless of their size, regardless of their underlying tech and regardless of the skill set within their account. And that's really important. A lot of the tools in the market today require certain things of the, of the customer. And it's our premise, regardless of the customer that we won't require anything from the customers themselves. It's up to them to tell us which portions of the experience they want to own, verse Artic Wolf owning. The second would be that we need to be able to ingest a vast amount of data, and we need to be able to make intelligent decisions with that data, in a short amount of time. And as we've built out our machine learning and our AR algorithms, what we've been able to do is leverage a tool set that allows us to ingest. I think we're up to now 1.5 approaching 2 trillion observations a week, right. Which might equate to a few hundred alerts within our SOC on a per customer basis. But we're only bringing one or two things to a customer on a weekly basis that really need attention. And that's all about the platform kind of curating, cultivating the vast amount of data that we've brought into it. And then, how do we explain and how do we sell that platform with this concierge later into the customer base is also important. And we've done that through what we call modules. So we kind of founded the company on MDR managed detection and response, but we are not a managed detection and response company. It's one of our modules. We've then added manage risk, which competes kind of in the vulnerability management space. We've added a SAS and IAS monitoring, which is really cloud security. We've added what we call log search, which is really our first foray into collaboration. And then we just recently launched a quarter ago, what we call managed security awareness training, which is, you know, training the human aspect of the company on the threats of cybersecurity. And we actually just announced another acquisition in the managed security space today with habituate, which is going to give us, you know, kind of a Hollywood style approach to content within managed awareness training. But tying all those together is very unique in the market. So generally speaking, you'll see a company focused on a specific attack surface, or a specific threat. And what we're trying to say is, look, you're not a hundred percent protected as a business, or you don't have a robust security operation unless you're bringing together all aspects of cybersecurity under one umbrella. And that's really our goal as a company. >> Okay. So you got all these different modules and you may not want to go here cause you're in the cyber business and you're, you're prudently secretive, but, but I'm interested in kind of what's underneath. I presume you're using best of breed tooling underneath, but unlike, you know, the hosting company of the past or those, you know, a big, you know, integrator who could do this, but they've got one of everything and it's sort of, kind of a mess. You're building a scalable business, but you're not, you're not developing, you know, best of breed, identity access products for the marketplace. You're I presume you're buying those in integrating them and working through whatever APIs and making it all work across your stack. Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack? >> Yeah, so the technology stack has been built from the ground up by Arctic Wolf. So certainly we're using, you know, various technologies or open source technologies from within the ecosystem, but the technology and the platform itself is Arctic Wolf. So we're not beholden to any third parties for what we deliver to the customer. And that makes us very nimble in a few areas. One, it makes us very nimble in the way that we price the solution to the customer, which for us is a very predictable model. And then two, it allows us to be nimble with customer needs as to what they want from us, both of the existing modules that we have, but also additional modules or, you know, additional solutions that we might bring to the market. So a lot of vendors that have historically kind of lived within the MDR space and certainly vendors that have lived in the managed, you know, the MSSP or MSP space, which we are certainly not, they're generally leveraging third-party technologies. They're generally buying and implementing or white labeling third-party technologies. And then they're layering kind of a services component on top. And we are not doing that. We've built the technology ourselves and don't get me wrong. That was a massive investment in both time and resources. But I think in the end, what it'll allow us to do is be very nimble with the market and most importantly, be very nimble with the customer's requirements and requests. >> Right. Okay. So let's talk about your market opportunity. I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, I got it well over a hundred billion, I don't know, maybe it's 110, 120 billion. That's kind of your tan, you may be not serving that entire market today. Although you said you started in small and mid-size, you're targeting now your enterprise, your higher end businesses growing, you talked about, I think you said a hundred percent growth, like eight quarters in a row. And so there's no shortage of opportunity for you. How do you think about your total available market? Maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's been eight years of a hundred percent growth. >> Eight years, not eight quarter, I apologize. >> It's been going really well for us. And it's a reflection on the market itself and the approach we're taking. So in our view, security operations is really the opportunity to unify all these disparate markets in cybersecurity. And, when I walk into a customer account, if I had to use two words to describe how they're feeling, one would be confused, the other would be frustrated. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes they're only one, but generally speaking, one of those two words comes out of their mouth. And the reason for it is at the end of the day, they just want to be protected. They want the outcome. And all of these disparate markets are promising the same outcome, but they're just promising it on the endpoint or just on the network or just in cloud or just an IOT or just an OT, or just in fill in the blank. And it's our view that it's our opportunity as a company to really fill that void for the customer, which is to unify all of these different technologies and spaces into one security operation. And sometimes that means that we're delivering our own end point. And sometimes that means that we're leveraging an end point or an end point solution that the customer has in house. And we're ingesting that data into our platform and we're making sense of it to the end user. But when you put that market together, you know, it's a hundred, I think Gartner's recent numbers there are 150 plus billion dollar market. And in 2021, I think it's growing at, you know, 12 to 15%. And it's our view that we can service the majority of that market, you know, I think on a conservative measure, you know, 90 to a hundred billion is the, is the Tam that we're addressing. And we're now starting to go, not only scaling out from the number of products for the markets that we service, and you can see that through managed security awareness training, but also the geographies we service, the segments of the market we service, specialization within verticals. And, for us, that is the opportunity at the end here. >> I wonder if you could help us squint through some of the data you hear in the industry, some of the trends you see in the press, certainly this came up in the, in the solar winds hack. We were seeing, I mentioned upfront, the adversaries are very capable. They're able to get in, live off the land, live stealthily, they're island hopping into the supply chain. You know, oftentimes you don't know, more than often, you don't know they're there, I've heard stats like, and we look at the solar winds hack, we saw that it was, you know, 300 days or over a year that they were inside the company. And you've heard, you know, average statistics from, you know, whatever that it's hundreds of days are those, are you able to compress those? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of where you see your customers and how you're helping them, you know, respond? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is really about limiting the volume of incidents within a customer account and then limiting the impact. And what you're talking about is the impact. And the impact as these threat actors have become, you know, more sophisticated is larger as they're in the environment for a longer period of time. So the faster you can get to an attack or the faster you can detect an attack, the better off you'll be as a business. And that is the core of what we do as a company. And, and certainly, you know, managed detection response or MDR, our first offering was all about that. It's all about detecting early and responding early to a threat so that you can get anything that has gotten through your perimeter defenses out of your systems, as fast as humanly possible. And then we feathered in, you know, manage risk, which is more about the front end. So how do we make sure that we have everything configured properly? How do we make sure that we, you know, fill any holes that are in the current environment so that we don't even get to a point where we have to manage the time with which an attack has had to live within your environment? So, it's all about kind of those two things, reduce the frequency and reduce the impact. And we're, we're focused on both, both the, kind of the proactive measures, which would be more on the front end and then the reactive measures, which is what do you do and how can you act as quickly as possible within your environment to ensure that, you know, they're not getting into the crown jewels of the business. >> We've seen lately where the, the attackers have. I mean, it's really insidious, right Nick, they, they will exfiltrate, they'll get in they'll exfiltrate stealthily and they'll be ready to attack from a ransomware standpoint. And then they, you know, maybe they're hitting the bank and they're scouring to see what the Chief Information Officer is going to invest in. And they're actually making trades ahead of that. They're making more money, you know, snooping than from the ransomware. And then when the company realizes and they respond, then they get them in a headlock and say, okay, now, now that you're going to stop us from making all this money through exfiltration, we're going to hit you with ransomware. So it's just, it's a really awful situation. So my point being that, or we've said, organizations have to be stealthy in their response. Have you seen that as a trend? Am I overstating that? >> No, no. I mean, customers are, you know, good news, bad news customers are very aware of the threats in particular ransomware, data exfiltration and all the other trends in the market. And I think they become more sophisticated in the way in which they respond. And I think as a result, we've seen both changes in the way customers kind of set up their environment technologically, but we've also seen a pretty dramatic shift recently with the way in which they view insurance and the way in which, you know, carriers, view insurance, and how that plays a role in, you know, cybersecurity in their cybersecurity operation. And for a lot of customers, I think recent trends are that the carriers are struggling to, you know, make money on their cyber books. And the reason for that is because they need to make sure that the customer's environment is truly secure, or they're kind of flying blind on what their book looks like. And we've started to see that both on the end-user side, we've seen that through the carriers themselves, and that also has played an integral role in the way in which the customer views risk. And I think that dynamics changing. And I think what the result of that will be is that customers are going to be looking more and more towards how they solve this problem by alleviating risk in-house, as opposed to transferring some of that risk to an insurance carrier or a third party. And what I hope that means for customers is that they'll have the proper investment. They'll have the proper tooling, they'll have the proper operations around how to react and how to respond in the quickest possible manner, which at the end of the day, the faster you can react to an incident, the smaller the impact will be and the smaller of a financial burden it will be. And they'll do that through vendors like Arctic Wolf, you know, tools that are best of breed within their infrastructure. And then a really well thought out plan about how to respond to anything that, that you know, happens within their environment. >> Yeah. I mean, if I'm an insurance company, I give a discount to somebody who's got an alarm in their house and they use it. Maybe I'll give a discount if they're working with a company like Arctic Wolf. >> Exactly. >> What percent, do you have a census to what percent of enterprises actually have a SOC? >> Yeah, we actually did a, some homework here and there's kind of two stats that jump out. And these are through a few different surveys through very well-known organizations in the cybersecurity market. But one is that last year, which would have been, you know, 2020, about 60% of organizations said that they suffered some semblance of a breach, 60%, you know, think about how many tools and how much money these organizations are investing in protecting their businesses. And over half are suffering some semblance of a breach. When those same customers are asked whether or not they felt like they have a security operation, over 99% answered no. >> Wow. >> Right. So they have a bunch of tools they're investing a ton of money, but at the end of the day, when asked, hey, do you feel like you have an operation that can protect your business? Their answer is no. And that's really the void we're trying to. >> And you and I both know that 60%, okay. But then the other 40%, they've been hacked. They just don't know it. So, all right. Let's wrap with the sub stats on the company. I think you've raised nearly half a million, half a billion dollars to date $500 million to date. So that's, I can infer from that some pretty lofty numbers, but where are you in funding with that kind of growth? I got to believe IPO is and you and your future. What can you tell, what metrics can you share? What can you tell us about where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few metrics on the platform and a few metrics on the company. So the platform itself, you know, we're observing over 1.5 trillion observations a week, we have 10,000 plus sensors in the field. You know, we're ingesting coming from a, you know, Compellent infrastructure guy. You know, we're in ingesting over a petabyte and a half a data week. I would have loved to have been that sales guy in the glory days, you know, but the platforms, you know, operating at massive scale, we've grown the business eight years in a row, over a hundred percent. We've talked about that. Our subscription gross margins are very software-like. We have over 2000 customers. You know, our customers are really happy with an NPS score, you know, approaching 70, you know, over a million licensed users. So we're, we're doing very, very well as a business. And as a result, we've raised money to invest in that growth, which is to the tune of about a half a billion dollars and our path here, and we've stated this publicly now is that, you know, next summer give or take a quarter is really the timeframe that we're marching towards for an IPO. If I'm being honest, given the metrics that we have as a business, we could be a publicly traded company today, especially with the way the market's operating in the valuations of some of the businesses that have gone out. There might be some, even some pressure to do so, but we want to make sure that we are ready to go from a systems and an operation standpoint to not just be, you know, a flashing the pan awesome IPO, but a company that's really kind of the backbone of cybersecurity for years to come. >> Well, obviously a hot space. What we've been covering for a couple of years now, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, we've seen what's happened in the action in the market there. I mean, what are your comps? I mean, I know, I think dark trace is getting ready to go. I don't think they've gone yet. I know Sentinel One went out. How should we think about you? You're not an Okta or I don't think well, CrowdStrike, but you know, those are pure play product companies. How should we think about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean, companies that were on a similar trajectory as us at our size, Sentinel One's a very good example. And you can kind of look across all the core business metrics on that. And clearly those will all be public here in under a year. CrowdStrike's a great example. If you go, you know, reel back the tape to when they were, you know, our size we're right in line with them Zscaler, Okta, you know, I joke with our board and investors and our CFO, that the number of companies that we benchmark ourselves against is starting to become a very small number, given you know, our growth at the scale that we're at. >> Well, that's an awesome story, Nick. We're really excited that you could make some time to come on the Cube and we want to follow your progress. Welcome you back anytime. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me, Dave, and looking forward to continuing the conversation at some point. >> Excellent and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube and we'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Sponsored by intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of the AWS re:Invent 2020. Three weeks we're here, covering re:Invent. It's virtual. We're not in person. Normally we are on the floor. Instructing *signal from the noise, but we're virtual. This is theCUBE Virtual. We are theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great interview here today. Sathish Balakrishnan, Vice president of hosted platforms for Red Hat joining us. Sathish, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Great to see you again. >> I wish we were in person, but we're remote because of the pandemic. But it's going to be a lot of action going on, a lot of content. Red Hat's relationship with AWS, and this is a really big story this year, at many levels. One is your relationship with Red Hat, but also the world's evolved. Clearly hybrid cloud's in play. Now you got multiple environments with the edge and other clouds around the corner. This is a huge deal. Hybrids validated multiple environments, including the edge. This is big. On premise in the cloud. What's your new update for your relationship? >> Absolutely, John, yeah. this is so you know, if anything this year has accelerated digital transformation, right The joke that COVID-19 is the biggest digital accelerator, digital transformation accelerator is no joke. I think going back to our relationship with AWS, as you rightly pointed out, we have a very storied and long relationship with AWS, we've been with AWS partnering with AWS since 2007, when we offered the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS since then, you know, we've made a lot of strides, but not in the middle of our products that are layered on AWS, as well as back in 2015, we offered OpenShift dedicated Red Hat OpenShift dedicated, which is our managed offering on AWS, you know, and since then we made a bunch of announcements right around the service broker, and then you know, the operators operator hub, and the operators that AWS has for services to be accessed from Kubernetes. As well as you know, the new exciting joint service that we announced. So you know, by AWS and Red Hat, increasingly, right, our leaders in public cloud and hybrid cloud and are approached by IT decision makers who are looking for guidance or on changing requirements, and they know how they should be doing application development in a very containerized and hybrid cloud world. So you know, excited to be here. And and this is a great event, you know, three week event, but you know, usually we were in Las Vegas, but you know, this week, this year, we will do it on workshop. But you know, nevertheless, the same excitement. And you know, I'm sure there's going to be same set of announcements that are going to come out of this event as well. >> Yeah, we'll keep track of it. Because it's digital. I think it's going to be a whole another user experience personally on the Discovery sites Learning Conference. But that's great stuff. I want to dig into the news, cause I think the relevant story here that you just talked about, I want to dig into the announcement, the new offering that you have with AWS, it's a joint offering, I believe, can you take a minute to explain what was and what's discussed? Cause you guys announced some stuff in May. Now you have OpenShift services. Is it on AWS? Can you take a minute to explain the news here? >> Absolutely John yeah. So I think we had really big announcement in May, you know, the first joint offering with AWS and it is Red Hat open shift service on AWS, it's a joint service with Red Hat and AWS, we're very excited to partner with them, and you know, be on the AWS console. And you know, it's great to be working with AWS engineering team, we've been making a lot of really good strides, it just amplify, as you know, our managed services story. So we are very excited to have that new offering that's going to be completely integrated with AWS console transacted through you know AWS marketplace, but you know, customers will get all the benefit of AWS service, like you know, how just launch it off the console, basically get, you know there and be part of the enterprise discount program and you we're very really excited and you know, that kind of interest has been really, really amazing. So we just announced that, you know, it's in preview we have a lot of customers already in preview, and we have a long list of customers that are waiting to get on this program. So but this offering, right, we have three ways in which you can consume OpenShift on AWS. One is, as I mentioned previously OpenShift dedicated on AWS, which we've had since 2015. Then we have OpenShift container platform, which is our previous self managed offering. And that's been available on AWS, also since 2015. And then, of course, this new service that are that OpenShift servers on AWS. So there's multiple ways in which customers can consume AWS and leverage the power of both OpenShift and AWS. And what I want to do here as well, right, is to take a moment to explain, you know what Red Hat's been doing in managed services, because then it's not very natural for somebody to say, oh, what's the Red Hat doing in managed services? You know, Red Hat believes in choice, right. We are all about try for that it's infrastructure footprint that's public cloud on-prem. It's managed or self managed, that's also tries to be offered to customers. And we've been doing managed services since 2011. That's kind of like a puzzling statement, people will be like, what? And yeah, it is true that we've been doing this since 2011. And in fact, we are one of the, you know, the earliest providers of managed Kubernetes. Since 2015. Right, I think there's only one other provider other than us, who has been doing managed Kubernetes, since then, which is kind of really a testament to the engineering work that Red Hat's been doing in Kubernetes. And, you know, with all that experience, and all the work that we've done upstream and building Kubernetes and making Kubernetes, really the you know, the hybrid cloud platform for the entire IT industry, we are excited to bring this joint offering. So we can bring all the engineering and the management strengths, as well as combined with the AWS infrastructure, and you know and other AWS teams, to bring this offering, because this is really going to help our customers as they move to the cloud. >> That's great insight, thanks for explaining that managed service, cause I was going to ask that question, but you hit it already. But I want to just follow up on that. Can you just do a deeper dive on the offering specifically, on what the customer benefits are here from having this managed service? Because again, you said, You Red Hats get multiple choice consumption vehicles here? What's the benefits? what's under the what's the deep dive? >> Absolutely, absolutely is a really, really good question. right as I mentioned, first thing is choice. like we start with choice customers, if they want, self managed, and they can always get that anywhere in any infrastructure footprint. If they're going to the cloud, most customers tend to think that you know, I'm going to the cloud because I want to consume everything as a service. And that's when all of these services come into play. But before we even get to the customer benefits, there's a lot of advantages to our software product as well. But as a managed service, we are actually customer zero. So we go through this entire iteration, right. And you probably everybody's familiar with, how we take open source projects, and we pull them into enterprise product. But we take it a second step, after we make it an enterprise product, we actually ship it to our multi tenant software system, which is called OpenShift Online, which is publicly available to millions of customers that manage exports on the public Internet, and then all the security challenges that we have to face through and fix, help solidify the product. And then we moved on to our single tenant OpenShift dedicated or you know soon to be the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS but, you know, pretty much all of Red Hat's mission critical applications, like quedado is a service that's serving like a billion containers, billion containers a month. So that scale is already been felt by the newly shipped product, so that you know, any challenges we have at scale, any challenges, we have security, any box that we have we fix before we really make the product available to all our customers. So that's kind of a really big benefit to just that software in general, with us being a provider of the software. The second thing is, you know, since we are actually now managing customers clusters, we exactly know, you know, when our customers are getting stock, which parts of the stock need to improve. So there's a really good product gap anticipation. So you know, as much as you know, we want still really engage with customers, and we continue to engage with customers, but we can also see the telemetry and the metrics and figure out, you know, what challenges our customers' facing. And how can we improve. Other thing that, you know, helps us with this whole thing is, since we are operators now, and all our customers are really operators of software, it gives us better insights into what the user experience should be, and in how we can do things better. So there's a whole lot of benefits that Red Hat gets out of just being a managed service provider. Because you know, drinking our own champagne really helps us you know, polish the champagne and make it really better for all our customers that are consuming. >> I always love the champagne better than dog food because champagne more taste better. Great, great, great insight. Final question. We only have a couple minutes left, only two minutes left. So take the time to explain the big customer macro trend, which is the on premise to cloud relationship. We know that's happening. It's an operating model on both sides. That's clear as it is in the industry. Everyone knows that. But the managed services piece. So what drives an organization and transition from an on-prem Red Hat cloud to a managed service at Amazon? >> Is a really good question. It does many things. And it really starts with the IT and technology strategy. The customer has, you know, it could be like a digital transformation push from the CEO. It could be a cloud native development from the CPO or it could just be a containerization or cost optimization. So you have to really figure out you know, which one of this and it could be multiple and many customers, it could be all four of them and many customers that's driving the move to the cloud and driving the move to containerization with OpenShift. And also customers are expanding into new businesses, they got to be more agile, they got to basically protect the stuff. Because you know, there are a lot of competitors, you know, that, and b&b and other analogies, you know, how they take on a big hotel chains, it's kind of, you know, customers have to be agile IT is, you know, very strategic in these days, you know, given how everything is digital, and as I pointed out, it has coverts really like the number one digital transformation(mumbles). So, for example, you know, we have BMW is a great customer of ours that uses OpenShift, for all the connected car infrastructure. So they run it out of, you know, their data centers, and, you know, they suddenly want to go to a new geo syn, in Asia, you know, they may not have the speed to go build a data center and do things, so they'll just move to the cloud very easily. And from all our strategy, you know, I think the world is hybrid, I know there's going to be a that single cloud, multi cloud on-pram, it's going to be multiple things that customers have. So they have to really start thinking about what are the compliance requirements? What is the data regulations that they need to comply to? Is that a lift and shift out(mumbles) gistic things? So they need to do cloud native development, as well as containerization to get the speed out of moving to the cloud. And then how are they measuring availability? You know, are they close to the customer? You know, what is the metrics that they have for, you know, speed to the customer, as well, as you know, what databases are they using? So we have a lot of experience with this. Because, you know, this is something that, you know, we've been advocating, you know, for at least eight years now, the open hybrid cloud, a lot of experience with open innovation labs, which is our way of telling customers, it's not just about the technology, but also about how you change processes and how you change other things with people aspects of it, as well as continued adoption programs and a bunch of other programs that Red Hat has been building to help customers with this transformation. >> Yeah, as a speed game. One of the big themes of all my interviews this week, a couple weeks here at reInvent has been speed. And BMW, what a great client. Yeah, shifting into high gear with BMW with OpenShift, you know, little slogan there, you know, free free attribute. >> Thank you, John, >> Shifting the idea, you know, OpenShift. Congratulations, and great announcement. I love the direction always been a big fan of OpenShift. I think with Kubernetes, a couple years ago, when that kind of came together, you saw everything kind of just snap into place with you guys. So congratulations Sathish. Final question. What is the top story that people should take away from you this year? Here at reInvent? What's the number one message that you'd like to share real quick? >> Yeah, I think number one is, you know, we have a Joint Service coming soon with AWS, it is one of it's kind work for us. And for AWS, it's the first time that we are partnering with them at such a deep level. So this is going to really help accelerate our customers' move to the cloud, right to the AWS cloud, and leverage all of AWS services very natively like they would if they were using another container service that's coming out of AWS and it's like a joint service. I'm really, really excited about the service because, you know, we've just seen that interest has been exploding and, you know, we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AWS and working together and you know, helping our customers, you know, move to the cloud as well as cloud native development, containerization and digital transformation in general. >> Congratulations, OpenShift on AWS. big story here, >> I was on AWS. I want to make sure that you know we comply with the brand >> OpenShifts on open shift service, on AWS >> on AWS is a pretty big thing. >> Yeah, and ecosys everyone knows that's a super high distinction on AWS has a certain the highest form of compliment, they have join engineering everything else going on. Congratulations thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John. Great talking to you. >> It's theCUBE virtual coverage we got theCUBE virtual covering reInvent three weeks we got a lot of content, wall to wall coverage, cube virtualization. We have multiple cubes out there with streaming videos, we're doing a lot of similar live all kinds of action. Thanks for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Sponsored by intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of the AWS re:Invent 2020. Three weeks we're here, covering re:Invent. It's virtual. We're not in person. Normally we are on the floor. Instructing *signal from the noise, but we're virtual. This is theCUBE Virtual. We are theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great interview here today. Satish Balakrishnan, Vice president of hosted platforms for Red Hat joining us. Satish, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Great to see you again. >> I wish we were in person, but we're remote because of the pandemic. But it's going to be a lot of action going on, a lot of content. Red Hat's relationship with AWS, and this is a really big story this year, at many levels. One is your relationship with Red Hat, but also the world's evolved. Clearly hybrid cloud's in play. Now you got multiple environments with the edge and other clouds around the corner. This is a huge deal. Hybrids validated multiple environments, including the edge. This is big. On premise in the cloud. What's your new update for your relationship? >> Absolutely, John, yeah. this is so you know, if anything this year has accelerated digital transformation, right The joke that COVID-19 is the biggest digital accelerator, digital transformation accelerator is no joke. I think going back to our relationship with AWS, as you rightly pointed out, we have a very storied and long relationship with AWS, we've been with AWS partnering with AWS since 2007, when we offered the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS since then, you know, we've made a lot of strides, but not in the middle of our products that are layered on AWS, as well as back in 2015, we offered OpenShift dedicated Red Hat OpenShift dedicated, which is our managed offering on AWS, you know, and since then we made a bunch of announcements right around the service broker, and then you know, the operators operator hub, and the operators that AWS has for services to be accessed from Kubernetes. As well as you know, the new exciting joint service that we announced. So you know, by AWS and Red Hat, increasingly, right, our leaders in public cloud and hybrid cloud and are approached by IT decision makers who are looking for guidance or on changing requirements, and they know how they should be doing application development in a very containerized and hybrid cloud world. So you know, excited to be here. And and this is a great event, you know, three week event, but you know, usually we were in Las Vegas, but you know, this week, this year, we will do it on workshop. But you know, nevertheless, the same excitement. And you know, I'm sure there's going to be same set of announcements that are going to come out of this event as well. >> Yeah, we'll keep track of it. Because it's digital. I think it's going to be a whole another user experience personally on the Discovery sites Learning Conference. But that's great stuff. I want to dig into the news, cause I think the relevant story here that you just talked about, I want to dig into the announcement, the new offering that you have with AWS, it's a joint offering, I believe, can you take a minute to explain what was and what's discussed? Cause you guys announced some stuff in May. Now you have OpenShift services. Is it on AWS? Can you take a minute to explain the news here? >> Absolutely John yeah. So I think we had really big announcement in May, you know, the first joint offering with AWS and it is Red Hat open shift service on AWS, it's a joint service with Red Hat and AWS, we're very excited to partner with them, and you know, be on the AWS console. And you know, it's great to be working with AWS engineering team, we've been making a lot of really good strides, it just amplify, as you know, our managed services story. So we are very excited to have that new offering that's going to be completely integrated with AWS console transacted through you know AWS marketplace, but you know, customers will get all the benefit of AWS service, like you know, how just launch it off the console, basically get, you know there and be part of the enterprise discount program and you we're very really excited and you know, that kind of interest has been really, really amazing. So we just announced that, you know, it's in preview we have a lot of customers already in preview, and we have a long list of customers that are waiting to get on this program. So but this offering, right, we have three ways in which you can consume OpenShift on AWS. One is, as I mentioned previously OpenShift dedicated on AWS, which we've had since 2015. Then we have OpenShift container platform, which is our previous self managed offering. And that's been available on AWS, also since 2015. And then, of course, this new service that are that OpenShift servers on AWS. So there's multiple ways in which customers can consume AWS and leverage the power of both OpenShift and AWS. And what I want to do here as well, right, is to take a moment to explain, you know what Red Hat's been doing in managed services, because then it's not very natural for somebody to say, oh, what's the Red Hat doing in managed services? You know, Red Hat believes in choice, right. We are all about try for that it's infrastructure footprint that's public cloud on-prem. It's managed or self managed, that's also tries to be offered to customers. And we've been doing managed services since 2011. That's kind of like a puzzling statement, people will be like, what? And yeah, it is true that we've been doing this since 2011. And in fact, we are one of the, you know, the earliest providers of managed Kubernetes. Since 2015. Right, I think there's only one other provider other than us, who has been doing managed Kubernetes, since then, which is kind of really a testament to the engineering work that Red Hat's been doing in Kubernetes. And, you know, with all that experience, and all the work that we've done upstream and building Kubernetes and making Kubernetes, really the you know, the hybrid cloud platform for the entire IT industry, we are excited to bring this joint offering. So we can bring all the engineering and the management strengths, as well as combined with the AWS infrastructure, and you know and other AWS teams, to bring this offering, because this is really going to help our customers as they move to the cloud. >> That's great insight, thanks for explaining that managed service, cause I was going to ask that question, but you hit it already. But I want to just follow up on that. Can you just do a deeper dive on the offering specifically, on what the customer benefits are here from having this managed service? Because again, you said, You Red Hats get multiple choice consumption vehicles here? What's the benefits? what's under the what's the deep dive? >> Absolutely, absolutely is a really, really good question. right as I mentioned, first thing is choice. like we start with choice customers, if they want, self managed, and they can always get that anywhere in any infrastructure footprint. If they're going to the cloud, most customers tend to think that you know, I'm going to the cloud because I want to consume everything as a service. And that's when all of these services come into play. But before we even get to the customer benefits, there's a lot of advantages to our software product as well. But as a managed service, we are actually customer zero. So we go through this entire iteration, right. And you probably everybody's familiar with, how we take open source projects, and we pull them into enterprise product. But we take it a second step, after we make it an enterprise product, we actually ship it to our multi tenant software system, which is called OpenShift Online, which is publicly available to millions of customers that manage exports on the public Internet, and then all the security challenges that we have to face through and fix, help solidify the product. And then we moved on to our single tenant OpenShift dedicated or you know soon to be the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS but, you know, pretty much all of Red Hat's mission critical applications, like quedado is a service that's serving like a billion containers, billion containers a month. So that scale is already been felt by the newly shipped product, so that you know, any challenges we have at scale, any challenges, we have security, any box that we have we fix before we really make the product available to all our customers. So that's kind of a really big benefit to just that software in general, with us being a provider of the software. The second thing is, you know, since we are actually now managing customers clusters, we exactly know, you know, when our customers are getting stock, which parts of the stock need to improve. So there's a really good product gap anticipation. So you know, as much as you know, we want still really engage with customers, and we continue to engage with customers, but we can also see the telemetry and the metrics and figure out, you know, what challenges our customers' facing. And how can we improve. Other thing that, you know, helps us with this whole thing is, since we are operators now, and all our customers are really operators of software, it gives us better insights into what the user experience should be, and in how we can do things better. So there's a whole lot of benefits that Red Hat gets out of just being a managed service provider. Because you know, drinking our own champagne really helps us you know, polish the champagne and make it really better for all our customers that are consuming. >> I always love the champagne better than dog food because champagne more taste better. Great, great, great insight. Final question. We only have a couple minutes left, only two minutes left. So take the time to explain the big customer macro trend, which is the on premise to cloud relationship. We know that's happening. It's an operating model on both sides. That's clear as it is in the industry. Everyone knows that. But the managed services piece. So what drives an organization and transition from an on-prem Red Hat cloud to a managed service at Amazon? >> Is a really good question. It does many things. And it really starts with the IT and technology strategy. The customer has, you know, it could be like a digital transformation push from the CEO. It could be a cloud native development from the CPO or it could just be a containerization or cost optimization. So you have to really figure out you know, which one of this and it could be multiple and many customers, it could be all four of them and many customers that's driving the move to the cloud and driving the move to containerization with OpenShift. And also customers are expanding into new businesses, they got to be more agile, they got to basically protect the stuff. Because you know, there are a lot of competitors, you know, that, and b&b and other analogies, you know, how they take on a big hotel chains, it's kind of, you know, customers have to be agile IT is, you know, very strategic in these days, you know, given how everything is digital, and as I pointed out, it has coverts really like the number one digital transformation(mumbles). So, for example, you know, we have BMW is a great customer of ours that uses OpenShift, for all the connected car infrastructure. So they run it out of, you know, their data centers, and, you know, they suddenly want to go to a new geo syn, in Asia, you know, they may not have the speed to go build a data center and do things, so they'll just move to the cloud very easily. And from all our strategy, you know, I think the world is hybrid, I know there's going to be a that single cloud, multi cloud on-pram, it's going to be multiple things that customers have. So they have to really start thinking about what are the compliance requirements? What is the data regulations that they need to comply to? Is that a lift and shift out(mumbles) gistic things? So they need to do cloud native development, as well as containerization to get the speed out of moving to the cloud. And then how are they measuring availability? You know, are they close to the customer? You know, what is the metrics that they have for, you know, speed to the customer, as well, as you know, what databases are they using? So we have a lot of experience with this. Because, you know, this is something that, you know, we've been advocating, you know, for at least eight years now, the open hybrid cloud, a lot of experience with open innovation labs, which is our way of telling customers, it's not just about the technology, but also about how you change processes and how you change other things with people aspects of it, as well as continued adoption programs and a bunch of other programs that Red Hat has been building to help customers with this transformation. >> Yeah, as a speed game. One of the big themes of all my interviews this week, a couple weeks here at reInvent has been speed. And BMW, what a great client. Yeah, shifting into high gear with BMW with OpenShift, you know, little slogan there, you know, free free attribute. >> Thank you, John, >> Shifting the idea, you know, OpenShift. Congratulations, and great announcement. I love the direction always been a big fan of OpenShift. I think with Kubernetes, a couple years ago, when that kind of came together, you saw everything kind of just snap into place with you guys. So congratulations Satish. Final question. What is the top story that people should take away from you this year? Here at reInvent? What's the number one message that you'd like to share real quick? >> Yeah, I think number one is, you know, we have a Joint Service coming soon with AWS, it is one of it's kind work for us. And for AWS, it's the first time that we are partnering with them at such a deep level. So this is going to really help accelerate our customers' move to the cloud, right to the AWS cloud, and leverage all of AWS services very natively like they would if they were using another container service that's coming out of AWS and it's like a joint service. I'm really, really excited about the service because, you know, we've just seen that interest has been exploding and, you know, we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AWS and working together and you know, helping our customers, you know, move to the cloud as well as cloud native development, containerization and digital transformation in general. >> Congratulations, OpenShift on AWS. big story here, >> I was on AWS. I want to make sure that you know we comply with the brand >> OpenShifts on open shift service, on AWS >> on AWS is a pretty big thing. >> Yeah, and ecosys everyone knows that's a super high distinction on AWS has a certain the highest form of compliment, they have join engineering everything else going on. Congratulations thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John. Great talking to you. >> It's theCUBE virtual coverage we got theCUBE virtual covering reInvent three weeks we got a lot of content, wall to wall coverage, cube virtualization. We have multiple cubes out there with streaming videos, we're doing a lot of similar live all kinds of action. Thanks for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Virtual Conversation. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today, I'm joined by Hermanth Manda. He is the Executive Director, IBM Data and AI, responsible for Cloud Pak for Data. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Hermanth. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> So we're talking now about the release of Cloud Pak for Data version 3.5. I want to explore it for, from a lot of different angles, but do you want to just talk a little bit about why it is unique in the marketplace, in particular, accelerating innovation, reducing costs, and reducing complexity? >> Absolutely, Rebecca. I mean, this is something very unique from an IBM perspective. Frankly speaking, this is unique in the marketplace because what we are doing is we are bringing together all of our data and AI capabilities into a single offering, single platform. And we have continued, as I said, we made it run on any cloud. So we are giving customers the flexibility. So it's innovation across multiple fronts. It's still in consolidation. It's, in doing automation and infusing collaboration and also having customers to basically modernize to the cloud-native world and pick their own cloud which is what we are seeing in the market today. So I would say this is a unique across multiple fronts. >> When we talk about any new platform, one of the big concerns is always around internal skills and maintenance tasks. What changes are you introducing with version 3.5 that does, that help clients be more flexible and sort of streamline their tasks? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. We are doing a lot of things with respect to 3.5, the latest release. Number one, we are simplifying the management of the platform, made it a lot simpler. We are infusing a lot of automation into it. We are embracing the concept of operators that are not open shelf has introduced into the market. So simple things such as provisioning, installation, upgrades, scaling it up and down, autopilot management. So all of that is taken care of as part of the latest release. Also, what we are doing is we are making the collaboration and user onboarding very easy to drive self service and use the productivity. So overall, this helps, basically, reduce the cost for our customers. >> One of the things that's so striking is the speed of the innovation. I mean, you've only been in the marketplace for two and a half years. This is already version 3.5. Can you talk a little bit about, about sort of the, the innovation that it takes to do this? >> Absolutely. You're right, we've been in the market for slightly over two and a half years, 3.5's our ninth release. So frankly speaking, for any company, or even for startups doing nine releases in 2.5 years is unheard of, and definitely unheard of at IBM. So we are acting and behaving like a startup while addressing the go to market, and the reach of IBM. So I would say that we are doing a lot here. And as I said before, we're trying to address the unique needs of the market, the need to modernize to the cloud-native architectures to move to the cloud also while addressing the needs of our existing customers, because there are two things we are trying to focus, here. First of all, make sure that we have a modern platform across the different capabilities in data and AI, that's number one. Number two is also how do we modernize our existing install base. We have six plus billion dollar business for data and AI across significant real estates. We're providing a platform through Cloud Pak for Data to those existing install base and existing customers to more nice, too. >> I want to talk about how you are addressing the needs of customers, but I want to delve into something you said earlier, and that is that you are behaving like a startup. How do you make sure that your employees have that kind of mindset that, that kind of experimental innovative, creative, resourceful mindset, particularly at a more mature company like IBM? What kinds of skills do you try to instill and cultivate in your, in your team? >> That's a very interesting question, Rebecca. I think there's no single answer, I would say. It starts with listening to the customers, trying to pay detailed attention to what's happening in the market. How competent is it reacting. Looking at the startups, themselves. What we did uniquely, that I didn't touch upon earlier is that we are also building an open ecosystem here, so we position ourselves as an open platform. Yes, there's a lot of IBM unique technology here, but we also are leveraging open source. We are, we have an ecosystem of 50 plus third party ISVs. So by doing that, we are able to drive a lot more innovation and a lot faster because when you are trying to do everything by yourself, it's a bit challenging. But when you're part of an open ecosystem, infusing open source and third party, it becomes a lot easier. In terms of culture, I just want to highlight one thing. I think we are making it a point to emphasize speed over being perfect, progress over perfection. And that, I think, that is something net new for IBM because at IBM, we pride ourselves in quality, scalability, trying to be perfect on day one. I think we didn't do that in this particular case. Initially, when we launched our offense two and a half years back, we tried to be quick to the market. Our time to market was prioritized over being perfect. But now that is not the case anymore, right? I think we will make sure we are exponentially better and those things are addressed for the past two and one-half years. >> Well, perfect is the enemy of the good, as we know. One of the things that your customers demand is flexibility when building with machine learning pipeline. What have you done to improve IBM machine learning tools on this platform? >> So there's a lot of things we've done. Number one, I want to emphasize our building AI, the initial problem that most of our customers concerned about, but in my opinion, that's 10% of the problem. Actually deploying those AI models or managing them and covering them at scales for the enterprise is a bigger challenge. So what we have is very unique. We have the end-to-end AI lifecycle, we have tools for all the way from building, deploying, managing, governing these models. Second is we are introducing net new capabilities as part of a latest release. We have this call or this new service called WMLA, Watson Machine Learning Accelerator that addresses the unique challenges of deep learning capabilities, managing GPUs, et cetera. We are also making the auto AI capabilities a lot more robust. And finally, we are introducing a net new concept called Federator Learning that allows you to build AI across distributed datasets, which is very unique. I'm not aware of any other vendor doing this, so you can actually have your data distributed across multiple clouds, and you can build an aggregated AI model without actually looking at the data that is spread across these clouds. And this concept, in my opinion, is going to get a lot more traction as we move forward. >> One of the things that IBM has always been proud of is the way it partners with ISVs and other vendors. Can you talk about how you work with your partners and foster this ecosystem of third-party capabilities that integrate into the platform? >> Yes, it's always a challenge. I mean, for this to be a platform, as I said before, you need to be open and you need to build an ecosystem. And so we made that a priority since day one and we have 53 third party ISVs, today. It's a chicken and egg problem, Rebecca, because you need to obviously showcase success and make it a priority for your partners to onboard and work with you closely. So, we obviously invest, we co-invest with our partners and we take them to market. We have different models. We have a tactical relationship with some of our third party ISVs. We also have a strategic relationship. So we partner with them depending on their ability to partner with us and we go invest and make sure that we are not only integrating them technically, but also we are integrating with them from a go-to-market perspective. >> I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the current environment that we're in. Of course, we're all living through a global health emergency in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. So much of the knowledge work is being done from home. It is being done remotely. Teams are working asynchronously over different kinds of digital platforms. How have you seen these changes affect the team, your team at IBM, what kinds of new kinds of capabilities, collaborations, what kinds of skills have you seen your team have to gain and have to gain quite quickly in this environment? >> Absolutely. I think historically, IBM had quite a, quite a portion of our workforce working remotely so we are used to this, but not at the scale that the current situation has compelled us to. So we made a lot more investments earlier this year in digital technologies, whether it is Zoom and WebEx or trying to use tools, digital tools that helps us coordinate and collaborate effectively. So part of it is technical, right? Part of it is also a cultural shift. And that came all the way from our CEO in terms of making sure that we have the necessary processes in place to ensure that our employees are not in getting burnt out, that they're being productive and effective. And so a combination of what I would say, technical investments, plus process and leadership initiatives helped us essentially embrace the changes that we've seen, today. >> And I want you to close us out, here. Talk a little bit about the future, both for Cloud Pak for Data, but also for the companies and clients that you work for. What do you see in the next 12 to 24 months changing in the term, in terms of how we have re-imagined the future of work. I know you said this was already version nine. You've only been in the marketplace for, for not even three years. That's incredible innovation and speed. Talk a little bit about changes you see coming down the pike. >> So I think everything that we have done is going to get amplified and accelerated as we move forward, shift to cloud, embracing AI, adopting AI into business processes to automate and amplify new business models, collaboration, to a certain extent, consolidation of the different offerings into platforms. So all of this, we, I obviously see that being accelerated and that acceleration will continue as we move forward. And the real challenge I see with our customers and all the enterprises is, I see them in two buckets. There's one bucket which are resisting change, like to stick to the old concepts, and there's one bucket of enterprises who are embracing the change and moving forward, and actually get accelerating this transformation and change. I think it will be successful over the next one to five years. You know, it could be under the other bucket and if you're not, I think it's, you're going to get, you're going to miss out and that is getting amplified and accelerated, as we speak. >> So for those ones in the bucket that are resistant to the change, how do you get them onboard? I mean, this is classic change management that they teach at business schools around the world. But what are some advice that you would have to those who are resisting the change? >> So, and again, frankly speaking, we, at IBM, are going through that transition so I can speak from experience. >> Rebecca: You're drinking the Kool-Aid. >> Yeah, when, when I think, one way to address this is basically take one step at a time, like as opposed to completely revolutionizing the way you do your business. You can transform your business one step at a time while keeping the end objective as your goal, as your end goal. So, and it just want a little highlight that with full factor, that's exactly what we are enabling because what we do is we enable you to actually run anywhere you like. So if most of your systems, most of your data and your models, and analytics are on-premise, you can actually start your journey there while you plan for the future of a public cloud or a managed service. So my advice is pretty simple. You start the journey, but you can take, you can, you don't need to, you don't need to do it as a big bang. You, it could be a journey, it could be a gradual transformation, but you need to start the journey today. If you don't, you're going to miss out. >> Baby steps. Hey Hermanth Manda, thank you so much for joining us for this Virtual CUBE Conversation >> Thank you very much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE Virtual. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of product marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, we are excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. So data protection in the news, what's going on? Yeah, it's been a busy year, we had our, obviously our PowerProtect DD appliance launched last year. And then this year, we have announcements on the software side, we had announcements at vMworld, some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect DP series appliances, the new integrated appliances, it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DP, the next generation of Data Domain. And we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protection software in a single converged all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today, because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up, really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the backup appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the target market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, it's not that just similar to actually our DD series from last year, which is there's four models in the new DP series. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency, we've got new hardware assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery. In fact, you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity 65 to one deduplication, which is just incredible. And 60,000 IOPS for instant access, so really ups the game both in performance and in efficiency. >> Those are big numbers. You mentioned a DD launched last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now, what's the significance of the DP series. >> And this is exciting for us because it does a couple things, it expands our PowerProtect appliance family, with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. on the software side, PowerProtect Data Manager, which we've been enhancing and continuing to talk about all year, also has some new improvements, the ability to deploy it in Azure, in AWS Govcloud for in-cloud protection, the enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about not that long ago at VMworld, about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes, right? And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marking of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect Data Manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one stop shop for all of your data protection needs, no matter where the data lives. No matter what SLA, whether it's a physical virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated. You've all got them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent, all right, last question for you Caitlin. We know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, its cloud, VMware, and cyber recovery. Anything else you want to add here? >> cyber resiliency, cyber recovery, ransomware has really risen to the top of the list unfortunately for many organizations, and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offering and market for a couple years, but the exciting new enhancement here. So it is the first cyber recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news Caitlin, thanks for sharing what's new. Congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Okay Gordon. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of A New Era In Database Management. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation with Nutanix. We're talking about A New Era In Database Management. To help us dig into it, first of all, I have the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nutanix Era Databases and Business Critical Applications, that is Bala Kuchibhotla. And one of our other CUBE alongs, Monica Kumar. Who's an SVP also with Nutanix. Bala, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you so... >> Great to be here. All right, so first of all, Bala a new Era. We, have a little bit of a punj. You've got me with some punjs there. Of course we know that the database for Nutanix solution is Era. So, we always like to bring out the news first. Why don't you tell us, what does this mean? What is Nutanix announcing today? >> Awesome. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, so today's a very big day for us. I'm super excited to inform all of us and our audience that we are announcing the Eratory dot two GA bits for customers to enjoy it. Some customers can download and start playing with it. So what's new with Nutanix Eratory dot two? As you knows 1.0 is a single cluster solution meaning the customers have to have a Nutanix cluster and then have around the same cluster to enjoy the databases. But with Eratory dot two, it becomes multi-cluster solution. It's not just a multi-cluster solution, but customers can enjoy database across clusters, That means that they can have their Always On Availability Groups SQL servers, their Postgres servers across Nutanix clusters. That means that they can spread across Azure Availability Zones. Now, the most interesting point of this is, it's not just across clusters, customers can place these clusters in the cloud. That is AWS. You can have Nutanix cluster in the AWS cluster and then the primary production clusters maybe on the Nutanix and primary enterprise cloud kind of stuff, that's number one. Number two, we have extended our data management capabilities, data management platform capabilities, and what we call them as global time mission. Global time mission with a data access management. Like racing river, that you need to harness the racing river by constructing a dam and then harness it for multipurpose either irrigation projects or hydroelectric project kind of stuff. You need to kind of do the similar things for your data in company, enterprise company. You need to make sure that the right persons get the right amount of data, so that you don't kind of give all production data to everyone in the company. At the same time, they also need the accessible, with one click they can get the database, the data they want. So that's the data access management. Imagine a QA person only gets the sanitized snapshots or sanitize database backups for them to create the copies. And then we are extending our database engine portfolios too to introduce SAP HANA to the thing. As you know, that we support Oracle today, Postgres, MalSQL, Mariadb SQL server. I'm excited to inform that we are introducing SAP HANA. Our customers can do one click sandbox creation into an environment for SAP HANA predown intense platform. And lastly, I'm super excited to inform that we are becoming a Postgres vendor. We are willing to give 24 by seven, 365 day support but Postgres database engine, that's kind of a provision through Nutanix setup platform. So this way the customers can enjoy the engine, platform, service all together in one single shot with a single 180 company that they can call and get the support they want. I'm super duper excited that this is going to make the customers a truly multicloud multi cluster data management platform. Thank you. >> Yeah. And I'll just add to that too. It's fantastic that we are now offering this new capability. I just want to kind of remind our audience that Nutanix for many years has been providing the foundation the infrastructure software, where you can run all these multiple workloads including databases today. And what we're doing with Era is fantastic because now they are giving our customers the ability to take that database that they run on top of Nutanix to provide that as a service now. So now are talking to a whole different organization here. It's database administrations, it's administrators, it's teams that run databases, it teams that care about data and providing access to data and organizations. >> Well, first of all, congratulations, I've taught for a couple of years to the teams at Nutanix especially some of the people working on PostgreSQL really exciting stuff and you've both seen really the unlocking of database. It used to be ,we talked about, I have one database it's kind of the one that everything runs on. Now, customers they have more databases. You talked about that flexibility is then, where we run it. We'd love to hear, maybe Monica we start with you. You talk about the customers, what does this really mean for them? Because one of our most mission critical applications we talk about, we're not just throwing our databases or what. I don't wake up in the morning and say, Oh let me move it to this cloud and put it in this data center. This needs to be reliable. I need to have access to the data. I need to be able to work with it. So, what does this really mean? And what does it unlock for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, I love to talk about this topic. I mean, if you think about databases, they are means to an end. And in this case, the end is being able to mine insights from the data and then make meaningful decisions based on that. So when we talk to customers, it's really clear that data has not become one of the most valuable assets that an organization owns. Well, of course, in addition to the employees that are part of the organization and our customers. Data is one of the most important assets. But most organizations, the challenges they face is a lot of data gets collected. And in fact, we've heard numbers thrown around for many years like, almost 80% of world's data has been created in the last like three or four years. And data is doubling every two years in terms of volume. Well guess what? Data gets collected. It sits there and organizations are struggling to get access to it with the right performance, the right security and regulation compliance, the reliability, availability, by persona, developers need certain access, analysts needs different access line of businesses need different access. So what we see is organizations are struggling in getting access to data at the right time by the right person on the team and when they need it. And I think that's where database as a service is critical. It's not just about having the database software which is of course important but how you know not make that service available to your stakeholders, to developers to lines of business within the SLAs that they demand. So is it instantly? How quickly can you make it available? How quickly can you use have access to data and do something meaningful with it? And mind the insights for smarter business? And then the one thing I'd like to add is that's where IT and business really come together. That's the glue. If you think about it today, what is the blue between an IT Organization and a business organization? It's the data. And that's where they're really coming together to say how can we together deliver the right service? So you, the business owner can deliver the right outcome for our business. >> That's very true. Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there. What we're trying to do is we are trying to bring the cloud experience, the RDS-like experience to the enterprise cloud and then hybrid cloud. So the customers will now have a choice of cloud. They don't need to be locked in a particular cloud, at the same time enjoy the true cloud utility experience. We help customers create clouds, database clouds either by themselves if that's big enough to manage the cloud themselves or they can partner with a GSIs like Wipro, WorkHCL and then create a completely managed database service kind of stuff. So, this brings this cloud neutrality, portability for customers and give them the choice and their terms, Stu. >> Well Bala, absolutely we've seen a huge growth in managed services as you've said, maybe bring us inside a little bit. What is free up customers? What we've said for so long that back when HCI first started, it was some of the storage administrators might bristle because you were taking things away from them. It was like, no, we're going to free you up to do other things that as Monica said, deliver more business value not mapping LUNs and doing that. How about from the DBA standpoint? What are some of those repetitive, undifferentiated heavy lifting that we're going to take away from them so that they can focus on the business value. >> Yep. Thank you Stu. So think about this. We all do copy paste operations in laptops. Something of that sort happens in data center at a much larger scale. Meaning that the same kind of copy paste operation happens to databases and petabytes and terabytes of scale. Hundreds of petabytes. It has become the most dreaded complex, long running error prone operation. Why should it be that way? Why should the DBS spend all this mundane tasks and then get busy for every cloning operation? It's a two day job for me, every backup job. It's like a hobby job for provisioning takes like three days. We can take this undifferentiated heavy lifting by this and then let the DBS focus on designing the cloud for them. Looking for the database tuning, design data modeling, ML aspects of the data kind of stuff. So we are freeing up the database Ops people, in a way that they can design the database cloud, and make sure that they are energy focused on high valid things and more towards the business center kind of stuff. >> Yeah. And you know automation is really important. You were talking about is automating mundane grunt work. Like IT spends 80% of its time in maintaining systems. So then where is the time for innovation. So if we can automate stuff that's repetitive, stuff that the machine can do, the software can do, why not? And I think that's what our database as a service often does. And I would add this, the big thing our database as a service does really is provide IT organizations and DV organizations a way to manage heterogeneous databases too. It's not like, here's my environment for Postgres. Here's my environment for my SQL. Here's my environment for Oracle. Here's my environment for SQL server. Now with a single offering, a single tool you can manage your heterogeneous environment across different clouds. On premises cloud, or in a public cloud environment. So I think that's the beauty we are talking about with Nutanix's Era. Is a truly, truly gives organizations that single environment to manage heterogeneous databases, apply the same automation and the ease of management across all these different environments. >> Yeah. I'll just add one comment to that. A true managed PaaS obviously customers in like a single shop go to public cloud, just click through and then they get the database and point. And then if someone is managing the database for them. But if you look at the enterprise data centers, they need to bring that enterprise GalNets and structure to these databases. It's not like anyone can do anything to any or these databases. So we are kind of getting the best of both, the needed enterprise GalNets by these enterprise people at the same time bringing the convenience for the application teams and developers they want to consume these databases like utility. So bringing the cloud experience, bringing the enterprise GalNets. At same time, I'm super confident we can cut down the cost. So that is what Nutanix Era is all about across all the clouds, including the enterprise cloud. >> Well, Bala being simpler and being less expensive are one of the original promises of the cloud that don't necessarily always come out there. So, that's super important. One of the other things, you talk about these hybrid environments. It's not just studied, in the public cloud want to understand these environments, if I'm in the public cloud, can I still leverage some of the services that are in the public cloud? So, if I want to run some analytics, if I want to use some of the phenomenal services that are coming out every day. Is that something that can be done in this environment? >> Yeah, beautiful. Thank you Stu. So we are seeing customers who two categories. There is a public cloud customer, completely born in public cloud cloud, native services. They realize that for every database that maintaining five or seven different copies and the management of these copies is prohibited just because every copy is a faulty copy in the public cloud. Meaning you take a backup snapshot and restore it. Your meter like New York taxi, it starts with running for your EBS   and that you are looking at it kind of stuff. So they can leverage Nutanix clusters and then have a highly efficient cloning capability so that they can cut down some of these costs for these secondary environments that I talk about. What we call is copy data management, that's one kind of use case. The other kind of customers that we are seeing who's cloud is a phenomenon. There's no way that people have to move to cloud. That's the something at a C level mandate that happens. These customers are enjoying their database experience on our enterprise cloud. But when they try to go to these big hyperscalers, they are seeing the disconnect that they're not able to enjoy some of the things that they are seeing on the enterprise cloud with us. So this transition, they are talking to us. Can you get this kind of functionality with Nutanix platform onto some of these big hyperscalers? So there are kind of customers moving both sides, some customers that are public cloud they're time to enjoy our facilities other than copy data management and Nutanix. Customers that are on-prem but they have a mandate to good public cloud ,with our hybrid cloud strategy. They get to enjoy the same kind of convenience that they are seeing it on enterprise and bringing the same kind of governance that they used to do it. so that maybe see customers. Yeah. >> Yeah. Monica, I want to go back to something you talked about customers dealing with that heterogeneous environment that they have reminds me of a lot of the themes that we talked about at nutanix.next because customers have they have multiple clouds they're using, requires different skillsets, different tooling. It's that simplicity layer that Nutanix has been working to deliver since day one. What are you from your customers? How are they doing with this? And especially in the database world. What are some of those challenges that they're really facing that we're looking to help solve with the solution today. >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, what customers at least in our experience, what they want or what they're looking for is this modern cloud platform that can really work across multiple cloud environments. Cause people don't want to change running, let's say an Oracle database you're on-prem on a certain stack and then using a whole different stack to run Oracle database in the cloud. What they want is the same exact foundation. So be so they can be, for sure have the right performance. Availability, reliability, the applications don't have to be rewritten on top of Oracle database. They want to preserve all of that, but they want the flexibility to be able to run that cloud platform wherever they choose to. So that's one. So that's choosing the right and modernizing and choosing the right cloud platform is definitely very important to our customers, but you nailed it on the head Stu. It's been about how do you manage it? How do you operate it on a daily basis? And that's where our customers are struggling with multiple types of tools out there, custom tool for every single environment. And that's what they don't want. They want to be able to manage, simply across multiple environments using the same tools and skillsets. And again, and I'm going to beat the same drum, but that's when Nutanix shines. That's a design principle is. It's the exact same technology foundation that you provide to customers to run any applications. In this case it happens to be databases. Exact same foundation you can use to run databases on-prem in the cloud. And then on top of that using Era boom! Simple management, simple operations, simple provisioning simple copy data management, simple patching, all of that becomes easy using just a single framework to manage and operate. And I will tell you this, when we talk to customers, what is it that DBS and database teams are struggling with? They're struggling with SLS and performance on scalability, that's one, number two they're struggling with keeping it up and running and fulfilling the demands of the stakeholders because they cannot keep up with how many databases they need to keep provisioning and patching and updating. So at Nutanix now we are actually solving both those problems with the platform. We are solving the problem of a very specific SLA that we can deliver in any cloud. And with Era, you're solving the issue of that operational complexity. We're making it really easy. So again, IT stakeholders DBS can fulfill the demands of the business stakeholders and really help them monetize the data. >> Yeah. I'll just add on with one concrete examples too. Like we have a big financial customer, they want to run Postgres. They are looking at the public cloud. Can we do a manage services kind of stuff, but you look at this, that the cost difference between a Postgres and your company infrastructure versus managed services almost like $3X to $4X dollars. Now, with Nutanix platform and Era, we were able to show that they can do at much reduced cost, manage their best service experience including their DBA cost are including the cloud administration cost. Like we added the infrastructure picture. We added the people who are going to manage the cloud, internal cloud and then intern experience being, plus plus of what they can see to public cloud. That's what makes the big difference. And this is what data sovereignty, data control, compliance and infrastructure governance, all these things coupled with cloud experiences, what customers really see the value of Era and the enterprise cloud and with an extension to the public cloud, with our hybrid cloud strategy. if they want to move this workload to public cloud they can do it. So, today with AWS clusters and tomorrow with our Azure clusters. So that gives them that kind of insurance not getting locked in by a big hyperscaler, but at same time enjoy the cloud experience. That's what big customers are looking for. >> Alright Bala, all the things you laid out here, what's the availability of Era rotically dot two? >> Era rotically dot two is actually available today. The customers can enjoy download the bits. We already have bunches of beta customers who are trying it out with the recall big telco companies are financial companies, and even big companies that manage big pensions kind of stuff. Let's talk about that kind of stuff. People are looking to us. In fact, there are customers who are looking for, when is this available for Azure cluster so that we can move some of our workloads to and manage the databases in Azure classes. So it is available and I'm looking forward to great feedback from our customers. And I'm hoping that it will solve some of their major critical problems. And in the process they get the best of Nutanix. >> Monica, last question I have for you. This doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same traditional infrastructure go to market for a solution like this. If I think back to, people think of HCI it was like, Oh! well, it was kind of a new box. We know Nutanix is a software company. More of what you do today is subscription based. So, maybe if you could talk a little bit to just how Nutanix goes to market with a solution like this. >> Yeah. And you know what, maybe people don't realize it but I'm hoping a lot of people do that. Nutanix is not just an infrastructure company anymore. In the last many years we've developed a full cloud platform in not only do we offer the infrastructure services with hyperconverged infrastructure which is now really the foundation. It's the hybrid cloud infrastructure. As you know, Stu, we talked to you a month ago and we talked about the evolution of XCI to really becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. But in addition to that, we also offer other data center services on storage DR Networking. We also offer DevOps services with application provisioning automation, application orchestration and then of course, database services that we talking about today and we offer desktop services. So Nutanix has really evolved in the last few years to a complete cloud platform really focusing on the application and workloads that run on top of the infrastructure stack. So not just the infrastructure layer but how can we be the best platform to run your databases? Your end is the computing workloads, your analytics applications your enterprise applications, cloud native applications. So that's what this is. And databases is one of our most successful workloads that's that runs a Nutanix very well because of the way the infrastructure software is architected. Because it's really great to scale high performance because again our superior architecture. And now with Era, it's a tool, it's all in one. Now it's also about really simplifying the management of databases and delivering them speedily and with agility to drive innovation in the organizations. >> Yep. Thank you Monica. Thank you. I I'll just add a couple of lines of comments into that. DTM for databases as erotically dots two, is going to be a challenge. And historically we are seen as an infrastructure company but the beauty of databases is so and to send to the infrastructure, the storage. So the language slightly becomes easy. And in fact, this holistic way of looking at solving the problem at the solution level rather than infrastructure helps us to go to a different kind of buyer, different kinds of decision maker, and we are learning. And I can tell you confidently the kind of progress that we have seen for in one enough year, the kind of customers that we are winning. And we are proving that we can bring a big difference to them. Though there is a challenge of DTM speaking the language of database, but the sheer nature of cloud platform the way they are a hundred hyperscale work. That's the kind of language that we take. You can run your solution. And here is how you can cut down your database backup time from hours to less than minute. Here's how you can cut down your patching from 16 hours to less than one hour. It is how you can cut down your provisioning time from multiple weeks to let them like matter of minutes. That holistic way of approaching it coupled with the power of the platform, really making the big difference for us. And I usually tell every time I meet, can you give us an opportunity to cut down your database cost, the PC vote, total cost of operations by close to 50%? That gets them excited that lets then move lean in and say, how do you plan to do it? And then we go about how do we do it? And we do a deep dive and PC people and all of it. So I'm excited. I think this is going to be a big play for Nutanix. We're going to make big difference. >> Absolutely well, Bala, congratulations to the team. Monica, both of you thank you so much for joining, really excited for all the announcements. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you >> Stay with us. We're going to dig in a little bit more with one more interview for this product launch of the New Era and Database Management from Nutanix. I'm Stu Minimam as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (cool music)

>> Welcome. My name is Richard Henshall. I'm a senior manager for product management, for Ansible Automation Platform. Think to yourself, how did you adapt to the changes this year? How was your team forced to adapt? And were you prepared and had you been automating already? Talking for the Ansible team, we're ready to move forward. Now we suspect that sentiment is shared by many of us here. We just had a good lesson in why being able to adapt quickly is so important. The previous ways of working may not always be available to us, and we have to change the way we focus and look at things. And this is why I have such a strong belief in the power that automation can gift us. And if we remind ourselves of what the goal of automation is, and to put it very simply, to perform work with minimal human interaction On one hand, this sounds great, no work. But it can also seem very impersonal. And the reality is automation cannot be achieved without knowledge and experience. Because what needs to be automated is what we learn. So much of what we do is specific to our circumstances, to our business or our own personal backgrounds. So how we approach automation is also important. And that's why this year's message "Automate to connect" is relevant to the times we find ourselves in. As a rhetorical question, and of course, all of these are rhetorical questions. I'm sat in a room at my house, staring at a camera. I would next ask you why we need to connect? And what do we connect for? Do we connect to share knowledge, to learn from others, to work on common goals and objectives? Reality is it should be all of these. Any intent when we connect from our work perspective, needs to be about collaboration. Collaboration is essential when we approach how we deal with change. Because when we talk about change, we often see it explained as people process and technology. But when we're forced to change, the unexpected circumstances, you can't always be prepared. You're not always given the time to plan and prepare the way you'd like. So having a way to connect, to build relationships and to collaborate is more important than ever. Back in the days when I was learning my trade, middleware engineering before the endless video calls, presentations and spreadsheets, the most difficult relationship to improve was between us in engineering and the network team. And it wasn't because of the skills it wasn't because we didn't like each other, at least I'd like to think so. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It's because the network team, they're on a different floor, big security door, magnetic locks, special key cards that you needed to have access for. It was aggressively protected so they couldn't be interfered with. It wasn't this opportunity to build the relationships in the same way that we could when we could go and collaborate with the Linux Windows or storage teams. You couldn't wander off and discuss a problem, just have a chat, they were locked away. Now, maybe they like that and sometimes it's good to be locked away, but it forms a barrier. And it's a barrier to collaboration. And so with this group, collaboration required meetings, it required planning and this made it harder. And when something's hard, it makes it easier not to do it. And additionally, we didn't have a platform to help us. So ask yourself, does that sound familiar to your circumstance? What we needed to connect those relationships and we've seen this time and time again, is that for automation we need a consistent technology foundation to connect. With the foundation encourages simplicity for collaboration foundation to connect the people, process and technology and a foundation to help us build trust in those relationships. If we'd had that foundation, that platform, we could have been successful much faster. 'Cause it's important we understand that success depends on trust between groups. To be successful in adapting to change we need to know we trust when the situation may not be perfect. It might be different offices, could be different countries, probably different languages, maybe even different objectives between these different groups. It might be a global pandemic, which is a phrase I never thought I would say in a keynote, but connecting with your colleagues, collaborating and therefore participating in the work that's done. Working as a wider team, enables you to see a broader perspective. Because how else do we trust? Unless we understand each other. How do we trust what we can create? Who has created it? Is he up to standard? And how do we trust what's running where? And who's been running it that we can scale with the correct control? And how do we trust that we can engage removing friction and complexity. And we can do all these things by being given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the overall process. Ultimately, how do we participate to achieve our goals? And what goals do we choose? Your goals are your business challenges automate what makes both your business and IT successful because participation is key to that process. And the more people you can bring together to connect, the more benefit you can achieve. If we've connected and collaborated, we trust what's being produced because automation can be a selfish act. I, the individual do something to make my job easier, but you should think of automation as a gift of knowledge and experience. How can you automate your job to make your colleagues' lives easier? So as we assume and know that participation enables collaboration, how do we help you to collaborate? Well with Ansible, the language of collaboration. And to collaborate, we need to connect. And for that, we have the Ansible Automation Platform. Everything I've described so far is drawn from our collective experience with customers. When Ansible the tool was released, it started as a way to perform automation in a simpler way. As your needs changed, we added more domains and then your needs changed again. As complexity and scale surfaced, a different set of challenges for us to look after. Not only did you do the automation, you need to do more automation as you achieve some successes. And afterwards you have to manage all that automation. To be successful we have deserved that it's not just what you do, it's how and where you do it. It's not just about the tool. It's about the structure, the framework. A focal point and a user experience in maintaining your automation assets. And this is why we focused all of our product offerings into Ansible Automation Platform, a single offering for enterprise grade automation. We've supported your changes in the past, and we've been working to support your changes for the future, help you adapt and connect. Now, if Ansible is the language of collaboration, collections, Ansible content collections are the building blocks of how you simplify the connection of your trusted technologies. Last year, we launched collections as a way to improve the management of content distributed within the Ansible project and the Ansible products. The teams involved were busy working on making this happen over the last 12 months. Working with our community and partners to migrate over 4000.5 modules. This work including this summer with the Ansible collections, 1.0 release. Last Ansible Fest we unveiled certified platforms with the Ansible certified partner program. End to end support for Ansible content between Red Hat and our trusted partners. We now have over 50 certified platforms focused on curated enterprise technology domains. The platforms that you use and rely upon because connecting these domains is connecting your teams. I'm talking about connecting teams. I'm sure that your planning has started already working on cloud native adoption. Key to that cloud native journey and story are containers. And that brings its own set of changes to the way that we work. And we want to support you as you adapt to these changes. I assume most of you are aware that OpenShift is Red Hat's intuivating container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. And I'd like to announce the release of certified Ansible content collections of Red Hat OpenShift. Whether it be for augmenting provisioning, customizing cluster nodes, or data operations. Collections gives us the perfect opportunity to deliver these use cases and more. Because we know Red Hat customers have chosen and trust Ansible Automation and OpenShift platforms to drive transformation programs. But the connection between these two platforms and the teams that deliver these has always been very implementation efforts. We know that we need to move away from that implementation effort and move to product integration. The reality of evolving tech is it's never all or nothing. If you're fortunate, you can deploy your cloud native application entirely on OpenShift. But what happens, we need to manage across clusters or access existing infrastructure like networks or databases. We're excited to bridge traditional container and edge through Ansible Automation. Perhaps the only automation and container platform solution that is truly agnostic Ansible just doesn't care whose platform you're running on. The new Ansible resource operator, which we deployed as part of Red Hat advanced cluster management is our answer. We're making the Ansible Automation platform a first class provider inside ACM. To enable call outs to automation assets deployed on the automation platform and to make it easily accessible to container management workflows and connect two industry leading technology platforms. Enabling this integration with our customers to identify and enforce policies, applied governance models consistently across multiple clusters, as a deploy and scale complex applications across hybrid multi cluster environments. In the future, the resource operator will be available for any OpenShift deployed service to integrate to the Ansible Automation Platform. And to find out more about this, be sure to checkout Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk" as well as the ACM breakout sessions. Now, as collections are about connecting technology and product integrations are about connecting process. We still need to think about connecting people. How do we ensure that users can find trusted content? So while many users are happy to get content from Ansible galaxy, we know that many enterprises are far less comfortable with that situation. And certainly not comfortable uploading private developed content themselves. We also know that galaxy isn't the only source of content for you to use. There are other source control, repositories, other locations, perhaps even file shares where you allow your teams to collaborate and connect. With all these different sources it can be hard for your users, your internal communities to connect and trust they're using approved content. So we want to connect teams, help them collaborate, have shared goals and ensure trust in how they automate. We need to fill that gap. And that's why last year we launched the automation hub on cloud@redhat.com. As a trusted source for download downstream certified Ansible content supported as part of ground sports automation platform subscription. And this is where you access the collections for those 50 certified platforms I mentioned earlier. But that was only part one of the plan. So while we can provide a location for trusted content that doesn't bring together content from other sources. Before, I mentioned collections were introduced to help the management of automation content. By adopting collections, you provide a path for automation developers to bring content together in a common location, allow multiple teams to increase their time to value in the automation adoption journeys. But to connect internal communities of practice, we need to provide a focal point for all things related to automation content. And that's why we're pleased to announce that the private version of automation hub will be released to the content and knowledge management component of the Ansible Automation Platform. Your privately hosted location for all your Ansible content, to allow you to curate which content is available from which sources, whether it's from Red Hat, the Ansible community, or develop internally. You now have the control over which content you trust. Finally, this year we launched our third hosted service and no additional cost to platform customers. The automation services catalog. The purpose of this service was to allow you to connect your business users with rules-based governance and a simplified user experience to the automation creator deployed via the platform. We're announcing a tech preview launch with the connected technology security connect to your own prem platform environments. It's based on a technology that's part of our future plans. And again, if you attend Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk", you'll hear more about what we're planning in this area. Because this year has been somewhat challenging, automation and Ansible have become more important to many individuals and organizations. So I could leave you with one set of thoughts to adapt and to change as we face, keep things simple, participate in making automation happen and understand the problems to be solved, but always try and keep it simple. Evolve and scale as you connect your teams, as you would grow and expand your automation, grow and expand the scale you're working at as you move forward. And collaborate to break down the silos and domains that build and build your automation that makes change possible. Whether you're an Ansible expert or someone looking for some way to start, we have sessions we hope will inspire you to make your own changes and sessions that will give you the knowledge of how to adapt for the future. Thank you and happy automating.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Big event, multiple tracks powered by theCUBE365. Happy to welcome you to the program. We have a first time guest, Willem du Plessis. He's the Director of Customer Success and Operations with Mirantis. Willem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks for having me. >> So customer success, of course, a big topic in the industry last few years. CX a is so important. Employee success and enabling that, but what, give us a little bit, your background and the purview that you and your team cover. >> Exactly, yeah, so everything under my umbrella would be basically post-sales. The whole customer experience after the point of a sale's been made so the whole account management, thereafter, the success of the accounts, as well as the health of the account, thereafter, that will be anything basically post-sales would be under my umbrella. >> Wonderful, well, the big piece is the shift. As we know, software went from shrink wrapped, and hardware talking about CapX to the cloud really ushered in OpX we're touching more subscription managed services and the like, so Mirantis has a subscription offering. Why don't you lay out for us the new pieces of this and how Mirantis puts together its offerings? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launch of our new product, Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, we're making two subscriptions available as well, named ProdCare, which is a 24/7 mission critical support offering and OpsCare, being a fully managed platform as a service subscription. Now, these offerings have been available on the Mirantis Cloud platform side of our business for quite some time, we've been very successful with them, so it's really excited making them available to our Docker Enterprise customers. So what we're trying to achieve with these accounts or with these subscriptions, rather, you know, 30% of the Fortune 100 companies are Mirantis customers, so we work on a day to day basis with their container and Kubernetes initiatives. So when we speak to these customers, there are really two trends that are becoming very clear, the first being the requirements of service providers or vendors being able to provide a true 24/7 experience. What I mean by that is not the ability to just react to an incident on a 24/7 basis. That's what I mean, what I mean is all of these companies would have operation centers spread across the globe. So it is at every hour of the day, it would be business as usual. And what these companies require is a, a partner or a service provider that can match that level, that way of operating. That is the first trend that we're noting. The second piece is really the, the evolution of the dev environment. The dev environment is no longer really seen as a secondary or a lower class citizen, if you want to call it, it's really become part of the whole DevOps pipeline, so it is really part of a mission critical process so that what customers, what we hear from our customers is that they require a real enterprise-grade subscription that they can cover this whole pipeline under and, you know, have the same quality of service from whether that is a dev or a production environment. So if you have a failure on your dev environment and your developer cannot push code, that is, is the same level of criticality than there would then they would be on if the failure was on the production environment. So this whole pipeline is decidedly seen as a mission critical component. And that's a great, that's really where ProdCare comes in. It is really this 24/7 mission critical follow the sun, enterprise-grade subscription that provides our customers with enhanced SLAs that, like I said, we've been running on the Mirantis Cloud platform side for quite some time, we've had some significant success with some really large companies. The second offering that we're making available with, like I said, is OpsCare. Now OpsCare is an ITIL-based managed service subscription, where we provide a platform as a service experience to a customer on their infrastructure of choice. So it is really irrelevant for us what your infrastructure is, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud, as long as the product can support the infrastructure, you know, the subscription would be available for you and the experience would be very much the same. So what OpsCare, like I said, entails is, is this whole ITIL framework that would include, you know, the monitoring and managing of your alerts, the incident management process, the problem management process, as well as change management that would include the lifecycle management of the whole environment. And that would just enable our customers to run on the latest and greatest offer of our product at all times. And same as with ProdCare that's been available for our brass cloud platform customers for quite a while, and have seen some significant success with that, as well. >> Well, we definitely have seen that growth of the managed care offerings like you're talking about with OpsCare, you know, shift left is so important for companies to be able to focus on what's critically important. As you said, developers need to be enabled, it can't just be waiting for things or be, you know, relegated to, you know, have to wait in line or use something that's not optimal. What are some of those outcomes? What can companies do that they weren't able before? What are some of those successes that you're seeing with the managed care OpsCare solution? >> Yeah, so the real way we OpsCare really comes to its own is allowing the customer ability to focus on what is important to their business and spend less time on what we call, keep the lights on. What I mean by that is they're solely focused on developing the application, developing the workload and spend basically no time on managing the infrastructure and, you know, maintaining it, or, you know, providing, do whatever to, to keep the platform stable, because that is done by Mirantis, already. So for example, if we take 2020 year to date, all the platforms running under OpsCare has an availability number of above four nines, and that is a significant number. So that really just sets such a strong foundation for a customer to just have that sole focus on, on what is important to them and, you know, just sets that foundation for them to develop their workload, to develop their business, and achieve their goals. >> Well, what about when it comes to the managing and monitoring of the environment? What kind of metrics are your customers having? Help us understand what the customer still does themselves or the reporting they're getting and what Mirantis, I'm assuming there's probably a Tam involved for at least some of the larger accounts there. Help us understand that shared responsibility, if you would for these type of environments. >> Yeah, exactly. So the whole ITIL framework, as I explained earlier, incident management, problem management, change, all of that, this is wrapped around why a customer success manager that is, you know, brings a single level of ownership on an accountability, and just have a customer direct for a single point of contact as a business partner. So all this is all our customers, their primary KPI or metric that we look at is just the availability of the platform. That is the primary SLA and thereafter, all of the other things happening, you know, the success of the workload and so on, because there's a lot of things that makes the result of the workload, not just the platform or the infrastructure, it's the quality of the workload, and so on, and so forth. But the main metric our customer would be looking at is that availability number, you know, how available and how stable and accessible is the environment, and, you know, like I said, just removing that requirement for them to spend, basically, no time on the platform or the infrastructure, and just focusing on the workload. >> Yeah, when it comes to in the field, your field, your partners, that line between ProdCare and OpsCare, obviously, the trend is going towards, you know, the fully managed option, but what guidance do you have out there, or what trends do you seeing? Is it a certain size company, that tends to be trending that way? Are there certain verticals that may be are further ahead? What's the reality, today? What do you expect to see over the next kind of six, 12 months? >> Yeah, so most of the companies that we see that as, that is engaging with us on an OpsCare, or managed service engagement, you know, they have the ambitions to go down the block model and build, operate, transfer, you know, to take the operations over themselves, at some point, and we have that option available to them, if they wish to choose it further along the line. What we do find is, is that they, that they don't really, you know, exercise that later on. It is, we do find it is such a smooth integration with our customers, that they tend to stay on OpsCare and see the value. This is actually a money saver for them, if they could, just focus their efforts on building, you know, focusing their time on the workload on top of the platform. From a vertical perspective, it's really anything and everything. We have customers in the science and research, we have TELCOs, large manufacturing, manufacturing, a lot of large organizations. There's really the breadth of the verticals that we see that are utilizing OpsCare and not even to mention ProdCare, that's really everything in there, as well. So it is not a really a subscription that is, that is custom for one vertical. It is basically something that we, that any vertical can actually utilize and find a significant amount of value in. >> All right, well, what final words do you have that you want to leave everyone with today? >> Yeah, so over the last six to nine months, you know, we've invested a significant amount of resources in the Docker Enterprise support business and we just with one focus, and that is just to take the support business to the next level and improve or give the customers an optimal customer experience. So with the availability of all these new subscriptions, I'm really excited to engage with our Docker Enterprise customers with these new, enhanced SLAs and just be able to work with them on these, like I said, enhanced subscriptions and just see, just give them a better customer experience. So, I'm really looking forward to working with them on the subscriptions. >> Willem, thank you so much for all the updates and want to welcome everyone to be sure to check out all the rest of the tracks on the Launchpad 2020 event. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)