(Intro music) >> Welcome back. We're LIVE here from SuperComputing 22 in Dallas Paul Gillin, for Silicon Angle in theCUBE with my guest host Dave... excuse me. And our, our guest today, this segment is Kim Leyenaar who is a storage performance architect at Broadcom. And the topic of this conversation is, is is networking, it's connectivity. I guess, how does that relate to the work of a storage performance architect? >> Well, that's a really good question. So yeah, I have been focused on storage performance for about 22 years. But even, even if we're talking about just storage the entire, all the components have a really big impact on ultimately how quickly you can access your data. So, you know, the, the switches the memory bandwidth, the, the expanders the just the different protocols that you're using. And so, and the big part of is actually ethernet because as you know, data's not siloed anymore. You have to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. >> Dave: So wait, so you're telling me that we're just not living in a CPU centric world now? >> Ha ha ha >> Because it is it is sort of interesting. When we talk about supercomputing and high performance computing we're always talking about clustering systems. So how do you connect those systems? Isn't that, isn't that kind of your, your wheelhouse? >> Kim: It really is. >> Dave: At Broadcom. >> It's, it is, it is Broadcom's wheelhouse. We are all about interconnectivity and we own the interconnectivity. You know, you know, years ago it was, 'Hey, you know buy this new server because, you know, we we've added more cores or we've got better memory.' But now you've got all this siloed data and we've got you know, we've got this, this stuff or defined kind of environment now this composable environments where, hey if you need more networking, just plug this in or just go here and just allocate yourself more. So what we're seeing is these silos really of, 'hey here's our compute, here's your networking, here's your storage.' And so, how do you put those all together? The thing is interconnectivity. So, that's really what we specialize in. I'm really, you know, I'm really happy to be here to talk about some of the things that that we do to enable high performance computing. >> Paul: Now we're seeing, you know, new breed of AI computers being built with multiple GPUs very large amounts of data being transferred between them. And the internet really has become a, a bottleneck. The interconnect has become a bottle, a bottleneck. Is that something that Broadcom is working on alleviating? >> Kim: Absolutely. So we work with a lot of different, there's there's a lot of different standards that we work with to define so that we can make sure that we work everywhere. So even if you're just a dentist's office that's deploying one server, or we're talking about these hyperscalers that are, you know that have thousands or, you know tens of thousands of servers, you know, we're working on making sure that the next generation is able to outperform the previous generation. Not only that, but we found that, you know with these siloed things, if, if you add more storage but that means we're going to eat up six cores using that it's not really as useful. So Broadcom's really been focused on trying to offload the CPU. So we're offloading it from, you know data security, data protection, you know, we're we do packet sniffing ourselves and things like that. So no longer do we rely on the CPU to do that kind of processing for us but we become very smart devices all on our own so that they work very well in these kind of environments. >> Dave: So how about, give, give us an example. I know a lot of the discussion here has been around using ethernet as the connectivity layer. >> Yes. >> You know, in in, in the past, people would think about supercomputing as exclusively being InfiniBand based. >> Ha ha ha. >> But give, give us an idea of what Broadcom is doing in the ethernet space. What, you know, what's what are the advantages of using ethernet? >> Kim: So we've made two really big announcements. The first one is our Tomahawk five ethernet switch. So it's a 400 gigi ethernet switch. And the other thing we announced too was our Thor. So we have, these are our network controllers that also support up to 400 gigi each as well. So, those two alone, it just, it's amazing to me how much data we're able to transfer with those. But not only that, but they're super super intelligent controllers too. And then we realized, you know, hey, we're we're managing all this data, let's go ahead and offload the CPU. So we actually adopted the Rocky Standards. So that's one of the things that puts us above InfiniBand is that ethernet is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. And InfiniBand is primarily just owned by one or two companies. And, and so, and it's also a lot more expensive. So ethernet is just, it's everywhere. And now with the, with the Rocky standards, we're working along with, it's, it's, it does what you're talking about much better than, you know predecessors. >> Tell us about the Rocky Standards. I'm not familiar with it. I'm sure some of our listeners are not. What is the Rocky standard? >> Kim: Ha ha ha. So it's our DNA over converged to ethernet. I'm not a Rocky expert myself but I am an expert on how to offload the CPU. And so one of the things it does is instead of using the CPU to transfer the data from, you know the user space over to the next, you know server when you're transferring it we actually will do it ourselves. So we'll handle it ourselves. We will take it, we will move it across the wire and we will put it in that remote computer. And we don't have to ask the CPU to do anything to get involved in that. So big, you know, it's a big savings. >> Yeah, I mean in, in a nutshell, because there are parts of the InfiniBand protocol that are essentially embedded in RDMA over converged ethernet. So... >> Right. >> So if you can, if you can leverage kind of the best of both worlds, but have it in an ethernet environment which is already ubiquitous, it seems like it's, kind of democratizing supercomputing and, and HPC and I know you guys are big partners with Dell as an example, you guys work with all sorts of other people. >> Kim: Yeah. >> But let's say, let's say somebody is going to be doing ethernet for connectivity, you also offer switches? >> Kim: We do, actually. >> So is that, I mean that's another piece of the puzzle. >> That's a big piece of the puzzle. So we just released our, our Atlas 2 switch. It is a PCIE Gen Five switch. And... >> Dave: What does that mean? What does Gen five, what does that mean? >> Oh, Gen Five PCIE, it's it's a magic connectivity right now. So, you know, we talk about the Sapphire Rapids release as well as the GENUWA release. I know that those, you know those have been talked about a lot here. I've been walking around and everybody's talking about it. Well, those enable the Gen Five PCIE interfaces. So we've been able to double the bandwidth from the Gen Four up to the Gen Five. So, in order to, to support that we do now have our Atlas two PCIE Gen Five switch. And it allows you to connect especially around here we're talking about, you know artificial intelligence and machine learning. A lot of these are relying on the GPU and the DPU that you see, you know a lot of people talking about enabling. So by in, you know, putting these switches in the servers you can connect multitudes of not only NVME devices but also these GPUs and these, these CPUs. So besides that we also have the storage component of it too. So to support that, we we just recently have released our 9,500 series HBAs which support 24 gig SAS. And you know, this is kind of a, this is kind of a big deal for some of our hyperscalers that say, Hey, look our next generation, we're putting a hundred hard drives in. So we're like, you know, so a lot of it is maybe for cold storage, but by giving them that 24 gig bandwidth and by having these mass 24 gig SAS expanders that allows these hyperscalers to build up their systems. >> Paul: And how are you supporting the HPC community at large? And what are you doing that's exclusively for supercomputing? >> Kim: Exclusively for? So we're doing the interconnectivity really for them. You know, you can have as, as much compute power as you want, but these are very data hungry applications and a lot of that data is not sitting right in the box. A lot of that data is sitting in some other country or in some other city, or just the box next door. So to be able to move that data around, you know there's a new concept where they say, you know do the compute where the data is and then there's another kind of, you know the other way is move the data around which is a lot easier kind of sometimes, but so we're allowing us to move that data around. So for that, you know, we do have our our tomahawk switches, we've got our Thor NICS and of course we got, you know, the really wide pipe. So our, our new 9,500 series HBA and RAID controllers not only allow us to do, so we're doing 28 gigabytes a second that we can trans through the one controller, and that's on protected data. So we can actually have the high availability protected data of RAID 5 or RAID 6, or RAID 10 in the box giving in 27 gigabytes a second. So it's, it's unheard of the latency that we're seeing even off of this too, we have a right cash latency that is sub 8 microseconds that is lower than most of the NVME drives that you see, you know that are available today. So, so you know we're able to support these applications that require really low latency as well as data protection. >> Dave: So, so often when we talk about the underlying hardware, it's a it's a game of, you know, whack-a-mole chase the bottleneck. And so you've mentioned PCIE five, a lot of folks who will be implementing five, gen five PCIE five are coming off of three, not even four. >> Kim: I know. >> So make, so, so they're not just getting a last generation to this generation bump but they're getting a two generations, bump. >> Kim: They are. >> How does that, is it the case that it would never make sense to use a next gen or a current gen card in an older generation bus because of the mismatch and performance? Are these things all designed to work together? >> Uh... That's a really tough question. I want to say, no, it doesn't make sense. It, it really makes sense just to kind of move things forward and buy a card that's made for the bus it's in. However, that's not always the case. So for instance, our 9,500 controller is a Gen four PCIE but what we did, we doubled the PCIE so it's a by 16, even though it's a gen four, it's a by 16. So we're getting really, really good bandwidth out of it. As I said before, you know, we're getting 28, 27.8 or almost 28 gigabytes a second bandwidth out of that by doubling the PCIE bus. >> Dave: But they worked together, it all works together? >> All works together. You can put, you can put our Gen four and a Gen five all day long and they work beautifully. Yeah. We, we do work to validate that. >> We're almost out our time. But I, I want to ask you a more, nuts and bolts question, about storage. And we've heard for, you know, for years of the aerial density of hard disk has been reached and there's really no, no way to excel. There's no way to make the, the dish any denser. What is the future of the hard disk look like as a storage medium? >> Kim: Multi actuator actually, we're seeing a lot of multi-actuator. I was surprised to see it come across my desk, you know because our 9,500 actually does support multi-actuator. And, and, and so it was really neat after I've been working with hard drives for 22 years and I remember when they could do 30 megabytes a second, and that was amazing. That was like, wow, 30 megabytes a second. And then, about 15 years ago, they hit around 200 to 250 megabytes a second, and they stayed there. They haven't gone anywhere. What they have done is they've increased the density so that you can have more storage. So you can easily go out and buy 15 to 30 terabyte drive, but you're not going to get any more performance. So what they've done is they've added multiple actuators. So each one of these can do its own streaming and each one of these can actually do their own seeking. So you can get two and four. And I've even seen a talk about, you know eight actuator per disc. I, I don't think that, I think that's still theory, but but they could implement those. So that's one of the things that we're seeing. >> Paul: Old technology somehow finds a way to, to remain current. >> It does. >> Even it does even in the face of new alternatives. Kim Leyenaar, Storage Architect, Storage Performance Architect at Broadcom Thanks so much for being here with us today. Thank you so much for having me. >> This is Paul Gillin with Dave Nicholson here at SuperComputing 22. We'll be right back. (Outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Partner Showcase season one, episode two. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guest here. Douglas Ko, Director of product marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph General Manager of AWS, Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Great to see you Sabina and Douglas. Great to see you, congratulations at Cohesity. Loved the shirt, got the colors wearing there on Cohesity, Always good I can't miss your booth at the shows, can't wait to get back in person, but thanks for coming in remotely. I got to say it's super excited to chat with you, appreciate it. >> Yeah, pleasure to be here. >> What are the trends you're seeing in the market when it comes to ransomware threats right now. You guys are in the middle of it right now more than ever. I was hearing more and more about security, cloud scale, cloud refactoring. You guys are in the middle of it. What's the latest trends in ransomware? >> Yeah, I have to say John, it's a pleasure to be here but on the other hand, when you asked me about ransomware, right? The data and the statistics are pretty sobering right now. If we look at what just happened in 2020 to 2021, we saw a tenfold increase in a ransomware attacks. We also saw the prediction of a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds meaning by the time I finished this sentence there's going to be another company falling victim to ransomware. And it's also expected by 2031 that the global impact of ransomware across businesses will be over $260 billion, right? So, that's huge. And even at Cohesisity, right, what we saw, we did our own survey, and this one actually directly to end users and consumers. And what we found was over 70% of them would reconsider doing business with a company that paid a ransom. So all these things are pretty alarming and pretty big problems that we face today in our industry. >> Yeah, there's so many dimensions to it. I mean, you guys at Cohesity have been doing a while. It's being baked in from day one, security in the cloud and backup recovery, all that is kind of all in one thing now. So to protect against ransomware and other threats is huge Sabina, I got to ask you Amazon's view of ransomware is serious. You guys take it very seriously. What's the posture and specifically, what is AWS doing to protect customers from this threat? >> Yeah, so as Doug mentioned, right, there's no industry that's immune to ransomware attacks. And just as so we all level set, right? What it means is somebody taking control over and locking your data as an individual or as a company, and then demanding a ransom for it, right? According to the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework, there are basically five main functions which are needed in order to plan and manage these kind of cybersecurity ransomware attacks. They go across identifying what do you need to protect, actually implementing the things that you need in order to protect yourself, detecting things if there is an attack that's going on, then also responding, how do you get out of this attack? And then bringing things, recovery, right? Bringing things back to where they were before the attack. As we all know, AWS takes security very seriously. We want to make sure that our customer's data is always protected. We have a number of native security solutions, but we are also looking to see how we can work with partners. And this is in fact when in the fall of 2019, the Cohesity CEO, Mohit Aron, myself and a couple of us, we met and we brainstorm, what could we do something that is differentiated in the market? When we built this data management as a service native solution on top of AWS, it's a first of a kind solution, John. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the market, even to even today. And we really focused on using the well architected review, the five pillars of security, reliability, operational excellence, performance, and cost optimization. And we built this differentiated solution together, and it was launched in April, 2020. And then of course from a customer viewpoint, they should use a comprehensive set of solutions. And going back to that security, that cyber security framework that I mentioned, the Cohesity data management as a service solution really falls into that recovery, that last area that I mentioned and solution actually provides, granular management of data, protection of data. Customers can spin up things very quickly and really scale their solution across the globe. And ensure that there is compliance, no matter how many times we do data changes, ads and so on across the world. >> Yeah, Sabina, that's a great point about that because a lot of the ransomware actually got bad actors, but also customers can misconfigure things. They don't follow the best practice. So having that native solutions are super important. So that's a great call out. Douglas, I got to go back to you because you're on the Cohesity side and a the partner of AWS. They have all these best practices that for the good actors, got to pay attention to the best practices and the bad actors also trying to get in creates a two, challenge an opportunity. So how do organizations protect their data against these attacks? And also how do they maintain their best practices? Because that's half the battle too, is the best practices to make sure you're following the guidelines on AWS side, as well as protecting the attacks. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, right? As an organization, you need to understand how ransomware operates and how it's evolved over the years. And when you first look at it, Sabina already mentioned it, they started with consumers, small businesses, attacking their data, right? And some of these, consumers or businesses didn't have any backup. So the first step is just to make sure your data is backed up, but then the criminals kind of went up market, right? They understood that big organizations had big pocket and purses. So they went after them and the larger organizations do have backup and recovery solutions in place. So the criminals knew that they had to go deeper, right? And what they did was they went after the backup systems themselves and went to attack, delete, tamper with those backup systems and make it difficult or impossible to recover. And that really highlighted some solutions is out there that had some vulnerabilities with their data immutability and capabilities around WORM. And those are areas we suggest customers look at, that have immutability and WORM. And more recently again, given the way attacks have happened now is really to add another layer of defense and protection. And that includes, traditionally what we used to call, the 3-2-1 rule. And that basically means, three copies of data on two different sets of media with one piece of that data offsite, right? And in today's world and the cloud, right? That's a great opportunity to kind of modernize your environment. I wish that was all that ransomware guys we're doing right now and the criminals were doing, but unfortunately that's not the case. And what we've seen is over the past two years specifically, we've seen a huge increase in what you would call data theft or data exfiltration. And that essentially is them taking that data, a specific sense of the data and they're threatening to expose it to the dark web or selling it to the highest bidder. So in this situation it's honestly very difficult to manage. And the biggest thing you could do is obviously harden your security systems, but also you need a good understanding about your data, right? Where all that sensitive information is, who has access to it and what are the potential risks of that data being exposed. So that takes another step in terms of leveraging a bunch of technologies to help with that problem set. >> What can businesses do from an architectural standpoint and platform standpoint that you guys see there's key guiding principles around how their mindset should be? What's the examples of other approaches- >> Yeah. >> Approach here? >> No, I think they are both us at Cohesity and I'll speak for Sabina, AWS, we believe in a platform approach. And the reason for that is this a very complicated problem and the more tools and more things you have in there, you add risk of complexity, even potential new attack surfaces that the criminals can go after. So we believe the architecture approach should kind of have some key elements. One is around data resiliency, right? And that again comes from things like data encryption, your own data is encrypted by your own keys, that the data is immutable and has that, right, want to read many or WORM capabilities, so the bad guys can't temper with your data, right? That's just step one. Step two is really understanding and having the right access controls within your environment, right? And that means having multi factor authentication, quorum, meaning having two keys for the closet before you can actually have access to it. But it's got to go beyond there as well too. We got to leverage some newer technologies like AI and machine learning. And that can help you with detection and analysis of both where all your sensitive information is, right? As well as understanding potential anomalies that could signify attack or threat in progress. So, those are all key elements. And the last one of course is I think it takes a village, right? To fight the ransomware war. So we know we can't do it alone so, that's why we partner with people like AWS. That's why we also partner with other people in the security space to ensure you really have a full ecosystem support to manage all those things around that framework. >> That's awesome. Before I get to Sabina, I want to get into the relationship real quick, but I want to come back and highlight what you said about the data management as a service. This is a joint collaboration. This is some of the innovation that Cohesity and AWS are bringing to the market to combat ransomware. Can you elaborate more on that piece 'cause this is important. It's a collaboration that we're going to gather. So it's a partner and you guys were going to take us through what that means for the customer and to you guys. I mean, that's a compelling offering. >> So when we start to work with partners, right? we want to make sure that we are solving a customer problem. That's the whole working backwards from a customer. We are adding something more that the customer could not do. That's why when either my team or me, we start to either work on a new partnership or a new solution, it's always focused on, okay, is this solution enabling our customer to do something that they couldn't do before? And this approach has really helped us, John, in enabling majority of the fortune 500 companies and 90% of the fortune 100 companies use partner solutions successfully. But it's not just focused on innovation and technology, it's also focused on the business side. How are we helping partners grow their business? And we've been scaling our field teams, our AWS sales teams globally. But what we realized is through partner feedback, in fact, that we were not doing a great job in helping our partners close those opportunities and also bring net new opportunities. So in our field, we actually introduced a new role called the ISV Success Manager, ISMs that are embedded in our field to help partners either close existing opportunities, but also bring net new opportunities to them. And then at re:Invent 2020, we also launched the ISB accelerate program, which enables our field teams, the AWS field teams to get incentive to work with our partners. Cohesity, of course, participates in all of these programs and has access to all of these resources. And they've done a great job in leveraging and bringing our field teams together, which has resulted in hundreds of wins for this data management as a service solution that was launched. >> So you're bringing customers to Cohesity. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, I got to get the side. So they're helping you, how's this relationship going? Could you talk about the relationship on the customer side? How's that going? Douglas, what's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going great. That's why we chose to partner with AWS and to be quite honest, as Sabina mentioned, we really only launched data management and service back in 2020, late 2020. And at that time we launched with just one service then, right, when we first launched with backup as a service. Now about 15 months later, right? We're on the brink of launching four services that are running on AWS cloud. So, without the level of support, both from a go to market standpoint that Sabina mentioned as well as the engineering and the available technology services that are on the AWS Cloud, right? There's no way we would've been able to spin up new services in such a short period of time. >> Is that Fort Knox and Data Govern, those are the services you're talking about Or is that- >> Yeah, so let me walk you through it. Yeah, so we have Cohesity DataProtect, which is our backup as a service solution. And that helps customers back their data to the cloud, on-prem, SaaS, cloud data like AWS, all in a single service and allows you to recover from ransomware, right? But a couple months ago we also announced a couple new services that you're alluding to John. And that is around Fort Knox and DataGovern. And basically Fort Knox, it is basically our SaaS solution for data isolation to a vaulted copy in the AWS cloud. And the goal of that is to really make it very simple for customers, not only to provide data immutability, but also that extra layer of protection by moving that data offsite and keeping it secure and vaulted away from cyber criminals and ransomware. And what we're doing is simplifying the whole process that normally is manual, right? You either do it manually with tapes or you'll manually replicate data to another data center or even to the cloud, but we're providing it as a service model, basically providing a modern 3-2-1 approach, right? For the cloud era. So, that's what's cool about Fort Knox, DataGovern, right? That's also a new service that we announced a few months ago and that really provides data governance and user behavior analytics services that leverages a lot that AI machine learning that everybody's so excited about. But really the application of that is to automate the discovery of sensitive data. So that could be your credit card numbers, healthcare records, a personal information of customers. So understanding where all that data is, is very important because that's the data that the criminals are going to go after and hold you host. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is again, leveraging machine learning, actually looking at how users are accessing and managing that data is also super important because that's going to help you identify potential anomalies, such as people sharing that data externally, which could be a threat. It could be in improper vault permissions, or other suspicious behaviors that could potentially signify data exfiltration or ransomware attack in progress. >> That's some great innovation. You got the data resiliency, of course, the control mechanism, but the AI piece machine learning is awesome. So congratulations on that innovation. Sabina, I'm listening to conversation and hear you talk. And it reminds me of our chat at re:Invent. And the whole theme of the conference was about the innovation and rapid innovations and how companies are refactoring with the cloud and this NextGen kind of journey. This is a fundamental pillar of AWS's rapid innovation concept with your partners. And I won't say it's new, but it's highly accelerated. How are you guys helping partners be with this rapid innovation, 'cause you're seeing benefits can come faster now, Agile is here. What are some of the programs that you're doing? How are you helping customers take advantage of the rapid innovation with the secret sauce of AWS? >> Yeah, so we have a number of leadership principles, John, and one of them, of course, is customer obsession. We are very focused on making sure we are developing things that our customers need. And we look for these very same qualities when we work with partners such as Cohesity. We want to make sure that it's a win-win approach for both sides because that's what will make the partnership durable over time. And this John, our leadership team at AWS, right from our CEO down believes that partners are critical to our success and as partners lean in, we lean in further. And that's why we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with Cohesity in April, 2020, where data management as a service solution was launch as part of that agreement. And for us, we've launched this solution now and as Doug said, what are the next things we could be doing, right? And just to go back a little bit when Cohesity was developing this solution with us, they used a number of our programs. Especially on the technical side, they used our SaaS factory program, which really helped them build this differentiated solution, especially focused around security compliance and cost optimizing the solution. Now that we've launched this solution, just like Doug mentioned, we are now focused on leveraging other services like security, AIML, and also our analytic services. And the reason for that is Cohesity, as we all know, protects, manages this data for the customer, but we want to make sure that the customer is extracting value from this data. That is why we continue to look, what can we do to continue to differentiate this solution in this market. >> That's awesome. You guys did a great job. I got to say, as it gets more scale, there's more needs for this rapid, I won't say prototyping, but rapid innovation and the Cohesity side does was you guys have been always on point on the back and recovery and now with security and the new modern application development, you guys are in the front row seats of all the action. So, I'll give you the final worry what's going on at Cohesity, give an update on what you guys are doing. What's it like over there these days? How's life give a quick plug for Cohesity. >> Yeah, Cohesity is doing great, right? We're always adding folks to the team, on our team, we have a few open racks open both on the marketing side, as well as the technology advocacy side. And of course, some of our other departments too, and engineering and sales and also our partner teams as well, working with AWS partners such as that. So, in our mind, the data delusion and growth is not going to slow down, right? So in this case, I think all tides raises all the boats here and we're glad to be innovative leader in this space and really looking to be really, the new wave of NextGen data management providers out there that leverages things like AI that leverages cybersecurity at the core and has an ecosystem of partners that we're working with, like AWS, that we're building out to help customers better manage their data. >> It's all great. Data is in the mid center of the value proposition. Sabina, great to see you again, thanks for sharing. And Douglas, great to see you too. Thanks for sharing this experience here in theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's AWS Partner Showcase special presentation, speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS worldwide public sector. >> Hello and welcome to theCube virtual, and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of public sector. We are theCube virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren, and today I'm joined by two people. We have Jim Richberg the CISO for Public Sector from Fortinet who comes to us from Washington DC. Jim, welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you, Justin. >> And we also have Kenny Holmes. Who's the head of worldwide Public Sector Go-to-market from Fortinet as well. And he comes to us from Chicago in Illinois. Kenny, thanks. >> Yes, thank you. Thank you, Justin. >> Gentlemen, welcome to theCube. Now this year has been pretty dramatic and for a lot of us as I'm sure you're very well aware and it's been a bit of an accelerator for people's interest in public cloud in particular for the public sector. So what have you seen, Kenny? Sorry, Jim, we'll start with you around the federal government's interest in cloud. What have you noticed in their adoption of public cloud and AWS in this year? >> So, we used to joke in the federal government in my 34 years, they'll never let a good crisis go to waste. That you can make an upside out of any situation. And as you noted, Justin this has been a dramatic accelerator to federal government's adoption of cloud. Three quarters of the agencies were already moving in the direction of the cloud and planning to spend roughly $8 billion on it this year. And that was pre COVID. And the pace certainly picked up. We had the guidance that came out of DHS, the interim guidance that facilitated abilities to let these now as of mid-March remote teleworkers connect directly to the cloud without having to connect back through their agency infrastructure. So they issued very quick guidance to say, look you got to get the job done. You got to get it done in the cloud. So they did that as a way to accelerate it in the short term. And then they put out the guidance later this year for a trusted internet connection access which had a use case that was built around again facilitating the ability to say you can connect directly to the cloud with security in that direct line stack. You no longer have to haul your data back to the enterprise edge, to the data center on-premise to then go straight out to the cloud. So the federal government said we will give you the ability to move in the direction of cloud and the agencies have been using this at scale. And that's why roughly half of the federal workforce is now working from home. And many of them are using cloud-based applications and services. So the dramatic impact on the federal government. >> Yeah, we've seen it here in Nate in my home of Australia. The federal government is very keen on that but there's other levels of government as I'm sure we're all aware. Particularly as state and even local governments. So Kenny, maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor for how does local and that more regional government have they been doing it basically the same as federal government or is there something unique to the way that they've had to adapt? >> Well, state and local governments are certainly facing the really the perfect storm of the rising demand and declining resources. The pandemic has certainly driven, a lower tax base and lower revenues. And as a result of that, we've seen adjustments in budgets, et cetera but we're also in a position uniquely where it's also driving digital innovation at the same time. So we're seeing the two of those and they don't necessarily have kind of diabolically opposed if you think about it. So, the two of those are coming together but so they're doing more with less and they're using digital transformation to get there where in the commercial world a lot of folks who've been doing digital transformation for a long time. Now, government is being more forced into doing it. And they're really embracing that from our perspective. So we've seen traditionally security be at the top of their demands from a CIO perspective and their most important initiatives. The now we're seeing digital transformation and more specifically we're seeing cloud, right be a key part of that. So, they've done things initially, obviously moving email and some of those things but today we're seeing an increasing amount of workloads that we're seeing them, move from maybe a previous provider, over to AWS et cetera. So, those are some of the things that we're seeing from our state and local perspective >> To build on Kenny's point. I think the key differentiator Justin, between the federal and the state and local experience has been the resources, the federal government with COVID. The federal government runs a deficit. We've seen the deficit balloon, federal spending is up 17 to 20%, not what it's passed out of the stimulus money but simply what government is spending at the federal level. So we are using cloud at the federal level to do more as Kenny noted, state governments and local governments because they're funded exclusively by taxes they can't run a deficit. They have had to say we need to spend smarter because we can't spend more. We can't even spend as much and oh my goodness we have to deliver more digital services at the same time. So for them it has been a matter of having to eke greater efficiencies out of every dollar which has pointed them in the direction of AWS and the cloud in a different sense. And the federal government that said there's greater efficiencies because we need our remote telework people to get the job done, state government, it's the perfect storm. And if they don't do this they're literally going to have to curtail vital services. >> Yeah and as we've seen the security challenge pretty much is the same everywhere. I mean, there's some variations in exactly one sort of threat you might have as a federal government compared to local but broadly speaking, the malware and ransomware and things of that nature is pretty much just a miasma that we have to wade through. So what does, Fortinet helping with these customers, particularly as they move to as you mentioned, they're moving a lot of things into AWS. So what is Fortinet's role there in helping customers make better use of public cloud? >> So I think one of the things that Fortinet really has brought to this equation is they really are a very broad based cybersecurity provider. The biggest problem that organizations typically have, of course, you know in the cloud, it's misconfiguration by the customer. It's not AWS that's making the mistake 99% plus of the time it's misconfiguration by the customer. So having the ability to say if you know how to do your security in an on-premise environment, and you've got controls, capabilities and settings that you're comfortable with you can migrate those intact if they work for you into your cloud environment. So the fact that we are soup to nuts, that we have things at the edge and offer that same suite of capabilities in AWS allows us to be able to tell, help the users if they've configured it right, not have to go back and start from scratch and say, well, now that I'm in AWS I need to reconfigure other than as you have to do it because it's a different platform, but if you've got the policies in place that are managing security managing risk well for your enterprise carry them forward to a different environment. >> I think Kenny is that a particular opportunity there for local government? As you mentioned that restrained resources means that it's much more difficult for them to correctly configure their environments but also to make this level of change, they have a lot of other responsibilities it's difficult to become cybersecurity experts. Is that where you see Fortinet helping a great deal in more local government. >> Yes it is one of the key areas. The best way you can think of it is the ability to do what Jim was saying in a single pane of glass. And the fact that we can do that. That's something you don't hear a lot about anymore, but Fortinet actually is one of the largest security providers in the world. Has it single pane of glass across, being able to manage your on-prem infrastructure being able to manage whether if someone's migrating away from another cloud over to AWS and being able to look at these holistically it's just a fantastic way for them to be efficient as well as around training and certifications and helping our customers to be able to take advantage of the products without additional costs or other things that I've been throwing down the gauntlet for other providers to say, hey, security shouldn't be something else that they have to invest. They're going to invest in your technology. You should provide them with the training, provide them with security awareness, sobriety with certifications around your product that should be table stakes. >> And we do see a lot of that structure of how to do this and provide that training tends to be the same regardless of where you are. Is that something that we see say to getting defined at federal government level with some of the standards and then that then sort of trickles down into more local government. Kenny, is that something that you see happening at all? Or are we seeing things defined at local government that are actually going back the other way? >> Yeah, well, compliance runs across both. I mean, there's probably more compliance on the federal side that Jim could speak to but there's certainly compliance is always a major factor. And it can't be that just we need to do one-off solutions for a particular compliance issue. It needs to be holistic as we're talking about it. If I have to pick solutions based on what and where they're protecting. And now I have to think about the compliance for those as well. That's yet another thing to think about, I don't see our customers thinking that way. They don't have the skillsets to continue to evolve that way. That's an expanded, use of what they're doing and they just don't have those resources. So they have to be able to do more with less we've talking about, and to be able to take a platform like the fabric that Fortinet it offers it really offers that to them. >> At the federal level I'm not even sure that I would characterize it as compliance and regulatory things that state local government have to do, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST tends to promulgate what are considered best practices. Then your cybersecurity framework has basically been adopted globally modified by certain places. And I did too in different ways, but when NIST comes up with something like zero trust architecture, new standards are understood, the 800 Series. I'm surprised people in local government where we'll talk about 800-53 or 800-207, just like we fed geeks too. So it's really setting best practices and standards that are different from compliance but to build on Kenny's point about resources where I think Kenny has flown the other way from local government up has been in the direction of saying state and local government had been the Canary in the coal mine on saying, you have to migrate to the cloud as a way of doing more with less. So the federal government has been turning the printing press, turning the crank faster and faster that will change, and this is one where can say you're spending smarter by moving in the direction of AWS and in accelerating that growth into the cloud, because my prediction as a former intelligence analyst is probably this time next year, a lot of federal agencies will be having the discussion about how to live in a much tightened budgetary environment because we went through something called sequestration 10 years ago that made for very tight zero sum budgeting. That's going to be a coming attraction and that's going to push federal government even more, so with the saying, I got to get the data off of Graham. I've got to continue to telework, Hey, and look we can follow the best practices of state and local government in this case. >> Well, it certainly sounds like we'll be able to learn from each other and adapt it. It's not going away. We're certainly going to have cybersecurity issues for the foreseeable future, but it sounds like there's a lot of work happening and there is room for happiness about how things are generally going. So, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us here and please thank you to my guest Jim Richberg and Kenny Holmes from Fortinet. You've been watching theCube virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector. Make sure you check out all the rest of our coverage on your desktop laptop or phone wherever you might be. I've been your host, Justin Warren. I look forward to seeing you again soon. (soft upbeat music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. Everybody we're back. This is Dave Vellante the cube, and this is our wall-to-wall coverage, IBM's digital thing experienced for 2020. We're really excited to have Jerry Cuomo on. He's the, uh, vice president of blockchain technologies and an IBM fellow and longtime cube alum. Jerry, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on and wish we were face to face, but yeah, this'll do. Good to see you too. Yes, thanks for having me. So we've been talking a lot of and talking to, I've been running a CEO series a, of course, a lot of the interviews around, uh, IBM think are focused on, on COBIT 19. But I wonder if you could start off by just talking a little bit about, you know, blockchain, why blockchain, why now, especially in the context of this pandemic. >>David's, it's as if we've been working out in the gym, but not knowing why we needed to be fixed. And I know now why we need to be fit. You know, blockchain is coming just in time. Mmm. You know, with the trust factor and the preserving privacy factor. Okay. The way we move forward the world is now becoming more digital than ever people working from home. Um, the reliance and online services is, that's critical. our ability to work as a community accompanies companies. The shared data is critical. you know, blockchain brings a magical ingredient and that's the ingredient of trust, you know, in sharing data. Okay. When, if that data and the sources that are providing that data arc okay. From verified and trusted, we're more likely to use that data and you the, any friction that's caused for fear of trepidation that the data is going to be misused. >>Mmm. It goes start to go away. And when that happens, you speed up an exchange and we need speed. Time is of the essence. So blockchain brings a platform for trusted data exchange while preserving privacy. And that provides a foundation. I can do some amazing things in this time of crisis, right? Yeah. And it's, it's not only trust, it's also expediency and you know, cutting out a lot of the red tape. And I want to talk about some of the applications. You're heavily involved in that in the distributed ledger, a project, you know, one of the early leads on that. Um, talk about some of the ways in which you're flying that distributed a ledger. And let's go into some of the examples. So we're, we're really fortunate to be an early adopter blockchain and, and provider of blockchain technology and kind of the fruit of that. >>Um, as I said, it couldn't happen any sooner where we have, Mmm, I would say over a thousand, alright. Users using IBM blockchain, which is powered by the opensource Hyperledger fabric, I'd say over a hundred of those users, um, have reached a level of production networks. you know, it's been great to see some of the proprietors of those networks now repurpose the networks towards hastening the relief of, uh, and one, a couple of examples that stand out, Dave. Mmm. You've seen what's happening to our supply chain. And then I think we got some rebound happening as we speak, but companies all of a sudden woke up one morning and their supply chains were, I'm exhausted. So suppliers, we're out of key goods and the buyers needed very rapidly to expand. They're, the supplier is in their, in their supply chain. there are laws and regulations about what it takes to onboard a new supplier. >>You want to make sure you're not onboarding bad actors. So in IBM for example, we have over 20,000 suppliers to our business and it takes 30 to 40 days who, uh, validate and verify one of those suppliers. We don't have 30 to 45 days, you know, think about you're a healthcare company or a food company. So working with a partner called Jane yard, uh, co-created a network called trust yourself buyer. And we've been able to repurpose, trust your supplier now or companies that are looking, you know, around Kobe 19 to rapidly okay, expand, you know, their, their supply chain. So if you imagine that taking us 45 days or 40 days to onboard a new supplier, okay. Pick, pick a company in our supply chain, Lenovo, that supplier may very well want to go to Lenovo to and provide services to them. Well guess what, it's going to take 40 days, the onboard to Lenovo. >>But if they're part of the trust or supplier network and they've already onboarded to IBM, they're well on their way. You're being visible to all of these other buyers that are part of the IBM network, like Lenovo and many others. And instead of taking 40 days, maybe it only takes five days. All right. So radically, radically, you know, improving the time it takes them. You know, with companies like Ford making ventilators and masks, it will kind of be able to onboard Ford into, you know, health care, uh, companies. But you know, we want to be able to do it with speed. So trust your supplier is a great use of blockchain. Two, expand a buyer and suppliers. Mmm. Exposure. Mmm. And they expand their network to quickly onboard. And you know, with the trust that you get an exchanging data from blockchain with the Mmm provenance, that Hey, this company information was truly vetted by one of the trusted members of the network. >>There's no fee or trepidation that somehow these records were tampered with or, or misused. So that's one example they have of using blockchain. That's a huge, uh, example that you gave because you're right, there are thousands and thousands of companies that are pivoting to making, like you said, ventilators and masks and yeah, they're moving so fast and there's gotta be a trust involved. On the one hand, they're moving fast to try to save their businesses or you know, in the case of Ford, you help save the, the country or the world. On the other hand, you know, there's risks there. So that, that helps. I want to understand me. Pasa basically is, if I understand it, you can privately share, uh, information on folks that are asymptomatic but might be carriers of covert 19. Am I getting that right on? Okay. So me Pasa starts as a project, uh, from a company called has Sarah and their CEO Jonathan Levy. >>And among other things, Jonathan Levy is an amazing, uh, software developer and he's helped us and the community at large, bill, the Hyperledger fabric, uh, blockchain technology, that's part of IBM. Mmm. The power is IBM blockchain. So Jonathan, I have this idea because w what was happening is there were many, many data sources, you know, from the very popular and well known, uh, Johns Hopkins source. And we have information coming from the weather company. There are other governments, um, putting out data. Jonathan had this, this idea of a verified Mmm. Data hub, right? So how do we kind of bring that information together in a hub where a developer can now to get access to not just one feed, but many feeds knowing that both the data is an a normalized format. So that's easy to consume. And like if you're consuming 10 different data sources, you don't have to think about 10 different ways to interact it. >>No kind of normalizing it through a fewer, like maybe one, but also that we really authentically know that this is the world health organization. This is indeed John Hopkins. So we have that trust. So, okay. Yeah. With me, Pasa being I'm a data hub four, uh, information verified information related to the Kronos virus, really laying a foundation now for a new class of applications that can mash up information to create new insights, perhaps applying Mmm. Artificial intelligence machine learning to really look not just at any one of those, uh, data sources, but now look across data sources, um, and start to make some informed decisions. No, I have to say operate with the lights on, uh, and with certainty that the information is correct. So me Pasa is that foundation and we have a call for code happening that IBM is hosting for developers to come out and okay. Bring their best ideas forward and X for exposing me Pasa as a service to the, in this hackathon so that developers can bring some of their best ideas and kind of help those best ideas come alive with me. Me has a resource. >>That's great. So we've got two, we got the supply chain, we just need to share the Pasa. There's the other one then I think we can all relate to is the secure key authentication, >>which I love. >>Uh, maybe you can explain that and talk about the role that blockchain >>we're launching fits, right. So you know, there is people working from home and digital identity verification. It is key. You know, think about it. You're working remotely, you're using tools like zoom. Um, there's a huge spike in calls and online requests from tele-health or government benefits programs. Yeah. So this is all happening. Everything behind the scenes is, yeah. Around that is, is this user who they say they are, is this doctor who they say they are, et cetera. And there are scams and frauds out there. So working with speed, it means working with certainty. and with the verified me networks set out to do a couple of years ago and the beautiful part is, you know, it's ready to go now for this, for this particular usage it's been using. Mmm. Basically think about it as my identity is my identity and I get to lease out information too different institutions to use it for my benefit, not necessarily just for their benefit. >>So it's almost like digital rights management. Like if you put out a digital piece of art or music, you can control the rights. Who gets to use it? What's the terms and conditions, um, on, on your terms? So verified me, um, allows through a mobile app users to invite institutions who represent them, verify them. No. And so I'll allow my department of motor vehicle and my employer, Mmm. Two to verify me, right? Because I want to go back to work sooner. I want to make sure my work environment, um, I'm making this up. I want to make sure my work environment, the people have been tested and vaccinated, but I don't want to necessarily, you know, kind of abuse people's privacy. Right? So I'll opt in, I'll share that information. I'll get my, my doctor and my, uh, department of motor vehicle to say, yes, this is Gary. >>He's from this address. Yes, he has been vaccinated and now I can kind of onboard to services as much quicker whether that service is going through TSA. Do you get on an airplane badging back into my office or you know, signing on to a, you know, telemedicine, a service or government, a benefits program, et cetera. So verify me is using the self, uh, at the station through a mobile application to help speed up the process of knowing that that is truly you and you truly want this service. Uh, and you are also calling the shots as to that. What happens with your information that, you know, it's not spread all over the interweb it's under your control at all time. Right. So I think it's the best of all worlds. The national Institute for standards and technology looked at, verified me. They're like, Oh my gosh, this is like the perfect storm of goodness for identity. >>They actually appointed, yeah, it has a term, it's called triple blind data exchange. It sounds like a magical act. A triple blind data exchange means the requester. Mmm. Doesn't know who the provider is and less know the requester. Um, allows the provider to know, Mmm, the provider doesn't know who the requester requested, doesn't know who the prior provider is that is double-blind. And then the network provider doesn't know either. Right. But somehow across disformed and that's the magic of blockchain. I'm allowing that to happen and with that we can move forward knowing we're sharing information where it matters without the risk of it leaking out to places we don't want to do. So great application of secure key and verified me. Yeah, I love that. Then the whole concept of being able to control your own data. You hear so much today about, you know, testing and in contact tracing using mobile technology to do that. >>But big privacy concerns. I've always felt like, you know, blockchain for so many applications in healthcare or just being able to, as you say, control your own data. I want to better understand the technology behind this. When I think about blockchain, Mmm. I obviously you don't think about it. Cryptography, you've mentioned developers a number of times. There's software engineering. Yeah. Distributed ledger. Um, I mean there's, there's game theory in the, in the, in the cryptocurrency world, we're not talking about that, but there's the confluence of these technologies coming to them. What's the technology underneath these, these applications? Talking about it there, there is an open source, an organization called Hyperledger. It's part of the Linux foundation. They're the gold standard and open source, openly governed, Mmm. Technology you know, early on in 2018 yep. 18, 26. I mean, we got involved, started contributing code and developers. >>Two Hyperledger fabric, which is the industry's first permissioned blockchain technology. Permission meaning members are accountable. So the network versus Bitcoin where members are anonymous and to pass industry Reggie regulations, you can't be anonymous. You have to be accountable. Um, that's not to say that you can't, okay. Work privately, you know, so you're accountable. But transactions in the network, Mmm. Only gets shared with those that have a need, need to know. So that the foundation is Hyperledger fabric. And IBM has a commercial offering called the IBM blockchain platform that embodies that. That kind of is a commercial distribution of Hyperledger fabric plus a set of advanced tools to make it really easy to work with. The open source. All the networks that I talked about are operating their network across the worldwide IBM public cloud. And so cloud technology lays a really big part of blockchain because blockchains are networks. >>Mmm. You know, our technology, IBM blockchain platform runs really well in the IBM wow. But it also allows you to run anywhere, right? Or like to say where it matters most. So you may have companies, I'm running blockchain nodes in the IBM cloud. You may have others running it on their own premises behind their firewall. You might have others running an Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Right. So we use, um, you may have heard of red hat open shift, the container technology so that we can run Mmm. Parts of a blockchain network, I guess they said where they matter most and you get strengthened a blockchain network based on the diversity of the operators. Because if it was all operated by one operator, there would be a chance maybe that there can be some collusion happening. But now if you could run it know across different geographies across the IBM cloud. >>So almost three networks all run on use this technology or run on the IBM cloud. And Dave, one more thing. If you look at these applications, they're just modern application, you know, their mobile front ends, their web portals and all of that kind of, okay. Okay. The blockchain part of these applications, usually it's only 20% of the overall endeavor that companies are going through. The other 80% it's business as usual. I'm building a modern cloud application. So what we're doing in IBM with, but you know, red hat with OpenShift with our cloud packs, which brings various enterprise software across different disciplines, blends and domains like integration, application, data, security. All of those things come together to fill the other 80% the above and beyond blockchain. So these three companies, okay. You know, 99 plus others are building applications as modern cloud applications that leverage this blockchain technology. So you don't have to be a cryptographer or you know, a distributed database expert. It's all, it's all embodied in this code. Mmm. Available on the IBM cloud, 29 cents a CPU hour. It was approximately the price. So it's quite affordable. And you know, that's what we've delivered. >>Well, the thing about that, that last point about the cloud is it law, it allows organizations, enterprises to experiment very cheaply, uh, and so they can get, uh, an MVP out or a proof of concept out very quickly, very cheaply, and then iterate, uh, extremely quickly. That to me is the real benefit, the cloud era and the pricing model. >>I just mentioned, David, as I said it when I started, you know, it's like we were working out in a gym, but we weren't quite sure. We knew why we were, we were so keen on getting fit. And what I see now is this, you know, blossoming of users who are looking at, you know, a new agreement. We thought we understood digital transformation. Mmm. But there's a whole new nice to be digitized right now. You know, we're probably not going to be jumping on planes and trains, uh, working as, as, as more intimately as we were face to face. So the need for new digital applications that link people together. Uh, w we're seeing so many use cases from, um, trade finance to food safety, to proxy voting for stock, know all of these applications that we're kind of moving along at a normal speed. I've been hyper accelerated, uh, because of the crisis we're in. So blockchain no. Couldn't come any sooner. >>Yeah. You know, I want to ask you, as a technologist, uh, you know, I've learned over the years, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. Um, could you do the types of things that you're talking about without blockchain? Um, I'm, I'm sure there are ways, but, but why is blockchain sort of the right path, >>Dave? Mmm. You can, you can certainly do things with databases. Mmm. But if you want the trust, it's as simple as this. A database traditionally has a single administrator that sets the rules up for when a transaction comes in. Mmm. What it takes to commit that transaction. And if the rules are met, the transactions committed, um, the database administrator has access who commands like delete and update. So at some level you can never be a hundred percent sure that that data was the data that was intended in there. With a blockchain, there's multiple administrators to the ledger. So the ledger is distributed and shared across multiple administrators. When a transaction is submitted, it is first proposed for those administrators, a process of consent happens. And then, and only then when the majority of the group agrees that it's a valid transaction, is it committed? And when it's committed, it's committed in a way that's cryptographically linked two other transactions in the ledger, I'm making it. >>Mmm tamper-proof right. Or very difficult to tamper with. And unlike databases, blockchains are append only so they don't have update and delete. Okay. All right. So if you really want that center of trusted data that is a tested, you know, that has checks and balances across different organizations, um, blockchain is the key to do it, you know? So could you do it in data with a database? Yes. But you have to trust that central organization. And for many applications, that's just fine. All right. But if we want to move quickly, we really want to share systems of record. Mmm. I hear you. Sharing a system of record, you have regulatory obligations, you can say, Oh, sorry, the record was wrong, but it was put in there by, by this other company. Well, they'll say, well, >>okay, >>nice for the other company, but sorry, you're the one in trouble. So with a blockchain, we have to bring assurances that we can't get into that kind of situation, right? So that shared Mmm. Distributed database that is kind of provides this tamper resistant audit log becomes the Colonel cross. And then with the privacy preservation that you get from encryption and privacy techniques, um, like we have like these things, both channels, um, you can transact, um Hm. And be accountable, but also, Mmm. Only share of transactions with those that have a need to know, right? So you get that level of privacy in there. And that combination of trust and privacy is the secret sauce that makes blockchain unique and quite timely for this. So yeah, check it out. I mean, on the IBM cloud, it's effortless. So to get up and running, you know, building a cloud native application with blockchain and you know, if you're used to doing things, um, on other clouds or back at the home base, we have the IBM blockchain software, which you can deploy. Yeah. Open shift anywhere. So we have what you need in a time of need. >>And as a technologist, again, you're being really, I think, honest and careful about the word tamper. You call it tamper resistant. And if I understand it right, that, I mean, obviously you can fish for somebody's credentials. Yeah. That's, you know, that's one thing. But if I understand that, that more than 50% of the peers in the community, it must agree to tamper in order for the system. You tampered with it. And, and that is the beauty of, of blockchain and the brilliance. Okay. >>Okay. Yeah. And, and, and for, um, performance reasons we've created optimizations. Like you can set a consensus policy up because maybe one transaction it's okay just to have a couple people agree and say, Oh, well, you know, out of the a hundred nodes, Mmm. Three agree, it's good enough. Okay. Other, other policies may be more stringent depending on the nature of the data and the transaction, right? So you can tone, you can kind of tune that in based on the class of transaction. And so it's kind of good and that's how we can get performance levels in the, you know, thousand plus. In fact, IBM and RBC, um, recently did, um, a series of performance analysis because RBC said, Hey, can I use this for some of my bank to bank exchanges and we need to support over a thousand transactions per second. They were able, in their use case, there's support over 3000. Transact for a second. Okay. Mmm. You know, that we were very encouraged by that. I'm glad you clarified that because, so essentially you're saying you can risk adjust the policies if you will. >>That's great to know. Mmm. I could go on forever on this topic. Well, we're unfortunately, Jerry, we're well over our time, but I want to thank you for coming back, planning this important topic. Thrilled. IBM has taken a leadership position here, and I think, you know, to your point, this pandemic is just going to, can accelerate a lot of things and blockchain is, but in my view anyway, one of them. Thank you, Dave. Oh, great questions and I really appreciate it. So everyone out there, um, stay safe. Stay healthy. All right. Thank you Jerry, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Our coverage of the IBM think digital 2020 event. We'll be right back. Perfect. The short break.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by >>Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. It runs two cubes. Live coverage of Ansel Fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John for a host of the Cube with stewed Minutemen. Analysts were looking angle. The Cube are next to guest Tom Anderson and most product owner. Red Hat is part of the sensible platform automation properly announced. And Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to the Cube Way had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the answerable automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? >>So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers have come to us. A lot of the last little one said, Hey, we're maturing. We're moving along the automation maturity curve, right, and we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, Hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation were doing security automation. What have you and they're coming to us and saying, Help us give us kind of the story if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that way I kind of feel the pole for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that. This task for that task. Too much more of a platform center. >>It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And look at the numbers six million plus activations on get Hub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be much more broader. Scope now. Bring more things together. What's the rationale behind? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? But the main thing is, >>automation is got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. You know, I'm a database administrator. I'm assists out, man. I'm a middle where I'm a nap deaf on those people, then would do task inside their job. But now we're going to the point off, actually, anybody that can see apiece. Technology can automate piece technology in the clouds have shown This is the way to go forward with the things what we had. We bring that not just in places where it's being created from scratch, a new How do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years like a heritage in the I T estate. How do you do with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you gotta be ableto automate across both of those areas and try and keep. You know, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organization effectiveness. Now how do I get to the point of the organization? Could be effective, supposed just doing things that make my job easier. And that's what we're gonna bring with applying automation capability that anybody can take advantage of. >>Richard. I actually felt the keynote demo this morning did a nice job of that line that they set it up with is this is this is tools that that all the various roles and teams just get it, and it's not the old traditional okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, you know? Oh, I've got the notification and then some feedback loops and, you know, we huddled for something and it gets done rather fast, not magic. It's still when I get a certain piece done. Okay, I need to wait for it's actually be up and running, but you know, you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration, almost with the tool driving those activities together >>on that. And that's why yesterday said that focus on collaboration is the great thing. All teams need to do that to be more successful because you get Maur inclusivity, Maurin puts. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. Make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're they're effective at what they're trying to do. >>Okay, I think I'm going to explain what's in the platform first because an engine and tower and there, what else is in there, what's new? What's what our customers is going to see. That's new. That's different >>it's the new components are automation Hope Collections, which is a technology inside answer ball itself. On also Automation Analytics and the casing is that engine and terrorist of the beating heart of the platform. But it's about building the body around the outside. So automation is about discover abilities like, What can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Um, and let six is about the post activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work well, How did it go? Who did what, who did? How much of what? How well did it work? How much did it failed? Succeeds and then, once you build on that, you don't start to expand out into other areas. So what? KP eyes, How much of what I do is automated versus no automated? You can start to instigate other aspects of business change, then Gamification amongst teams. Who's the Who's the boat? The closest motive here into the strategy input source toe How? >>Find out what's working right, essentially and sharing mechanism to for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening >>and how is my platform performing which areas are performing well, which airs might not be performing well. And then, as we move down the road, kind of how my performing against my peers are other organizations that are automating using the ants will automation platform doing? And am I keeping up on my doing better? That kind of stuff. >>So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about. Their platform feels like it builds on yet to change the dynamic a little bit. When you talk about the automation hub and collections, you've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us two through a little bit. What led Thio. You know all these announcements and where you expect, you know, how would this change the dynamics of >>the body? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content there. Ansel automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users and what what the collections does is part of the platforms allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform. But you having yet having content be able to read fast. And our partners love that idea because they can content. They can develop content, create content, get into their users hands faster. So partners like at five and Microsoft you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors. And they've been part of the pole for us to get to the platform >>from a customer perspective. And the thing I love most about doing this job with the gas of customers is because I was a customer on Guy was danceable customer, and then I came over to this side on Dhe. I now go and see customers. I see what they've done, and I know what that's what I want to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And she started to see those what people wanted to achieve, and I was said yesterday it is moving away from should I automate. How would we automate Maura? What should I automate? And so we'll start to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's no there's many different ways people do. This is about different customers, >>you know. What's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula first. Well, congratulations. It's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market, because is not just the niche configuration management. More automation become with cloud to point a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community customers adopting and then ecosystem that seems to be the successful former in these kinds of growth growth waves you guys experiencing? What is the partnering with you mentioned? S five Microsoft? Because that, to me, is gonna be a tipping point in a tel sign for you guys because you got the community. You got the customers that check check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on? They're >>so you're absolutely so you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform and for us I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F five collection, plugged it into a workflow, and they were automating. What are partners? Experience through their customers is Look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment. I've got automation from AWS. I've got azure automation via more automation. Five. Got Sisko. I've got Palo Alto. I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together, and the customers are coming and telling those vendors Look, we don't want to use your automation to end this automation tooling that one we want to use Ansel is the common substrate if you will automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, Hey, I had I was out five Aspire last week, and they're all in a natural. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much there in unanswerable and how much they're being driven by their customers when they do Ansell workshops without five, they say the attendance is amazing so they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us. And that's driving our platform kind of usability across the across the scale. >>Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers of the partners that are actually doing the work to work with danceable is that they're seeing is ah, change also in how they it's no longer like an individual customer side individual day center because everything is so much more open and so much more visible. You know there's value in there, making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing. And also the fact that the scales across those customers as well because they have their internal team's doing it, saying the same things and so bringing them to an automation capable, like Ansel have to push. That means that they also gained some of the customers appreciation for them, making it easier to do their tasking collaboration with us and you know, the best collaborations. We've got some more partners, all initiated by customers, saying Hey, I want you to go and get danceable content, >>the customer driving a lot of behavior, the guest system. Correct. On the just another point, we've been hearing a lot of security side separate sector, but cyber security. A lot of customers are building teams internally, Dev teams building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers a support my AP eyes. So now you start to see more of a P I integration point. Is that something that is gonna be something that you guys gonna be doubling down on? What's that? What's the approach there? How does that partner connected scale with the customers? So we've >>been eso Ansel security automation, which is the automation connecting I. P. S. C. P. S that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansel Network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exactly see the exact same thing in the security automation space compliance. The side over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's whether it's resilient by the EMS, resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and and all of that kind of >>the same trajectory as the network automation >>Zach. Same trajectory, just runnin the same play and it's working out right now. We're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve, and we have partners jumping in with us. >>You're talking to customers. We've heard certain stories. You know how I got, you know, 1000 hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those those hero stats O. R. Any anything along those lines? >>Talk about analytic committee from yes, >>well, again without any analytic side. I mean, those things starts become possible that one of the things we've been doing is turning on Maur more metrics. And it's actually about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can we can do that work for all the customers rather than have to duel themselves. Then you start to build those pictures and we start with a few different areas. But as we advance with those and start, see how people use them and start having that conversation customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's gonna be very possible. You know, it's so >>important. E think was laid out here nicely. That automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic, but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven. That's that's gonna drive them for it. And any good customer examples you have of the outcomes. No, you're talking to a lot of >>PS one from this morning. Yeah, >>so I mean, I'll be Esther up this morning, and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000 from launch to the end of the year. 100,000 changes through their platform on this year so far that in a 1,000,000. So now you know, from my recollection, that's about the same time frame on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration. Side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, You know how many times you were telling some customers yesterday? What used to take eight hours to a D R test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend now takes 12 minutes for two People on the base is just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything worked that that type of you can't get away from that type of change. >>J. P. Morgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, time savings and people are, I mean, this legit times. I mean, we're talking serious order of magnitude, time savings. So that's awesome. Then I want to ask you guys, Next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base, where it's the same problem being automated, allover the place so playbooks become kind of key as that starts to happen is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise with its I'm decentralized or centralized, are organized problem getting more gear? I'm getting more clouds, game or operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly five g I ot is coming around the corner. Mention security. All this is expanding to be much more touchpoints. Automation seems to be the killer app for this automation, those mundane task, but also identifying new things, right? Can you guys comment on that? >>Yeah, so maybe I'll start rich. You could jump in, which is a little bit around, uh, particularly those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something, using Ansel and then be able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else. The organization. So that idea of being for them to be able to curate they're automation content that they've created. Maybe they pulled something down from galaxy. Maybe they've got something from our automation husband. They've made it their own, and now they want to curate that and spread it across the organization to either obviously become more efficient, but also in four standards. That's where automation hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certify content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across the organization. >>Yeah, I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that call discover abilities, I had away go and find what I want. And then the next day, the next day, after you've run the automation, you then got the nerve to say, Well, who's who's using the right corporate approved rolls? Who's using the same set of rolls from the team that builds the standards to make sure you're gonna compliant build again, showing the demo That's just admin has his way of doing it, puts the security baseline application on top and you go, Oh, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time. So you can both imposed the the security standards in the way the build works. But you can also validate that everybody is actually doing the security standards. >>You what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing, and I think this is came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it. And some of the community conversations is a social construct here. Going on is that there's a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a slack channel on texting. The servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the company's. Because you have people from different geography is you have champions driving change. And there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people, whether they're silo door decentralized. So there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of the substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? You planning forward? Are you doubling down on it? >>I think so. And we talk about community right on how important that is. But how did you create that community internally and so ask balls like the catalyst so most teams don't actually need to understand in their current day jobs. Get on all the Dev ops, focus tools or the next generation. Then you bring answer because they want to automate, and suddenly they go. Okay, Now I need to understand source control, and it's honest and version. I need to understand how to get pulls a full request on this and so on and so forth on it changes that provides this off. The catalyst for them to focus on what changed they have to make about how they work, because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do you no good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think >>Bart for Microsoft hit on that yesterday. You know, if you saw Bart Session but their network engineers having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development, life cycles right and starting to manage those things in repose. And think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to. But once they're over that kind of humping understand that the answer language itself is simple, and our operations person admin can use it. No problem, >>he said himself. Didn't my network engineers have become network developers. >>It's funny watching and talking to a bunch of customers. They all have their automation journey that they're going through. And I hear the Gamification I'm like, Okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach in it unlocked capabilities, you know, in the community along the way. Maybe that could build a built in the future. >>Maybe it's swag based, you know, you >>get level C shows that nice work environment when you're not talking about the server's down on some slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. Yeah, so that mean that's the shift. That's what I'm saying, going >>firefighting to being able to >>do for throwing bombs. Yeah, wars. And the guy was going through this >>myself. Now you start a lot of the different team to the deaf teams and the ops teams. And I say it would be nice if these teams don't have to talk to complain about something that hadn't worked. It was Mexican figured it was just like I just like to talk to you because you're my friend. My colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated, so it's consistent. It's repeatable. That's a nice, nice way. It can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. I think that absent an interesting dynamic >>on our survey, our customer base in our community before things one of the four things that came up was happier employees. Because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self actualizing their job. That becomes an interesting It's not just a checkbox in some HR manual actually really impact. >>And I kind of think the customers we've heard talk rvs, gentlemen, this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job, and what we've heard from everybody is that's not absolutely That's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that, um or pro >>after that big data, that automation thing. That's ridiculous. >>I didn't use it yesterday. My little Joe Comet with that is when I tried to explain to my father what I do. Andi just said Well, in the 19 seventies, they said that computers you mean we'll do a two day week on? That hasn't come >>true. Trade your beeper and for a phone full of pots. But Richard, Thanks for coming on. Thanks for unpacking the ants. Full automation platforms with features. Congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, Jonah. Everybody will be following you guys to Cuba. Coverage here in Atlanta, First Amendment Stevens for day two of cube coverage after this short break.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube, we continue our coverage. We're live in San Francisco. Mosconi, North Day to wrapping up Day two of our three days of coverage here, Veum. World 2019 day Volante. John Wall's glad to have you with us here on the Cube. And we're now joined by Kevin Schatz. Camera. Who's the Vice president of service provider Strategy and solutions. A deli. Um, See, Kevin. Good to see this afternoon. Thank you. You as well. And, uh, yeah, Tarazi, Who is the S v p and chief technical officer at Dell Technologies in the heart. Good to see you. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. A couple of telco guys and we've had a lot of telco on and talking about it in terms of progress that you made. This was an area that you got into with a major commitment, some probably three years ago. Kind of bitch market for me then for where you were there on on day one to where you are now today and the progress you've made and maybe the service is that you're about to provide. Yeah, >> sure. So I think if we look over the last three years, our opportunity that we defined early on telecommunications space was the virtual ization, and software to find everything was leaving the data center. And we would see the software to find architecture extend all the way from radio through the core network through the cloud over a period of time. And it started with technologies like network function virtualization. So if we flash back three years ago, where our entire strategy was built on the premise that relationships with the network equipment providers like Nokia and Ericsson, where our primary path to market our primary opportunity, I think what we've realized is we've emerged in this space to a greater detail is that our expertise, our expertise and experience in building I T Networks and Building Cloud has led to the first wave of conversations in the telecommunications industry directly not through the network equipment providers, but that carriers want to engage directly with Delhi emcee for the lessons learned and how did to play. I tr detectors. And now, as we extend towards the edge that they want to engage directly with Del Technologies in terms of how we build cloud architectures. We've had a number of big announcements. Over the last several years. We've announced partnerships and engagements with NTT. We've announced partnerships and engagements with China Unicom. Just in the last three months, we've announced partnerships with our rounds around network EJ out of France and then most recently with 18 C on the automation of EJ infrastructure related to their airship project. I think from a benchmark perspective, it's just been a continued growth opportunity for us and recognition that the more we engaged in, the more we contribute as a productive member of what is a very complex and changing and transforming industry, the more success in relationships that will build, and the more it will translate into opportunity to sell to >> when you think about you have the the modernization of N F. E. For example, as a former technologist inside a large telco, Um, what were some of the challenges? Is it? It's taken a long time. Obviously, when you talk to some of the telcos, they say, Well, you know it affects our infrastructure, but we still get this application mass. I mean, maybe you could add some color and describe for our audience why it's been so challenging. >> Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. Um, going back to my days at Telco on data centers, even S d n and the software defined tools were just beginning to show up. So the biggest challenges where you were basically having toe work with predefined operating system. But he defined hardware. The hardware was not exposed for for GAM ability, the ability to take advantage of it. And then you had to interrogate multiple players of technology in a way where it took significant time, too, not only for software development, but for product development and user experience. Since then, many of those walls have come down, and some of them have come down very hard. When you look at what we're doing, Adele here and we lead for the open networking. Not only do you have the choice of operating system were also pushing hard. Don't new open operating systems for networking like Sonic with Microsoft and bade calm. And then we're taking industry leading steps to expose the silicon chips themselves for four GAM ability. These are all the components that are critical. When you talk about five G, for example, do you really have to have those capabilities? I also would say that the software evolution have made it to infrastructure. The Dev ops and the modern applications we talk about here is also available for infrastructure, which means you really can develop a capability in weeks instead of years and months. Five people can do in amazing parkas. All of this was not possible before, >> so we talked to Shekhar about this in the earlier segment challenges in the telco business. I mean, the one hand you got these quasi monopolies in some cases real monopolies that just chug along and do pretty well. But the same time you got the cost for a bit dramatically coming down, you've got the data growth doing this. You got over the top providers taking advantage of the those those networks, and so new infrastructure allows them to be more more agile. But there's a workforce component to that, and there's a skill set, and that's how they got to transform. I wonder if you could maybe talk about that a little bit. Kevin. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think when we work within this industry, it's not just a technology conversation. It's the ability to consume an operationalized technology. And I think that comes down to a number of different things, comes down to the processes that exist when it comes down to the skill sets that exists to be able to build these new processes around. And I think if we flash back several years ago, the model of how we build networks was that the team that operated it needed to understand networking. Right now, if you look at the team that needs to operate it, they need to understand networking. They need to understand, compute. They need to understand virtualization. They need to understand AP eyes. They need to be able to script and program. They need to understand some level of data science that they can close a loop in the operational models eventually with a I and machine learning technologies. So I think that the teams that are getting built look very different than the single soul capabilities that they've had in the past, right? These air smaller teams they're more agile teams that can develop and have their own more unique processes in each part of the network. Right? And even if we think about the organizational structures, we've always built vertical organizations. Right? When I had an appliance, that was an e p. C. I had an operations team that was focused on an e p. C. And I even broke that into an S gateway P Gateway and Emma, me et cetera. If we look at the world now, that s Gateway P Gateway. Mm E consists of a server consists of the networking that connects at server consists of a virtual ization layer. It consists of a stack of a software application, and all of those need to be automated, orchestrated program toe work as any PC does. So I think that the skill sets have just really expanded in terms of what's expected, >> and this is really important because the process is used to be pretty well known and hardened, so the infrastructure could be hard, and now it's of every every months, the more the market changes right. What kind of what kind of challenges is that bring to the telco provider? But also to the infrastructure provider. >> Yeah, I actually I have a really good way to describe what I think is happening. We heard it from a lot of our customers and not just tell cause but enterprises. I would say the last 5 to 10 years everybody's been dealing with Hybrid Cloud. The Move to Cloud Waas. The Big Challenge. While this remains a key challenge, a new challenge showed up, which is how to succeed in this new modern software development model. You know, are you able to do to move at that speed, which means you have full stack engineers? Can you develop the app beginning to end? It's not a nightie model anymore. Also, you no longer have an operations team. You really have to have saris who, able with software and also the customer service, changed to a softwood Devyn. So we're starting to hear from a lot of our customers. That's the next journey they really need help with. If you think of infrastructure, those challenges are even bigger, and this is where it's important to lean on technology partners who can help you with that, >> and you hit on five G a little bit ago. You have in your initial statement and we've kind of touched on the impact that it can have in terms of you understanding there. They're going to a transformative time, right? I mean, telcos are with new capabilities, and new opportunities in this whole edge is gonna be crazy. So you've got to you've got I would say some learning to do, but you have. You've got to get up to speed on what their new fundamentals are going to be, right? Yeah, I think that's >> true. I think where you know, we we've understood >> their fundamentals because it's the same transition that the IittIe world's gone through. And to a large degree, that cloud world has gone through. I think that the challenge we've we've been working to break through collectively as an industry is the paralysis at the rate of adoption of new technologies because they're so much change so quickly because we talk about virtualization. And then we're talking about kubernetes. We're talking about cloud native we're talking about Ah, bare Metal Service's. We continue to talk about Micro Micro Service's architectures. We see this progression of technology that's happening so fast in various segments of the industry. I think that the telecommunications industry has been somewhat paralyzed in terms of where do they jump in and which do they adopt and how fast they migrate between them. And which of them can be capable of being hardened to be telco grade and fit into their requirements. That they have for being able to offer regulated service >> is paralyzed because it's just too fast. It's too fast for a big amazed, a big decision to make for big. But but things are evolving too quickly. That's that's It's evolving >> too quickly. And they also sometimes have a concern that they get stuck on a dead end path, right, Because things change so quickly it's Do I jump here? Then here, then here, then here, Then here. Where do I follow a logical path and what we tend to find when we work with the telecommunications industry is that, yes, del technologies can define a strategy. Certainly VM wear and L E. M. C can define our individual strategies. Are operators can define their strategies. But there's just not one strategy for this industry. Reality is, is that when you get when you get together with an ecosystem of partners, and you work at a particular telecommunications company. That is a strategy, and you start from scratch when you go to the next right because they're their ability to consume technology. It's just so different the end game, maybe the same across the board. But the path to get there will look different, >> so every customer's different Get that. But clearly some patterns must be emerging. So my question is, where do you start your sitting down with What are you seeing in terms of common starting points and advice you'd give Thio? >> I think that to Maine has everybody starting with First of all, the physical infrastructure. Compute storage Networking is moving to X 86 model of some sort, which means many, many parts of their infrastructure today that is not based on X 86 needs to transition. So what? Seeing big art piece significant discussions of how you take compute and this new programmable networking and put it everywhere like in thousands of locations. So infrastructure wise, that is a known specific thing to be solved at early stages and given you know, that capability he's we've delivered toward enterprises. We have a lot of tools and capabilities to give them, and the 2nd 1 is that a lot of people are approaching this as a network issue. In reality, it's a cloud decision, not a network. You hurt Shaker, talk about it so the tools capabilities you need to build a cloud is completely different. This cloud may not be genetic cloud it needs to be. It needs to support the defense specific platforms under for they want Cloud, and they needed to support the specific capabilities. So that's the two. A year ago, nobody even could articulate. That was the challenge they were facing. But I would say that's what we are today. >> I would add to that that as we kind of think about the infrastructure and then that cloud decision that there's abstractions that exist between those right at the infrastructure layer, there is the need tohave, an automation system that has the ability to support multiple different cloud platforms that sit on top of it. And that's work that we're doing in the deli in seaside and then secondary to that at the cloud layer. It's the ability to support a multi virtualization environment. Virtual machines do exist and will continue to exist. Kubernetes and cloud native containerized applications do exist and will continue to exist. And the challenge becomes. How do I orchestrate an environment that allows those two exist simultaneously and be layered on top of a common building block of infrastructure? And I think that's really the power that the broader Del Technologies has is that we have all of these entities and capabilities in house. >> How long does this take? A telco toe transform is this decade. Is it? Is it Maur can Obviously certain parts can happen faster. But when when you sit down with with customers and they put together their plans, I mean, what what what's their time horizon? >> So I would argue that we define the first NFI standards and 2012. And if we look globally and even within the vast majority of the Indus story and carriers were somewhere in the 10 to 15% range, yeah, >> yeah, that too compelling. Uh, hey, is that enough? Maybe be a forcing function for making some of those decisions. Are the economics on moving toe X 86 are very compelling. It's 10 times the speed to deploy, and it's a massive order of magnitude and costs. Therefore, it's not something that you could wait on as you continue to build capacity. So that's is forcing the infrastructure decision. The second forcing function is that what five G's starting to look like is not network and wireless, independent from enterprise solutions, you really have to collapse. The single infrastructure you know to offer service is and why it lists embedded on That's another forcing function in terms of enterprises is starting to ask for those capabilities. >> You know, you mentioned X 86 couple times and when you think about the Telco Cloud generically what we're talking about here in the in the commercial cloud not to tell ghost no commercial but the mainstream cloud you're getting a lot of offload, you know, hardware offload alternative processing arm uh, GP use F p g a Z even, you know, custom, a six coming back. You've seen the same thing in the Telco club >> for sure, I think I think if if you look at what we've done over the last several years, we've seen this dramatic shift in almost a pendulum swing away from a six and proprietary hardware towards everything on X 86 I think what we've learned over the last several years at X 86 is a platform that has its value. But it's just not for every work with So we've seen things like network slicing and control, user plane separation and technologies that her first moving user playing very high Io applications back onto smart nicks and F PJs and eventually onto merchant silicon with programmable silicate in the network switches. But I think that even if you look at what's happening in in Public Cloud with things like GPU virtualization, they're still largely virtualized in the time domain, which means that they're used by a particular application for a period of time and then the next application scheduled it in the next application schedule. Is it that doesn't work for network workloads? So I think that what we're finding is we go to this Toko Cloud model, especially with offload in the virtual ization of Acceleration Technologies, is that it's an entire set of problems that just aren't solved in public cloud yet. >> Yeah, I would say, based on experience, the vast majority of network workloads have to be x 86 I definitely think arm cores and GPO offloads will play all at some point in the future. But they that's not the heavy duty that you need to offload those functions because most of these network applications were it. And for custom, a sick. That's very high performance that you know, it has high throughput. Security, built in ability to build service is directly into the silicon. So that kind of transition over time you'll feed. You see a lot of distributed applications, it and container formats all the way at the edge. But that transition to that kind of distributed model from what we are today is probably not possible. And I would argue you'll always have their mics off high performance, high throughput. I mean, think about it. If you're trying to activate 20,000 I ot devices instantly, you really need a high core density, you know, x 86 chip with significant memory. You really worry about the data plane and how much data you can put. So it's better >> we didn't even hit I ot dead. Wait, wait Another day, Another conversation. Hey, thanks for the time. We certainly appreciate it. Been a good show I for you all to write for, sir? Good. Good energy. Good vibes and good business. Thanks for the time We appreciate it. >> Thank you, guys. Thank >> you very much for your time. >> Watching the Cube live coverage Here it Veum World 2019 in San Francisco. Thank you.

>> Presenter: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the Cube. Covering vmworld 2019. Brought to you by vmware and its ecosystem partners. >> So good to have you here with us on the first day of three days of live coverage here in San Francisco as The Cube continues its 10th year of coverage at vmworld 2019. Along with John Troyer, I'm John Walls, glad to have you with us. We're joined now by Bina Hallman who is the vice president of storage at IBM. Bina good to have you with us with this afternoon. >> Thanks for having me. >> You bet. You know, your everyday assignment is keeping so many people up at night and that's how do we defend ourselves, cyber. How do we develop these resilient networks, resilient services. Let's take a step back for a second and try to paint the scope of the problem in terms of what you're seeing at IBM in terms of cyber intrusions, the nature of those attacks and the areas where those are happening. >> I'll tell you from a client industry perspective, right touch on that a little bit. But cyber resiliency, cyber security it's a huge topic. This is something that every business is thinking about, is talking about. It's not just a discussion in the different departments, it's at the C Suite level, the board level. Because if you think about it, cyber crimes as frequent as they are and as impactful as they are, they can really affect the overall company's revenue generation. The cost of recovering from them can be very expensive. >> We're talking about more than just breeches here. Every week we hear ransomware is very interesting, it's very prevalent, it's here. I honestly hear a lot of government small town governments, or state governments, municipal governments maybe because they have reporting requirements. I don't know what goes on underneath in the private sector, but does it seem like that is one things? >> That's right that's right. We hear it in the news a lot. We hear about ransomware quite a bit as data breeches, as other types of things. When you look at some of the analyst statistics and what they say about the frequency of these types of events, and the likelihood of a business getting affected, the likelihood of a business getting affected by a cyber event is 1 in 3. It used to be 1 in 4 a couple years ago, now 1 in 3 over the next two years. Ransomware itself is increasing frequency. I think it was like every 14 seconds there is a ransomware attack somewhere in the world. The cost of this is tremendous. It's in the trillions of dollars. Both from recovering from that attack, the loss in business and revenue generation and actually the impact to the company's reputation. Again, not just ransomware, it's happening in many industries. You talked about government, it's in manufacturing, it's in financial, it's in health, it's in transportation. When you step back and say, how is it so broad, when you think about every organization to some extent is going through some level of transformation. There's digital transformation. They're leveraging capabilities like hybrid multi cloud, having resources on prim, workloads on prim some services in the cloud. They've got team members that are using mobile devices. Some companies depending on their business might have IOT. So when you look at all of those entry points, these are new ways that the bad guys can get into an organization. That creates the scale and complexity, just gets very large. It used to be that you have a backup. The traditional way for business resiliency used to be you do a backup, you have the data on an external system, you restore it if something happened. And then there was the business continuity. You would have a secondary infrastructure that in the case of an accident or some kind of a natural disaster, which didn't happen very often, you would have somewhere, a secondary infrastructure. All of those were designed with the likelihood being very low of happening. Then the recovery times and the disruption to business was somewhat tolerable. These days, with all of the dynamics we're talking about, and the potential areas of entry you need more of an end to end solution. That's a cyber resiliency strategy that is really comprehensive and that's what a lot of the businesses are thinking about today. How do I make sure I have a complete solution and a strategy that allows me to survive through and come up very quickly after an attack happens. I think most people recognize that they're going to get impacted at some point. It's not if, but it's when and when it does how do I quickly recover. >> You said it with the statistic, that 1 in 3 every two years. So my math tells me in six years time, I'm going to get hit by that standard. But it tells me that it's not if, it is when. So in terms of the strategies that companies are adopting, what do you recommend? What do you suggest now? You paint a realistically grim picture that there's so many different avenues, different opportunities and it's hard to put your fingers in all those holes. >> There's a lot happening in this space and I think that, you know, there are different standards, a lot of regulations but one that has been accepted and being leveraged in the US is around a framework and some guidance the NIST organization, National Institute of Standards in Technology. It's a framework that they put in place, a guidance on how do you plan for, how do you detect and then recover from these types of situations. I'll talk about it a little bit, but it's a very good approach. It starts with an organization needs to start by identifying what are some of the critical business services that their business is dependent on. What are they, what are the systems, what are the workloads, what are the applications. They identify and then what's the tolerance level. How quickly do you need to come up. What's the RPO, RTF. Based on that, develop and prioritize a plan. That plan has to be holistic. It involves from the CIO to the CSA, security office to the operations to the business continuity, to the data owners, the line of business. And then in this environment, you've got partners, you've got services you're leveraging. All of that has to be encompassing for those key services that you identify and prioritize as a client that you need up and running. And up and running very quickly. One of the examples of a client, financial institution. They determined they had 300 services they needed up and running within 24 hours in case there was an attack or in case something happened to their data or their environment. That they defined as what their requirement was. Then you go about working with them to do a few things. You identify and then there are other phases around that I can talk about that as well. >> I was going to go over to IBM a little bit in that obviously, you're with IBM and we're talking about storage, people may not realize how integral storage is now in security, but IBM brings to the table a lot more than just storage. >> Absolutely. >> So can you talk a little bit about that portfolio and IBM's approach? >> Sure, so when I talk about the NIST framework and I talk about the identify stage, there's also things around protection, protecting the environment and those services and those systems. The infrastructure, we do a lot in that space. It's around detection. So now that you've got the protection, and protection might include things like having identity management, having access control, just making sure that the applications are at the latest code levels. Often times that's when the vulnerability comes in when you don't have those security patches installed. Data protection and when it comes to that segment, we've got a very rich portfolio of data protection capabilities with our Spectrum Protect offerings. From a protection perspective, going into an encryption, having capabilities where the infrastructure is designed to have multiple types. You can have physical separation, so you can have an air gap, things like tape are ideal for that because it's physically separated. Tiering to the cloud. You can have technologies like write once read many where they're immutable, you can't change those. You can read them but you can't change them. We've done a lot of work in innovation around what we call safeguarded copies. This is making snapshots, but those snapshots are not deletable, they're access controlled, they're read-only. That allows you to very quickly bring up an environment. >> I think people don't realize that, I see some patterns of, sometimes these things hide. They'll be in there and they will be innocuous so you can't just restore the last backup. >> That's right. >> They may try to rewrite the backup so you may have to go back and find a good one. >> Absolutely, and detection is very important. Detecting that as early as possible is the best way to reduce the cost of recovering from these kinds of events. But like you said, I think I want to say 160 days, your environment might be exposed for 160 days before you detect it. So having capabilities in a portfolio in our offerings, and we do a lot working with a research team our security team on things like our data protection where we have algorithms built in where we look for patterns and we look for anomalies. As soon as we see the patterns for malware, ransomware, we alert the operator so you don't allow it to be resident for that period of time. You quickly try to identify it. Another example is in our infrastructure management software. You can see your whole heterogeneous storage environment. You typically start out by base lining a normal environment, similar to the backup piece but then it looks for anomalies, and are there certain things happening in the network, the storage that warns the operator. >> I almost get the feeling that sometimes it's almost like termites. You don't realize you have a problem until it's too late because they haven't been visible. In a 160 day window, whatever it might be, you might be passed that but because whatever that attack was, it was malicious and as clandestine enough that you didn't find it and it does cause problems so as we're wrapping up here, what kind of confidence do you want to share with the end users with people to let them know that there are tools that they can deploy. That it's not all grim reaper. But it is difficult. >> It is difficult, it's very real. But it's absolutely something that every business can have under control, have a plan around. From an IBM perspective, we are number one leader in security, we're the leader in security. Our focus is not just at a software level, it's starting from the chips we design to the servers we deliver to the storage, the flash core modules, FIPS 140 compliance, the storage software, the data protection, the storage management software all the way through the stack. All the way through our cloud infrastructure. Having that comprehensive end to end security and we have those capabilities, we also have services. Our services and security organization work with clients to establish these, evaluate the environment, establish these strategies and interim plans. It's really about creating the plan, prioritizing it and implementing it, making sure the whole organization is aware and educated on it. >> You got to prepare no doubt about that. Thanks for the time Bina, we appreciate that. And it's not all doom and gloom but it is tough. Tough work and very necessary work. Back with more here on The Cube. You're watching our coverage from vmworld 2019, Here in San Francisco.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. Happy to welcome back to the program first Ben Sigelman, who is the co-founder and CEO of LightStep. And welcome to the program a first time Morgan McLean, who's a product manager at Google Cloud Platform. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah. >> All right so, this was a last minute ad for us because you guys had some interesting news in the keynote. I think the feedback everybody's heard is there's too many projects and everything's overlapping, and how do I make a decision, but interesting piece is OpenCensus, which Morgan was doing, and OpenTracing, which Ben and LightStep were doing are now moving together for OpenTelemetry if I got it right. >> Yup. >> So, is it just everybody's holding hands and singing Kumbaya around the Kubernetes campfire, or is there something more to this? >> Well I mean, it started when the CNCF locked us in a room and told us there were too many projects. (Stu and Ben laughing) Really wouldn't let us leave. No, to be fair they did actually take us to a room and really start the ball rolling, but conversations have picked up for the last few months and personally I'm just really excited that it's gone so well. Initially if you told me six or nine months ago that this would happen, I would've been, given just the way the projects were going, both were growing very quickly, I would've been a little skeptical. But seriously, this merger's gone beyond my wildest dreams. It's awesome, both to unite the communities, it's awesome to unite the projects together. >> What has the response been from the communities on this merger? >> Very positive. >> Yeah. >> Very positive. I mean OpenTracing and OpenCensus are both projects with healthy user bases that are growing quickly and all that, but the reason people adopt them is to future-proof their own software. Because they want to adopt something that's going to be here to stay. And by having these two things out in the world that are both successful, and were overlapping in terms of their goals, I think the presence of two projects was actually really problematic for people. So, the fact that they're merging is net positive, absolutely for the end user community, also for the vendor community, it's a similar, it's almost exactly the same parallel thought process. When we met, the CNCF did broker an in-person meeting where they gave us some space and we all got together and, I don't know how many people were there, like 20 or 30 people in that room. >> They did let us leave the room though, yesterday, yeah that was nice. >> They did let us leave the room, that's true. We were not locked in there, (Morgan laughing) but they asked us in the beginning, essentially they asked everyone to state what their goals were. And almost all of us really had the same goal, which is just to try and make it easy for end users to adopt a telemetry project that they can stick with for the long haul. And so when you think of it in that respect, the merger seems completely obvious. It is true that it doesn't happen very often, and we could speculate about why that is. But I think in this case it was enabled by the fact that we had pretty good social relationships with OpenCensus people. I think Twitter tends to amplify negativity in the world in general, as I'm sure people, not a controversial statement. >> News alert, wait, absolutely the negatives are, it's something in the algorithm I think. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Maybe they should fix that. >> Yeah, yeah (laughs) exactly. And it was funny, there was a lot of perceived animosity between OpenTracing and OpenCensus a year ago, nine months ago, but when you actually talk to the principals in the projects and even just the general purpose developers who are doing a huge amount of work for both projects, that wasn't a sentiment that was widely held or widely felt I think. So, it has been a very kind of happy, it's a huge relief frankly, this whole thing has been a huge relief for all of us I think. >> Yeah it feels like the general ask has always been that, for tracing that doesn't suck. And that tends to be a bit of a tall order. The way that they have seemed to have responded to it is a credit to the maturity of the community. And I think it also speaks to a growing realization that no one wants to have a monoculture of just one option, any color you want so long as it's black. (Ben laughing) Versus there's 500 different things you can pick that all stand in that same spot, and at that point analysis paralysis kicks in. So this feels like it's a net positive for, absolutely everyone involved. >> Definitely. Yeah, one of the anecdotes that Ben and I have shared throughout a lot of these interviews is there were a lot of projects that wanted to include distributed tracing in them. So various web frameworks, I think, was it Hadoop or HBase was-- >> HBase and HDFS were jointly deciding what to do about instrumentation. >> Yeah, and so they would publish an issue on GitHub and someone from OpenTracing would respond saying hey, OpenTracing does this. And they'd be like oh, that's interesting, we can go build an implementation file and issue, someone from OpenCensus would respond and say, no wait, you should use OpenCensus. And with these being very similar yet incompatible APIs, these groups like HBase would sit it and be like, this isn't mature enough, I don't want to deal with this, I've got more important things to focus on right now. And rather than even picking one and ignoring the other, they just ignored tracing, right? With things moving to microservices with Kubernetes being so popular, I mean just look at this conference. Distributed tracing is no longer this kind of nice to have when you're a big company, you need it to understand how your app works and understand the cause of an outage, the cause of a problem. And when you had organizations like this that were looking at tracing instrumentation saying this is a bit of joke with two competing projects, no one was being served well. >> All right, so you talked about there were incompatible APIs, so how do we get from where we were to where we're going? >> So I can talk about that a little bit. The APIs are conceptually incredibly similar. And the part of the criteria for any new language, for OpenTelemetry, are that we are able to build a software bridge to both OpenTracing and OpenCensus that will translate existing instrumentation alongside OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and omit the correct data at the end. And we've built that out in Java already and then starting working a few other languages. It's not a tremendously difficult thing to do if that's your goal. I've worked on this stuff, I started working on Dapper in 2004, so it's been 15 years that I've been working in this space, and I have a lot of regrets about what we did to OpenTracing. And I had this unbelievably tempting thing to start Greenfield like, let's do it right this time, and I'm suppressing every last impulse to do that. And the only goal for this project technically is backwards compatibility. >> Yeah. >> 100% backwards compatibility. There's the famous XKCD comic where you have 14 standards and someone says, we need to create a new standard that will unify across all 14 standards, and now you have 15 standards. So, we don't want to follow that pattern. And by having the leadership from OpenTracing and OpenCensus involved wholesale in this new effort, as well as having these compatibility bridges, we can avoid the fate of IPv6, of Python 3 and things like that. Where the new thing is very appealing but it's so far from the old thing that you literally can't get there incrementally. So that's, our entire design constraint is make sure that backwards compatibility works, get to one project and then we can think about the grand unifying theory of a provability-- >> Ben you are ruining the best thing about standards is that there is so many of them to choose from. (everyone laughing) >> There's still plenty more growing in other areas (laughs) just in this particular space it's smaller. >> One could argue that your approach is nonstandard in its own right. (Ben laughing) And in my own experiments with distributed tracing it seems like step one is, first you have to go back and instrument everything you've built. And step two, hey come back here, because that's a lot of work. The idea of an organization going back and reinstrumenting everything they've already instrumented the first time. >> It's unlikely. >> Unless they build things very modularly and very portably to do exactly that, it's a bit of a heavy lift. >> I agree, yeah, yeah. >> So going forward, are people who have deployed one or the other of your projects going to have to go back and do a reinstrumentation, or will they unify and continue to work as they are? >> So, I would pause at the, I don't know, I would be making up the statistic, so I shouldn't. But let's say a vast majority, I'm thinking like 95, 98% of instrumentation is actually embedded in frameworks and libraries that people depend on. So you need to get Dropwizard, and Spring, and Django, and Flask, and Kafka, things like that need to be instrumented. The application code, the instrumentation, that burden is a bit lower. We announced something called SpecialAgent at LightStep last week, separate to all of this. It's kind of a funny combination, a typical APM agent will interpose on individual function calls, which is a very complicated and heavyweight thing. This doesn't do any of that, but it takes, it basically surveys what you have in your process, it looks for OpenTracing, and in the future OpenTelemetry instrumentation that matches that, and then installs it for you. So you don't have to do any manual work, just basically gluing tab A into slot B or whatever, you don't have to do any of that stuff which is what most OpenTracing instrumentation actually looks like these days. And you can get off the ground without doing any code modifications. So, I think that direction, which is totally portable and vendor neutral as well, as a layer on top of telemetry makes a ton of sense. There are also data translation efforts that are part of OpenCensus that are being ported in to OpenTelemetry that also serve to repurpose existing sources of correlated data. So, all these things are ways to take existing software and get it into the new world without requiring any code changes or redeploys. >> The long-term goal of this has always been that because web framework and client library providers will go and build the instrumentation into those, that when you're writing your own service that you're deploying in Kubernetes or somewhere else, that by linking one of the OpenTelemetry implementations that you get all of that tracing and context propagation, everything out of the box. You as a sort of individual developer are only using the APIs to define custom metrics, custom spans, things that are specific to your business. >> So Ben, you didn't name LightStep the same as your project. But that being said, a major piece of your business is going through a change here, what does this mean for LightStep? >> That's actually not the way I see it for what it's worth. LightStep as a product, since you're giving me an opportunity to talk about it, (laughs) foolish move on your part. No, I'm just kidding. But LightStep as a product is totally omnivorous, we don't really care where the data comes from. And translating any source of data that has a correlation ID and a timestamp is a pretty trivial exercise for us. So we do support OpenTracing, we also support OpenCensus for what it's worth. We'll support OpenTelemetry, we support a bunch of weird in-house things people have already built. We don't care about that at all. The reason that we're pursuing OpenTelemetry is two-fold, one is that we do want to see high quality data coming out of projects. We said at the keynote this morning, but observability literally cannot be better than your telemetry. If your telemetry sucks, your observability will also suck. It's just definitionally true, if you go back to the definition of observability from the '60s. And so we want high quality telemetry so our product can be awesome. Also, just as an individual, I'm a nerd about this stuff and I just like it. I mean a lot of my motivation for working on this is that I personally find it gratifying. It's not really a commercial thing, I just like it. >> Do you find that, as you start talking about this more and more with companies that are becoming cloud-native rapidly, either through digital transformation or from springing fully formed from the forehead of some God, however these born in the cloud companies tend to be, that they intuitively are starting to grasp the value of tracing? Or does this wind up being a much heavier lift as you start, showing them the golden path as it were? >> It's definitely grown like I-- >> Well I think the value of tracing, you see that after you see the negative value of a really catastrophic outage. >> Yes. >> I mean I was just talking to a bank, I won't name the bank but a bank at this conference, and they were talking about their own adoption of tracing, which was pretty slow, until they had a really bad outage where they couldn't transact for an hour and they didn't know which of the 200 services was responsible for the issue. And that really put some muscle behind their tracing initiative. So, typically it's inspired by an incident like that, and then, it's a bit reactive. Sometimes it's not but either way you end up in that place eventually. >> I'm a strong proponent of distributed tracing and I feel very seen by your last answer. (Ben laughing) >> But it's definitely made a big impact. If you came to conferences like this two years ago you'd have Adrian, or Yuri or someone doing a talk on distributed tracing. And they would always start by asking the 100 to 200 person audience, who here knows what distributed tracing is? And like five people would raise their hand and everyone else would be like no, that's why I'm here at the talk, I want to find out about it. And you go to ones now, or even last year, and now they have 400 people at the talk and you ask, who knows what distributed tracing is? And last year over half the people would raise their hand, now it's going to be even higher. And I think just beyond even anecdotes, clearly businesses are finding the value because they're implementing it. And you can see that through the number of companies that have an interest in OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, OpenCensus. You can see that in the growth of startups in this space, LightStep and others. >> The other thing I like about OpenTelemetry as a name, it's a bit of a mouthful but that's, it's important for people to understand the distinction between telemetry and tracing data and actual solutions. I mean OpenTelemetry stops when the correct data is being omitted. And then what you do with that data is your own business. And I also think that people are realizing that tracing is more than just visualizing a single distributed trace. >> Yeah. >> The traces have an enormous amount of information in there about resource usage, security patterns, access patterns, large-scale performance patterns that are embedded in thousands of traces, that sort of data is making its way into products as well. And I really like that OpenTelemetry has clearly delineated that it stops with the telemetry. OpenTracing was confusing for people, where they'd want tracing and they'd adopt OpenTracing, and then be like, where's my UI? And it's like well no, it's not that kind of project. With OpenTelemetry I think we've been very clear, this is about getting >> The name is more clear yeah. >> very high quality data in a portable way with minimal effort. And then you can use that in any number of ways, and I like that distinction, I think it's important. >> Okay so, how do we make sure that the combination of these two doesn't just get watered-down to the least common denominator, or that Ben just doesn't get upset and say, forget it, I'm going to start from scratch and do it right this time? (Ben laughing) >> I'm not sure I see either of those two happening. To your comment about the least common denominator, we're starting from what I was just commenting about like two years ago, from very little prior art. Like yeah, you had projects like Zipkin, and Zipkin had its own instrumentation, but it was just for tracing, it was just for Zipkin. And you had Jaeger with its own. And so, I think we're so far away, in a few years the least common denominator will be dramatically better than what we have today. (laughs) And so at this stage, I'm not even remotely worried about that. And secondly to some vendor, I know, because Ben had just exampled this, >> Some vendor, some vendor. >> that's probably not, probably not the best one. But for vendor interference in this projects, I really don't see it. Both because of what we talked about earlier where the vendors right now want more telemetry. I meet with them, Ben meets with 'em, we all meet with 'em all the time, we work with them. And the biggest challenge we have is just the data we get is bad, right? Either we don't support certain platforms, we'll get traces that dead end at certain places, we don't get metrics with the same name for certain types of telemetry. And so this project is going to fix that and it's going to solve this problem for a lot of vendors who have this, frankly, a really strong economic incentive to play ball, and to contribute to it. >> Do you see that this, I guess merging of the two projects, is offering an opportunity to either of you to fix some, or revisit if not fix, some of the mistakes, as they were, of the past? I know every time I build something I look back and it was frankly terrible because that's the kind of developer I am. But are you seeing this, as someone who's probably, presumably much better at developing than I've ever been, as the opportunity to unwind some of the decisions you made earlier on, out of either ignorance or it didn't work out as well as you hoped? >> There are a couple of things about each project that we see an opportunity to correct here without doing any damage to the compatibility story. For OpenTracing it was just a bit too narrow. I mean I would talk a lot about how we want to describe the software, not the tracing system. But we kind of made a mistake in that we called it OpenTracing. Really people want, if a request comes in, they want to describe that request and then have it go to their tracing system, but also to their metric system, and to their logging stack, and to anywhere else, their security system. You should only have to instrument that once. So, OpenTracing was a bit too narrow. OpenCensus, we've talked about this a lot, built a really high quality reference implementation into the product, if OpenCensus, the product I mean. And that coupling created problems for vendors to adopt and it was a bit thick for some end users as well. So we are still keeping the reference implementation, but it's now cleanly decoupled. >> Yeah. >> So we have loose coupling, a la OpenTracing, but wider scope a la OpenCensus. And in that aspect, I think philosophically, this OpenTelemetry effort has taken the best of both worlds from these two projects that it started with. >> All right well, Ben and Morgan thank you so much for sharing. Best of luck and let us know if CNCF needs to pull you guys in a room a little bit more to help work through any of the issues. (Ben laughing) But thanks again for joining us. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us, it's been a pleasure. >> Yeah. >> All right for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman we'll be back to wrap up our day one of two days live coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019, Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft instrumental music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen Brought to you by nutanix. >> Hello, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are live at nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Michael Bushong. He is the vice president Enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks. Thank you so much for returning to the Cube, Your Cuba Lem. >> So thank you for this is this is awesome and you can't see it on the cameras. But this is a, like, just amazing. >> It's very We are in the clouds up here. It's a very high stage. Everything's coming full circle. >> Jim Cramer. Ask a little bit >> serious. Okay. >> Of course. I'm going to ask the tough questions >> going on. He's going to start slamming everything very soon, >> But we've known each other for a long time, Jennifer Going back ten years ago. So look, a tangle started. We're in our tenth year. You know, if you've seen the journey, I am a juniper. You left juniper startup brocade, then back to juniper. So you've seen that circle? You've seen the couple waves? I mean one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera was saw. Network fabrics to Dover had Juno's and then be anywhere. But you know, So this arrow, which became the ESPN Wave, are now suffer to find data center. So you've been in that journey is a product person. And now marking juniper, it's actually goes back about a decade. This whole esti n stuff networking. So what's What's the role now that you're doing? What's juniper doing? Why Nutanix? What's your story year? >> Sure. So I run enterprise marketing at Juniper, so my goal is effectively toe to make some of the hype makes sense, right? It goes back a decade. Actually, the early days of the only ESPN movement we didn't call it s tiene right. Juniper started with open flow and PC and alto and all these acronyms, and we actually, we're a great engineering company. Maybe not so great marketing company. And we actually call it network program ability. That didn't take off. But the technology's kind of endured. And I think what we saw was this lengthy incubation period to the point that now, as we sit here dot next in twenty nineteen. We're starting to see now some of the attraction of the last couple of years. That's a junipers general position. So we wantto dr Adoption. Certainly there's products and technology that underpins that, but But fundamentally, we're looking at a huge operational shift. And if that operational shift doesn't happen, then that's to the detriment of everyone in the industry. >> What's the relationship with NUTANIX? Can you talk about how you guys work together? What's the connection? >> Sure. So nutanix obviously does the whole hyper converge space. We provide the networking components to that. So whether that's the top Iraq connectivity, how do you get your traffic into the rest of the network? We've done some security stuff which we can talk more about. And then, if you look at the overall management piece, we've got integrations at the management policy layer as well. >> So your relationship you both got a very similar world view. How you see technology, you're both taken on VM. Where to? Can you talk a little bit about the relationships there and and why it works? >> Sure, fundamentally, if you look at what Nutanix is trying to do, it's this whole idea of one click. It ties ing everything right. They talk a lot in their keynote sessions. You hear the executives talk, You look at their collateral, the messages they take, the customers. It's about making things simple. Junipers Strategy is this idea of engineering simplicity. So just a top level? What's our purpose? What's our role in this industry at large? I think we have a very common worldview. Of course, driving simplicity is going to happen in the context of real architectural change on the change That's kind of everywhere is cloud and increasingly multi cloud. And so both Nutanix and Juniper about really driving simplicity in the context of Cloud multi cloud, giving customers the opportunity, toe run workloads wherever they need Teo without taking on additional operational burden. That's kind of cesarean unwanted in enterprises networking. >> So the Big Tran, this multi cloud you guys. That's a key part of the strategy. Dave along tonight and Stew Minutemen were arguing on the cute couple events ago. There are not one of our sessions about the hype around multi cloud. The reality of it. The reality is, is that everyone kind of has multiple clouds. It's not like that the clouds aren't talking to each other, and then we're just kind of riffing on the cloud is just big. One big distributed network, different computing, distributed networks. These air knew these aren't new paradigms. These are existing things that have computer science behind them. Engineering behind it. So juniper, you have been around for a long time. Connecting networks. The cloud is like some of the same concert on premise Hybrid Cloud and multiplied it basically a distributed network. It's all cloud operations. We get that, but the technology issue is not that hard, but I won't say that that hard, but it's similar to what you guys have done in the past. Just differently. How are you guys looking at that? Because multiple clouds, just like Internet working the switches routers, you move from packet that point A and point B get storage. His store stuff So concepts are all the same. How do you guys seeing the multi cloud opportunity within juniper? >> So I would make the distinction between multiple clouds and multi cloud? I agree with you. If you look at most enterprises, they have a workload in Amazon. They're using sales force, and so you know, they're multi cloud, right? They have multiple clouds, multi clouds, more of an operational condition. It's about taking disparate pools of resource is and managing. That is one thing. So think of it more about how you do stuff and less about where you host an application. If you look it even like describing Amazon, some people say, Well, Amazon is just, you know, Cloud is just using other people servers. It's not. You're not renting their servers. What you're leveraging is their operations. That's the transformation. That's this kind of underfoot. And so while some of the technology bits are common, the ability to do abstracted control moving to declare it over intent based management, right, these air right technology building blocks. What you're seeing now is the operational models are coming along, and that's really that's the change we have to drive on. I'll just kind of close with when you change technology. If it's just about deploying a piece of software, if it's just about deploying a piece of hardware like candidly, that challenge isn't that it's not that hard, right? We know how to deploy stuff when you start talking about changing how people fundamentally do their jobs. When you started talking about changing, you know how businesses operate. That's that's the piece that takes some time and I would venture. That's why you know, you look a decade ago why we're where we started. If you look at what's taking a decade, it's the operational change, not the technology piece >> and the cultural jobs movement. Certainly forcing function on that, which is awesome. And that's the tale when I think. And then again, Gene Came was on yesterday Who wrote The Devil's Handbook and also does that death. The Devil Enterprise. Someone said, We're three percent in. I would agree with him. I think it's so early, but But the challenge. I want to get your thoughts, Michael. And this is that Connecting multiple on disparity environments is great, but late in C kills now. So now late and see these air old school concepts, you know, get a time can't change the laws of physics. Right? So Leighton sees matters s l A's matter. So these air network challenges these air software challenges. What's your view on that piece of the puzzle? >> We leave when we say cloud, you know a lot of people probably think, um, you know, G C P Azure. They might think a WSB probably picture in your head, you know, some logically central cloud. First, we need to disavow people of the notion that cloud is this thing that somehow sits at the center of everything. It's not. There are centralized clouds. If you're optimizing for economics, that makes perfect sense. Tow To do that. There's distributed clouds. The whole rise of multi axis edge computing is about changing the paradigm from moving data to the application. Right. If your applications in Amazon and you're going to send your data there, that's one model Teo. Sometimes you might want to move the application to the data. If you have a lot of data like an i o t. Use case as an example, I was used oil platforms is a really good example. I don't know if you know, but you know how they get all their. They have all these mining and manufacturing bits. They've got lots of data. How did they get that data off the oil platforms? Snowball. So what they do is the helicopters come in, they take the drives off and they they they leave right. The reason they do that because if your reliance on satellite links just too much data, you can't statue >> is going to get a helicopter to ransom helicopter to come in, >> we'LL know when they're swapping the crew out every fourteen days, that's what happens. So here's the thing, right? If in that kind of model than the cloud, the data center exists on premises. And if that's the case, then when we think about you know kind of what the cloud is, cloud is, it's It's a lot. It's a lot more than what we most of us probably think about. Certainly, we see it with Outpost as a WS is starting to move on premises versions, and there's a lot of reasons you might wanna have a distributed cloud. Certainly it could be, you know, your comfort and security and control. There's real privacy implications, country of origin, so subpoenas can access your information depending on where it resides. >> What you're saying is, basically, it's all cloud. It's operational is the new definition. So you figured from an operational standpoint, Ops and Dev's That's it. The rest is just all connected somehow through the text, >> and then you need to have it. Yes. So we we understand the connectivity, bitch, you've gotta have the right, you know, elements. But if it's operational, it's about how do you do policy management? So part of the whole nutanix thing and kind of what drove us together was this idea that if I want a one click everything. If you could do that within the hyper converge space, you still have to do that over the connected environment, which means managing policy from a single location, regardless of where it is. And of course, using that policy to Dr Security >> and their strategy is to take what that worked for. The CIA and the data center move that into this new operator operating model, which spans multiple quote, disparity, environments or clouds or edges. It's similar similar concept, but different environmental. Yeah, >> that's exactly right. And so then what Nutanix needs that is a strong networking partner because they have tto do the bits that they do. They need other people to do the bits that that you know that we can do. We pull those things together and then you can provide essentially a secure environment for hybrid workload. >> So you guys embed it into their product? You guys joined cell together. Is it more of a partnership? How deep is the partnership with you With Nutanix >> s all just They'LL say yes, we get along s o and it kind of the most surface level you know, you need to have top Iraq switches. You gotta connect to the network and so we do qualification there. So if you deploy nutanix, you can deploy juniper alongside and that looks more like a kind of a co selling meat in the channel type model. Beyond that, if you look at how we provide security over like a workload environment, the question is, then you know what's the security element? So we've taken our virtual firewall. We cut our V s are axe, which essentially runs in the V M. And we can run it on a V, and so that gives them a segmentation strategies. So if you look it workloads that air distributed across the cluster by having a firewall element that we can enforce policy. Of course, that firewall element is then integrated with prism. So if I want to deploy these things when I spin up a new V M. What I want to do is spin up the security with it, and so you see management integration. Then if we continue this too, it's kind of full conclusion. We have, ah, product suite We call contrail in the enterprise version Contra Enterprise Multi Cloud, which is all about policy management and underlay management. And so, as we extend the partnership, it gives us additional opportunity to take um to provide routed elements which provide policy enforcement points and then to give us a way of managing policy over a diverse environment. >> And you guys can bring in that platform element for nutanix. Is there now a platform? They have a full stack of software on Lee. So you guys, you cannot take their stuff, put it there and vice versa. >> That's exactly right. So whether the workload resides in a ws on two or whether it resides kind of on premises in a jiffy, weaken one, we're kind of co managed and then to it gives us the security elements toe play across that >> one of the things that we're talking a lot about at this rinse it and at a lot of other events like it, it's sort of or the dark side of technology. We're at a time where major presidential candidates are talking about breaking up. Big tech were becoming much more aware of the privacy concerns. The biases that are built into algorithms. Exactly. I want to hear your thoughts as a technology veteran. Do you? Are you still a technology optimist or do you did? Does this stuff keep you up at night? I mean, how where do you fit your personal views? I was >> somewhat of a technology optimists, but I'm a skeptic when it comes to the people. I think if the technology existed in a vacuum, I think some of the problems go away. I think privacy is a major concern. I think it's going to shape regulatory action, especially in Europe. Well, so I think we'LL see similar actions in the US I don't have quite a strong connection to what's happening in Asia. Um, I think that the regulatory, the challenge I have from a technology perspective is that if the regulations come in the absence of understanding how the technology works, then you end up with some really terrifying outcomes on DSO I'm Sam. I'm a fan of the technology. I'm nervous of the people on that in terms of like, our overall Ruelas is cos here, I think, you know, we need to do a candidate a better job of, of making sure things land before we move on to the next big thing on DH. You know, we're talking cloud. We're ten years into cloud and people were always talking about the next frontier. To some extent, I think the world doesn't move as fast as we like to think it does. I don't think that the even like the mark, I'm in a marketing role. I don't think that the marketing hype necessary. I don't think it serves us by moving too far ahead because I will tell you when the gap between the promise and the reality becomes insurmountable e wide. I think it's Ah, I think I think everyone loses Andi. You run the risk of stranding an entire generation of people who who gets stuck behind it, and I don't you know, I'm nervous about about what that means, and I think it's you asked the question that you're the dark side. I think it's Certainly it plays out in our industry. I think it plays out. You know, there's a digital divide that's growing in the U. S. Based on broadband access. By the way, that's gonna widen with five G. I think it plays out between different nation states. So I Yeah, I don't know. I'm an optimist. Maybe I'm a pragmatist. >> Realist. >> Yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm a little scared. >> Little cloud definitely happened, and that's a good point. And we took a lot of heat at looking ankle. Keep on the cube. Was too many Men in the team put out the first private cloud report People like this is nonsense. Well, well. And our thesis was clouds grade if you want. If you're in the cloud as a cloud native or, you know, new startup, why wouldn't you go on Amazon? Everyone, we did that. But if once you taste cloud operations, you go Wow. This is so much awesome. Right? Then go into a modern and enterprise. It's not going to be overnight. Change over. I mean, we might say it's going to take about a decade. We fell from the beginning that cloud operations once you taste cloud you realize this is a new operating model. There's a lot of benefits to that, but to change it over in the enterprise, and that turned out to be what everyone's now do it. But that was three years ago. >> Well, there's implications. So if its operations then operations is inherently an end end proposition, you can't have operations in a silo. Things like you're monitoring tools. How do you do cloud monitoring it on premises monitoring. How do you do workflow Execution? How do you do? You know, automation, whether that's event driven or even just scripted. If you have wildly different environments that require you to buy for Kate, your investment, then there's a very real There's a complexity that comes with that your people have tto do more than one thing that's that's hard. There's a cost that comes with that because you have different teams for different things. There's a lack of coordination. I don't think you unlock the value of cloud in that in that environment. And I think that operational pieces really around converging on >> Michael your point about people in technology. It's so right on. We see that all the time where I'm a technology Optimus. I love technology, but I totally agree that people can really destroy it looked fake news. It's just, you know, it's infrastructure network effect with bad content policy because Facebook's immediate company not a platform >> well, technology's only is good on our end are >> gonna run. The government don't even have the Internet work. So you know when you when you go to the cloud, same >> knowledge just also want the government to come away with that we do it >> where the government just doesn't know how the Internet works. Some people that do but like the good hearings, it's ridiculous. But you know, there's a real D o. D project going on future military Jet I contract. We've been reporting on where modern data driven application workloads. I could use a soul, cloud or multi class so that the dogma of what multi vendor was in the old days is changing. >> I don't I actually don't know if you look at multi cloud. If it's an end end proposition, then by definition it's also going to be multi vendor like there's no future where it's like end in all one vendor. I think we have to come to grips with that is an industry. But I think if you're clinging to your you know, kind of I want my single procurement vehicle. I want my single certification. By the way, I think if you believe fundamentally that incumbency is going to be that your path forward, I think it's a dangerous place to be. That's not to say that. I think the incumbents all go away. I don't There's a there's a heavy rule to play but certainly were going to open things up. And >> you see procurement modernized. I mean, I mean, government goes back to nineteen ninety five procurement standards, but either the enterprise procurement moving So the text moves so fast. Procurement still has rules from >> so no, I don't think all >> of the second right. >> Then there's a whole A procurement in our industry is driven by our peace. Our peace tend to be derivative. I take my last r p. I had some new lines. If you want Esti n so you take the cup copy and paste five hundred seventy four lines at the five hundred seventy fifth line. S T n. You're gonna end up in the same solution because the first five seventy four of the same I do think we should learn a little bit from what the big public cloud cos they're doing, which is, you know, tightening refreshed cycles, retiring things with as much passion as they introduced new things tightening up. Ultimately, what gets deployed? Maintaining diversity of underlying components so you could maintain economic leverage when you're doing procurement. But then solidifying on operationally streamlined model, That's I think that's the future. That's certainly what we've been on as a company. I think that's what we're betting on with Nutanix From a partnership point of view, I think we'LL be on the right side of change on that, and I think it's going to, you know, it may take some time to play out. That's where I think things go >> well. Michael Bushong. Always a pleasure having you on the Cube. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) (electronic whooshing) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Washington, DC, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. This is the reinvent for the global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman is here as well, he'll be coming out. Our next guest is Jeff Valentine, who is the Chief Product Officer at Cloudchecker, a really hot, growing company, innovating with the cloud around security and data management, all kinds of great stuff around compliance. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So we've been following you guys, you guys are at all the reinvents and summits with huge booths, you guys are growing like crazy. You guys cracked the code on using the cloud's scale and really delivering great value properties. And before we get into some of the public sector news and also new things for you guys, what's the core business for Cloudchecker and how are you different, and why are you guys winning? >> Yeah, no that's a great question. You know, businesses that are moving to the cloud have this huge problem, once you get to the cloud, it's probably more expensive than you thought, it's probably less secure than you thought, and you really don't know how to run it like you used to run your own data center. So we solve those problems, that's what a CMP does, a cloud Management Platform. Our system controls costs for government, it actually helps you to hit your budget, for security, we're monitoring continuously for all these weird things that might happen. And, of course, we're making a new announcement today, around compliance. >> Yeah, I mean, the phenomenon that we've seen, this is a pattern, including us, we're on Amazon, we started using it. You don't really know what happened 'til you look at your bill. (laughs) Once you go, oh damn, that's kind of elementary. But as it gets more complicated, new services are coming out, Amazon announces at every reinvent a zillion services. So you got Redshift, you got Stagement, all this new stuff's going on, you got to really manage that in like, a portfolio, you guys do that. >> We do. >> Now, how does that translate to the public sector? 'Cause some companies actually can't translate, and that's something that we looked at for who's successful. If a company can be good in commercial enterprise and also move to the public sector, they've got something going on that's right. The one's that can't, don't. And you guys are doing it, what's the unique public sector pivot or linkage or linchpin for you guys? >> That's a great question, you know, public sector, to us, is a large enterprise and we go to that market the same way we go to other large enterprises, we go through our partners. Sometimes agencies will come to us directly, that's great when they do. Oftentimes they need help from some of our partners around the show floor today. They're going to go to them for the people power and they'll come to Cloudchecker for the software or the automation. >> Jeff, when you said earlier that sometimes you go to the cloud, you're all excited to get in, and then you find out, maybe it's less secure than you thought. Where are the gaps? Help us square the circle, because you hear from, you know, the large cloud providers, cloud's more secure. People like myself actually believe it's probably more secure than what I can do as a small business, but where are the gaps that you're filling? >> Yeah, so here's the issue. It is inherently secure when it's used that way. Now, you've got 3500 developers that are writing code for various agencies, and if one of them forgets to close off a certain setting on, maybe an S3 bucket for Amazon, all of a sudden, somebody can get to that data. Our system is there to be a backstop, so we're automatically checking and alerting when there's a problem like that. >> So you automate that entire process. >> We automate that, we look at the whole thing every second. >> Awesome. >> Tell me about the customers' challenges, migrating to the cloud. How would you summarize the challenges that an agency or a group within the public sector migration challenges? What are the key things that goes through the customer that you guys can talk to directly? >> Sure, I mean, there's really three categories again. On the cost side, they have a budget to hit, and you really can't be over by a penny. It has to be matched up to the penny every single time. So we help them to do that, spend exactly what you're supposed to spend, not a penny more. The next problem they run into, of course, is the security. You need to be able to prove that you're secure, not just think you're secure, but know you're secure all the time. Our software's there to automate it. And then they have to actually prove through an audit process that they're compliant with various federal standards, like NIST 800-53 and others. They have to be compliant in that environment, as well, our software can automate that compliance. >> Tell me about the hard news you guys had. You had a press release that had gone out this morning, you guys had got some news, share the breaking news here on theCUBE. >> Sure, yeah. For years we've always been a security product and a cost product. The third leg of that stool is now total compliance. That total compliance module is free for all our customers, is free for all our current and future customers. But it automatically checks against 37 different compliance standards. So, HIPAA, PCI, all the NIST standards, et cetera, we're giving you a score card and a dashboard, how you're doing, and let's you remediate those problems when you see them. >> And what's the impact of the customer base? >> Well, they literally can't pass their security audits unless they do a lot of work today, to prove that they're in compliance with these standards. Our software now saves them the time to do that. >> So the trend is automation in this. >> It is. >> What's the secret sauce on the product side? Can you share a little bit of the Cloudchecker magic? >> Sure, let me try to describe it this way, Amazon's price list, which is complicated to understand, because there's 100,000 items on it, changes all the time. Nobody really gets that. They add new products, little variations, little instant sizes, little restrictions, little price changes, (chuckles) for every different type of way you can buy it, whether it's a reserved instance or not. And being able then, to unblend those to all your different customers, if you're a service provider and selling it again, you have to go share those costs. And, by the way, you then need to calculate your own margin on top of that. That manipulation of 100,000 things every second, we actually generate terabytes of data per month from each one of our customers and we store it for seven years. That volume, it's a really big data problem, that's our secret sauce, yeah. >> So, talk a little bit about the architecture of your products, 'cause when I think about security, you know, cost management, asset management, governance, even just within those categories, oftentimes, there's like a zillion point products. >> Yeah. >> It sounds like your philosophy is to have a, sort of an all-in-one. Maybe talk about some of the challenges of developing that product and how you're approaching it architecturally? >> Yeah, it starts with being deep on everything that we do. Our cost only product, if you just look at cost, hundreds of functions and reports, very complex product. Take that same level of complexity to security, we have 550 best practice checks, not 10 or 20, Amazon has 80, we have 550. (laughs) Take that now to compliance, not just a few standards, 37 different standards that we automatically monitor for. You have to have the depth in each one of those to be able to do any of them. >> And the depth comes from, obviously you've got to have some domain expertise, but then you've got codify that. >> We do, yeah, I mean, honestly, we started in 2011, so it's a maturity. You can't do it if you just started six months ago, (laughs) you have to build up. >> And how do you charge for the product? >> Our customers pay us on a percentage basis of what it costs them to run in the cloud. So if they're paying Amazon $10, they'll pay us a percentage of $10 to manage that. >> And that will vary by how many functions they turn on? Or, like for instance, the announcements that you had today, do I have to pay more for that or is that included in the cost? Maybe explain that. >> No, it's all included. Our philosophy has been, we don't want to nickel and dime our customers, they expect great value from our product. I have to keep adding value every day to keep them excited, so I'm going to continue to develop that product. It's never done, it's an ongoing process and we're going to keep adding free features to the product. >> So you have a solution, basically they win, you win. >> That's right, we get a percentage of all of cloud. I mean, Gartner says cloud's growing at 40%, yeah, we're growing it much faster, because our partners are growing and they're getting new customers that are growing and you get this compounding effect. >> Dave and I was talking about software economics, and then you add to that the cloud, it's amazing. Alright, I want to get into one last area before you go. You guys are an advanced technology partner of AWS. What does that mean? Obviously you bring a lot to the table with the product, you went into detail on that. What is being an advanced technology partner mean for agencies and potentially customers that are looking to work with you guys? >> Sure, now, being a technology partner of Amazon means that we have security and governments competencies, so we're experts in what we do. It means that we have staff that is certified on Amazon, we have top-secret clearance staff, we have partnerships with top-secret cleared agencies that work with us. Our software uniquely runs, not only in commercial, it runs on GovCloud and it runs on the IC region, the secret region, Amazon calls it, that's completely air-gapped from the rest of the world. That C2S marketplace is something that we do get a lot of business from. It's funny, Amazon can't tell us who the customer is, like, we get anonymized data, but they're using us. (laughter) We get the checks in the mail. >> You're doing the Cloudchecker thing. >> We're doing the Cloudchecker. But it's part of our business model to be able to serve, by being experts at Amazon. >> Last question, if I may, you know, the big talk about multi-cloud and, you know, different types of cloud. What are you seeing as the trend there and how does Cloudchecker, you know, help customers? >> Sure, I think today there's a competition amongst the cloud providers for the same workloads. I don't think that's going to be there in the future, I think cloud providers are going to specialize in certain areas. You're going to have some generalists that can do everything, like Amazon, I think there are going to be some that are better suited to working only in certain regions or only with certain functions. If you just wanted to do realtime video processing for theCUBE, there's other ways that you might look at doing that. In the future, a combination of best of breed for multi-cloud providers, needs a central management platform, and that's where we're enacting into it. >> That's an interesting dynamic, I totally like that approach on that observation. But also, I want to ask you, with respect to partnering, 'cause if you believe that to be true, which I think it's true, more providers are going to come into the space specialized, but also, they're going to look like service providers and professional services. We saw REAN Cloud being very successful, although they got cut back on that contract on the DOD, a new kind of system integratives are emerging. >> That's right. >> How do you talk about that, and what is happening with that model? 'Cause you can automate it. >> We can. >> And it kind of takes away the labor piece. How is the SI market changing? >> No, that's a good question. Most of the SIs with Amazon are our customers, so they all use our software. They'll put there logo on it, but they end up, you know, using our software to help them complete projects. When you end up competing for a project amongst other SIs, they're all competing for the same business, right? So, when you can go in with an automation solution that cuts your costs and maintains your margin, you're going to win that business more often. So they need to bring in automation to be competitive against the others that are doing it. >> And also speed of deployment's another factor, scale. >> I think that's right. >> How is that changing the game? >> No, it's totally true. We're going from, you know, state of local workloads to federal workloads and this JEDI program. You're going to start to see massive movements from data centers to the cloud. That's going to take time, but it requires both people and technology, we're the technology piece of that. >> It's not going to be years, it's going to be weeks. >> (laughs) That's true. >> Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cloudchecker, check them out, great company, advanced technology partner with Amazon Web Services. Here on theCUBE, talking about public sector, this is theCUBE, here in Washington, DC, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more live coverage, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here with theCUBE in San Francisco for exclusive coverage for VMware's Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is the event where everyone comes together in the R&D and the organic engineering organization of VMware to flex their technical muscles, stretch their minds, compete for the papers, and also get to know each other. And the key person behind this is the chief research officer David Tennenhouse. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you John. Really glad to be here. >> So you're the chief research officer. You got to look at the company-wide agenda. But this event is more of a special event, organically. Talk about for the folks out there watching what's different about this event that goes outside the scope of kind of the top-down research. >> Yeah this is really, you know, for the developers by the developers. So when you said I'm in charge, I'm definitely not in charge. And you know, we have a program committee. There's a programming committee chair. It's much like the way an academic conference might be organized, where you know, there's kind of a group of academics that sort of watch over the content. In this case, we have many hundreds of folks that submit proposals into radio. They can't all get selected. It's very competitive because in addition, if you get accepted, you get a ticket to radio. You get to attend. So everybody really wants to do that. >> Talk about the organic nature. 'Cause this is one of the things that I've seen that's been part of a world-class organization. Like Amazon has their own process for it called the big idea. They have certain working documents that process to foster any idea across the organization. How important is that as part of Radio? I mean literally it's anyone right? >> Well it's not just Radio. It's important to the whole company. So I think of this as when you're working on innovation, you're gonna have sort of a breadth component. You want everybody doing a little. And some of that's gonna be incremental. One thing I learned in a prior role at a different company is you know if you add up a lot of two percenters, that's how you can double things and keep on Moore's law every year. So you're gonna get some of that. And you're gonna get some really disruptive ideas. So you know, from a top-down point of view, we try to drive some disruptions. Some disruptions show up organically from the troops. And a ton of that breadth stuff shows up. >> I'm honored to be here. It's the 14th year, and some T-shirts commemorating the key milestones from way back in the day. This is the first year press was allowed in. I noticed a handful of folks came in to kind of document this. A lot of the brightest minds in VMware here. Again, great to have us. We're super excited. But share with us. Like, what's happened over the years. Give some examples of where people were coming together, where there's a collision of ideas, and just that combustion that happens. Can you share some stories around key notable, or potentially as Raghu pointed out, there's been some misses too. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're gonna get some of that. I mean you've gotta take risks. Not everything's gonna work. You know and just to speak to misses. What I've learned in the innovation and research space is as much as anything, it's about timing. It's pretty rare that you completely technically miss. Usually engineers have an idea. They'll figure out a way to make it happen. Then the question is, is it the right time? Are the customers ready? Is the market ready to go in that direction? So, that's just to talk to that. >> Timing's everything. >> Timing is a big deal. >> Well there's never a miss too in R&D because if you, like Pat Yelson said, understand when it's gotta be re-casted. Know if it works or not. >> Yeah just understanding. So those are the ones actually you know I feel, what I really hate is if for some reason we have to end a project and we haven't actually gotten to the bottom of it. And so you don't know yes or no. And sometimes that can be the kind of time's run out, right. You've decided well, even if it works, it's too late. But you know, getting back to some of the examples, I'll focus on some more recent ones. We had some really interesting work come together on containers. And there were some folks that, and this is going back like four years ago. Containers aren't a new story, and certainly not for VMware. But around four years ago, there was a proposal at Radio that had to do with hey let's make containers a first class citizen on VMware's platform. Okay, so top level that makes great sense. Let's go do it. Containers are great for developers. The IT folks still want the isolation they get form VMs. Let's put these together really effectively. So that was top level. There was a next level, the idea that said gee at Radio, a couple years before, there'd been this idea of being able to do something called VM fork, or being able to clone a VM. And saying you know... And this came out of our end user computing group, the VDI folks. And if you think about it, if you've got a virtualized PC, you want to be able to clone that so you can start these up really fast. And the container folks said hey, we've got the same problem. Could we actually try to make use of that technology and use that as part of our bigger container push? So you know, those are examples of things that came together at Radio. And there are also examples of things where the market timing may not have quite been there. So we went out with the container work. That was actually post-Radio. It was funded. We incubated it. You've got vSphere Integrated Containers hit the market exactly the right time. >> Timing right there. >> Right, timing right there. But what we learned as we actually started doing trials with customers was that they didn't actually need the instant clone on the containers. What they needed is throughput. They wanted to know that they could do large numbers per second as opposed to you'll get that container really quickly. So as the team went along, they actually shifted away from that fork idea. We'll probably come back to it when the time's right for it. >> Well you have a nice little positioning there. I like the timing. 'Cause by the way, entrepreneurial timing is the same way. You go outside... >> I was a VC. (laughing) >> Okay, so you know okay. Timing's everything. How many times you seen that entrepreneur wicked early on it going... And they keep scratching that itch and finally they get it. The art of the timing. But also the art of knowing when to, what to keep in inventory. Pat mentioned vCloud Air as an interesting example. Recognizing abandonment there. Okay hey, let's just stop, take pause. Let's use what we have. >> Do something else. >> Do something else. >> Gotta do something else. And by the way along the way, in parallel with vCloud Air, we had built up these vCloud partners. And that's phenomenal right. So we have you know, people think in terms of a couple of very large public clouds. But we've got literally thousands of people running public clouds in either specialized markets, or particular countries, that are running on our platform. And you know that whole vCloud Air effort helped push that forward. >> So where were you a VC? Just curious. >> I was actually in a company that fits with sort of my role in research and innovation. I was in a specialized firm, boutique firm, new venture partners, that specialized in spin outs from large companies. This goes to the timing, right. I'd previously been at another large company. You know, and whenever you have a research portfolio, you're gonna have some projects that you started. They were technically successful. That's your first notch. Then you go look and say hey, can I find a business model for it. Some of these are both technically successful. You find a business model, but you had anticipated that the company strategically was gonna zig. The company zagged. Now this is a great opportunity that doesn't quite fit. So you know, we did those as spin outs. >> Well I love the perspective too of you said earlier, David, around not getting to the bottom of it. And that's the most frustrating part. Because you just gotta get some closure you know. Like okay, this thing, we took it to the end, completion, this is not gonna... Good try guys. >> And we know why. >> And you know why. Now let's take it to the next level. Now the market we're living in now I heard with Ray O'Farrell, I was talking with earlier. We talked about the confluence of these big markets coming together. Infrastructure market, which is kinda declining on paper. But cloud is filling the void. Big data's becoming AI, and blockchain over the top. These are four major markets. And at the center of them, intersecting all these nuances, security, data, IoT. >> Governance. >> Governance. So there's some sticky areas that are evolving based upon these moving markets. Opportunity recognition's another one. So this is what you're kind of doing now with the research. Talk about opportunity recognition. >> We definitely do that. And I do want to say on the infrastructure side, you know something to recall is that as people, you know they've got their private clouds. Those are individually getting actually bigger as they consolidate. But now with IoT, you're seeing edge computing pop up. Right, so the private infrastructure doesn't go away, it moves around. It's like a liquid. And you pour it from place to place in some sense. >> Moving computer around. Sound like what Ray O'Farrell was talking about in his keynote, early days of VMware. Again, Compute's the center of this. >> Right, Compute, but you know I'm a networking guy so you know, we've grown that. And I think that in fact, you know more and more as we make progress with software defined network, and network virtualization. And if you think about that, so you know let's look at that. So Compute's definitely at the center of what happens in the data center, in the cloud, right. You're gonna want to be able to string those piece together. So today we've got AirWatch. I think that's strategically really key. Because it gives us a little bit of presence on the edge devices that touch people. That's one of the ways information gets from the physical world to the virtual world is through people. >> It's an edge device. People are things too. >> IoT, right. So we're you know, working hard. And that's one of the projects that we incubated, and researched, and is now become a business at Vmware. It's to get that presence right at the edge of the gateways that bridge between the things that are connected to the physical world, and bringing it into the virtual world. Now if we can put our software defined network between all that, so you got it between the public cloud, the private cloud, the mobile devices in people's hands. >> And on premise, data center. >> Exactly, all of 'em. >> All right, so here's a question for you. This is one of those trick questions. Is the cell phone an edge device or an IoT device? >> Well I think it's in many ways both. And what I think of it is is more of a gateway. If you think about the IoT world, you have the things. >> IoT is a strict definition though in your mind, right. People refer to IoT as more of a sensor thing to a physical device. >> I tend to think of it as it's got some connection to some physical device. It's able to bring information in from the physical world. Okay, so now you look at your cell phone. It can bring information. It's got that microphone. It's got that camera, right. It can bring information in. >> [John] Connect it to a physical person. >> It can put information back out. Yeah, through a physical person. I've been in the space for a long time. Going back to my time at DARPA, we set out to create the IoT world. This wasn't an accident, right. We looked at this and said, okay the main way information gets between these two worlds today is through human beings. The way I used to explain this to the generals is you know, we can't keep putting human beings in the direct line of fire of information technology. So we've gotta get these devices, gotta get all these sensors. It's taken a long time. This is you know again, timing. But if you look at the research world. >> By the way, incredible work you've done by the way from there to here, it's been amazing. >> You know pull this along. But you know so when you look at that cell phone, it's got some of those sensors. It's got actually a whole pile of sensors in the phones today. It's got actuation, the ability to put the information back out. It's also a gateway. Because typically you know, particularly through its Bluetooth functionality, and as we get Bluetooth low power now. So it's also acting as a gateway to connect up other devices around your body, network etc. >> Personal networking, whatever comes on your physical presence. >> So you know, turn that around and it says in the IoT world, we've gotta manage gateways. We've gotta make sure gateways stay secure. Because they're really gonna be the sort of main perimeter, the line of defense. If you think about all these things that are gonna be out there, as an industry, we're gonna collectively try very hard to secure all those things. But let's be realistic. They're gonna be supplied from a wide variety of companies, and they're gonna last longer than people might think. >> How much of those devices are operationally, operation technology is non IP, versus not IP. Internet Protocol. >> Non Internet Protocol. Yeah, yeah. >> Internet Protocol now. >> [David] Non Internet, you had it right. >> Got the VC in the brain there. The VC, IP, I'm like get that IP right. So internet protocol devices, which has some challenges but that's getting fixed, versus OT just sensors proprietary. >> Yeah well either proprietary or let's say, you know it may be an industry standard, but an industrial standard. So today, a very large fraction, particularly you asked about how we focused at Vmware. Well one of our foci is we're about what are our enterprise customers gonna need. So when we think IoT, we're not really thinking that much about the consumer devices. We're thinking about those enterprise devices. So a lot of those will use... >> That's where AirWatch might come in. So employees still have phones though. >> Employees still have phones. So that's why I said, so there's the human interface. We want to be there. And there's the other enterprise interfaces to all these sensors. That could be in a factory. It could be in a smart city, any number of places. So as we pull information in from those, we're gonna find that they come from a lot of different suppliers and they're gonna last a long time. You know, even if you buy a device that's got a three to four year lifetime, probably 10 to 20% of those still gonna be around 10 years later, right. You're smiling because you know that in your home you have some wifi connected devices that are a little older than they probably should be. >> And they have full processing capability threaded processes on it, which could be running malware as we speak. >> So as I said, as an industry, we'll try to secure those really edge things. But the reality is we're gonna have to draw the line at the gateway. >> It's a lot more security work. I totally hear you. I mean the light bulb could have a full thread on there. The surface area is so huge now. >> And there have been attacks on light bulbs. >> Yeah I know. So I gotta ask you a question. 'Cause you bring up this networking edge, which by the way I love anything that's network. 'Cause I think this is the future of work. How is the future of work impacting some of the R&D you're doing. Because you talked about AirWatch them having more mobility. The human impact, society, whether it's mission driven and or just human collaboration going digital. You're gonna need to have policies. You need to have a networked society. This is super relevant. But it brings back that future work. >> It does. And so couple different aspects. You know, one you know, which just relates to a point you raised is if you look at something like our Workspace ONE product, if you've had a chance to do that. It's kind of a win win, because you get one portal. So you know, an employee for an enterprise, they've got one portal. They get access, it doesn't matter whether they're getting to a web app, they're getting to a you know, a DVI supported application. They're getting to something that's on a server, something on a SAS player, right. They get through that portal. So for them it's convenient. I mean for me as a manager, I love this, right. Because whether I'm on my cell phone, I'm on a laptop, doesn't matter, I can get to the same expense app. I can approve things. >> You don't need to carry two phones. My work phone and my... >> And I can do all these approvals really easily, right. So I also don't worry. I don't see the difference between which device I'm on. At the same time that you're delivering that convenience to the user, you're delivering governance because the IT team can be deciding how that portal's populated, how things are connected, right, and how the wiring works. All the authorization, you've got a common identification system and all of that. So that's kind of very specific to you know, let's say near term changing the user interface. In terms of the broader future of work, clearly machine learning is the big story here, right. And I think that what we're gonna see is, particularly again in enterprise, more and more need for data analysts to be able to look at the big data. We're gonna see sort of more and more use of machine-learning technologies. It's gonna you know basically creep in everywhere. And we're getting this at just the right time. So if you want to think about future work in the big national and international scale, what you really sort of stop to look at is say, gee, okay, these machines are gonna do all this work. What about the people? And you know a lot of people therefore get concerned. Gee, the computers are gonna take away all the jobs. Right, you get these sound bytes. >> I think right now we're worried about fake news and real content. (laughing) >> Well let's come back to that one later. But there is a sense of gee, you know, the computers will take on all the jobs. And you know what I think people are not doing carefully is looking at the demographics. Because if you look at basically all the developed economies for practical purposes, we actually have a demographic problem. Our problem is actually not a surplus of workers. It's gonna be a shortage of workers. In fact, actually in the US right now, you're starting to feel this. Now that's at the peak of the economic cycle. So of course you feel it, you know, a bit. >> They need trained workers too. Also people who qualify. >> Right. So I think the thing we really need to look at is how do we do a much better job at matching, you know, sort of workers, both folks coming into the workplace, people with existing skills, to available opportunities. Because actually we're gonna have a shortage of workers. And it's not just sort of the US and Europe. I mean China, Japan. Well Japan for a long time. China, headed to a shortage of workers. I was out in Singapore not too long ago and was surprised to find out not just that they're concerned. But they went and looked at the Southeast Asian countries around them that are their markets. They're looking at a shortage of workers. So you know, if we didn't have something like machine-learning and AI coming along, we'd be sitting there saying, how are we gonna keep our economies growing? >> We need augmentation for sure. >> We need this augmentation. And it's coming at just, you know, you talked about timing. You know, it's coming at just the right time. Now, there definitely are gonna be some tough transitions along the way, right. So we definitely, you know, for example, as autonomous vehicles come along, we've gotta figure out, okay, all those people that are driving vehicles, what are they gonna do going forward? But let's not kid ourselves too, you know. If you've got trucks moving around with high-value cargoes, you're not gonna leave those unattended, right. We're gonna have to figure all this out. So there's gonna be a lot of interesting opportunities. >> What's your take on blockchain? Well first of all, GDPR, real quick. Train wreck, useful? >> I think it's you know, if you backed up and asked me four or five years ago, I'd have said train wreck. And largely because we still don't have the sort of kind of international consensus on what the rules should be. >> But you mentioned governance earlier. That certainly needs to be at the center of the action. >> Right, but you know, if we take a look now, it seems like it's showing up at just the right time, right. You know, in that sense. I think part of what's happened is over the intervening years, a lot of countries outside of Europe, because they realize these regulations would apply to them, they've worked with European regulators to help the regulators understand the technology, you know, help the companies understand. >> That's a good politically correct answer. I'll just say I think it's a shit-show personally. But you know. I mean it's gonna force people... It's like Y2K in money making, but Y2 never happened. It's forcing people to really, I think the value of GDPR is the big companies are gonna get hit hard on some suits. Just the trolling thing bothers me. Just the trolls that come out of the woodwork. But I think the positive that puts the center of the value proposition, making data, not a one off, like backup and recovery. It has to be core to technical operations. >> And making privacy something that's really in that first class category. You know, as I said. >> Great first step, but... There's a big but. >> There is more to be done. >> Hopefully they don't go after us little guys. All right, final question, blockchain. We are super excited about blockchain. You have teams working on this. >> [David] I am super excited about blockchain. >> Talk about your view on blockchain. Why are you excited about it? Obviously we feel it's very efficient, makes inefficiencies efficient across all industries. Your thoughts. >> Okay so again, we look at things through this prism. What are enterprise customers gonna be looking at? What do they want? And you know, so we're not you know... I think you're in the same place. We're not looking at the crypto currencies, right. That's not the thing. And in fact, we're not even looking at cohabiting on the Bitcoin blockchain. Because do you really want to run your business in the same place that a whole bunch of other people are running illegal businesses and the whole thing. >> And by the way, there's some technical issues. (laughing) >> We'll get to that. We're gonna get there. But just even as a starting point. So we pretty quickly looking even you know, three, four years ago said, okay enterprise is not gonna want to go that way. But this idea of a federated ledger, right. So if you can make federated ledgers and we can have reusable technology, that means now, if I want to federate with other companies or other organizations, or you know, or you need companies federating with governments, or governments federating with each other. Anywhere you want to pull together essentially a club for the exchange of data, with a persistent record of what happened, you've now got a common way of doing it, right. Or we can drive towards that. You know there'll be a standardization process to get there. But so it's not to me, federated ledgers means lowering the barrier to federation. And I think that's pretty exciting. Whole bunch of places. You know, supply chain, clearly one. Financial technology, but... >> David, we gotta spend some time, have you come in the studio. I'd love to explore some of these great topics with you. But I gotta ask you one final question. You know, with your history going back to ARPA, D-ARPA days, and looking at really the beginning of the information super highway, IP, connecting some universities together, to today, the waves that have gone through. We've talked about standards. The OSI stack, you had all these grandiose standard plans. Not all of them have happened exactly as planned. But defacto standards play a really important role. It galvanizes community, gives people guiding principles, a north star, whatever metaphor you want to use. The key is the enabling disrupting technologies, a defacto standard. What's happening now in your mind that you see out there that's starting to emerge as defacto? 'Cause certainly there's a lot of standard things going, open sources for tier one citizen growing, rapidly, which is greatness. Cloud is booming, unlimited resources, Compute, fingertip compute... All this is good. >> Yeah. >> All these new standards, I got Kubernetes, I got this going on, what's emerging? >> Well again, they're defacto, right. Kubernetes is an interesting example of basically open source meets defacto. And that's pretty exciting right. I mean, we're excited about it. I think people are often surprised we're a fan of open source. And I guess really, I just like to sort of back up a notch. Because you know what you touched on is defacto standards, whether it's open source or not, have suddenly become a lot easier. When I say suddenly, over like a 10 year period. And I think what's going on there is this is part of the change to software. So you know, if you're talking about hardware, and you got screws, you know, and you got threads, these physical things have to match, and they have to match exactly, right. Say when you travel overseas, you need to carry converters, physical converters to convert from one thing to another. So if you want to interoperate, if you and I want to have stuff that interoperates, we needed to build like either, do the same thing, or have a physical adapter. There was a cost to not having a standard. If you think about in the software world, we can build software converters, right. So if I've got you know, say we've got two, or three, or four, or even 50 defacto standards in the software world. You know, blockchain. So there's 50 new things. Everybody launches their own. Pretty quickly, the market will drive that down to a small number. And then you can put software converters in place. So we no longer actually have to get to one. >> [John] That's the software economic model. >> It's a big change. >> And that is huge. So by the way, we had Dirk Hohndel on at CubeCon. Love his open source mission, just a shout out to you guys, doing a great job. You guys at VMware certainly that we know, love you over on the East Coast. Final prediction. Final question. Give us a prediction. >> Give you a prediction. >> 2018, second half of the year, what's gonna happen? What's gonna be a notable thing that you see out on the horizon that might happen in the marketplace that might be notable for people to stand up and pay attention to? >> I think we're gonna see some significant developments in the blockchain space. And it's gonna be in the category of people starting to announce real deployments. And you know, if you're sort of looking at that time frame, you know you've had a lot of different enterprises try things. We've had people kind of dabble at things. I think you're gonna start seeing some people really move significantly in that space. >> And do you think like, just to follow up on that, do you think like in the database world now, where by the way, it's okay to have a zillion databases now. 'Cause you talk about databases. >> But it consolidated down to a few players. >> You get some extraction layers. It's okay to have a few variety of blockchains. I mean, there's no one blockchain. >> Correct, so that's where I think as I said, you're gonna see actually a bunch of these deployments. They'll be using different technologies. And then the fun really starts right. As people consolidate, especially with open source, they swap ideas. We boil it down to what's the best of the best. We've got you know, stuff we're doing certainly to knock the throughput down, sorry throughput up, latency down. (John laughing) And you know, we think we've got a very scalable approach. And most important, you know something that's really... I don't know if you talked to people about our sustainability. You know, it's a key value for VMware. >> [John] Yeah, lot of great standards there, yeah. >> So you can imagine we looked at blockchain. We looked at proof of work. And we said that's proof of energy wasted. We're not going there. >> Gotta make it more efficient. >> I think you're gonna see more and more folks focusing on things like Byzantine fault tolerant. Ours is scalable. You know SBFT. >> Yeah performance is key. And the energy's a huge problem. >> But performance and at acceptable energy. You can't you know, just waste. It's immoral to just waste energy. And it really goes against what a lot of the whole IT industry's built up. You know, I think we've, over the decades, we've done a lot of things for the good of society. And we gotta stay the mission. >> I think as the more, I won't say mature, but big world-class organizations join in, I think that'll straighten itself out. And certainly, as any evolution would see, the web. I remember dial-up and AOL. It can't go as fast as this minicomputer. Well you don't get it, it's the web okay. David, thanks so much for coming on, appreciate it. Great conversation here at Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage of VMware's annual 14th year conference, at Radio 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and you're watching our exclusive coverage of VEEAMON 2018. #VeeamON. My name is Dave Vallante and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman. Stu, great to be working with you again. >> Thanks Dave. Admiral, David G. Simpson is here. He's a former Chief Public Safety and homeland Security Bureau and CEO, currently, of Pelorus, a consultancy that helps organizations think through some of the risk factors that they face. David, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for taking time out. >> It's my pleasure to be here. >> So, as I was saying, we, we missed a big chunk of your keynote this morning cause we had to come back to the cube and do our open, but let's start with your background and kind of why you're here. >> Sure, well, I spent over three decades in the Navy where my responsibilities throughout included the resiliency of the ability to command and control forces in areas around the world not always so nice and often arduous and often at sea. So, that experience really has given me a very good appreciation, not only for how important economy of operations is, but how difficult it can be and how important the details are, so I am a natural fan of what FEMA's doing to make that easier for organizations. After DOD, I was recruited by the chairman of the FCC to lead the Public Safety Homeland Security Bureau for the Federal Communications Commission. And, in that position, I have responsibility for the nation's climate one system, emergency alerting, and the resiliency of over 30,000 telecommunication companies in the domestic market, so both experiences really have given me a very good insight into the need, the consequence of not getting it right, how to prepare to get it right, but also an ability to look at what's coming down the pike with the new telecommunications technologies that will really be game changers for functionality in the new internet of things environment. >> So, three decades of public service. First of all, thank you. >> Thank you. It's quite an accomplishment. And then, we had talked off camera that we, a couple of years ago, had Robert Gates on and we were gettin' detailed into how the experience that someone like you has had in the public sector translated to the private sector. It used to be there was just such a huge gap between, you know, what you did and what a, what a company had to, had to worry about. Do you see that gap closing? And, maybe, you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and in particular, in the cyber arena, you know, cyber, unlike the land, sea, and air domains, is a domain of Man's own making and the constraints around that domain are of our own choosing. And, we're not constrained by physics, we're constrained by the investment decisions we make and the contours of that expanding environment. But, the internet started out as a DOD research and development project, ARPA, so it has not been unusual for DOD to be out in front in some of the development aspects where counterintuitively we would, normally, see industry out in front. The same occurred I believe with cyber when our intelligence community over 10 years ago said, hey, this is a great thing, this internet thing. And, it's super that we're doing more and more communications, that we're talking with devices at the edge around the battle space, but it's vulnerable to attack and we need to organize, so that we are capable in the defense of that great cyber set of functionality that we've built. >> Could you expand? Just, so, you're doing some teaching in the cyber security world too. Maybe you could share a little bit what you're doing and what you see as kind of the state of this today >> Yeah, well, thank you for asking that about a year ago, the dean of the business school of Virginia Tech, asked me if I wouldn't consider building a cyber program for the business school. Tech has always had a strong engineering component to cyber security and it's led by a good friend of mine Dr. Charles Clancy with some superb research going on, but, increasingly, over two thirds of the work roles, in cyber security are not engineering. They really have much more to do with traditional business functions. Yet, most business leaders aren't well prepared to assess that risk environment, let alone appreciate it, and then, drive investments to address risk reduction. So, at Virginia Tech, we've built a series of four courses that in the MBA programs, the Masters of Accounting, the Masters of Business IT, we are now teaching prospective business leaders how to look at the risk environment and organize an investment structure using the NIST, or National Institute of the Standards of Technology, risk management framework, so that can be done in a repeatable way that communicates well with industry. And, companies like Veeam have an important role to play in that space because Veeam really translates much of the engineering complexities into business understandable conditions by which decisions about that data space can really be made. >> I want to share an observation that we had on the Cube last year, one of my favorite interviews was with a gentleman from ICIT, James Scott. He's a security expert, you may know him. And, we asked him what the biggest threat was to United States and his answer surprised me. I thought it was going to be, you know, cyber warfare or risks to critical infrastructure, he said the weaponization of social media was the number one threat, like wow. And, we had a really interesting discussion about that and, you know, I think of, you know, your background, loose lips sink ships, people on social give up there credentials, all of a sudden, you've got some outside bad actors controlling the narrative, controlling the meme and controlling the population without firing a shot. Wow, so what are your thoughts on social media and it's risk to our society and how to deal with it? >> Well, we're seeing in the last year, that he's very prescient, right, in that you can lockdown all the bits and the bytes and get the integrity, the confidentiality, and the availability of your data sets taken care of, but in a world where the public square, if you will, is now a virtual public square, if an adversary can change the perception of reality in that public square, or if they can cause our democracy to lose confidence in that public square, then an adversary can really achieve a kill, if you will, a desired effect in a way that is very negative for the country, so I don't see that though as being completely distinguished from cyber security. I see, in my mind, that we need to expand the universe, to protect the universe of cyber into that cognitive space. And, we need to understand, increasingly, the origin of comment in the social media arena. We need to understand therole algorithms have to play in amplifying a message and suppressing other messages. And, we need to, I think, have a greater accountability for businesses that are in that virtual public square line of business to help consumers and communities continue to have confidence in that public square and we're, we're challenged in that area. 'cause see Mark Zuckerberg's testimony, right >> Sure. >> Illuminated some big challenges there. >> Yeah, I mean, my heart went out to Zuckerberg, it was, I was like the poor guy, he's just trying to build out a social network and now he's getting, you know, attacked by politicians who are saying, wow you mean you use data for political gain, or you allowed somebody to do it. >> He was in a tough spot. >> And politicians themselves, I think, were a bit embarrassed in revealing their lack of tech savvy in a world where we should expect policy makers to be at least aware enough of the parameters around the virtual public square where they can help develop the right policy to ensure that this continues to be a net asset for the United States, for communities, and for consumers. >> Technology kind of got us into this problem, but, technology, in and of itself, is not going to get out of, get us out of this problem >> Right. >> It's others in the organization, the lines of business, the policies, the practices, some of the work that you do in your teachings, may be >> Yeah, absolutely and when I talk to aspiring business leaders, I communicate a couple of things to them. One, they need to get their heads out of being the decider as the CEO. Increasingly, they will be creating decision environments, right, where decision operations occur and are driven by algorithms, by machine learning, and AI, and so they've got to be thinking, about how do they create those environments to deliver the right kind of decision results that they're looking for. The second piece that I talk to them about, that's counterintuitive, is that they need to, as they bring in network functional virtualization and more and more software oriented things that used to be hardware, they've got to understand the risk exposure from that and bring in, they can, a way to address cyber risk as they introduce new functionality in the market. >> Well, it's interesting of an Admiral talking about network function virtualization, I'm very impressed. Admiral Simpson, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. >> Sure. >> Really a pleasure having you and best of luck in your work. >> Well, thank you and it's great to be here with the Veeam professionals that, I think, are really building a command and control layer of an enterprise of data space that will be very important for the future. >> Alright, okay, thanks for watching everybody. We will be right back, Stu Miniman and Dave Vallante from VeeamOn 2018, you're watching the Cube. >> Great thanks. (upbeat music)

(techy music playing) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBEConversation. I'm here with Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa, from our beautiful Palo Alto theCUBE Studios, and we're talking a bit about some of the trends and most importantly, some of the real business value reasons behind some of the new network virtualization technologies, but before we get there, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get here? >> Okay, thank you, Peter, thanks for having me in today. I am CEO of Pensa, I've been there for about six months, company's about three years old, so I joined them when a lot of the engineering work had already been done and I've been around the tech industry, mostly on the enterprise side, for a long time. I worked with Hewlett-Packard in a number of different roles, I worked at Dell, I worked at EMC and a number of startups. So, I've been through, you know, a lot of different transitions in tech, as you have, over the years, and got excited about this because I think we're on the cusp of a number of big transitions with some of the things that are coming down the road that make a company like Pensa really interesting and have a lot of potential. So, it's been a tremendous amount of fun working in startup land again. >> So, what does Pensa do? >> So, Pensa is a software company and again, we're based here in Mountain View. Most of our operations are here. We also have an engineering team over in India, and they're all people that are focused on networking technology. They have a long history there and what we do is help primarily service providers, you can think the classic telecommunications industry, but also other modern service providers, build modern networks. We're very focused on network functions, virtualization technology or NFE, which is about building network services that are highly flexible in software that you can deploy on industry standard server technologies, you know, kind of cloud native network service development as opposed to, you know, what many folks have done with hardware-based and siloed networking technologies in that industry for a really long time. So, what we help them do is use intelligent automation to make it easy to build those things in incredible combinations with a lot of complexity, but do it fast, do it correctly every time, and deliver those network services in a way that they can actually transform their businesses and develop new apps a lot faster than they could do otherwise. >> So, Tom, I got to tell you, I'm an analyst, I've been around for a long time and every so often someone comes along and says, "Yeah, the tel-cos are finally going to "break out of their malaise and do something different," yet they always don't quite get there. What is it about this transition that makes it more likely that they succeed at becoming more than just a hauler of data to actual digital services provider? >> Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent question. Frankly, you know, it's one that I face all the time. You know, as you traffic around Silicon Valley people are focused on certain hot topics, and you know, getting folks to understand that, you know, we are at a cusp point where this industry's going to fundamentally change and there's a huge amount of money that's actually being spent and a lot more coming. You know, a lot of folks don't necessarily, who don't spend their time there everyday, realize what's happening in these communications service providers, which you know, we used to call tel-cos, because what's happened, and I think, you know, I'm interested in your perspective on this, over time you see long periods in that industry of things don't change and then everything changes at once. >> Yeah. >> We've seen that many, many times, you know, and the disruptions in that industry, which were very public, you know, 15 years ago and then another 10 years before that, those were trigger points when the industry had to change, and we strongly believe that we're at that point right now where if you look at the rest of, like, enterprise IT where I've spent most of my career, we've gone through 15 years of going from hardware-based, proprietary, siloed to software-based, industry standard servers, cloud, and cloud native. >> Peter: And service-based. >> And service-based, right, and the formerly known as tel-co business is late to the party, you know. So, it's almost like that industry is the last domino to fall in this transition to new technology, and right now they're under enormous pressure. They have been for a while, I mean, I think if you look at the industry it's a trillion dollar plus business that touches basically every business and every person in the world, and every business and every person has gone to wireless and data from wire-line and the old way of doing things, and these service providers have pretty much squeezed as much as they can possibly get out of the old technology model and doing a great job of adapting to wireless and delivering new services, but now there's a whole new wave of growth coming and there's new technologies coming that the old model won't adapt to, and so frankly, the industry's been trying to figure this out for about five years through standards and cooperation and investment and open-source stuff, and it's kind of only at the point now where a lot of these technologies work, but our job is to come in and figure out how do we make them, you know, work in production. How do we make it scalable, and so you know, that's why we're focused there is because there's an enormous amount of money that gets spent here, there are real problems. It's not crowded with startups, you know. We have kind of a free shot on goal to actually do something big, and that's why I'm excited about being part of this company. >> Well, the network industry is always, unlike the server and storage industries, always been a series of step functions, and it's largely because of exactly what you said, that the tel-cos, which I'll still call them tel-cos, but those network service providers historically have tied their services and their rates back to capital investments. >> Tom: You're right, yeah. >> And so they'd wait and they'd wait and they'd wait before they pulled the trigger on that capital investment-- >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> Because there was no smooth way of doing it. >> Tom: Right, yeah. >> And so as a consequence you've got these horrible step functions, and customers, enterprises like a more smooth set of transitions, >> Tom: Yeah. and so it's not surprising that more of the money's been going to the server and the storage guys and the traditional networking types of technologies. >> Mm-hm, yeah. >> But this raises an interested question. Does some of the technology that you're providing make it possible for the tel-co or the network service provider. >> Tom: Yeah, yeah. >> To say, "You know what, I can use NFV "as a way of smoothing out my investments "and enter into markets faster with a little bit "more agility so that I can make my customers "happy by showing a smoother program forward." You know, make my rates, adjust my rates accordingly, but ultimately be more likely to be successful because I don't have to put two or three or $10 billion behind a new service. I can put just what's needed and use NFV to help me scale that. >> That's exactly right, I mean, we're really bringing software programmability and devops kinds of capabilities to this industry, us and other folks that are involved in this, you know, this transition, which we think is enormous. I mean, it's probably one of the biggest transitions that's left to happen in tech, and the old model of set it and forget it. I put in my hardware based router, my switch, build out my, make a big investment, that step function you talked about, and depreciate it over a long period of time doesn't work it anymore, because during that long period of time new opportunities emerge, and these communication service providers haven't gotten all the growth because other people have jumped into those opportunities, the over-the-top people, the Netflixes, probably increasingly cloud players and saying we're going to take that growth, and so if you're one of these... You know, there's a few hundred large communication service providers throughout the world. This is an existential problem for them. They have to figure out how to adapt, so when the next thing comes along they can reprogram that network. You know, if there's an opportunity to drop a server in a remote branch and offer a whole range of services on it, they want to be able to continually reprogram that, update those, and you know, we've seen the first signs of that, we saw-- >> And let me stop-- >> Right, as an example of that. >> But not just take a hardware approach to adding new services and improving the quality of the experience that the customers have. >> That's exactly right, they want to have software programmability. They want to behave like everybody else in the world now-- >> Right. >> And take advantage, frankly, of a lot of things that have been proven to work in other spheres. >> So, the fundamental value proposition that you guys are providing to them is bring some of these new software disciplines to your traditional way of building out your infrastructure so that you can add new services more smoothly, grow them in a way that's natural and organic, establish rates that don't require a 30-year visibility in what your capital expenses are. >> That's right, I mean, so one of our, you know, our flagship customers is Nokia. Nokia you can think about as kind of a classic network equipment supplier to many of those service providers, but they also provide software based services through things like Nuage that they own and some things they got from Alcatel-Lucent, and they do system integration and they've been kind of on the leading edge in using our technology to help with that of saying, "Look, let's deliver you "industry standard, intel-based servers, "running network functions in software," and what we help them do is actually design, validate, build those capabilities that they ship to their customers, and you know, without something like Pensa... Somebody has to go in and code it up. Somebody has to really understand how to make these different parts work together. I've got a router from one place. I've got a virtual network function from someplace else. Interoperability is a challenge. We automate all of that. >> Peter: Right. >> And we're using intelligence to do it, so you can kind of go much faster than you otherwise could. >> Which means that you're bringing value to them and at the same time essentially fitting their operating model of how they operate. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So, you're not forcing dramatic change in how they think about their assets, but there are some real serious changes on the horizon. 5G, net neutrality and what that means and whether or not these service providers are going to be able to enter into new markets, so it does seem like there's a triple witching hour here of the need for new capital investment because those new services are going to have to be required, and there's new competitors that are coming after them. We like to think that, or we think in many respects the companies that are really in AWS's crosshairs are the tel-cos, and you guys are trying to give them approach so that they can introduce new agility or be more agile, introduce some services, and break that bond of rate-based, capital investment-based innovation. >> Yeah, exactly right, and also, frankly, break the bond of having to buy everything from the same tel-co equipment provider they've done for the last 20 years in extraordinary margins. People want to have flexibility to combine things in different combinations as these changes hit. You know, 5G, you mentioned, is probably the biggest one, you know, and I'd say even a year ago it was clearly on the horizon but way out in the distance, and now almost every day you're seeing production deployments in certain areas, and it is going to fundamentally change how the relationship works between businesses and consumers and the service providers and the cloud people. All of a sudden you have the ability to slice up a network, you have the ability to program it remotely, you have the ability to deliver all kinds of new video-based apps and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can't even conceive of. The key thing is you need to be able to program it in software and change it when change is required, and they don't have that with technology like this. >> That's right, and 5G provides that density of services that can actually truly be provided in a wireless way. >> Exactly. >> All right, but so this raises an issue. Look, we're talking about big problems here. These are big, big, big problems, and no company, let alone Pensa, has unlimited resources. >> Tom: Hm. >> So, where are you driving your engineers and your team to place their design and engineering bets? >> Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly a set of problems that need to be solved, and then there's some things that we do particularly well. We have some technology that we think is actually unique in a couple of areas. Probably the heart of it is intelligently validating that the network you designed works. So, let's say you are a person in a service provider or you're an SI providing a solution to a service provider, you make choices based on the requirements, because you're a network engineer, that I'm going to use this router, I'm going to use a Palo Alto Networks firewall, I'm going to use Nginx, I'm going to use Nuage, whatever that combination is, so I've got my network service. Very often they don't have a way to figure out that it's going to work when they deploy it. >> Peter: Hm. >> And we build, effectively, models for every single element and understand the relationships of how they work together. So, we can, you know, pretty much on-the-fly validate that a new network service is going to work. The next thing we do is go match that to the hardware that's required. I mean, servers, you know, they're not all the same and configurations matter. I mean, we know that obviously from the enterprise space and we can make sure that what you're actually intending to deploy you have a server configuration or underlying network infrastructure that can support it. So, our goal is to say, you know, we do everything, frankly, from import network services or onboard them from different vendors and test them from an interoperability standpoint, help you do the design, but the real heart of what we do is in that validation area. I think the key design choice that we are making, and frankly, have had to make is to be integratable and interoperable, and what that means is, you know, these service providers are working with multiple different other vendors. They might have two different orchestration software platforms. They might have some old stuff they want to work with. What we're going to do is kind of be integratable with all of the major players out there. We're not going to come in and force, you know, our orchestrator down your throat. We're going to work with all of the major open-source ones that are there and be integratable with them. You know, we believe strongly in kind of an API economy where we've got to make our APIs available and be integratable because, as you said, it's a big problem. We're not going to solve it all ourselves. We've got to work with other choices that one of these customers makes. >> So, we like to say at Wikibon that in many respects the goal of some of these technologies, the NFV software defined networking technologies, needs to be to move away from the device being the primary citizen to truly the API being the primary citizen. >> Mm-hm. >> People talk about the network economy without actually explaining what it means. Well, in many respects what it really means is networks of APIs. >> Tom: Yes. >> Is that kind of the direction that you see your product going and how are you going to rely on the open-source community, or not, to get there, because there's a lot of ancillary activity going on in creating new inventive and innovative capabilities. >> Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a really big question and to kind of tackle the key parts of it in my mind... You know, open-source is extremely valuable, and if you were a communication service provider you may want to use open-source because it gives you the ability to innovate. You can have your programmers go in and make changes and do something other folks might not do, but the other side of the coin for these service providers is they need it to be bullet-proof. >> Peter: Right. >> They can't have networks that go down, and that's the value of validation and proving that it works, but they also need commercial software companies to be able to work with the major open-source components and bring them together in a way that when they deploy it they know it's going to work, and so we've joined the Linux Foundation. We're one of the founding members of Linux Foundation networking, which now has open NFV, and has ONAP, and a number of other critical programs, and we're working with them. We've also joined OSM, which is part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which is another big standards organization. I'm not aware of another company in our space or related to NFV that's working with both, and so we feel positively about open-source but we think that there's a role for commercial software companies to help make it bullet-proof for that buyer and make... If you are a very large service provider you want somebody that you can work with that will stand behind it and support it, and that's what we intend to do. >> Well, as you said, your fundamental value proposition sounds like yeah, you're doing network virtualization, you're doing the, you're adding the elements required for interoperability and integration, but also you're adding that layer of operational affinity to how tel-cos, or how service providers actually work. >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> That is a tough computing model. I don't know that open-source is going to do that. There's always going to be a need to try to ensure that all these technologies can fit into the way a business actually works. >> Tom: Yeah. >> And that's going to be a software, an enterprise software approach, whoever the target customer is, do you agree? >> Yeah, we use a great partnership between the open-source community, commercial software companies like us, and the service providers-- >> Peter: Right. >> To build this thing, and we've seen that happen in enterprise. Devops was that kind of a phenomenon. You have winning commercial software providers, you have a lot of open-source, and you have the users themselves, and we think a lot of those concepts are going into this service provider space, and you know, for us it's all about at the end of the day we want to have the ability to get people to do their job faster. You know, if things change in the industry, a service provider using Pensa or an SI using Pensa can design, validate, build and run that next thing and blow it out to their network faster than anybody else. >> Peter: Time to value. So, it's time to value. >> Right, time to value. >> And certainty that it'll work. >> And in many respects, at the end of the day we all want to be big, digital businesses, but if you don't have a network that supports your digital business you don't have a digital business. >> That is correct. >> All right, so last question. >> Tom: Yes. >> Pensa two years from now... >> Tom: Hm. >> What does it look like? >> Yeah, I think we're, our goal right now is to line up with some of the leading industry players here. You know, folks that service those large service providers and help them build these solutions and do it faster. I think our goal over the next two years is to become a control point before service providers and again, folks like SIs that work for them and sometimes help run their networks for them. Give them a control point to adapt to new opportunities and respond to new threats by being able to rapidly change and modify and roll out new network services for new opportunities. You know, the thing we learned in the whole mobile transition is you really can't conceive of what's next. What's next two years from now in this space, who knows? You know, if your model is buy a bunch of hardware and depreciate it over five years you won't be able to adapt. We want to be-- >> You do know that. >> We know that, you know, we want to be one of those control points-- >> Peter: Right. >> That helps you do that quickly without having to go wade into the code. You know, so our goal is to allow... You know, our whole tagline is think faster, which means use intelligent technology to drive your business faster, and that's what we intend to be in two years. >> Excellent, Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And for all of you, this is Peter Burris. Once again, another great CUBEConversation from our Palo Alto Studios. Look forward to seeing you on another CUBEConversation. (techy music playing)