>>Hello and welcome to the AWS partners showcase season one, episode two. I'm your host of the cube John ferry. We're here with two great guests who John Kumar, CEO of and Sabina Joseph, the general manager of AWS. Welcome to the show. Welcome to welcome to the cube, >>John. Good to see you >>Again. Great to see both of you both cube. Alumna's great to see how the businesses is going, going very well. Cloud scale, continuing to dominate Columbia is doing extremely well. Tell us more about what's going on in Columbia. What's your mission? What kinds of use cases are you seeing? Napa John, that's helping you guys keep your growth trajectory and solve your customer problems. >>Yeah. Firstly, thank you, John. Thank you, Sabina. Great to be here is a backup as a service platform. That's built natively on AWS for AWS, and we do support other use cases beyond AWS. But our primary mission is to basically deliver, you know, a ransomware data protection solution, you know, on AWS for AWS customers. Right? So if we think about it, you know, one of the things that's, you know, typically holding back any company to put mission critical workloads on a fantastic platform, a public cloud platform like AWS is to make sure that the data is protected in the event of any attack. And it's also done with extreme amount of simplicity, right? So that nobody is doing the heavy lift of doing backup themselves, right? So that's what really drew me or provides. It's a service. It's a turnkey service that provides, you know, data protection on AWS, whatever. >>Well, you're a frequent cube alumni. We're always talking about the importance of that, but I want to ask you this year more than ever, you're seeing it at the center of the conversation built in from day one, you're seeing a lot more threats, certainly mentioned ransomware and more there's more and more online attacks that's impacting this particular area more than ever before. Can you comment on what your focus has been this year around that? >>Yeah, I see it. If you think about tumor's evolution, our primary mission has been to go and protect every data source, but guess what? Right with more and more move to the public cloud and you look just AWS is journey and that pioneer in public cloud going from, you know, whatever 3 billion in revenues, 10 years ago to north of 70 billion run rate today, there's so much of data that is in the public cloud and the, and the most important thing that customers need is they want to free themselves from going and protecting this data themselves. Right? And, and there's a lot of scale in these environments, right? If you look at customers running hundreds of thousands of AWS accounts across every region on AWS, and if you give them that kind of flexibility and that kind of scale, what they want is give me a turnkey solution that just allows me to go and protect all of these workloads running across all of these regions in a service that takes the data out of my accounts separately in an air gap fashion, right. And that's really what we basically provide. And that's what we focused on over the last 12 months. Right? So if you look at what we have done is we've gone after every important service on AWS TC to EBS RDS, S3, dynamo, sequel databases, and other databases running on top of BC too. So now that becomes the comprehensive set of things that somebody needs to use to really deliver an application on top of the public cloud. And that's where we want for, >>And the growth has been there and the results on Amazon because of the refactoring has been huge. Can you share any examples of some successes that you've had with, with the AWS refactoring and all that good stuff going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think that what we have seen is, you know, customers that basically told us that before you guys existed, we had to go and build these things ourselves, right. Again, you know, they had all the, the, the blocks to go and do it themselves, but it was so much of a heavy lift to go and do it themselves. And again, they didn't want to be in a, you know, in that business. So, so what we have done essentially for, and we have, you know, we have some joint customers at a pretty massive scale that basically have said that, okay, let me just use your solution to protect my critical assets. Like, you know, things, you know, sitting in S3 and really, you know, we'll use gloomy as a, as a >>Yeah, I think that's a great example of the refactoring Sabina. Gotta, I gotta ask you, you obviously you're at the center of this. You have your hand on the wheel of the partnerships and all the innovators out there. The growth of AWS just has been spectacular because there's value being created. Again, companies are refactoring their business on the cloud and you're at the center of it. So talk about the partnership with Clooney. Can you tell us how it all started and where it's going? >>Yeah, thanks for having me here, John, and good to see you again, Fujian, if I'm not mistaken for John, we met each other at the San Francisco summit, the AWS San Francisco summit, actually I believe it was in 2016 or 2017. You can correct me if I'm wrong here, but yes, I think so. It was, it was in the 8% a month of April. I still remember it. And that's when, you know, you kind of mentioned to me about and this modern backup as a service solution that you were creating, you're still in stealth mode. So you couldn't talk a lot about it. And B started to engage deeply on the partnership, right from 2017. And initially we were kind of focused around helping Colombia build a solution using our well-architected review. And then as soon as we all came out of stealth mode, we started to engage more deeply around deeper integrations and also on go to market activities. >>As you know, AWS has a very prescriptive approach to our partnerships. So we started to work with around the five pillars of security, reliability, cost optimization, performance, and operational excellence to really help them tune the solution on AWS. And we also started to engage with our service teams and I have to thank Paul John and his team here. They really embraced those deeper and broader integrations, many services that Pooja mentioned, but also specifically want to mention S3 EBS. And our Columbia was also a launch partner for AWS outpost when AWS in fact, launched outpost. So I want to kind of commend CLU, CLU MEO, and the entire team kind of embracing this technology and innovation and this modern backup as a service approach. And also also embracing how we want to focus on the five key pillars that I mentioned. >>And that's a great example of success when you ride the wave, which I talk about the ACLU, Colombia trends in the data protection, because one of the things that you pointed out earlier is the ransomware. Okay. That's a big one, right? That's a big, hot area. How, how is the cloud, first of all, how is that going? And then how has the cloud equation changed the ransomware defense and protection piece of it? >>Yeah. Now I just, I wonder I had a little bit on what Sabina mentioned before I answered the question, John, if you don't mind. Sure. I think that collaboration is where is the reason why we are here today, right? Like if you think about it, like we were the first design partners to go and build, you know, the EBS direct API, right. And we work closely with the EBS teams, not just for the API, but the cost structure of it. How would somebody like us use it? So we are at the bleeding edge of some of these services that we are using and that has enabled us, you know, to be where we are today. So again, thank you very much to be enough for this fantastic partnership. And again, there's so much to go and do to really go and nail this in a, in a, in a, in a great way on, on the public cloud. >>So now coming back to your question, John, you know, fundamentally, if you see right, you know, what happened is when, when, when customers move to the public cloud, you know, right there, you know, the ease of use with which, you know, AWS provides these services, right? And the consumption of these services actually drives some amazing behavior, right? Where people actually want to go and build, build, build, and build. But then it comes a time where somebody comes in and says, okay, you know, are you compliant? Right. You know, do you have the right compliance in place? You have all these accounts that you have, but what is running in each of these accounts, you have visibility in those accounts. And are these accounts that the data in these accounts is this gap, right? This is getting air gap in the same region, or does it need to be across regions? >>Right. You know, I'm in the east, do I need to, you know, have an air gap in the west and so on and so forth. Right? So all of these, you know, confluence of all these things come in and by the, all these problems existed in on-premise world, they get translated in, in the public cloud, where do I need to replicate my data, doing it to back it up? Do I need air gapped in a, like an on-prem world? You had a data domain of plans, which was separate from your primary storage for a reason, same similar something similar now needs to happen here for compliance reasons and for ransomware reason. So a lot of parallels here is just that here we are, it almost feels like, you know, as they say, right, the more things changed. The more they remain the same. That's what it is in the public cloud again. >>Well, that's a good point. I mean, let's take that example of on premises versus the cloud. Also, the clouds got more scale too, by the way. So now you've got regions, this is a common problem that customers are having, you can build your own and, or use solutions, but if you don't get ahead of it, the compliance question can bite you in the, you know what, because you then got to go back and retrofit everything. So, so that's kind of what I hear a lot on my end is like, okay, I want to be compliant from day one. I want to have an answer when asked, I don't want to have to go to old techniques that don't fit the cloud. That comes up a lot. What's your answer to that? >>Yeah, no, no. We were pretty much right. I think it's like, you know, when it, when it comes to compliance and all of these things, you know, people at the end of the day are looking for that same foundation of, of things. The same questions are asked for an encryption. You know, you know, I is my data where it needs to be when it needs to be right. What is my recovery point? Objective? What is my recovery time objective? All of these things basically come together. And now, as you said, it's just the scale that you're dealing is, is extremely different in the cloud and the, and the services, right? The easier it is that, you know, it is to use these services. And especially what AWS does, it makes it so easy. So compelling that same ease of use needs to get translated with a SAS service, like what we are doing with data protection, right? That that ease of use is very important. You have to preserve that sanctity >>Sabina. Let's get back to you. You mentioned earlier about the design partner, that benefits for Colombia. Now let's take it to the next level. As customers really realize they have a problem, they need solutions and you're on the AWS side. So you gotta have the answers for the customers. You've got to put people together, make things work. There's a variety of things that you guys offer. What are some of the different facets of the ISV or the partner programs that you offer to partners like Clooney, you know, that they can benefit from? >>Absolutely John, we believe in a win-win approach to the partnerships because that's what makes partnerships durable over time. We're always striving to do better here. And we continue to broaden our investments. As you know, John, the AWS management team, right from Adam Phillipsky, our CEO down firmly believe that partners are critical to our success, our longterm success, and as partners like CLU MEO work to lean in with us with more investment resources, our technology innovation. We also ensure that we are doing our part by providing value back to Cleo about a few years ago, as you might recall, right. We really did a lot of investment in our sales team on the AWS side. Well, one of the tanks me and also our partners observed is while we were making investments in the AWS sales team, I don't think we were doing a great job at helping our partners with reaching out to those customers. >>What we call as co-sale and partners gave us feedback on this. We are very partner and customer feedback driven, and we introduced in fact, a new role called the ISP success manager, ISS, who are basically embedded in our field. And they work with partners to help them close opportunities. And also net new opportunities are we've also in 2020. I believe that re-invent, we launched the ISB accelerate program whereby we offer incentives to the AWS field team to work with our partners to close existing opportunities and also bring in net new opportunities. So all of this has led to closer collaboration in the field between both our field teams, Muir's field team and our field team, but also accelerated mutual customer wins. I'm not saying that we are doing everything great. We still have a long ways to go. And we are constantly getting feedback from cluneal and also some of our other key partners, and we'll continue to get better at it. But I think the role of the ISV success manager and also the ISP accelerate program has been key to bringing in cold cell success. >>Well, John, what's your take on, is this a good partnership for you? I mean, see, the wave of Vegas has got the growth numbers. You mentioned that, but from a partnership standpoint, you're closing business, they got scale. Is it working? How do you organize your company to take advantage of these benefits? Can you share your thoughts? >>Absolutely not. We have embraced the ecosystem wholeheartedly 100%, but if you think about it, what we have done is look at our offering on AWS marketplace. There's an example, right? We are the only company I would say in our domain, obviously that routes our entire business through AWS marketplace. Whether obviously we get a lot of organic benefit from AWS marketplace, people go and search for a solution and from your shows up, and obviously they go and onboard self onboard themselves, and guess what? We let them self onboard themselves. And we rely on AWS's billing automatically. So you don't need to talk to us. You can just get billed automatically in your AWS bill and you get your data protection solution. Or if you directly reached out to us, guess what we do. We actually route you through AWS marketplace. All the onboarding is just to one place and it's a fantastic experience. >>So we have gone like all in, on that experience and completely like, you know, internalized that that's the right way to do things. And of course, thanks to, you know, Sabina's team and the marketplace team to create that platform so that we could actually plug it into it. But that's the kind of benefits that we have that we have, you know, taken advantage of a DWI. That's one example, another example that Sabina mentioned, right, which is the whole ACE program. We put a ton of registrations on AIS and with all the wins that we get on AWS, they could broadcast it to the sellers. So that creates its own vicious cycle in terms of more coming into the pipeline and more closing in. So, so these are just two small examples, but there's other examples that we look at our recent press release, where AWS, you know, when we, when we launched yesterday data protection and backup, the GM of AWSs three supported us in the press release. So there's things like that, that it's a, it's a fantastic collaboration. That's working really well for our joint customers. Sorry. >>And tell us something about the partnership between 80 of us, including, you know, that people might not be aware of some of the things that Poojan said that they're different out there that, that are, co-selling go marketing, that you guys offer people you guys work together on. >>Yeah. The, the ISV accelerate program that was created, it was really created with partners like Klunier in mind, our SAS partners. I think that that is something very, very unique between our partnership and, you know, I, I want to double click on what Poojan said, which is riding their opportunities through marketplace, right? All of their opportunities. That is something pretty unique. They understand the richness of the platform and also how customers are procuring software today in this world. And they've embraced that. And we really appreciate that. And I want to say, you know, another thing about Qumulo is they're all in on AWS, which is another unique thing. There are not a lot of, I would say all in partnerships in my world and I manage infrastructure, business apps, applications, and industry partnerships from the Americas globally. And all of those things are very, very unique in our partnership, which has led to success. Right. We started very, very early stage when Columbia was in stealth mode in 2017 and look where we've come today. And it's really kudos to Paul, John and his entire team for believing in the partnership for leaning in with us and for placing that trust with us. >>Awesome. Pooja, any final words you'd like to share for folks out there about the conversation and what's going on in Columbia? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, as I said, I think we have been fortunate to be very early adopters of all these technologies and go and really build what a true cloud native solution has to be. Right. And, and again, right, you know, this is what customers are really looking for. And people are looking for, you know, at least on the data protection side, you know, ransomware air gap solution, people are looking for a solution natively built on the cloud because that's the only way a solution can deliver something at the scale and the cost structure that is needed to have, you know, a data protection solution in the public cloud. So, so this has been just a fantastic thing end to end, you know, for us overall. And we really look forward to, you know, going, you know, doing much more with AWS as we essentially go and scale, >>I have to ask, but before we, before we go, cause you're the CEO of the company and founder having all that backend infrastructure from Amazon, just on the resources, great. It creates a market for your product, but also the sales piece, you know, they got the marketplace, you mentioned, that's a big expense that you don't have to carry, you know, and you get revenue and top line. I mean, that's an impact for startups out there and growing companies. That's a pretty big deal. What's your, what's your advice to folks out there who are trying to think about the buy versus use the leverage of the, of the marketplace, which is, which is at large scale, because as a CEO, you're, you've got to make these decisions. What's your opinion on that? >>It's not, it's not as, as easy as I make it sound to do your own part. You know, AWS is, is, is, is huge, right? It's huge. And so we have to do our part to educate everybody within the, you know, even the AWS seller base to make sure that they internalize the fact that this is the right solution for the customers, for our joint customers, right? So we have to do that all day long. So there's no running away the no shortcut to everything, but obviously AWS does its part to make it very, as easy as possible, but there's a lot of heavy lifting we still have to do. And I think that'll only become easier and easier over the next few years >>And Sabina your takeout at AVS. You've got a great job. You were with all the hot growth companies. This is the big wave we're on right now with the cloud next generation clouds here, a lot of opportunities. >>Absolutely. And it's, and it's thanks to Pooja and, and partners like Lumeo that really understand what it takes to build a cloud native solution because it's part of it is building. And part of it is the co-selling go-to-market engine and embracing both of that is critical to success. >>Well, thank you both for coming on this journey here on the cube, as part of the showcase, push on. Great to see you to being a great to see you as well. And thanks for sharing that insight. Appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. AWS partners showcase speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Ford, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello and welcome today's cube presentation of eight of us startup showcase. I'm john for your host highlighting the hottest companies and devops data analytics and cloud management lisa martin and David want are here to kick it off. We've got a great program for you again. This is our, our new community event model where we're doing every quarter, we have every new episode, this is quarter three this year or episode three, season one of the hottest cloud startups and we're gonna be featured. Then we're gonna do a keynote package and then 15 countries will present their story, Go check them out and then have a closing keynote with a practitioner and we've got some great lineups, lisa Dave, great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >>Hey guys, >>great to be here. So David got to ask you, you know, back in events last night we're at the 14 it's event where they had the golf PGA championship with the cube Now we got the hybrid model, This is the new normal. We're in, we got these great companies were showcasing them. What's your take? >>Well, you're right. I mean, I think there's a combination of things. We're seeing some live shows. We saw what we did with at mobile world Congress. We did the show with AWS storage day where it was, we were at the spheres, there was no, there was a live audience, but they weren't there physically. It was just virtual and yeah, so, and I just got pained about reinvent. Hey Dave, you gotta make your flights. So I'm making my flights >>were gonna be at the amazon web services, public sector summit next week. At least a lot, a lot of cloud convergence going on here. We got many companies being featured here that we spoke with the Ceo and their top people cloud management, devops data, nelson security. Really cutting edge companies, >>yes, cutting edge companies who are all focused on acceleration. We've talked about the acceleration of digital transformation the last 18 months and we've seen a tremendous amount of acceleration in innovation with what these startups are doing. We've talked to like you said, there's, there's C suite, we've also talked to their customers about how they are innovating so quickly with this hybrid environment, this remote work and we've talked a lot about security in the last week or so. You mentioned that we were at Fortinet cybersecurity skills gap. What some of these companies are doing with automation for example, to help shorten that gap, which is a big opportunity >>for the job market. Great stuff. Dave so the format of this event, you're going to have a fireside chat with the practitioner, we'd like to end these programs with a great experienced practitioner cutting edge in data february. The beginning lisa are gonna be kicking off with of course Jeff bar to give us the update on what's going on AWS and then a special presentation from Emily Freeman who is the author of devops for dummies, she's introducing new content. The revolution in devops devops two point oh and of course jerry Chen from Greylock cube alumni is going to come on and talk about his new thesis castles in the cloud creating moats at cloud scale. We've got a great lineup of people and so the front ends can be great. Dave give us a little preview of what people can expect at the end of the fireside chat. >>Well at the highest level john I've always said we're entering that sort of third great wave of cloud. First wave was experimentation. The second big wave was migration. The third wave of integration, Deep business integration and what you're >>going to hear from >>Hello Fresh today is how they like many companies that started early last decade. They started with an on prem Hadoop system and then of course we all know what happened is S three essentially took the knees out from, from the on prem Hadoop market lowered costs, brought things into the cloud and what Hello Fresh is doing is they're transforming from that legacy Hadoop system into its running on AWS but into a data mess, you know, it's a passionate topic of mine. Hello Fresh was scaling they realized that they couldn't keep up so they had to rethink their entire data architecture and they built it around data mesh Clements key and christoph Soewandi gonna explain how they actually did that are on a journey or decentralized data >>measure it and your posts have been awesome on data measure. We get a lot of traction. Certainly you're breaking analysis for the folks watching check out David Landes, Breaking analysis every week, highlighting the cutting edge trends in tech Dave. We're gonna see you later, lisa and I are gonna be here in the morning talking about with Emily. We got Jeff Barr teed up. Dave. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to fireside chat lisa. We'll see you when Emily comes back on. But we're gonna go to Jeff bar right now for Dave and I are gonna interview Jeff. Mm >>Hey Jeff, >>here he is. Hey, how are you? How's it going really well. So I gotta ask you, the reinvent is on, everyone wants to know that's happening right. We're good with Reinvent. >>Reinvent is happening. I've got my hotel and actually listening today, if I just remembered, I still need to actually book my flights. I've got my to do list on my desk and I do need to get my >>flights. Uh, >>really looking forward >>to it. I can't wait to see the all the announcements and blog posts. We're gonna, we're gonna hear from jerry Chen later. I love the after on our next event. Get your reaction to this castle and castles in the cloud where competitive advantages can be built in the cloud. We're seeing examples of that. But first I gotta ask you give us an update of what's going on. The ap and ecosystem has been an incredible uh, celebration these past couple weeks, >>so, so a lot of different things happening and the interesting thing to me is that as part of my job, I often think that I'm effectively living in the future because I get to see all this really cool stuff that we're building just a little bit before our customers get to, and so I'm always thinking okay, here I am now, and what's the world going to be like in a couple of weeks to a month or two when these launches? I'm working on actually get out the door and that, that's always really, really fun, just kind of getting that, that little edge into where we're going, but this year was a little interesting because we had to really significant birthdays, we had the 15 year anniversary of both EC two and S three and we're so focused on innovating and moving forward, that it's actually pretty rare for us at Aws to look back and say, wow, we've actually done all these amazing things in in the last 15 years, >>you know, it's kind of cool Jeff, if I may is is, you know, of course in the early days everybody said, well, a place for startup is a W. S and now the great thing about the startup showcases, we're seeing the startups that >>are >>very near, or some of them have even reached escape velocity, so they're not, they're not tiny little companies anymore, they're in their transforming their respective industries, >>they really are and I think that as they start ups grow, they really start to lean into the power of the cloud. They as they start to think, okay, we've we've got our basic infrastructure in place, we've got, we were serving data, we're serving up a few customers, everything is actually working pretty well for us. We've got our fundamental model proven out now, we can invest in publicity and marketing and scaling and but they don't have to think about what's happening behind the scenes. They just if they've got their auto scaling or if they're survivalists, the infrastructure simply grows to meet their demand and it's it's just a lot less things that they have to worry about. They can focus on the fun part of their business which is actually listening to customers and building up an awesome business >>Jeff as you guys are putting together all the big pre reinvented, knows a lot of stuff that goes on prior as well and they say all the big good stuff to reinvent. But you start to see some themes emerged this year. One of them is modernization of applications, the speed of application development in the cloud with the cloud scale devops personas, whatever persona you want to talk about but basically speed the speed of of the app developers where other departments have been slowing things down, I won't say name names, but security group and I t I mean I shouldn't have said that but only kidding but no but seriously people want in minutes and seconds now not days or weeks. You know whether it's policy. What are some of the trends that you're seeing around this this year as we get into some of the new stuff coming out >>So Dave customers really do want speed and for we've actually encapsulate this for a long time in amazon in what we call the bias for action leadership principle >>where >>we just need to jump in and move forward and and make things happen. A lot of customers look at that and they say yes this is great. We need to have the same bias fraction. Some do. Some are still trying to figure out exactly how to put it into play. And they absolutely for sure need to pay attention to security. They need to respect the past and make sure that whatever they're doing is in line with I. T. But they do want to move forward. And the interesting thing that I see time and time again is it's not simply about let's adopt a new technology. It's how do we >>how do we keep our workforce >>engaged? How do we make sure that they've got the right training? How do we bring our our I. T. Team along for this. Hopefully new and fun and exciting journey where they get to learn some interesting new technologies they've got all this very much accumulated business knowledge they still want to put to use, maybe they're a little bit apprehensive about something brand new and they hear about the cloud, but there by and large, they really want to move forward. They just need a little bit of >>help to make it happen >>real good guys. One of the things you're gonna hear today, we're talking about speed traditionally going fast. Oftentimes you meant you have to sacrifice some things on quality and what you're going to hear from some of the startups today is how they're addressing that to automation and modern devoPS technologies and sort of rethinking that whole application development approach. That's something I'm really excited to see organization is beginning to adopt so they don't have to make that tradeoff anymore. >>Yeah, I would >>never want to see someone >>sacrifice quality, >>but I do think that iterating very quickly and using the best of devoPS principles to be able to iterate incredibly quickly and get that first launch out there and then listen with both ears just >>as much >>as you can, Everything. You hear iterate really quickly to meet those needs in, in hours and days, not months, quarters or years. >>Great stuff. Chef and a lot of the companies were featuring here in the startup showcase represent that new kind of thinking, um, systems thinking as well as you know, the cloud scale and again and it's finally here, the revolution of deVOps is going to the next generation and uh, we're excited to have Emily Freeman who's going to come on and give a little preview for her new talk on this revolution. So Jeff, thank you for coming on, appreciate you sharing the update here on the cube. Happy >>to be. I'm actually really looking forward to hearing from Emily. >>Yeah, it's great. Great. Looking forward to the talk. Brand new Premier, Okay, uh, lisa martin, Emily Freeman is here. She's ready to come in and we're going to preview her lightning talk Emily. Um, thanks for coming on, we really appreciate you coming on really, this is about to talk around deVOPS next gen and I think lisa this is one of those things we've been, we've been discussing with all the companies. It's a new kind of thinking it's a revolution, it's a systems mindset, you're starting to see the connections there she is. Emily, Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So your teaser video >>was amazing. Um, you know, that little secret radical idea, something completely different. Um, you gotta talk coming up, what's the premise behind this revolution, you know, these tying together architecture, development, automation deployment, operating altogether. >>Yes, well, we have traditionally always used the sclc, which is the software delivery life cycle. Um, and it is a straight linear process that has actually been around since the sixties, which is wild to me um, and really originated in manufacturing. Um, and as much as I love the Toyota production system and how much it has shown up in devops as a sort of inspiration on how to run things better. We are not making cars, we are making software and I think we have to use different approaches and create a sort of model that better reflects our modern software development process. >>It's a bold idea and looking forward to the talk and as motivation. I went into my basement and dusted off all my books from college in the 80s and the sea estimates it was waterfall. It was software development life cycle. They trained us to think this way and it came from the mainframe people. It was like, it's old school, like really, really old and it really hasn't been updated. Where's the motivation? I actually cloud is kind of converging everything together. We see that, but you kind of hit on this persona thing. Where did that come from this persona? Because you know, people want to put people in buckets release engineer. I mean, where's that motivation coming from? >>Yes, you're absolutely right that it came from the mainframes. I think, you know, waterfall is necessary when you're using a punch card or mag tape to load things onto a mainframe, but we don't exist in that world anymore. Thank goodness. And um, yes, so we, we use personas all the time in tech, you know, even to register, well not actually to register for this event, but a lot events. A lot of events, you have to click that drop down. Right. Are you a developer? Are you a manager, whatever? And the thing is personas are immutable in my opinion. I was a developer. I will always identify as a developer despite playing a lot of different roles and doing a lot of different jobs. Uh, and this can vary throughout the day. Right. You might have someone who has a title of software architect who ends up helping someone pair program or develop or test or deploy. Um, and so we wear a lot of hats day to day and I think our discussions around roles would be a better, um, certainly a better approach than personas >>lease. And I've been discussing with many of these companies around the roles and we're hearing from them directly and they're finding out that people have, they're mixing and matching on teams. So you're, you're an S R E on one team and you're doing something on another team where the workflows and the workloads defined the team formation. So this is a cultural discussion. >>It absolutely is. Yes. I think it is a cultural discussion and it really comes to the heart of devops, right? It's people process. And then tools deVOps has always been about culture and making sure that developers have all the tools they need to be productive and honestly happy. What good is all of this? If developing software isn't a joyful experience. Well, >>I got to ask you, I got you here obviously with server list and functions just starting to see this kind of this next gen. And we're gonna hear from jerry Chen, who's a Greylock VC who's going to talk about castles in the clouds, where he's discussing the moats that could be created with a competitive advantage in cloud scale. And I think he points to the snowflakes of the world. You're starting to see this new thing happening. This is devops 2.0, this is the revolution. Is this kind of where you see the same vision of your talk? >>Yes, so DeVOps created 2000 and 8, 2000 and nine, totally different ecosystem in the world we were living in, you know, we didn't have things like surveillance and containers, we didn't have this sort of default distributed nature, certainly not the cloud. Uh and so I'm very excited for jerry's talk. I'm curious to hear more about these moz. I think it's fascinating. Um but yeah, you're seeing different companies use different tools and processes to accelerate their delivery and that is the competitive advantage. How can we figure out how to utilize these tools in the most efficient way possible. >>Thank you for coming and giving us a preview. Let's now go to your lightning keynote talk. Fresh content. Premier of this revolution in Devops and the Freemans Talk, we'll go there now. >>Hi, I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of devops for dummies and the curator of 97 things every cloud engineer should know. I am thrilled to be here with you all today. I am really excited to share with you a kind of a wild idea, a complete re imagining of the S DLC and I want to be clear, I need your feedback. I want to know what you think of this. You can always find me on twitter at editing. Emily, most of my work centers around deVOps and I really can't overstate what an impact the concept of deVOPS has had on this industry in many ways it built on the foundation of Agile to become a default a standard we all reach for in our everyday work. When devops surfaced as an idea in 2008, the tech industry was in a vastly different space. AWS was an infancy offering only a handful of services. Azure and G C P didn't exist yet. The majority's majority of companies maintained their own infrastructure. Developers wrote code and relied on sys admins to deploy new code at scheduled intervals. Sometimes months apart, container technology hadn't been invented applications adhered to a monolithic architecture, databases were almost exclusively relational and serverless wasn't even a concept. Everything from the application to the engineers was centralized. Our current ecosystem couldn't be more different. Software is still hard, don't get me wrong, but we continue to find novel solutions to consistently difficult, persistent problems. Now, some of these end up being a sort of rebranding of old ideas, but others are a unique and clever take to abstracting complexity or automating toil or perhaps most important, rethinking challenging the very premises we have accepted as Cannon for years, if not decades. In the years since deVOps attempted to answer the critical conflict between developers and operations, engineers, deVOps has become a catch all term and there have been a number of derivative works. Devops has come to mean 5000 different things to 5000 different people. For some, it can be distilled to continuous integration and continuous delivery or C I C D. For others, it's simply deploying code more frequently, perhaps adding a smattering of tests for others. Still, its organizational, they've added a platform team, perhaps even a questionably named DEVOPS team or have created an engineering structure that focuses on a separation of concerns. Leaving feature teams to manage the development, deployment, security and maintenance of their siloed services, say, whatever the interpretation, what's important is that there isn't a universally accepted standard. Well, what deVOPS is or what it looks like an execution, it's a philosophy more than anything else. A framework people can utilize to configure and customize their specific circumstances to modern development practices. The characteristic of deVOPS that I think we can all agree on though, is that an attempted to capture the challenges of the entire software development process. It's that broad umbrella, that holistic view that I think we need to breathe life into again, The challenge we face is that DeVOps isn't increasingly outmoded solution to a previous problem developers now face. Cultural and technical challenge is far greater than how to more quickly deploy a monolithic application. Cloud native is the future the next collection of default development decisions and one the deVOPS story can't absorb in its current form. I believe the era of deVOPS is waning and in this moment as the sun sets on deVOPS, we have a unique opportunity to rethink rebuild free platform. Even now, I don't have a crystal ball. That would be very handy. I'm not completely certain with the next decade of tech looks like and I can't write this story alone. I need you but I have some ideas that can get the conversation started, I believe to build on what was we have to throw away assumptions that we've taken for granted all this time in order to move forward. We must first step back. Mhm. The software or systems development life cycle, what we call the S. D. L. C. has been in use since the 1960s and it's remained more or less the same since before color television and the touch tone phone. Over the last 60 or so odd years we've made tweaks, slight adjustments, massaged it. The stages or steps are always a little different with agile and deVOps we sort of looped it into a circle and then an infinity loop we've added pretty colors. But the sclc is more or less the same and it has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore, universally adopted constructs like the sclc have an unspoken permanence. They feel as if they have always been and always will be. I think the impact of that is even more potent. If you were born after a construct was popularized. Nearly everything around us is a construct, a model, an artifact of a human idea. The chair you're sitting in the desk, you work at the mug from which you drink coffee or sometimes wine, buildings, toilets, plumbing, roads, cars, art, computers, everything. The sclc is a remnant an artifact of a previous era and I think we should throw it away or perhaps more accurately replace it, replace it with something that better reflects the actual nature of our work. A linear, single threaded model designed for the manufacturer of material goods cannot possibly capture the distributed complexity of modern socio technical systems. It just can't. Mhm. And these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive that the sclc was industry changing, valuable and extraordinarily impactful and that it's time for something new. I believe we are strong enough to hold these two ideas at the same time, showing respect for the past while envisioning the future. Now, I don't know about you, I've never had a software project goes smoothly in one go. No matter how small. Even if I'm the only person working on it and committing directly to master software development is chaos. It's a study and entropy and it is not getting any more simple. The model with which we think and talk about software development must capture the multithreaded, non sequential nature of our work. It should embody the roles engineers take on and the considerations they make along the way. It should build on the foundations of agile and devops and represent the iterative nature of continuous innovation. Now, when I was thinking about this, I was inspired by ideas like extreme programming and the spiral model. I I wanted something that would have layers, threads, even a way of visually representing multiple processes happening in parallel. And what I settled on is the revolution model. I believe the visualization of revolution is capable of capturing the pivotal moments of any software scenario. And I'm going to dive into all the discrete elements. But I want to give you a moment to have a first impression, to absorb my idea. I call it revolution because well for one it revolves, it's circular shape reflects the continuous and iterative nature of our work, but also because it is revolutionary. I am challenging a 60 year old model that is embedded into our daily language. I don't expect Gartner to build a magic quadrant around this tomorrow, but that would be super cool. And you should call me my mission with. This is to challenge the status quo to create a model that I think more accurately reflects the complexity of modern cloud native software development. The revolution model is constructed of five concentric circles describing the critical roles of software development architect. Ng development, automating, deploying and operating intersecting each loop are six spokes that describe the production considerations every engineer has to consider throughout any engineering work and that's test, ability, secure ability, reliability, observe ability, flexibility and scalability. The considerations listed are not all encompassing. There are of course things not explicitly included. I figured if I put 20 spokes, some of us, including myself, might feel a little overwhelmed. So let's dive into each element in this model. We have long used personas as the default way to do divide audiences and tailor messages to group people. Every company in the world right now is repeating the mantra of developers, developers, developers but personas have always bugged me a bit because this approach typically either oversimplifies someone's career are needlessly complicated. Few people fit cleanly and completely into persona based buckets like developers and operations anymore. The lines have gotten fuzzy on the other hand, I don't think we need to specifically tailor messages as to call out the difference between a devops engineer and a release engineer or a security administrator versus a security engineer but perhaps most critically, I believe personas are immutable. A persona is wholly dependent on how someone identifies themselves. It's intrinsic not extrinsic. Their titles may change their jobs may differ, but they're probably still selecting the same persona on that ubiquitous drop down. We all have to choose from when registering for an event. Probably this one too. I I was a developer and I will always identify as a developer despite doing a ton of work in areas like devops and Ai Ops and Deverell in my heart. I'm a developer I think about problems from that perspective. First it influences my thinking and my approach roles are very different. Roles are temporary, inconsistent, constantly fluctuating. If I were an actress, the parts I would play would be lengthy and varied, but the persona I would identify as would remain an actress and artist lesbian. Your work isn't confined to a single set of skills. It may have been a decade ago, but it is not today in any given week or sprint, you may play the role of an architect. Thinking about how to design a feature or service, developer building out code or fixing a bug and on automation engineer, looking at how to improve manual processes. We often refer to as soil release engineer, deploying code to different environments or releasing it to customers or in operations. Engineer ensuring an application functions inconsistent expected ways and no matter what role we play. We have to consider a number of issues. The first is test ability. All software systems require testing to assure architects that designs work developers, the code works operators, that infrastructure is running as expected and engineers of all disciplines that code changes won't bring down the whole system testing in its many forms is what enables systems to be durable and have longevity. It's what reassures engineers that changes won't impact current functionality. A system without tests is a disaster waiting to happen, which is why test ability is first among equals at this particular roundtable. Security is everyone's responsibility. But if you understand how to design and execute secure systems, I struggle with this security incidents for the most part are high impact, low probability events. The really big disasters, the one that the ones that end up on the news and get us all free credit reporting for a year. They don't happen super frequently and then goodness because you know that there are endless small vulnerabilities lurking in our systems. Security is something we all know we should dedicate time to but often don't make time for. And let's be honest, it's hard and complicated and a little scary def sec apps. The first derivative of deVOPS asked engineers to move security left this approach. Mint security was a consideration early in the process, not something that would block release at the last moment. This is also the consideration under which I'm putting compliance and governance well not perfectly aligned. I figure all the things you have to call lawyers for should just live together. I'm kidding. But in all seriousness, these three concepts are really about risk management, identity, data, authorization. It doesn't really matter what specific issue you're speaking about, the question is who has access to what win and how and that is everyone's responsibility at every stage site reliability engineering or sorry, is a discipline job and approach for good reason. It is absolutely critical that applications and services work as expected. Most of the time. That said, availability is often mistakenly treated as a synonym for reliability. Instead, it's a single aspect of the concept if a system is available but customer data is inaccurate or out of sync. The system is not reliable, reliability has five key components, availability, latency, throughput. Fidelity and durability, reliability is the end result. But resiliency for me is the journey the action engineers can take to improve reliability, observe ability is the ability to have insight into an application or system. It's the combination of telemetry and monitoring and alerting available to engineers and leadership. There's an aspect of observe ability that overlaps with reliability, but the purpose of observe ability isn't just to maintain a reliable system though, that is of course important. It is the capacity for engineers working on a system to have visibility into the inner workings of that system. The concept of observe ability actually originates and linear dynamic systems. It's defined as how well internal states of a system can be understood based on information about its external outputs. If it is critical when companies move systems to the cloud or utilize managed services that they don't lose visibility and confidence in their systems. The shared responsibility model of cloud storage compute and managed services require that engineering teams be able to quickly be alerted to identify and remediate issues as they arise. Flexible systems are capable of adapting to meet the ever changing needs of the customer and the market segment, flexible code bases absorb new code smoothly. Embody a clean separation of concerns. Are partitioned into small components or classes and architected to enable the now as well as the next inflexible systems. Change dependencies are reduced or eliminated. Database schemas accommodate change well components, communicate via a standardized and well documented A. P. I. The only thing constant in our industry is change and every role we play, creating flexibility and solutions that can be flexible that will grow as the applications grow is absolutely critical. Finally, scalability scalability refers to more than a system's ability to scale for additional load. It implies growth scalability and the revolution model carries the continuous innovation of a team and the byproducts of that growth within a system. For me, scalability is the most human of the considerations. It requires each of us in our various roles to consider everyone around us, our customers who use the system or rely on its services, our colleagues current and future with whom we collaborate and even our future selves. Mhm. Software development isn't a straight line, nor is it a perfect loop. It is an ever changing complex dance. There are twirls and pivots and difficult spins forward and backward. Engineers move in parallel, creating truly magnificent pieces of art. We need a modern model for this modern era and I believe this is just the revolution to get us started. Thank you so much for having me. >>Hey, we're back here. Live in the keynote studio. I'm john for your host here with lisa martin. David lot is getting ready for the fireside chat ending keynote with the practitioner. Hello! Fresh without data mesh lisa Emily is amazing. The funky artwork there. She's amazing with the talk. I was mesmerized. It was impressive. >>The revolution of devops and the creative element was a really nice surprise there. But I love what she's doing. She's challenging the status quo. If we've learned nothing in the last year and a half, We need to challenge the status quo. A model from the 1960s that is no longer linear. What she's doing is revolutionary. >>And we hear this all the time. All the cube interviews we do is that you're seeing the leaders, the SVP's of engineering or these departments where there's new new people coming in that are engineering or developers, they're playing multiple roles. It's almost a multidisciplinary aspect where you know, it's like going into in and out burger in the fryer later and then you're doing the grill, you're doing the cashier, people are changing roles or an architect, their test release all in one no longer departmental, slow siloed groups. >>She brought up a great point about persona is that we no longer fit into these buckets. That the changing roles. It's really the driver of how we should be looking at this. >>I think I'm really impressed, really bold idea, no brainer as far as I'm concerned, I think one of the things and then the comments were off the charts in a lot of young people come from discord servers. We had a good traction over there but they're all like learning. Then you have the experience, people saying this is definitely has happened and happening. The dominoes are falling and they're falling in the direction of modernization. That's the key trend speed. >>Absolutely with speed. But the way that Emily is presenting it is not in a brash bold, but it's in a way that makes great sense. The way that she creatively visually lined out what she was talking about Is amenable to the folks that have been doing this for since the 60s and the new folks now to really look at this from a different >>lens and I think she's a great setup on that lightning top of the 15 companies we got because you think about sis dig harness. I white sourced flamingo hacker one send out, I oh, okay. Thought spot rock set Sarah Ops ramp and Ops Monte cloud apps, sani all are doing modern stuff and we talked to them and they're all on this new wave, this monster wave coming. What's your observation when you talk to these companies? >>They are, it was great. I got to talk with eight of the 15 and the amount of acceleration of innovation that they've done in the last 18 months is phenomenal obviously with the power and the fuel and the brand reputation of aws but really what they're all facilitating cultural shift when we think of devoPS and the security folks. Um, there's a lot of work going on with ai to an automation to really kind of enabled to develop the develops folks to be in control of the process and not have to be security experts but ensuring that the security is baked in shifting >>left. We saw that the chat room was really active on the security side and one of the things I noticed was not just shift left but the other groups, the security groups and the theme of cultural, I won't say war but collision cultural shift that's happening between the groups is interesting because you have this new devops persona has been around Emily put it out for a while. But now it's going to the next level. There's new revolutions about a mindset, a systems mindset. It's a thinking and you start to see the new young companies coming out being funded by the gray locks of the world who are now like not going to be given the we lost the top three clouds one, everything. there's new business models and new technical architecture in the cloud and that's gonna be jerry Chen talk coming up next is going to be castles in the clouds because jerry chant always talked about moats, competitive advantage and how moats are key to success to guard the castle. And then we always joke, there's no more moz because the cloud has killed all the boats. But now the motor in the cloud, the castles are in the cloud, not on the ground. So very interesting thought provoking. But he's got data and if you look at the successful companies like the snowflakes of the world, you're starting to see these new formations of this new layer of innovation where companies are growing rapidly, 98 unicorns now in the cloud. Unbelievable, >>wow, that's a lot. One of the things you mentioned, there's competitive advantage and these startups are all fueled by that they know that there are other companies in the rear view mirror right behind them. If they're not able to work as quickly and as flexibly as a competitor, they have to have that speed that time to market that time to value. It was absolutely critical. And that's one of the things I think thematically that I saw along the eighth sort of that I talked to is that time to value is absolutely table stakes. >>Well, I'm looking forward to talking to jerry chan because we've talked on the queue before about this whole idea of What happens when winner takes most would mean the top 3, 4 cloud players. What happens? And we were talking about that and saying, if you have a model where an ecosystem can develop, what does that look like and back in 2013, 2014, 2015, no one really had an answer. Jerry was the only BC. He really nailed it with this castles in the cloud. He nailed the idea that this is going to happen. And so I think, you know, we'll look back at the tape or the videos from the cube, we'll find those cuts. But we were talking about this then we were pontificating and riffing on the fact that there's going to be new winners and they're gonna look different as Andy Jassy always says in the cube you have to be misunderstood if you're really going to make something happen. Most of the most successful companies are misunderstood. Not anymore. The cloud scales there. And that's what's exciting about all this. >>It is exciting that the scale is there, the appetite is there the appetite to challenge the status quo, which is right now in this economic and dynamic market that we're living in is there's nothing better. >>One of the things that's come up and and that's just real quick before we bring jerry in is automation has been insecurity, absolutely security's been in every conversation, but automation is now so hot in the sense of it's real and it's becoming part of all the design decisions. How can we automate can we automate faster where the keys to automation? Is that having the right data, What data is available? So I think the idea of automation and Ai are driving all the change and that's to me is what these new companies represent this modern error where AI is built into the outcome and the apps and all that infrastructure. So it's super exciting. Um, let's check in, we got jerry Chen line at least a great. We're gonna come back after jerry and then kick off the day. Let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there. He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey, congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, Well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of workout out either. Not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time. But you've been on this for a while. It's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research to come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, the new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is, how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow, Like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all? Winner take most And if it is winner take most, where are the white spaces for Some starts to to emerge and clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey, we've seen big companies, data breaks, snowflakes, elastic Mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is, you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers, Amazon google and Azure winning. You know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors, but there are like 500 plus um startups competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska, Mongo Snowflake. No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the moats being on land. But now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um, new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before. Not just from the cloud players but From companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets you, I think you call 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of a sub market, which means that there's like we used to call it white space back in the day, remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud, there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did. We downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right? And you know what as recalls a database or database service like a document DB and amazon is like Cosmo dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples # one number two is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know you and I can rock right. That's what amazon Azure and google think about. It is very different and the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle is a single database for all your needs. They're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um analytics, databases. We're talking rocks at later today. Right. Um uh, document databases like Mongo search database like elastic. And so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market And 30, 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good news is for a start up you can find plenty of white speeds solving a pain point, very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up to power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services, but also there's big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition >>literally you >>get Snowflake has created like a storm, create a hole, that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set do your real time analytics is Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, to your parallel argument. Even the big optic snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like me and >>you. And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase. Um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud you if you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented so a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that. And just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills. They're still there. So again, repatriation comes back, That's a big conversation that's come up. What's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation. The other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud so that I think has been going for the past eight years, there's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not the repatriation of my own data center, which is kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS east or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud. The excellent cloud. The of the $38 billion invested this quarter. Um Ai and ml number one, um analytics. Number two, security number three. Actually, security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud. You could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property. It's a protocol >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I. P. So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because of powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data, that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business, then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. We're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh No, you put it out there. Great love the restart. Think you're on point on this one. Where did we go from here? >>We have to follow pieces um in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon and how that's been a powerful strategy a second. Is this kind of just aggregation of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, where were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022. We'll see the difference were the more unicorns were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all of this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff and, and congratulations on the southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns. Congratulations that. Great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on and congratulations you nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for sharing. >>Thanks john thanks for having us. >>Okay. Okay. This is the cube here and 81 startup showcase. We're about to get going in on all the hot companies closing out the kino lisa uh, see jerry Chen cube alumni. He was right from day one. We've been riffing on this, but he nails it here. I think Greylock is lucky to have him as a general partner. He's done great deals, but I think he's hitting the next wave big. This is, this is huge. >>I was listening to you guys talking thinking if if you had a crystal ball back in 2013, some of the things Jerry saying now his narrative now, what did he have a crystal >>ball? He did. I mean he could be a cuBA host and I could be a venture capital. We were both right. I think so. We could have been, you know, doing that together now and all serious now. He was right. I mean, we talked off camera about who's the next amazon who's going to challenge amazon and Andy Jassy was quoted many times in the queue by saying, you know, he was surprised that it took so long for people to figure out what they were doing. Okay, jerry was that VM where he had visibility into the cloud. He saw amazon right away like we did like this is a winning formula and so he was really out front on this one. >>Well in the investments that they're making in these unicorns is exciting. They have this, this lens that they're able to see the opportunities there almost before anybody else can. And finding more white space where we didn't even know there was any. >>Yeah. And what's interesting about the report I'm gonna dig into and I want to get to him while he's on camera because it's a great report, but He says it's like 500 services I think Amazon has 5000. So how you define services as an interesting thing and a lot of amazon services that they have as your doesn't have and vice versa, they do call that out. So I find the report interesting. It's gonna be a feature game in the future between clouds the big three. They're gonna say we do this, you're starting to see the formation, Google's much more developer oriented. Amazon is much more stronger in the governance area with data obviously as he pointed out, they have such experience Microsoft, not so much their developer cloud and more office, not so much on the government's side. So that that's an indicator of my, my opinion of kind of where they rank. So including the number one is still amazon web services as your long second place, way behind google, right behind Azure. So we'll see how the horses come in, >>right. And it's also kind of speaks to the hybrid world in which we're living the hybrid multi cloud world in which many companies are living as companies to not just survive in the last year and a half, but to thrive and really have to become data companies and leverage that data as a competitive advantage to be able to unlock the value of it. And a lot of these startups that we talked to in the showcase are talking about how they're helping organizations unlock that data value. As jerry said, it is the new oil, it's the new gold. Not unless you can unlock that value faster than your competition. >>Yeah, well, I'm just super excited. We got a great day ahead of us with with all the cots startups. And then at the end day, Volonte is gonna interview, hello, fresh practitioners, We're gonna close it out every episode now, we're going to do with the closing practitioner. We try to get jpmorgan chase data measures. The hottest area right now in the enterprise data is new competitive advantage. We know that data workflows are now intellectual property. You're starting to see data really factoring into these applications now as a key aspect of the competitive advantage and the value creation. So companies that are smart are investing heavily in that and the ones that are kind of slow on the uptake are lagging the market and just trying to figure it out. So you start to see that transition and you're starting to see people fall away now from the fact that they're not gonna make it right, You're starting to, you know, you can look at look at any happens saying how much ai is really in there. Real ai what's their data strategy and you almost squint through that and go, okay, that's gonna be losing application. >>Well the winners are making it a board level conversation >>And security isn't built in. Great to have you on this morning kicking it off. Thanks John Okay, we're going to go into the next set of the program at 10:00 we're going to move into the breakouts. Check out the companies is three tracks in there. We have an awesome track on devops pure devops. We've got the data and analytics and we got the cloud management and just to run down real quick check out the sis dig harness. Io system is doing great, securing devops harness. IO modern software delivery platform, White Source. They're preventing and remediating the rest of the internet for them for the company's that's a really interesting and lumbago, effortless acres land and monitoring functions, server list super hot. And of course hacker one is always great doing a lot of great missions and and bounties you see those success continue to send i O there in Palo alto changing the game on data engineering and data pipe lining. Okay. Data driven another new platform, horizontally scalable and of course thought spot ai driven kind of a search paradigm and of course rock set jerry Chen's companies here and press are all doing great in the analytics and then the cloud management cost side 80 operations day to operate. Ops ramps and ops multi cloud are all there and sunny, all all going to present. So check them out. This is the Cubes Adria's startup showcase episode three.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston AKA the Storage Alchemist shared a story with me and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4,000 BC the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens or either data would remain secure with an accurate record, let's call it quasi immutable and lived in a clay vault. Since that time, we've seen quite an evolution in data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data, backing data up during most of the mainframe era and that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, Recovery Time Objective and RPO, Recovery Point Objective, and just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000s data reduction made displace backup more popular and push tape into an archive last resort media data domain then EMC now Dell still sell many purpose built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc base. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute i.e backup. And we saw the rise of Veeam, the cleverly named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera but more recently cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against ransomware attacks as the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds that's according to a recent study by HashiCorp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing they're either building out or they're buying, really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So, what this does, the good news is it simplifies provisioning and management but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data, these challenges fundamentally become data problems in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing, I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections these are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable and as clouds expand rapidly data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers, as you can see we projected they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021, that's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80 plus billion dollars in revenue but a 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in CapEx. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date legacy vendors and their surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud, "Oh, not everything is going to move to the cloud, it's not a zero sum game we here." And while that's all true the narrative was really kind of a defense posture and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna's comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective. HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on theCUBE by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. >> Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a Telco cloud, a hybrid cloud, multicloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud, cloud. Yet, they'll all be there, but it's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything. >> Okay, so in my view, Michael nailed it, the cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy and you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big, right? He said enables everything. What he's basically saying is that, technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we've seen with the pandemic there's an acceleration toward digital and that has caused an escalation if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds, you've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, really those big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all over the place, but multicloud to that HashiCorp data point, 75, 76%, and then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare-metal, you can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement and you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, Personally Identifiable Information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, it abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models things like Graviton and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no, it actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services and it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity and all this is automated and orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gapped if you will, otherwise, you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach, not a bolt on it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this, again, we come back to the skills gap if were seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers, not public cloud providers, people are concerned about lock-in and that's really not their role. They're not high touch services company, probably not your technology arms dealer, excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here and dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston shared with me, it's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panama Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y-axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now it's interesting, the top two are compromised credentials and fishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many and specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide looks so cluttered. So it's a huge challenge for companies, and that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the SolarWinds hack have made trust the number one issue for CEOs and CSOs and boards of directors, shifting CSO spending patterns are clear. Shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, Crowdstrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind and robust solutions are required and that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3-2-1, or maybe it's 3-2-1-1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gapped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. Customers as I said earlier, increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap and that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration I'll emphasize on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often, it's a X, Y axis, and the Y-axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum and the horizontal axis is market share. Now market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set, think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide in the storage category, there is no data protection or backup category so what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Notice that red line, that red line is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated, you can see only rubric in the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still rubric is the only one. Now look at Cohesity and rubric in the January, 2020. So last year pre-pandemic Cohesity and Rubrik they've come well off their peaks for net score. Look at Veeam, Veeam having studied this data for the last say 24 plus months, Veeam has been Steady Eddie. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end so it's coming up in the survey, customers are mentioning Veeam and it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line but it's hovering just below consistently, that's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions, he did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched metallic that's driving cloud affinity within a Commvault large customer base so it's a good example of a legacy player, pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas continues to underperform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's say add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Okay, this previous slide I isolated on the pure plays, but this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be, probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course and you could see the spending momentum in accordingly. So you could see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity, but still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two when you're 20 plus, 15 plus, 25 plus you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam again is very impressive. Its net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small but it's improving relative to last several surveys and we talked about Commvault. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now and that's the renaissance that's coming in compute. Now we all know about Moore's law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months and that leads to a doubling of performance in that time frame. X86, that X86 curve is in the blue and if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is a representative of Apple's A series culminating in the A-15 most recently, the A series is what Apple is now... It's the technology basis for what's inside, and one the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that orange line there we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's law is waning in one sense so we wrote a piece Moore's law is not dead so I'm sort of contradicting myself there, but the traditional Moore's law curve on X86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s, but look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine the CPU, the NPU, which is the neural processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at a 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there you see in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases Apple is an example but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS Graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out Graviton and Nitro that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years Whereas the Intel cycles we know they've been running it four to five years now, maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those, but Intel is behind. So, organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection? I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential compute architecture, and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero Trust is the new mandate and what Arm has done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in separate from the OS. Remember the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign even though it's anything but. So in this architecture, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture so there's protection throughout if you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to on-prem and the cloud you've got that end-to-end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in the cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and is a better architectural construct to support Zero Trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, head of Intel in our view. So you got to pay attention to that, research that, we're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture or ideally the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat you're even in a better place to do it now, you don't have to solve it yourself, you can't and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Or you can reach me at dvellante on Twitter, email me at Dave.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is braking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years, literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts, and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston, AKA the Storage Alchemist, shared a story with me, and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4000 BC, the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now, they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens, i.e the data, would remain secure with an accurate record that was, let's call it quasi, immutable, and lived in a clay vault. And since that time, we've seen quite an evolution of data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data and backing data up during most of the mainframe era. And that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, recovery time objective and RPO recovery point objective. And just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000's data reduction made disk-based backup more popular and pushed tape into an archive last resort media. Data Domain, then EMC, now Dell still sell many purpose-built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc-based. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies, as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute, i.e, backup. And we saw the rise of Veem, the cleverly-named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now, the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance, latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera. But more recently, cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against attacks is the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape, or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds, that's according to a recent study by Hashi Corp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE, and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address, given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing, they're either building out or they're buying really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So what this does... The good news is it's simplifies provisioning and management, but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data. These challenges fundamentally become data problems, in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing. I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections. These are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros, and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable. And as clouds span rapidly, data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly-expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers. As you can see, we projected that they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021. That's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80-plus billion dollars in revenue, but 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in cap ex. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date, legacy vendors and the surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud. Oh, not everything's going to move to the cloud. It's not a zero sum game we hear. And while that's all true, the narrative was really kind of a defensive posture, and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective, HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on the queue by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. So in my view, Michael nailed it. The cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy. And you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big. He said, "Enables everything." He's basically saying is that technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we all know, we've seen with the pandemic, there's an acceleration in toward digital, and that has caused an escalation, if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds. You've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba. Really those are the big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all their place. But multi-cloud, to that Hashi Corp data point, 75, 70 6%. And then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud, if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud, it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare metal. You can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement. And you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, personally identifiable information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models, things like graviton, and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no. It actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services. And it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity. And all this is automated and an orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air-gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gaped, if you will. Otherwise, (laughs) you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach. Not a bolt on, it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges, but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this. Again, we come back to the skill skills gap if we're seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers. Not public cloud providers. People are concerned about lock-in, and that's really not their role. They're not high-touch services company. Probably not your technology arms dealer, (clear throat) excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here, dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston, shared with me. It's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panmore Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now, it's interesting. The top two compromise credentials and phishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many. And specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide, looks so cluttered. So there's a huge challenge for companies. And that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the solar winds hack have made trust the number one issue for CIOs and CISOs and boards of directors. Shifting CISO spending patterns are clear. They're shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security, identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing. And that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind, and robust solutions are required. And that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however, to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3, 2, 1, or maybe it's 3, 2, 1, 1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gaped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. And customers, as I said earlier, are increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap. And that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration, I'll emphasize, on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often. It's a X-Y axis. And the Y axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is market share. Now, market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set. Think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide, in the storage category. There is no data protection or backup category. So what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Now notice that red line, that red is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated. And you can see only Rubrik, and the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still, Rubrik is the only one. Now, look at Cohesity and Rubrik in the January 2020. So last year, pre-pandemic, Cohesity and Rubrik, they've come well off their peak for net score. Look at Veeam. Veeam, having studied this data for the last say 24 hours months, Veeam has been steady Eddy. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end, so it's coming up in the survey. Customers are mentioning Veeam. And it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line, but it's hovering just below consistently. That's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions. He did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched Metallic, that's driving cloud affinity within Commvault's large customer base. So it's good example of a legacy player pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas, it continues to under perform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Just previous slide, I isolated on the pure plays. But this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be. Probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course. And you could see the spending momentum accordingly. So you can see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So some smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity. But still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two. When you're 20-plus, 15-plus 25-plus, you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam, again, is very impressive. It's net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small, but it's improving relative to last several surveys. And we talked about Convolt. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now. And that's the Renaissance that's coming in compute. Now, we all know about Moore's Law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months. And that leads to a doubling of performance in that timeframe. X86, that x86 curve is in the blue. And if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is representative of Apples A series, culminating in the A15, most recently. The A series is what Apple is now... Well, it's the technology basis for what's inside M1, the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that that orange line there, we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's Law is waning in one sense, so we wrote a piece Moore's Law is not dead. So I'm sort of contradicting myself there. But the traditional Moore's Law curve on x86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s. But look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine then the CPU, the NPU, which neuro processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring, and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there, and you're seeing this in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases, Apple is an example, but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out graviton and nitro, that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years. Whereas the Intel cycles, we know, they've been running it four to five years now. Maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those. But Intel is behind. So organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection. I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential, compute architecture and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero trust is the new mandate. And what Arm has it's done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in, separate from the OS. Remember, the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access, and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign, even though it's anything but. So in this, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture. So there's protection throughout. If you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to the on-prem or the cloud, you've got that end to end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in a cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and it's a better architectural construct to support zero trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors, you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, ahead of Intel, in our view. So you've got to pay attention to that, research that. We're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture. Or ideally, the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life, he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat, you're even in a better place to do it now. You don't have to solve it yourself, you can't, and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm. I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Braking Analysis Podcast. I publish weekly on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter, email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to eigth automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Damum meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God mighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Domuo meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God almighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube Coverage of eight of us reinvent 2020 Virtual. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Normally we're in person this year. It's a virtual event. It is reinvent and cube virtual here. We got great interview here. Segment with VM ware and A W s. Two great guests. Keep both Cube alumni. Marc Lemire, senior vice president, general manager, The Cloud Services Business Unit VM Ware and Dave Brown, Vice president Elastic Compute Cloud easy to from Amazon Web services Gentlemen, great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Great. Thank you. Good to be back. >>Thanks. Great to be back. >>So you know, Dave, we love having you on because ec2 obviously is the core building block of a device. Once the power engine, it's the core product. And Mark, we were just talking a few months ago at VM World of momentum you guys have had on the business front. It's even mawr accelerated with co vid on the pandemic. Give us the update The partnership three years ago when Pat and Andy in San Francisco announced the partnership has been nothing but performance. Business performance, technical integration. Ah, lots happened. What's the update here for reinvent? >>Yeah, I guess the first thing I would say is look, you know, the partnership has has never been stronger. You know, as you said, uh, we announced the partnership and delivered the initial service three years ago. And I think since then, both companies have really been focused on innovating rapidly on behalf of our customers bringing together the best of the VM, or portfolio, and the best of, you know, the entire AWS. A set of capabilities. And so we've been incredibly pleased to be able to deliver those that value to our joint customers. And we look forward to continue to work very closely together. You know, across all aspects of our two companies toe continue to deliver more and more value to our joint customers. >>Well, I want to congratulate you guys at VM where, you know, we've been following that story from day one. I let a lot of people skeptical on the partnership. We were pretty bullish on it. We saw the value. It's been just been great Synergy day. I want to get your thoughts because, you know, I've always been riffing about enabling technologies and and the way it works is enabling technologies. Allow your partners to make more money, too. Right? So you guys do that with the C two, and I know that for a fact because we're doing well with our virtual event cloud, but are easy to bills are up, but who cares? We're doing well. This is the trend you guys are enabling partners, and VM Ware in particular, has a lot of customers that are on AWS. What's your perspective on all this? >>You know the part. The part maker system is so important for us, right? And we get from our customers. We have many customers who, you know, use VM ware in their own environment. They've been using it for years and years, um, true for many other software applications as well and other technologies. Andi, when they moved to AWS there very often. When you use those tools on those services on AWS is well and so you know, we we partner with many, many, many, many companies, and so it's a high priority for us. The VM Ware partnership, I think, is being sort of role model for us in terms of, you know, sitting out outside Sana goal back in 2016. I think it waas and, you know, delivering on that. Then continue to innovate on features over the last three years listening to our customers, bringing larger customers on board, giving them more advanced networking features, improving. You know that the instance types of being whereas utilizing to deliver value to their customers and most recently, obviously, with Outpost AWS outposts and parking with VM ware on VM are enabled outposts and bringing that to our customers and their own data centers. So we see the whole partner ecosystem is critically important. Way were spent a lot of time with VM and other partners on something that our customers really value. >>Mark, I want to get your thoughts on this because I was just riffing with Day Volonte about this. Um, heightened awareness with that covert 19 in the pandemic has kind of created, which is an accelerant of the value. And one >>of the >>things that's a parent is when you have this software driven and software defined kind of environment, whether it's in space or on premise or in the cloud. Um, it's the software that's driving everything, but you have to kind of components. You have the how do you operate something, And then how does the software works? So you know, it's the hand in the glove operators and software in the cloud really is becoming kind of the key things. You guys have been very successful as a company with I t operations, and now you're moving into the cloud. Can you share your thoughts on how VM Ware cloud on AWS takes that next level for your customers? So I think that's a key point that needs to be called that. What's your What's your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, and I think, you know, look, every company is on a journey to transform the level of capability they're able to offer to their customers and their employees, right? And a big part of that is how do they modernize their application environment? How do they how do they deliver new applications and services? And so this has been underway for for a while now. But if if anything, I think Cove, it has only accelerated. Um, the need for customers to be able to continue to go down that path. And so, you know, between VM ware in AWS, um, you know, we're looking to provide those customers a platform that allows them to accelerate their path to application, modernization and new services and capabilities. And, um, you know, Dave talked about the ecosystem and the importance of the ecosystem that AWS and I think you know, together. What we've been able to do if you sort of think about it, is, you know, bringing together this rich set of VM Ware services and capabilities. Um, that we've talked about before, as well as new VM Ware capabilities, for example, the ability to enable kubernetes based applications and services on top of this Corby, um or platform with Tan Xue. Right. So customers can get access to all of that is they go down this modernization path. But, you know, right next door in the same ese is 375 native AWS services that they can use together in conjunction, uh, with that environment. And so if you think about accelerating that journey right Being ableto rapidly migrate those VM ware based workloads into the AWS cloud. When you're in the AWS cloud, be able to modernize that environment using the VM Ware Tansu capability, the native AWS services and then the infrastructure that needs to come together to make that possible, for example, the network connectivity that needs to be enabled, um, to take advantage of some of those services together. Um, you know, we're really we're trying to accelerate our delivery of those capabilities so that we can help our customers accelerate the delivery of that application value thio to their customers. >>David want to get your thoughts on the trends If you speak to the customers out there at VM Ware, customers that are on the cloud because you know the sphere, for instance, very popular on the Ws Cloud with VM Ware Cloud as well as these new modern application trends like Tan Xue, Project Monterey is coming around the corner that was announced that VM world what trends do you see from the two perspective that you could share to the VM ware eight of his customers? What's the key wave right now that they should be riding on. >>Yeah, I think a few things, you know, we definitely are seeing an acceleration in customers Looking Thio looking to utilize humor on AWS You know, there was a lot of interest early on, really, over the last year, I think we've seen 140% growth in the service, which has been incredibly exciting for both of us and really shows that we we're providing customers with the service that works. You know, I think one of the key things that Mark called out just talking previously was just how simple it is for customers to move. You know, often moving to the cloud gets muddled with modernization, and it takes a long time because customers to kind of think about how do they actually make this move? Or are they stuck within their own facility on data center or they need to modernize? We moved to a different hyper visor with PM on AWS. You literally get that same environment on AWS, and so whether it's a a migration because you want to move out of your on premise facility, whether it's a migration because you want to grow and expand your facility without needing to. You know, build more data centers yourself Whether you're looking to build a d. R site on AWS on whether you looking just, you know, maybe build a new applications tank that you wanna build in a modern way, you know, using PMR in Tanzania and all the AWS services, all of those a positive we're seeing from customers. Um, you know, I think I think as the customers grow, the demand for features on being were in AWS grows as well. And we put out a number of important features to support customers that really, really large scale. And that's something that's being exciting. It's just some of the scale that we're seeing from very, very large being, we customers moving over to AWS. And so I think you know a key messages. If you have a Vienna installation today and you're thinking about moving to the cloud, it's really a little that needs to stop you in starting to move. It is is very simple to set up, and very little you have to do to your application stack to actually move it over. >>Mark, that's a great point. I want to get your thoughts on that in reaction toe. What? Dave just said Because this is kind of what you guys had said many years ago and also a VM world when we were chatting, disrupting operations just to stand up the clubs shouldn't be in place. It should be easy on you. Heard what Dave said. It's like you got >>a >>lot of cultures that are operating large infrastructure and they want to move to the cloud. But they got a mandate toe make everything. Is a services more cloud native coming. So, yeah, you gotta check off the VM where boxes and keep things running. But you gotta add more modern tooling mawr application pressure there. So there's a lot of pressure from the business units and the business models to say We gotta take advantage of the modern applications. How do you How do you look at that? >>Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think Look, making this a simple is possible is obviously a really important aspect of what we're trying Thio enable for our customers. Also, I think the speed is important, right? How you know, how can we enable them? Thio accelerate their ability to move to the cloud, but then also accelerate their ability Thio, um, deliver new services and capabilities that will differentiate their business. And then how do we, uh, kind of take some of the heavy lifting off the customers plate in terms of what it actually takes to operate and run the infrastructure and do so in a highly available way that they could depend upon for their business? And of course, delivering that full capabilities of service is a big part of that. You know, one of my when my favorite customer examples eyes a company called Stage Coach, uh, European based transportation company. And they run a network of Busses and trains, etcetera, and they actually decided to use VM. Tosto run one of their most mission critical applications, which is involved with basically scheduling, scheduling those systems right in the people that they know, the bus drivers in the train conductors etcetera. And so if you think about that application right, its's a mission critical application for them. It's also one that they need to be able to iterate involved and improve very quickly, and they were able to take advantage of a number of fairly unique capabilities of the joint service we built together to make that possible. Um, you know, the first thing that they did is they took advantage of something called stretch clusters. The M we're cloud on AWS stretch clusters Where, uh, we basically take that VM Ware environment and we stretch it. We stretch the network across to aws availability zones in the same region, Onda. Then they could basically run their applications on top of that that environment. And this is a really powerful capability because it ensures the highest levels of s L. A. For that application for four nines. In this case, if anything happens, Thio fail in one of those, uh, Aziz, we can automatically fail over and restart the application in the second ese on DSO provides this high level of availability, but they're also able to take advantage of that without on day one. Talk about keeping it simple without on day one, requiring any changes to the application of myself because that application knew how to work in the sphere. And so you know that I work in the sphere in the cloud and it can fail over on the sphere in the cloud on dso they were able to get there quickly. They're able Thio enable that application and now they're taking the next step. Which is how do I enhance and make that application even better, you know, leveraging some of the VM or capabilities also looking to take advantage of some of the native AWS capabilities. So I think that sort of speed, um you know that simplicity that helps helps customers down that path to delivering more value to their employees and their customers. That and we're really excited that were ableto offer that your customers >>just love the philosophy that both companies work back from the customer customer driven kind of mentality certainly key here to this partnership, and you can see the performance. But I think one of the differentiations that I love is that join integration thing engineering that you guys were doing together. I think that's a super valuable, differentiated VM where Dave, this is a key part of the relationship. You know, when I talked to Pat Gelsinger and and again back three years ago and he had Raghu from VM, Ware was like, This is different engineering together. What's your perspective from the West side when someone says, Yeah. Is that Riel? You know, it is easy to really kind of tied in there and his Amazon really doing joint engineering. What do you say to that? >>Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's very real. I mean, it's been an incredible, incredible journey together, Right? Right, Right from the start, we were trying to work out how to do this back in 2016. You know, we were using some very new technology back then that we hadn't honestly released yet. Uh, the nitrous system, right? We started working with family and the nitrous system back in late 2016, and we only launched our first nitrous system enabled instance that reinvent 2017. And so we were, you know, for a year having being a run on the nitrous system, internally making sure that, you know, we would support their application and that VM Ware ran well on BC around. Well, on aws on, that's been ongoing. And, you know, the other thing I really enjoy about the relationship is learning how to best support each other's customers on on AWS and being where, and Mark is talking about stretch clusters and are being whereas, you know, utilizing the availability zones. We've done other things in terms of optimizing placement with across, you know, physical reaction in data centers. You know, Mark and the team have put forward requirements around, you know, different instance types and how they should perform invest in the Beamer environment. We've taken that back into our instance type definition and what we've released there. So it happens in a very, very low level. And I think it's both teams working together frequently, lots of meetings and then, you know, pushing each other. You know, honestly. And I think for the best experience or at the end of the day, for our joint customers. So it's been a great relationship. >>It helps when both companies are very fluent technically and pushing the envelope with technology. Both cultures, I know personally, are very strong technically, but they also customer centric. Uhm, Mark, I gotta put you on the spot on this question because this comes up every year this year more than ever. Um, is the question around VM ware on A W S and VM ware in general, and it's more of a general industry theme. But I wanna ask you because I think it relates to the US Um vm ware cloud on aws. Um, the number one question we get is how can I automate my I t operations? Because it's kind of a no brainer. Now it's kind of the genes out of the bottle. That's a mandate. But it's not always easy. Easy as it sounds to dio, you still got a lot to dio. Automation gets you level set to take advantage of some of these higher level services, and all customers want to get there fast. Ai i o t a lot of goodness in the cloud that you kinda gotta get there through kinda automating the based up first. So how did how are your customers? How are you guys helping customers automate their infrastructure operations? >>Yeah, I mean, Askew articulated right? This is a huge demand. The requirement from our customer base, right? Uh, long gone are the days that you wanna manually go into a u I and click around here, click there to make things happen, right? And so, um, you know, obviously, in addition to the core benefit of hey, we're delivering this whole thing is a service, and you don't have to worry about the hardware, the software, the life cycle all of that, Um you know, at a higher level of the stack, we're doing a lot of work to basically expose a very rich set of AP eyes. We actually have enabled that through something called the VM, or Cloud Developer center, where you can go and customer could go and understand all of the a p i s that we make available to that they can use to build on top of to effectively automated orchestrate their entire VM or cloud on AWS based infrastructure. And so that's an area we've we've invested a lot in. And at the end of the day, you know we want Thio. Both enable our customers to take their existing automation tooling that they might have been using on their VM ware based environment in their own data center. Obviously, all of that should continue to work is they bring that into the emcee aws. Um but now, once we're in AWS and we're delivering, this is a service in AWS. There's actually a higher level of automation, um that we can enable, and so you know everything that you can do through the VM or cloud console. Um, you can do through a P. I s So we've exposed roughly a piece that allow you to add or remove instance capacity ap eyes that allow you to configure the network FBI's that allow you toe effectively. Um, automate all aspects of sort of how you want Thio configure and pull together that infrastructure. Onda. You know, as Dave said, a lot of this, you know, came from some of those early just customer discussions where that was a very, very clear expectations. So, you know, we've we've been working hard. Thio make that possible. >>So can customers integrate native Cloud native technologies from AWS into APS running on VM ware cloud on any of us? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll give you one example for so we you know, we've been able to support for cloud formation right on top of the M C. Mehta best. And so that's, you know, one way that you can leverage these 80 best tools on top of on top of the m. C at best. Um and you know, as we talked about before, uh, you know everything on the VM ware in the VM ware service. We're exposing through those AP eyes. And then, of course, everything it best does has been built that way from the start. And so customers can work. Um, you know, seamlessly across those two environments. >>Great stuff. Great update. Final question for both of you. Uh, Dave will start with you. What's the unique advantages? When you people watching? That's gonna say, OK, I get it. I see the momentum. I've now got a thing about post pandemic growth strategies. I gotta fund the projects, so I'm either gonna retool while I'm waiting for the world to open up. Two. I got a tail wind. This is good for my business. I'm gonna take advantage of this. How do they modernize our application? What? The unique things with VM Ware Cloud on AWS. What's unique? What would you say? I >>mean, I think the big thing for me eyes the consistency, um, the other way that were built This between the the sphere on prime environment and the the sphere that you get on aws with BMC on aws. Um you know, when I think about modernization and honestly, any project that I do, we do it Amazon I don't like projects that required enormous amount of planning and then tooling. And then, you know, you've this massive waterfall stock project before you do anything meaningful. And what's so great about what we built here is you can start that migration almost immediately, start bringing a few applications over. And when you do that, you can start saying, Okay, where do we want to make improvements? But just by moving over to aws NBN were on AWS, you start to reap the benefits of being in the child right from day one. Many of the things Mark called out about infrastructure management and that sort of thing. But then you get to modernize off to that as well. And so just the richness in terms of, you know, being where a tan xue and then the you know, I think it's more than 200 AWS services. Now you get to bring all that into your application stack, but at a time at a at a at a cadence or time that really matters to you. But you could get going immediately, and I think that's the thing that customers ready need to do if you find yourself in a situation you know, with just how much the world's changed in the last year. Looking Thio. Modernize your applications deck, Looking for the cost benefits. Looking to maybe get out of the data center. Um, it's a relatively easy both forward and just put in a couple of engineers a couple of technicians on to actually starting to do the process. I think you'll be very surprised at how much progress you can actually make in a short amount of time. >>Mark, you're in charge of the Cloud Services business unit at VM Ware CPM. Where cloud on AWS successful more to do a lot of action kubernetes cloud native automation and the list goes on and on. What are the most unique advantages that you guys have? What would you say? >>Yeah, I mean, I would maybe just build on Dave's comments a bit. I think you know, if you look at it through the customer lens three ability to reiterate and the ability to move quickly and not being forced into sort of a one size fits all model, right? And so there may be certain applications that they run into VM, and they want to run into VM forever. Great. We could enable that there might be other applications that they want to move from a VM into a container, remove into kubernetes and do that in a very seamless way. And we can enable that with, uh, with Tan Xue, right? By the way, they may wanna actually many applications. They're gonna require, uh, complex composite applications that have some aspects of it running in communities, other aspects running on VMS. You know, other aspects connecting to some native AWS services. And so, you know, we could enable those types of, you know, incremental value that's delivered very, very quickly that allows them at the end of the day to move, move fast on behalf of their own customers and deliver more about it to them. So I think this this sort of philosophy, right that Dave talked about I think is is one of the really important things we've tried to focus on, um, together. But, you know, on behalf of our joint customers and you know that that sort of capabilities just gets richer and richer. Overtime right. Both of us are continuing to innovate, and both of us will continue to think about how we bring those services together as we innovate in our respective areas and how they need to link together as part of this This intense solution. Um, so, uh, you know that I think that you're gonna see us continue to invest, continue to move quickly. Um, continue to respond to what our customers together are asking us. Thio enable for them. >>Well, really appreciate the insight. Thanks for coming on this cube virtual, um, segment. Um, virtualization has hit the cube where we have multiple virtual stages out there at reinvent on the site. Obviously, it's a virtual event over three weeks, so it's a little bit not four days or three days. It's three weeks. So, um, if you're watching this, check out the site. Tons of good V o D. The executive leaderships Check out the keynotes that air there. It's awesome. Big news. Of course. Check out the cube coverage, but I have one final final question is you guys are leaders in the industry and within your companies, and we're virtual this year. You gotta manage your teams. You still gotta go to work every day. You gotta operate your business is a swell as work with customers. What have you guys learned? And can you share any, um, advice or observations of how to be effective as a leader, a za manager, and as a customer interface point for your companies? >>Well, I I think, uh, let me go first, then Mark Mark and had some things, you know, I think we're moving to certainly in the last year, specifically with covert. You know, we've we've we've just passed out. I think we just passed out seven months off, being remote now on, obviously doing reinvent as well. Um, it zits certainly taken some adjusting. I think we've done relatively well, um, with, you know, going virtual. We were well prepared at Amazon to go virtual, but from a leadership point of view, you know, making sure that you have been some positives, right? So for one, I have I have teams all over the world, and, uh, being virtually actually helped a lot with that. You know, everybody is virtually all on the same stage. It's not like we have a group of us in Seattle and a few others scattered around the world. Everybody's on the same cold now. on that has the same you know, be able to listen to in the same way. But I better think a lot about sort of just my own time. Personally, in the time that my team spends, I think it's been very easy for us. Thio run a little too hot waken start a little too early and run a little too late in the evenings on DSO, making sure that we protect that time. And then, obviously, from a customer point of view, you know, we found that customers are very willing to engage virtually as well around the world s Oh, that's something we've been able to utilize very well to continue to have. You know what we call our executive briefing center and do those sorts of things customer meetings on in some ways. You know, without the plane trip on either side to the other side of the world, you're able to do more of those and stay even more in contact with your customers. So it's been it's been a lot of adjustment for us. I think we've done well. I think you know, a zay said. We've had a look at Are we keeping it balanced because I think it's very easy to get out of balance and just from a time point of view. But I think I'm sure it'll show. It'll change again as the world goes back to normal. But in many ways, I think we've learned a lot of valuable lessons that I hope in some cases don't go away. I think well will probably be more virtual going forward. So that's what a bit of from my side >>creating. Yeah. Confronting hot people run hard. You can, you know, miss misfire on that and burnout gonna stay, Stay tuned. Mark your thoughts. Is leader customers defeating employees? Customers? >>Yeah. I mean, in many ways, I would say similar experience. I think, uh, I mean, if you sort of think back, right, uh, it's in many ways amazing that within the course of literally a week, right, I think about some of the BMR experience we went from, uh, you know, 90 95% of our employees, at least in the US, working in an office right to immediately all working from home. And, uh, you know, I think having the technology is available to make that possible and really? For the most part, without skipping a beat. Um, it is pretty pretty amazing, right? Um and then, you know, I think from a productivity perspective, in many ways, you know, it z increased productivity. Right? Um, they have mentioned the ability engage customers much more easily you think about in the past, you would have taken a flight to Europe to maybe meet with, you know, 5 to 10 customers and spent an entire week. And now you can do that in, you know, in the morning, right? Um, and the way we sort of engaged our teams, I think in many ways, um, sort of online, uh, can create a very, very rich experience, right? In a way to bring people together across many locations in a much more seamless way than if maybe part of the team is there in the office. And some other part of the team is trying toe connect in through resume or something else. A little bit of a fragmented experience. But if everyone's on the same platform, regardless of where you are e think we've seen some benefits from that. >>It's interesting. You see virtualization. What that did to the servers created cloud, you know. Hey, Productivity. >>You also have to be careful. You don't run those servers too hot. You >>gotta have a cooling. You got the cooling Eso I You know, this is really an interesting, you know, social, uh, equation Global phenomenon of productivity Cloud. Combined with this notion of virtual changes, the workloads, the work flows, the workplace and the workforce, right, The future work. So I think, you know, we're watching this closely. I know you guys have both had great success from the pandemic with this new pressure on the cloud, because it's a new model, a new way to do things, So we'll keep watching it. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for coming on and and enjoy the rest of reinvent. >>Great. Thank >>you. Great to be here. >>Okay, this the cubes coverage. I'm John for your host of Cuban, remember? Go to the reinvent site. Three weeks of great virtual content over this month, Of course. Cube coverage for three weeks. Stay tuned off. All the analysis and a lot of great thought leadership in the industry commentary. Stay with us throughout the month. Thank you. Yeah,

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and back in 2013, when it was becoming pretty obvious that the cloud was going to have a major impact on our industry, the IT industry, I wrote at the time that the way incumbents were going to have to compete was to really go into vertical markets and build ecosystems for their own clouds, and that's exactly what IBM did late last year, when it announced a major partnership with Bank of America in the financial services cloud, and guess what, Hillery Hunter is back in the house, she's the vice president and CTO of the IBM cloud, and an IBM fellow, Hillery, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks so much for having me again, always a pleasure to be here. >> So we had an awesome conversation, I think we got into the FS cloud a little bit, but as I was saying, you guys announced last year, Bank of America, but let me start here. Why does the industry need a financial services cloud? >> Yeah, you know, it's key that we ground ourselves in that question of why a financial services cloud, and I think it really goes back to the sensitivity of the workloads and the data that that industry stewards. The financial services industry stewards the data of millions and millions of customers, and they are heavily regulated because of that, and they handle very high value transactions, and being able to take that context and translate that into what does it mean to do high value transactions, sensitive data, consumer data computing, also with all those benefits of elasticity and the value proposition of different deployment locations, is really what financial cloud is about. And those needs of that industry are a little bit different, the regulations are higher, the bar and data protection is higher, and the need to interlock across workload characteristics and the cloud deployment is a bit different. And so, we are bringing what we know about that industry to bear in the context also of cloud computing. >> Okay, so you're making some new announcements, there's some hard news here, but I want to know, if you're an executive, or business leader in the financial services industry, what's in it for me in these announcements? >> Yeah, what's in it for you is that we are moving into the next phase of financial services cloud in making the policy framework that has been developed through an enormous amount of work available to additional industry participants, and we're also moving into a phase of global expansion, and so being able to take this value proposition of an end to end considered secure and confine environment for financial services, out to more players in the industry, out to additional geographies and deployment locations, it's an exciting moment because everyone's really not looking just for a cloud, but they're looking for a choice of deployment locations, they're looking to move more workload to the cloud, and this is really about providing a cloud solution that more workload can move to, not just the first couple phases of analytics and things like that, but also moving into more transformation of the core of banking and the core of banking business, so it is about getting more workload to the cloud, getting that done faster, and getting it done at a net improved security and compliance posture. >> Got it, so I want to ask you about some learnings, now you're the double whammy of learnings here. When you announced the collaboration with B of A, obviously one of the top banks of the world, you've obviously made some progress since then, but the other part of that whammy was COVID. So what did you learn from the collaboration with B of A, and have you guys, how have you expanded your thinking BC, from before COVID, versus AC, after COVID? >> Yeah, you know, the initial motivation for this program was about having trust and transparency in public cloud, and having a public cloud suited also to sensitive and even core banking workloads. We have seen this conversation and the need for it and the urgency for it only pick up since COVID. A lot of things in the world kind of took a pause, but cloud computing really accelerated. We're seeing that businesses need to digitally transform their banking, so core banking transformation is a very hot topic. They need to deal with elasticity, we worked with banks during COVID that were having to suddenly stand up their national equivalent of the Payroll Protection Program. Banks that had to suddenly have three times the elasticity, because all of a sudden consumers were interacting with them purely digitally. And cloud can enable all of those kind of things, and so COVID has really accelerated the motivation toward banking in the cloud, and also toward core banking transformation, which is at the heart of setting a very high security bar in public cloud, to be able to also enable those kind of workloads. >> Yeah, so many changes as a result of COVID, I mean the volume of loans, like you said, everything was digital. I know a lot of older people that always still like to go into the bank, that like to see people, and they knew people and people knew them, well they had no choice but to go digital, so that's huge, if you didn't have a digital solution, and cloud is fundamental in that equation. But let's get into it a little bit more. We talked a little about this at IBM Think, but what are the key attributes that make the IBM financial services cloud suitable for financial services, is it the certifications, I wonder if you could add some color there. >> Yeah, so the key elements of the financial services cloud program are number one, a policy framework, which is a set of controls that are customized to the financial services industry, so this isn't about some existing standard, this is a customization of controls and security for the financial services industry, and that's a major element of what we're announcing right now. In addition to the policy framework is also the way that the different elements of the industry and of regulatory expertise are coming together, so this cloud, and these public cloud offerings, were co-developed and co-designed with IBM Promontory, with IBM Security Services that work with banks, with our anchor partner, and moving forward, we'll be advised by an advisory council of CSOs who have that day to day experience with security and with regulations. And so that is also a very unique context for not this being just a point in time with a policy framework, but being an ongoing initiative that will stay up to date, as security concerns and as regulatory concerns change. And the third aspect is a really unique set of technologies that make all of that possible, so you have to define how the cloud is going to be secure, and then you have to actually do it, and the unique capabilities that we have in IBM public cloud that have enabled this program include a number of things, but amongst them, the industry's highest standard for data protection, with our FIPS-140-2 Level 4 based key protect service, it includes capabilities that we'll be releasing through our acquisition of Spanugo around cloud security and compliance posture management, mapped back to that context of financial services. And so it's really three things, it's a policy framework custom and optimized for the financial services industry, the forward evolution of that through industry expertise, and participation of multi parties in that, and then core technologies that enable folks to accomplish that security posture through data protection, through cloud security posture management, et cetera. >> I forgot about the Promontory, you guys made that acquisition several years ago, that's a nice little feature of the FS cloud. But I want to ask, how hard is it to get these certifications? I mean it's obviously not a layup. Lot of work, lot of time, my reason of my question, is this a moat for you, as you guys start to scale? How difficult is it? >> Yeah, so we have been putting in the time and effort, and so that's why this is an exciting moment for us with the initial work product of this effort. And so our intention really is not for that to be a moat, but for us having traversed the moat, to now have a bridge there through the methodology that we built, through the control framework that we built, for others to now get across that moat. And so this is really about taking what is an extensive amount of work, and an extensive amount of expertise, IBM Promontory, you just mentioned, but they monitor over 70 regulatory obligations in over 20 jurisdictions globally, right? I mean this is a tremendous depth of expertise, and so having crossed the moat, and having built the bridge across it, this is where we can then help others to save time in this process of adopting public cloud for further workloads. >> You've mentioned workloads, you've talked about core financial workloads, but maybe give us a little insight on what type of workloads are the most suitable for the financial services cloud, because let's face it, most of the hardcore mission-critical workloads haven't moved, actually probably none of 'em have moved to the cloud, you kind of referenced that before. Ginni Rometty talks about that all the time. But what are the right workload strategic fits for your cloud? >> Yeah, you know you mentioned Ginni Rometty, and so I'll take a quick note there from some of the language that you'll hear her use, she talks about, there was chapter one of the cloud journey, and stuff that was on less sensitive data, analytics, some things on public information, were certainly done, also in finance and also in regulated industries in the cloud. And she talks about chapter two, chapter two being mission-critical workloads. And this program really is the definition of chapter two for the financial services industry. It is the enabling expertise, the enabling control set, the enabling security technologies, the enabling cloud services, for that chapter two, right, for that next layer of adoption of things that had been kept behind the firewall, had been kept in a private cloud context, can now be considered also for public cloud. And so easing that adoption, streamlining that process, et cetera, is really what we're looking to accomplish. >> I mean obviously IBM, huge presence in the banking community, is this really for just big banks? What about the ecosystem, what do you got in there for ISVs and SaaS providers? >> Yeah, you know, you asked me a question at the beginning here about COVID and what's happened, and I think, the transformation of ISV providers to become SaaS providers, the expansion of their capabilities being needed in payments and digital client experiences and such, also for regionals and second and third tier banking institutions and such, is as much of what is happening right now as anything else, amongst the first tiers, because there's just as much pressure for transformation and digital consumer experience, and other things like that, also in the regionals and second and third tiers. So part of our announcement is around the ecosystem of partners that we have now for the financial services cloud program. And that includes ISVs and SaaS providers that are servicing many different types of needs of institutions large and small, so we're seeing those that are servicing core banking, and payments, those that are servicing analytics use cases for this industry, and even HR function, just because of that concern about stewarding data well for these industries and those first tier banks, and so that transition to digital, that drive to infuse AI capabilities, the need to transform core banking, is something that's very much also happening within the ISV and SaaS providers, and we're thrilled with the wide variety of partner base that we're seeing develop there within our ecosystem for this program. >> I was talking to a CIO friend of mine several years ago, and he said to me, "You know, this idea of lifting and shifting, "it's fine, you get little cost savings, maybe, "but unless you change your operating model "and you drive an innovation agenda, "you really aren't going to get the type "of telephone number returns from cloud "that you would want or expect." So my question is around innovation, and we've said many times in theCUBE that the new innovation cocktail, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data applying machine intelligence and then the cloud, and the reason why the cloud is important is scale, okay, there's maybe a little bit of cost as well, but it's also innovation. It's the ability to attract people into an ecosystem, and that resonates with line of business. If your cloud is just about making IT's life better, well that's nice, but what's in this announcement and in this initiative for the line of business? >> Yeah, it is all about the workloads. I always say that to me the cloud journey is about, number one your platform, which is the thing onto which you modernize. It is what are you going to get out of moving to containers, what are you going to get out of moving to microservices, how does that help all of those cloud metrics that you mentioned? But number two, it's about the workload, right, which workloads are we talking about, how will they deliver, how will those workloads be able to because of cloud deliver not just TCO but improvement in customer experience, how will those workloads be able to meet elasticity, resiliency, cybersecurity concerns, changes in the way the workforce is working these days, et cetera. And from the line of business perspective, there is a tremendous need to consume, for example, fintech-based innovation. But a lot of folks have struggled to move past POCs because of concerns about security and compliance, for those deployment scenarios, and so being able to bring the ISVs and SaaS providers, and then also fintechs into an ecosystem with a prescriptive and proactive security and compliance context is really what we're all about here. And that will enable a flourishing of adoption of innovation. >> You know, I always love to talk about the competition on these episodes. But I want to ask differentiation, how different is this, can I just go to any cloud supplier and get this, will I eventually be able to, what's IBM's differentiation, Hillery? >> Yeah, so you want to think of it that, in financial services, you are concerned, and you have to be concerned about everything. You have to be concerned about things into the details of the cloud itself, you have to be concerned about things that are related to the behavior and the permissions of your developers in that environment. Financial services cloud really has to be an end to end, soup to nuts conversation, and so this is a program of our public cloud, where end to end, we can stand behind and provide trust and resiliency and this policy framework, end to end within an environment that can be trusted for mission-critical workload. And so when we look at differentiation, our investments are in bringing together IBM's expertise all the way going back to regulations and security consulting that we've been doing for decades in this industry, applying that to that cloud context, taking capabilities that are developed all the way down into the transistors, investments we've made even into the silicon around how cryptography is done, bringing that into the cloud context. And so having brought those things together into our public cloud context, that's how we're able to solution this in a different way, because it really is end to end about the expertise, from all of that regulatory advising, that security context, all the way down into the silicon and the transistors, and I think that's a very unique value proposition, as a cloud provider, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to bring together those pieces. And to continue to be a trusted partner to these companies that we have long been a trusted partner of. >> Now of course you guys have a relationship with VMware, you were the first, actually, to announce a VMware cloud relationship. And so let's say, okay, I got some VMware workloads, I move 'em into your FS cloud. Make sure that I've got the security and compliance checked. Six months down the road, so I've done that sort of first step, what's next for me, is that the end, or are there other things on my journey? >> Yeah, so absolutely, I mean VMware is part of what we are solution financial services clients to, but also cloud-native, and OpenShift, containerization, that modernization journey, is an ongoing journey for everyone, and so to your point of what's next, we're seeing a continual conversation of balancing lift and shift and modernization across workloads, and there are different reasons at different points in time, for people to consider that. I think the key is that they trust where they are taking that data, and whatever the form is that the workload goes, it needs to be in the context of that trust around the data in a security context, and so we're absolutely seeing everything, honestly, from financial services institutions looking to engage with us, also in our new research innovation lab, where we're engaging directly with financial services clients that are trying to work through this differentiation, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it even serverless? What is the right and most effective balance of how workloads are programmed and run for the next generation of banking. >> You know, Hillery, I've been doing a lot of interviews in the last decade, and it's been interesting to see the ascendancy of cloud, of course, but also the change in perception, particularly in financial services, in the early days of cloud, cloud was an evil word. The C that should not be named. And so I want to understand if I'm, and of course COVID has also changed the perception, because if you weren't digital and you didn't have cloud, you couldn't really transact businesses as well, you didn't have that business resiliency. So, what if I'm a financial services person now, okay, I'm through the knothole, I want to get started, where do I start? >> Yeah, well call us first, but past that, I think that the conversations, the first conversations that we're having with our clients are, number one, do you have an architecture? So is cloud not just a place, like I like to say, but is cloud a plan, is there an architectural plan to enable you to have consistency, for example, in your developer experience between your private cloud environment and your public cloud environment? Architecturally are there those foundational choices around common services about being able to deploy capabilities in one location, and develop them in another, et cetera. All those value propositions of what we have been creating around OpenShift and Cloud Paks in our public cloud, and consistency across different environments and such, I think that's the first thing to start with is architecting a cloud, not accidental usage of multiple environments, but architecting use of multiple environments. And then I think the second conversation is to make a security and compliance plan that is going to be robust enough to withstand even the intense scrutiny of a regulated industry CCO and risk team, and so that's the other foundational conversation that we're having with our clients, and helping them with, so we can provide services and reference architectures, and all that other kind of thing, to enable them to stabilize planning on both fronts, both architecturally for what cloud means in its entirety, not just a cloud, but in its entirety, all clouds, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. And then secondly, then, a comprehensive security plan for that public cloud choice, and that's what we're really locking down with this policy framework, is bringing standardization on that for public cloud. >> Well, lot of innovation for the financial services community, which is again your wheelhouse. I wrote a piece right around Think that IBM's future rests on its innovation agenda, and I'm glad you brought up the notion of private, public, and then the whole hybrid thing, because I see OpenShift as a key, and RedHat as a key enabler of that across whether it's cloud, on-prem, edge, across multiple clouds. That's an ambitious agenda, as somebody who's responsible for cloud. That is something that is real innovation, and really differentiable I think, in the marketplace, and probably pretty expensive to build out across all those different platforms. >> Yeah, it is, but I think on the word innovation, my mind, as an IBMer, goes to the IBM research division. Thousands of researchers globally, and they've very much been a part of this journey with us. The journey with us on containerization, the journey on workload modernization from monolith to microservices, the journey of our public cloud, and now also very much a part of our work in financial services, so our research division is this incredible gift and asset that we have, that is working with us also on our cloud security and compliance posture management, that security and compliance control center that we're talking about in this announcement, et cetera, and so them being a part of this innovation stream for us is a really exciting part, again, of bringing together all these different pieces that IBM has to offer in this space to make it all stack up, to be a cloud for financial services. >> I got a couple of little housekeeping items before we close here. This is announced for the US first, right? What about other regions, first of all, is that correct, and what about other regions? >> That's correct, and we are also announcing additional participation of global banking partners as well in this announcement. And so this is also again our initial public statement of our expansion past the US. >> Last question, so just give us a glimpse of the future, where do you want to be in a few years, thinking about let's say three years down the road, what's that outcome look like? >> Yeah, you know I think that three years from now, we would love to see that people are able to make a decision, going back to your question about the line of business owners, make a decision about what they're trying to accomplish with a workload, and not be held back by security and compliance concerns in terms of putting that workload where it needs to be, where it will be most efficient, and where it can be embraced by a set of cloud capabilities that enable it to move in a competitive pace forward, infusing AI into everything that is done. Leveraging the latest in technologies, and serverless computing and all these other kind of things that can facilitate a line of business delivering more value so that cloud really continues, but also realizes its promises in that chapter two version of the story, also for regulated industries and also for their mission-critical workloads. >> Well Hillery, good luck with this, I mean congratulations on the progress that you've made, really since you guys announced this late last year, and really excited to see this start to take off, and you're a great guest, love having you on, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much for having me, pleasure talking to you as always. >> All right, cheers. And thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in our Palo Alto studios, we got our quarantine crew, getting the remote interviews, getting the conversations that matter, a great guest Chris Eldredge, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at Paycor. Chris, thanks for joining today remotely from Ohio. Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, John. >> I was just joking with a friend football seasons up in the air and I know Ohio you're stuck in between all the different cities there. The east coast, certainly there's a lot of football madness might be canceled. So, this COVID-19 has hit us hard and I hope everyone's safe out there with you guys. >> Yeah, yeah, we're staying hunkered down. >> So tell us more about Paycor. What are you guys doing to make a difference? >> Good question. Paycor is a software as a service company that focuses on payroll, human capital management, time, for small and medium businesses, and we are a growing company. We've got nearly 2000 employees, and we've been in business for about 30 years. But it really does feel like a start up every day. Because we have, such a focus for our customer and the technology is improving all the time. >> Business intelligence has been around, you have the old school guard companies and you've been around for 30 years, you've seen them, the technology has changed, and with that, there's been more data. Okay, now you add on the pandemic, and more surge of demand in computer science, data science, data engineering, one of the hottest categories on the job market front, all pointing to the same thing. There's a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities around data, and the implications for businesses. And you guys are on the front lines, give us your take on how you see that evolving because more than ever data is at the center of the value proposition. And even more now and it's changing very rapidly, what's your perspective? >> Absolutely right, you would think when you have a pandemic, you would really slow things down. But in fact, we did not, in fact, we actually went from an environment where we were doing monthly and occasionally weekly reporting, and then all of a sudden, we needed daily updates. If you remember, when COVID first started out, and everything started closing, people wanted information fast and furious, and nobody really knew what to do. Luckily, because about a year before that, we had put in place a very dynamic and incremental approach to how we're going to enable data strategy at Paycor, we were able to just in a matter of days, give them a daily dashboard of over 50 metrics. >> What are some of the challenges you guys have faced? Because now you guys also have to move in real time, you got to put out the insights, they got to be actionable, but data is not that easy to work with, depending upon how it's built. So how are you guys facing the challenges, and what's the implication for your business? >> A great question again, so when I first came to Paycor in early 2019. We really had an environment where it was the wild west of data. There were lots of folks that were cobbling together their own data sets, people were rolling up products and customers any way they wanted to, and you had just incompatible data. Well, we really had to focus on there, and what made a difference to kind of unwind this, tangle of data was really to just talk to folks, get them aligned, get people to understand the true impact of data and if you can govern it, master it, then you can set it up in such a way that people understand how it mixes and matches with other data sets, you have power, and that was the real key is helping people understand the power of what they could unlock with their data, and then being ready to unleash that when it's needed. >> I talked a lot of data pros, I've seen Informatica, all these other companies, certainly cloud scale helps when you start to get into data that has to be integrated across different platforms or applications or new insights that are emerging out a new data sets, whether it's unstructured data or whatnot, you get more stakeholders more people in the equation, more fingers in the pie so to speak, as that happens, which is natural, by the way, you've seen that with virtual events and how people, what was once a department now as the whole company, a lot of stakeholders to please, how did you guys approach that? Because you got to align the business, you got to try to please everyone, and that's really hard to do. How do you get that done? >> Well, John, you have to be careful with what you do, because success is contagious, and once you start setting up one department or one function in a company, that they're happy with their data, most places that I've been and I've worked with this a long time, no one's ever happy with their data or their reporting, right, and so once you get people that are happy with it, all of a sudden, now that kind of explodes, and everybody wants your time, everybody wants your attention, and everybody wants their data to be accessible as well. And so you have to think about what does that scale look like? How do I go from five metrics to 500 metrics? And how quickly do I need to do that? Those are the kind of things you have in mind. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the scale, I'll throw another word at that, and I want to get your reaction to it because scale matters, speed also matters. You got scale and speed, these are becoming requirements. What's your reaction to that? >> Yes. Not just scale and speed, but the technology itself is changing. If you think about predictive modeling, if you think about data science that people talk about and how to operationalize artificial intelligence, if you don't have a good data foundation, none of that's going to help you. So, you really have to enable speed by having processes in place where as the business changes, you can make sure that you have the right data, you have to enable scale, and that you could go easily from a couple thousand records to your millions and millions of records depending on how the data needs to be structured, how you want to think about the data and what kind of features you would want, and let's just say a predictive model, that really proliferate your data, so you need all three of those things. >> Take me through play by play on how you guys modernize with Informatica, because you had to kind of take a step back, you got to look holistically at things. How did they play that role in your modernization of the business intelligence environment? >> Well, essentially, we took a look at the landscape and we saw that most people were self sourcing their data and they didn't really know how, and when something went wrong, they really struggled with, how do I fix this? How do I re-run it? If I'm on vacation who's going to make sure that these data sets get populated? And so we changed the game with Informatica by basically saying, let's pre-think all the things that we need to do around data movement into the data warehouse. And let's really think about not from A, how do I get it from A to B, but how do I get a production grade pipeline of data into my environment, so that I can really have what I need, and anybody in the business that is either part of the data team, or part of the IT team can understand what we're doing, can troubleshoot what we're doing, and we can have a common language, about how we talk about that data. So we put in place standards, we put in place, common metadata, we put in place a process that was aligned across, and we made sure that we put protections in there using things like DevOps, to make sure that whatever we gave the business in terms of data was bulletproof, and was structured in such a way that it had been tested, it was backed up, and it was something that we could actually, re-create if we needed to. That's an elegant it. >> When did this all go down? Last year, this year? Can you take us through the timeline? >> Well, we first started thinking about Informatica, the first half of 2019, and we first signed a contract with them in June of 2019. But before we did anything before we installed it, before we started writing the code, we talked to people we talked to people depending on which area you're talking about between three and six months before we actually implemented. And because we had set up the process, the procedure, we understood how the data model needed to be put together, and we understood the expectations of the business, whether they wanted drill through reporting or they wanted top of the house KPIs or things like that. We talked to them and once we knew what that blueprint needed to look like, Informatica really helped by making it very easy for us to pull that data in, from variety of sources all in the same way or manage the same way, and build our data warehouse. We essentially built a data lake where we tried to get data as close to what it looks like in the source system as possible but accessible by the data engineers. And then we built certified data marts that were structured in a way that was more useful for the business. And all that really took less than a year, the actual hands to keyboard code took less than six months just because we had spent all the time preparing. >> And now we're in COVID, so take me through cause it's really kind of a change of landscape, BC before COVID, DC during COVID, and then AC which is coming after COVID, hopefully sooner than later, but this is the new reality. How has the impact changed your environment if any good, bad, did it change the trajectory? Was the solution in place before? Any benefits coming out of it? Because you're an interesting timetable here, you went in full planning, went into production, and then COVID hits March. How did you get to respond to that? What happened? >> Be careful what you wish for, and also, no good deed goes unpunished, right? So, because we had to quickly adapt our plan, and go from, weekly, monthly, typically monthly reporting into a daily environment, people wanted daily metrics every day. As you can imagine, during the chaos of COVID, some of those 50 metrics changed, or maybe weren't understood completely and needed to be adjusted so that they were more in line with the expectations of the stakeholders as well as match the spirit of the other metrics. And so, now going forward we have to be prepared that as requests come in, as needs come in, we might have new daily reporting, and that means we have to figure out where that's coming from, figure out who owns that information, figure out what transforms needs to be done, to make sure that it's represented correctly, and then figure out how to make sure that we get that same data pipeline flowing every single day. And that's a challenge, but luckily, we were able to do that, because we were able to, set that platform, right, we didn't have to guess about what we're going to use to pull the data. We don't have to guess about what kind of things were happening to name it, we don't guess about where we're going to put that data, and so we know how to record it. >> What's interesting, you mentioned DevOps earlier in the interview, you have that DevOps mindset, and now, the business has to react to the environment, which is the pandemic, and a lot of companies are actually re-factoring or re-setting and then have to put a re-invention plan to get on the business side and then have a growth strategy which might mean completely change a metrics, so being agile with the data, super valuable sounds like that's what happened. There are folks out there that may or may not be in that same situation, so how do you share your best practice for someone out there who's saying, I had an environment, I was in the middle of this or I need to rethink it, but because my stakeholders are saying we need to change or refactor our business, I got to make the data agile. What do you say to that? What do you say to your peers and your colleagues in the industry? >> DevOps is a good place to start, and I bring that up because DevOps is a critical function, a lot of companies like Paycor have dedicated people working on DevOps, but there are also other groups within the technical community that can have a hand in your success, right? There's database administrators, there's application development teams, there's enterprise level architects that are looking across, there's information security, we live in a world where privacy is becoming more and more important. And any one of those groups, if you're not aligned correctly, or if you haven't thought about it, really can cause your progress to slow down, and if you do work together with them, and you build the right operating model, then you can actually figure out a way to make your progress speed up, if you have alignment with those guys, and let's just say a privacy or personal identifying information, question comes up, if you've already thought about who needs to answer that, how you need to evaluate that, and ultimately, how can you move something like that in your production environment, you're way better off and it takes sometimes a matter of minutes, whereas in some cases, in some companies I've been at, it can actually take weeks or months to work through those kind of issues. >> I want to give you a personal take because one of the things that's historic time for the tech industry as it continues to try to do good at the same time, cause there's health issues involved, every company has a thing about the health of their employees and their customers being, in a sheltered in place. We're living in a kind of historic time where, this real agility in engineering around the architecture and thinking things through, because there is a new reality and that is going to be more work at home, which is edge of the network, more data coming out, maybe there's more sources. So, a new wave of challenges is coming in. How do you see that? If based on your experience over the years, you've seen many waves, what's going on? What's some of the learnings that you've seen? What observations can you share any insight from the perspective of where you're sitting? >> So from that perspective, data governance becomes a lot more important. Yeah, whereas in the past, when you were in an office, when we all used to work in an office, you could actually just walk to your neighbor or walk across to another department, you could have that conversation. Today that's, a little bit more challenging in terms of, you would have to figure out are they online? You'd chat them up? Do you use the collaboration tools? And because of that environment, because everybody is digital or online, now you have to think about, how do we make sure that the data governance manifests correctly? And so that means we have to think about data catalogs, how can I go to a definition quickly of what is this data set or metric mean, metadata itself? How do I understand what I'm even looking at? We think about things like, data lineage, how can I go into that and figure out, where do this data come from? How has it changed, if at all possible, who is using it? That needs to be something that's accessible to a broader community, and especially now, where you have collaboration tools, you have things like Slack and Microsoft Teams, you have things like Zoom and Skype, and you need to connect together but you're also online and you're on the network. So, if you can point to documents or better yet, companies like Informatica have tools, like glossaries and data catalogs and things like that where you can actually provide stakeholders, that makes it much easier. And that's much more important now, because you're getting thrown so much stuff on the computer, so much data, so much information, you really need to understand how to parse through that. >> I think it's a great opportunity for someone to come up with some really new collaboration tools around the use case, right? That's what we're talking about here, because you don't have the neighbor, you don't have someone you can just walk down the hall, or jump into a conference room and whiteboard something, you got to do it online. It's like what the heck. >> It really makes you think and when you come into data, right, so I like to think about data as the data pipeline or how it gets sourced, right, I think about the data model and how you need to make sure that it's something that can be consumed by people. But then there's really the business intelligence side or the data consumption side, and those tools are changing they changing quickly, and we need to think about how we use those to communicate the way people are communicating now. >> Chris, thanks for coming on sharing the insight. One final question, obviously as cloud and we've seen the past decade of big data, unstructured data, as the world starts to become more horizontally scalable where data needs to be accessed by a lot of different things, but yet be needed with specialism around machine learning and automation, you've got this new kind of thinking going on, that's kind of becoming more mainstream, which is, hey, I want the data to be everywhere, and I want it to be specialized for machine learning. I mean, sounds really easy, but it's not right? So, this is kind of the future architecture. Would you shade your perspective on that? And that's a segment cause I think this is teasing out some of the things like the tooling, the workforce involved, how is your architecture going to be laid out? This seems to be something that seems to be more of a conversation now than ever before. What's your thoughts? >> Well, you've triggered upon a real time discussion we're having at Paycor of how does the cloud how does the introduction of machine learning across the different parts of any kind of data chain or value chain or process, how does that change where our focus needs to be? And in this case, if we're talking specifically around data, and how do I analyze data, you really need to think about the foundational side, machine learning, artificial intelligence is meant to make our lives easier. It doesn't mean it's easy to implement. But it also means that, if you're giving up that control from a person to a machine, whether it's an algorithm, predictive model, whatever it might be, you really need to make sure that the underlying foundation of data is correct, right. And so, you change the focus, whereas we used to have, over the last couple decades, we had a lot of people thrown at reporting, somebody working on a report or with a business intelligence tool can interact with that and turn things around. If you give that to an artificial intelligence, your application, now whatever they're looking at, you're not going to have those natural connections like, oh, that doesn't look right. >> Yeah. >> And you need to make sure that you put your resources are there people on making sure that that data is as good as it possibly can be. >> That's a great point. You have this amazing fast reports that actually are wrong, right, you got to think foundational first, and it makes the humans more important. I mean, you don't lean on the machines, if they're augmenting the humans, this is a big point. Close us out with that thought. >> Well, you absolutely still need people it's just a matter of where does their focus change to, what can you now free them up from doing that was maybe tedious or maybe just busy work that was needed, but not super value added into much more higher value added type activities. >> Chris, great insight, thanks for sharing. I see you're on the cutting edge, Business Intelligence is changing, you guys been working hard, congratulations, stay safe, and looking forward to catching up another time. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much I enjoyed it. >> Chris Eldredge, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at Paycor, implementing some great data engineering, having the data warehousing, now it's scaling in the right place the right time, as businesses reacting to it, and this is what everyone's facing right now. How do you make data agile as the business evolves quickly, and excel on a highly accelerated basis? How do you become more agile to serve the business needs? This is theCUBE bringing you remote coverage from Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of data automated and event series brought to you by IO Tahoe. >> Welcome back everybody to the power panel, driving business performance with smart data life cycles. Lester Waters is here. He's the chief technology officer from IO Tahoe, he's joined by Patrick Smith, who is field CTO from Pure Storage and Ezat Dayeh, who's a system engineering manager at Cohesity. Gentlemen, good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on this panel. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Let's start with Lester. I wonder if each of you could just give us a quick overview of your role and what's the number one problem that you're focused on solving for your customers? Let's start with Lester please. >> Yes, I'm Lester waters, chief technology officer for IO Tahoe, and really the number one problem that we are trying to solve for our customers is to help them understand what they have. 'Cause if they don't understand what they have in terms of their data, they can't manage it, they can't control it, they can't monitor it. They can't ensure compliance. So really that's finding all you can about your data that you have and building a catalog that can be readily consumed by the entire business is what we do. >> Great. All right, Patrick, field CTO in your title. That says to me you're talking to customers all the time. So you've got a good perspective on it. Give us you know, your take on things here. >> Yeah, absolutely. So my patch is EMEA and talk to customers and prospects in lots of different verticals across the region. And as they look at their environments and their data landscape, they're faced with massive growth in the data that they're trying to analyze and demands to be able to get in site faster and to deliver business value faster than they've ever had to do in the past. So big challenges that we're seeing across the region. >> Got it. And is that, Cohesity? You're like the new kid on the block, you guys are really growing rapidly, created this whole notion of data management backup and beyond, but from a system engineering manager, what are you seeing from customers, your role and the number one problem that you're solving? >> Yeah, sure. So the number one problem, I see time and again, speaking with customers, fall around data fragmentation. So due to things like organic growth, you know, even maybe budgetary limitations, infrastructure has grown over time, very piecemeal and it's highly distributed internally. And just to be clear, you know, when I say internally, you know, that could be that it's on multiple platforms or silos within an on-prem infrastructure, but that it also does extend to the cloud as well. So we've seen, you know, over the past few years, a big drive towards cloud consumption, almost at any cost in some examples. You know, there could be business reasons like moving from things like CapEx to a more of an OPEX model. And what this has done is it's gone to, to create further silos, you know, both on-prem and also in the cloud. And while short term needs may be met by doing that, what it's doing is it's causing longer term problems and it's reducing the agility for these customers to be able to change and transform. >> Right, hey cloud is cool. Everybody wants to be in the cloud, right? So you're right. It creates maybe unintended consequences. So let's start with the business outcome and kind of try to work backwards. I mean, people, you know, they want to get more insights from data. They want to have a more efficient data life cycle, but so Lester, let me start with you, thinking about like the North star to creating data-driven cultures, you know, what is the North star for customers here? >> I think the North star in a nutshell is driving value from your data without question. I mean, we differentiate ourselves these days by even in nuances in our data. Now, underpinning that there's a lot of things that have to happen to make that work out well, you know, for example, making sure you adequately protect your data, you know, do you have a good, do you have a good storage subsystem? Do you have a good backup and recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives? Do you, are you fully compliant? Are you ensuring that you're ticking all the boxes? There's a lot of regulations these days in term, with respect to compliance, data retention, data privacy, and so forth. Are you ticking those boxes? Are you being efficient with your data? You know, in other words, I think there's a statistic that someone mentioned to me the other day, that 53% of all businesses have between three and 15 copies of the same data. So, you know, finding and eliminating those is part of the, part of the problem is you need to chase. >> Yeah, so Patrick and Ezat, I mean, you know, Lester touched on a lot of the areas that you guys are involved in. I like to think of, you know, you're right. Lester, no doubt, business value, and a lot of that comes from reducing the end to end cycle times, but anything that you guys would, would add to that, Patrick, maybe start with Patrick. >> Yeah, I think, I think getting value from data really hits on, it hits on what everyone wants to achieve, but I think there are a couple of key steps in doing that. First of all, is getting access to the data and that really hits three big problems. Firstly, working out what you've got. Secondly, after working out what you've got, how to get access to it, because it's all very well knowing you've got some data, but if you can't get access to it, either because of privacy reasons, security reasons, then that's a big challenge. And then finally, once you've got access to the data, making sure that you can process that data in a timely manner and at the scale that you need to, to deliver your business objectives. So I think those are really three key steps in successfully getting value from the data within our organization. >> Ezat, I'll ask you, anything else you'd fill in? >> Yeah, so the guys have touched on a lot of things already. For me, you know, it would be that an organization has got a really good global view of all of its data. It understands the data flow and dependencies within their infrastructure, understands the precise legal and compliance requirements and have the ability to action changes or initiatives within their environment, forgive the pun, but with a cloud-like agility. You know, and that's no easy feat, right? That is hard work. Another thing as well is that it's for companies to be mature enough, to truly like delete and get rid of unneeded data from their system. You know, I've seen so many times in the past, organizations paying more than they need to because they've acquired a lot of data baggage. Like it just gets carried over from refresh to refresh. And, you know, if you can afford it great, but chances are, you want to be as competitive as possible. And what happens is that this results in, you know, spend that is unnecessary, not just in terms of acquisition, but also in terms of maintaining the infrastructure, but then the other knock on effect as well is, you know, from a compliance and a security point of view, you're exposing yourself. So, you know, if you don't need it, delete it or at least archive it. >> Okay, So we've talked about the challenges in some of the objectives, but there's a lot of blockers out there, and I want to understand how you guys are helping remove them. So Lester, what are some of those blockers? I mean, I can mention a couple, there's their skillsets. There's obviously you talked about the problem of siloed data, but there's also data ownership. That's my data. There's budget issues. What do you see as some of the big blockers in terms of people really leaning in to this smart data life cycle? >> Yeah, silos is probably one of the biggest one I see in businesses. Yes, it's my data, not your data. Lots of compartmentalization and breaking that down is one of the, one of the challenges and having the right tools to help you do that is only part of the solution. There's obviously a lot of cultural things that need to take place to break down those silos and work together. If you can identify where you have redundant data across your enterprise, you might be able to consolidate those, you know, bring together applications. A lot of companies, you know, it's not uncommon for a large enterprise to have, you know, several thousand applications, many of which have their own instance of the very same data. So if there's a customer list, for example, it might be in five or six different sources of truth. And there's no reason to have that, and bringing that together by bringing those things together, you will start to tear down the business boundary silos that automatically exist. I think, I think one of the other challenges too, is self service. As Patrick mentioned, gaining access to your data and being able to work with it in a safe and secure fashion, is key here. You know, right now you typically raise a ticket, wait for access to the data, and then maybe, you know, maybe a week later out pops the bit you need and really, you know, with data being such a commodity and having timeliness to it, being able to have quick access to that data is key. >> Yeah, so I want to go to Patrick. So, you know, one of the blockers that I see is legacy infrastructure, technical debt, sucking all the budget. You've got, you know, too many people having to look after, you know, storage. It's just, it's just too complicated. And I wonder if you have, obviously that's my perspective, what's your perspective on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. We'd agree with that. As you look at the infrastructure that supports people's data landscapes today, for primarily legacy reasons, the infrastructure itself is siloed. So you have different technologies with different underlying hardware, different management methodologies that are there for good reason, because historically you had to have specific fitness for purpose, for different data requirements. That's one of the challenges that we tackled head on at Pure with the flash blade technology and the concept of the data hub, a platform that can deliver in different characteristics for the different workloads, but from a consistent data platform. And it means that we get rid of those silos. It means that from an operational perspective, it's far more efficient. And once your data set is consolidated into the data hub, you don't have to move that data around. You can bring your applications and your workloads to the data rather than the other way around. >> Now, Ezat, I want to go to you because you know, in the world, in your world, which to me goes beyond backup. I mean, one of the challenges is, you know, they say backup is one thing. Recovery is everything, But as well, the CFO doesn't want to pay for just protection. And one of the things that I like about what you guys have done is you've broadened the perspective to get more value out of your, what was once seen as an insurance policy. I wonder if you could talk about that as a blocker and how you're having success removing it. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as well as what the guys have already said, you know, I do see one of the biggest blockers as the fact that the task at hand can, you know, can be overwhelming for customers and it can overwhelm them very, very quickly. And that's because, you know, this stuff is complicated. It's got risk, you know, people are used to the status quo, but the key here is to remember that it's not an overnight change. It's not, you know, a flick of a switch. It's something that can be tackled in a very piecemeal manner, and absolutely like you you said, you know, reduction in TCO and being able to leverage the data for other purposes is a key driver for this. So like you said, you know, for us specifically, one of the areas that we help customers around with first of all, it's usually data protection. It can also be things like consolidation of unstructured file data. And, you know, the reason why customers are doing this is because legacy data protection is very costly. You know, you'd be surprised how costly it is. A lot of people don't actually know how expensive it can be. And it's very complicated involving multiple vendors. And it's there really to achieve one goal. And the thing is, it's very inflexible and it doesn't help towards being an agile data driven company. So, you know, this can be, this can be resolved. It can be very, you know, pretty straightforward. It can be quite painless as well. Same goes for unstructured data, which is very complex to manage. And, you know, we've all heard the stats from the analysts, you know, data obviously is growing at an extremely rapid rate. But actually when you look at that, you know, how is it actually growing? 80% of that growth is actually in unstructured data. And only 20% of that growth is in structured data. So, you know, these are quick win areas that the customers can realize. Immediate TCO improvement and increased agility as well, when it comes to managing and automating their infrastructure. So, yeah, it's all about making, you know, doing more with, with what you have. >> So let's paint a picture of this guys, if you could bring up the life cycle, I want to explore that a little bit and ask each of you to provide a perspective on this. And so, you know, what you can see here is you've got this, this cycle, the data life cycle, and what we're wanting to do is really inject intelligence or smarts into this life cycle, you can see, you start with ingestion or creation of data. You're storing it. You got to put it somewhere, right? You got to classify it, you got to protect it. And then of course you want to, you know, reduce the copies, make it efficient, and then you want to prepare it, so the businesses can actually consume it. And then you've got clients and governance and privacy issues. And at some point when it's legal to do so, you want to get rid of it. We never get rid of stuff in technology. We keep it forever. But I wonder if we could start with you Lester. This is, you know, the picture of the life cycle. What role does automation play in terms of injecting smarts into the life cycle? >> Automation is key here. You know, especially from the discover catalog and classified perspective. I've seen companies where we, where they go and will take and dump their, all of their database schemes into a spreadsheet so that they can sit down and manually figure out what attribute 37 needs for a column name. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. So being able to automatically detect what you have, automatically deduce what's consuming the data, you know, upstream and downstream, being able to understand all of the things related to the life cycle of your data, backup archive, deletion. It is key. So having good tools is very important. >> So Patrick, obviously you participated in the store piece of this picture. So I wonder if you could just talk more specifically about that, but I'm also interested in how you affect the whole system view, the end to end cycle time. >> Yeah, I think Lester kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of the importance of automation, because data volumes are just so massive now that you, you can't, you can't effectively manage or understand or catalog your data without automation. But once you, once you understand the data and the value of the data, then that's where you can work out where the data needs to be at any point in time. And that's where we come into play. You know, if data needs to be online, if it's hot data, if it's data that needs to be analyzed, and, you know, we're moving to a world of analytics where some of our customers say, there's no such thing as cold data anymore, then it needs to be on a performance platform, but you need to understand exactly what the data is that you have to work out where to place it and where it fits into that data life cycle. And then there's that whole challenge of protecting it through the life cycle, whether that's protecting the hot data or as the data moves off into, you know, into an archive or into a cold store, still making sure you know where it is, and easily retrievable, should you need to move it back into the working set. So I think automation is key, but also making sure that it ties into understanding where you place your data at any point in time. >> Right, so Pure and Cohesity, obviously, partner to do that. And of course, Ezat, you guys are part of the protect, you're certainly part of the retain, but also you provide data management capabilities and analytics. I wonder if you could add some color there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, you know, we focus pretty heavily on data protection as just one of our areas and that infrastructure, it is just sitting there really you know, the legacy infrastructure, it's just sitting there, you know, consuming power, space cooling and pretty inefficient. And, you know, one of our main purposes is like we said, to make that data useful and automating that process is a key part of that, right? So, you know, not only are we doing things like obviously making it easier to manage, improving RPOs and RTOs with policy-based SLAs, but we're making it useful and having a system that can be automated through APIs and being an API first based system. It's almost mandatory now when you're going through a digital, you know, digital transformation. And one of the things that we can do is as part of that automation, is that we can make copies of data without consuming additional capacity available, pretty much instantaneously. You might want to do that for many different purposes. So examples of that could be, you know, for example, reproducing copies of production data for development purposes, or for testing new applications for example. And you know, how would you, how would you go about doing that in a legacy environment? The simple answer is it's painfully, right? So you just can't do those kinds of things. You know, I need more infrastructure to store the data. I need more compute to actually perform the things that I want to do on it, such as analytics, and to actually get a copy of that data, you know, I have to either manually copy it myself or I restore from a backup. And obviously all of that takes time, additional energy. And you end up with a big sprawling infrastructure, which isn't a manageable, like Patrick said, it's just the sheer amount of data, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't warrant doing that anymore. So, you know, if I have a modern day platform such as, you know, the Cohesity data platform, I can actually do a lot of analytics on that through applications. So we have a marketplace for apps. And the other great thing is that it's an open system, right? So anybody can develop an app. It's not just apps that are developed by us. It can be third parties, it could be customers. And with the data being consolidated in one place, you can then start to start to realize some of these benefits of deriving insights out of your data. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up earlier in your little example there, because you're right. You know, how do you deal with that? You throw people at the problem and it becomes nights and weekends, and that sort of just fails. It doesn't scale. I wonder if we could talk about metadata. It's increasingly important. Metadata is data about the data, but Lester, maybe explain why it's so important and what role it plays in terms of creating smart data lifecycle. >> Well, yes, metadata, it does describe the data, but it's, a lot of people think it's just about the data itself, but there's a lot of extended characteristics about your data. So, imagine if for my data life cycle, I can communicate with the backup system from Cohesity and find out when the last time that data was backed up, or where it's backed up to. I can communicate exchange data with Pure Storage and find out what tier it's on. Is the data at the right tier commensurate with its use level that Patrick pointed out? And being able to share that metadata across systems. I think that's the direction that we're going in. Right now we're at the stage, we're just identifying the metadata and trying to bring it together and catalog it. The next stage will be, okay using the APIs that we have between our systems. Can we communicate and share that data and build good solutions for our customers to use? >> I think it's a huge point that you just made. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, automating classification was the big problem and it was machine intelligence. You know, we're obviously attacking that, but your point about as machines start communicating to each other and you start, you know, it's cloud to cloud, there's all kinds of metadata, kind of new metadata that's being created. I often joke that someday there's going to be more metadata than the data. So that brings us to cloud. And Ezat, I'd like to start with you, because you were talking about some cloud creep before. So what's your take on cloud? I mean, you've got private clouds, you got hybrid clouds, public clouds, inter clouds, IOT, and the edge is sort of another form of cloud. So how does cloud fit into the data life cycle? How does it affect the data life cycle? >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, I do think, you know, having the cloud is a great thing and it has got its role to play and you can have many different permutations and iterations of how you use it. And, you know, as I, as I may have sort of mentioned previously, you know, I've seen customers go into the cloud very, very quickly. And actually recently they're starting to remove web codes from the cloud. And the reason why this happens is that, you know, cloud has got its role to play, but it's not right for absolutely everything, especially in their current form as well. So, you know, a good analogy I like to use, and this may sound a little bit cliche, but you know, when you compare clouds versus on premises data centers, you can use the analogy of houses and hotels. So to give you an idea, so, you know, when we look at hotels, that's like the equivalent of a cloud, right? I can get everything I need from there. I can get my food, my water, my outdoor facilities. If I need to accommodate more people, I can rent some more rooms. I don't have to maintain the hotel. It's all done for me. When you look at houses, the equivalent to, you know, on premises infrastructure, I pretty much have to do everything myself, right? So I have to purchase the house. I have to maintain it. I have to buy my own food and water, eat it. I have to make improvements myself, but then why do we all live in houses, not in hotels? And the simple answer that I can, I can only think of is, is that it's cheaper, right? It's cheaper to do it myself, but that's not to say that hotels haven't got their role to play. You know, so for example, if I've got loads of visitors coming over for the weekend, I'm not going to go and build an extension to my house, just for them. I will burst into my hotel, into the cloud, and use it for, you know, for things like that. And you know, if I want to go somewhere on holiday, for example, then I'm not going to go buy a house there. I'm going to go in, I'm going to stay in a hotel, same thing. I need some temporary usage. You know, I'll use the cloud for that as well. Now, look, this is a loose analogy, right? But it kind of works. And it resonates with me at least anyway. So what I'm really saying is the cloud is great for many things, but it can work out costlier for certain applications while others are a perfect fit. So when customers do want to look at using the cloud, it really does need to be planned in an organized way, you know, so that you can avoid some of the pitfalls that we're talking about around, for example, creating additional silos, which are just going to make your life more complicated in the long run. So, you know, things like security planning, you know, adequate training for staff is absolutely a must. We've all seen the, you know, the horror stories in the press where certain data maybe has been left exposed in the cloud. Obviously nobody wants to see that. So as long as it's a well planned and considered approach, the cloud is great and it really does help customers out. >> Yeah, it's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought of that before, but you're right. 'Cause I was going to say, well, part of it is you want the cloud experience everywhere, but you don't always want the cloud experience, especially, you know, when you're with your family, you want certain privacy. I've not heard that before Ezat, so that's a new perspective, so thank you. But so, but Patrick, I do want to come back to that cloud experience because in fact, that's what's happening in a lot of cases. Organizations are extending the cloud properties of automation on-prem and in hybrid. And certainly you guys have done that. You've created, you know, cloud-based capabilities. They can run in AWS or wherever, but what's your take on cloud? What's Pure's perspective? >> Yeah, I thought Ezat brought up a really interesting point and a great analogy for the use of the public cloud, and it really reinforces the importance of the hybrid and multicloud environment, because it gives you that flexibility to choose where is the optimal environment to run your business workloads. And that's what it's all about. And the flexibility to change which environment you're running in, either from one month to the next or from one year to the next, because workloads change and the characteristics that are available in the cloud change on a pretty frequent basis. It's a fast moving world. So one of the areas of focus for us with our cloud block store technology is to provide effectively a bridge between the on-prem cloud and the public cloud, to provide that consistent data management layer that allows customers to move their data where they need it when they need it. And the hybrid cloud is something that we've lived with ourselves at Pure. So our Pure1 management technology actually sits in a hybrid cloud environment. We started off entirely cloud native, but now we use the public cloud for compute and we use our own technology, the end of a high performance network link to support our data platform. So we get the best of both worlds. And I think that's where a lot of our customers are trying to get to is cloud flexibility, but also efficiency and optimization. >> All right, I want to come back in a moment there, but before we do, Lester, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about compliance governance and privacy. You know, that, a lot of that comes down to data, the EU right now, I think the Brits on this panel are still in the EU for now, but the EU are looking at new rules, new regulations going beyond GDPR, tightening things up in a, specifically kind of pointing at the cloud. Where does sort of privacy, governance, compliance fit in to the, to the data life cycle, then Ezat, I want your thoughts on this as well. >> Yeah, this is a very important point because the landscape for compliance around data privacy and data retention is changing very rapidly and being able to keep up with those changing regulations in an automated fashion is the only way you're going to be able to do it. Even, I think there's a, some sort of a, maybe a ruling coming out today or tomorrow with the change to GDPR. So this is, these are all very key points, and being able to codify those rules into some software, whether you know, IO Tahoe or your storage system or Cohesity that'll help you be compliant is crucial. >> Yeah, Esat, anything you can add there? I mean, this really is your wheelhouse. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think anybody who's watching this probably has gotten the message that, you know, less silos is better. And then absolutely it also applies to data in the cloud as well. So, you know, by aiming to consolidate into fewer platforms, customers can realize a lot better control over their data. And then natural effect of this is that it makes meeting compliance and governance a lot easier. So when it's consolidated, you can start to confidently understand who is accessing your data, how frequently are they accessing the data? You can also do things like detecting anomalous file access activities, and quickly identify potential threats. You know, and this can be delivered by apps which are running on one platform that has consolidated the data as well. And you can also start getting into lots of things like, you know, rapidly searching for PII. So personally identifiable information across different file types. And you can report on all of this activity back to the business, by identifying, you know, where are you storing your copies of data? How many copies have you got and who has access to them? These are all becoming table stakes as far as I'm concerned. >> Right, right. >> The organizations continue that move into digital transformation and more regulation comes into law. So it's something that has to be taken very, very seriously. The easier you make your infrastructure, the easier it will be for you to comply with it. >> Okay, Patrick, we were talking, you talked earlier about storage optimization. We talked to Adam Worthington about the business case. You get the sort of numerator, which is the business value and then the denominator, which is the cost. And so storage efficiency is obviously a key part of it. It's part of your value proposition to pick up on your sort of earlier comments, and what's unique about Pure in this regard? >> Yeah, and I think there are, there are multiple dimensions to that. Firstly, if you look at the difference between legacy storage platforms, they used to take up racks or isles of space in a data center with flash technology that underpins flash blade, we effectively switch out racks for rack units. And it has a big play in terms of data center footprint, and the environmentals associated with the data center, but it doesn't stop at that. You know, we make sure that we efficiently store data on our platforms. We use advanced compression techniques to make sure that we make flash storage as cost competitive as we possibly can. And then if you look at extending out storage efficiencies and the benefits it brings, just the performance has a direct effect on staff, whether that's, you know, the staff and the simplicity of the platform, so that it's easy and efficient to manage, or whether it's the efficiency you get from your data scientists who are using the outcomes from the platform and making them more efficient. If you look at some of our customers in the financial space, their time to results are improved by 10 or 20 X by switching to our technology from legacy technologies for their analytics platforms. >> So guys we've been running, you know, CUBE interviews in our studios remotely for the last 120 days, it's probably the first interview I've done where I haven't started off talking about COVID, but digital transformation, you know, BC, before COVID. Yeah, it was real, but it was all of a buzzy wordy too. And now it's like a mandate. So Lester, I wonder if you could talk about smart data life cycle and how it fits into this isolation economy and hopefully what will soon be a post isolation economy? >> Yeah, COVID has dramatically accelerated the data economy. I think, you know, first and foremost, we've all learned to work at home. I, you know, we've all had that experience where, you know, there were people who would um and ah about being able to work at home just a couple of days a week. And here we are working five days a week. That's had a knock on impact to infrastructure to be able to support that. But going further than that, you know, the data economy is all about how a business can leverage their data to compete in this new world order that we are now in. So, you know, they've got to be able to drive that value from their data and if they're not prepared for it, they're going to falter. We've unfortunately seen a few companies that have faltered because they weren't prepared for this data economy. This is where all your value is driven from. So COVID has really been a forcing function to, you know, it's probably one of the few good things that have come out of COVID, is that we have been forced to adapt. And it's been an interesting journey and it continues to be so. >> Well, is that too, you know, everybody talks about business resiliency, ransomware comes into effect here, and Patrick, you, you may have some thoughts on this too, but Ezat, your thoughts on the whole work from home pivot and how it's impacting the data life cycle. >> Absolutely, like, like Lester said, you know, we've, we're seeing a huge impact here. You know, working from home has, has pretty much become the norm now. Companies have been forced into basically making it work. If you look at online retail, that's accelerated dramatically as well. Unified communications and video conferencing. So really, you know, the point here is that yes, absolutely. You know, we've compressed you know, in the past maybe four months, what probably would have taken maybe even five years, maybe 10 years or so. And so with all this digital capability, you know, when you talk about things like RPOs and RTOs, these things are, you know, very much, you know, front of mind basically and they're being taken very seriously. You know, with legacy infrastructure, you're pretty much limited with what you can do around that. But with next generation, it puts it front and center. And when it comes to, you know, to ransomware, of course, it's not a case of if it's going to happen, it's a case of when it's going to happen. Again, we've all seen lots of stuff in the press, different companies being impacted by this, you know, both private and public organizations. So it's a case of, you know, you have to think long and hard about how you're going to combat this, because actually malware also, it's becoming, it's becoming a lot more sophisticated. You know, what we're seeing now is that actually, when, when customers get impacted, the malware will sit in their environment and it will have a look around it, it won't actually do anything. And what it's actually trying to do is, it's trying to identify things like your backups, where are your backups? Because you know, what do, what do we all do? If we get hit by a situation like this, we go to our backups. But you know, the bad actors out there, they, you know, they're getting pretty smart as well. And if your legacy solution is sitting on a system that can be compromised quite easily, that's a really bad situation, you know, waiting to happen. And, you know, if you can't recover from your backups, essentially, unfortunately, you know, people are going to be making trips to the bank because you're going to have to pay to get your data back. And of course, nobody wants to see that happening. So one of the ways, for example, that we look to help customers defend against this is actually we have, we have a three pronged approach. So protect, detect, and respond. So what we mean by protect, and let me say, you know, first of all, this isn't a silver bullet, right? Security is an industry all of itself. It's very complicated. And the approach here is that you have to layer it. What Cohesity, for example, helps customers with, is around protecting that insurance policy, right? The backups. So by ensuring that that data is immutable, cannot be edited in any way, which is inherent to our file system. We make sure that nothing can affect that, but it's not just external actors you have to think about, it's also potentially internal bad actors as well. So things like being able to data lock your information so that even administrators can't change, edit or delete data, is just another way in which we help customers to protect. And then also you have things like multifactor authentication as well, but once we've okay, so we've protected the data. Now, when it comes, now it comes to detection. So again, being, you know, ingrained into data protection, we have a good view of what's happening with all of this data that's flowing around the organization. And if we start to see, for example, that backup times, or, you know, backup quantities, data quantities are suddenly spiking all of a sudden, we use things like, you know, AI machine learning to highlight these, and once we detect an anomaly such as this, we can then alert our users to this fact. And not only do we alert them and just say, look, we think something might be going on with your systems, but we'll also point them to a known good recovery point as well, so that they don't have to sit searching, well, when did this thing hit and you know, which recovery point do I have to use? And so, you know, and we use metadata to do all of these kinds of things with our global management platform called Helios. And that actually runs in the cloud as well. And so when we find this kind of stuff, we can basically recover it very, very quickly. And this comes back now to the RPOs and the RTOs. So your recovery point objective, we can shrink that, right? And essentially what that means is that you will lose less data. But more importantly, the RTO, your recovery time objective, it means that actually, should something happen and we need to recover that data, we can also shrink that dramatically. So again, when you think about other, you know, legacy technology out there, when something like this happens, you might be waiting hours, most likely days, possibly even weeks and months, depending on the severity. Whereas we're talking about being able to bring data back, you know, we're talking maybe, you know, a few hundred virtual machines in seconds and minutes. And so, you know, when you think about the value that that can give an organization, it becomes, it becomes a no brainer really, as far as, as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, that really covers how we respond to these situations. So protect, detect, and respond. >> Great, great summary. I mean, my summary is adverse, right? The adversaries are very, very capable. You got to put security practices in place. The backup Corpus becomes increasingly important. You got to have analytics to detect anomalous behavior and you got to have, you know, fast recovery. And thank you for that. We got to wrap, but so Lester, let me, let me ask you to sort of paint picture of the sort of journey or the maturity model that people have to take. You know, if they want to get into it, where do they start and where are they going? Give us that view. >> I think first it's knowing what you have. If you don't know what you have, you can't manage it, you can't control it, you can't secure it, you can't ensure it's compliant. So that's first and foremost. The second is really, you know, ensuring that you're compliant. Once you know what you have, are you securing it? Are you following the regulatory, the applicable regulations? Are you able to evidence that? How are you storing your data? Are you archiving it? Are you storing it effectively and efficiently? You know, have you, Nirvana from my perspective is really getting to a point where you've consolidated your data, you've broken down the silos and you have a virtually self service environment by which the business can consume and build upon their data. And really at the end of the day, as we said at the beginning, it's all about driving value out of your data. And the automation is key to this journey. >> That's awesome. And you just described sort of a winning data culture. Lester, Patrick, Ezat, thanks so much for participating in this power panel. >> Thank you, David. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover. 2020. The virtual experience Pradeep Kumar is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of Point Next services for our things in Houston. Welcome. >>Very good. It's a Z usual. It's warm and sunny, so I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. So now let's set this up. So when HP split into two companies formed H, P E and HP, it did a spin merge with E DS. It's large services business, and one of the things that came out of that was the point. Next services brand and group within HP, and this was very important. I want to share this with our audience because it really streamlined H H PS services Messaging is offering. It opened up new partnering opportunities and produced. This is really the business that you run. So maybe add any color to my little narrative upfront and talk about your role there. >>No, absolutely. I think what HP wanted to make sure is they have ah white portfolio of services. So also, we we have advisory and professional services as well as operational services in the back end. So we just streamline everything for the customer from a services point of view. And that's what the next stands for. You described it pretty validated >>now as you as you know, because you can imagine a lot of these virtual events that we've been doing. The pandemic, of course, has been a topic of discussion. But really, the discussion thus far has been on. Okay, how are you handling it? What kinds of things are you doing to support clients? And I want to understand that from you. But now we're at a point. We're really talking about the post isolation economy and what that all means. So what are you seeing for deep in your client base? >>Yeah, the point you made is a very critical one, right? During the pandemic, everybody Waas Hey, can I business continuity plans, right? Can I manage my business in that? In that scenario day? Really? Preparation was everything right? Things that we take it for granted, like remote working capabilities, parts having parts at the right places. Right now we have more pastors to describe. It's more. What is the new normal? What is business going to look like in the future? And how can technology help you to achieve that, right, If I give an example off, you know how many people were working from offices, including HB substantial portion off the team Members of the workforce was working from an office. Now probably about 1/3 will be working from the office, and about one toe probably will work from home. And there's another one who will come to the office in a infrequent basis for collaboration. So the whole landscape off the new normal has changed forever. >>So what I'd like to do for Deep is if we could bring up some data that we have and to really just set the context and drill in a little bit in terms of what you guys are seeing you again, point next is critical. Not only was it a business that Antonio Neri kind of ran the services business, so he understands it well, but it really is the touch point to customers. Now, when you talk to CIOs, this is data from our data partner CTR. In a survey of 700 CIOs and I t pros is that what they see is the shape of the recovery. And you can see here 44% expect a U shaped recovery. Now you've got in the 16%. There's a tailwind, businesses, their health supplies, video conferencing. You work from home or remote workers. What you were talking about, these companies actually saw a tailwind of their business. And then, of course, you've got essential businesses, and you've got, you know, businesses are just now coming back, and then you've got businesses that are really struggling Airlines, hospitality restaurants, mall. So it's really a very much fragmented recovery. So I'm wondering what you guys are specifically seeing because you are so close to so many of these customers. >>Yeah, so we see that mix bag right? So I feel like whether it's a UI or where they it's a U shaped recovery, it's sort of a more point, right, because it's not going to be the same as before. The right things have changed. Even if you are, um, in a particular business, let me take just It's the worship right house of worship, right? So it could be a temple, a synagogue, church, a mosque. It doesn't matter, right? They had a particular constituency that we had before. Who used to come? Let's take a church, for example, Who used to come to mass on A on a Sunday, Right. And in my case, my family would get out and go out there to the Mass at the last minute, right? I have 22 teenage boys, and, you know, my wife wants to go on time to mass, but we will never make it. You know, we'll be last minute worshippers going in there. And then, um, you know, find appeal, dissident. Right now, if we look at it, how it has changed for these worshippers, it's very different now, right? A set of worshippers >>who, uh, >>who watch it live stream that comes from the church will never go back or very go back, very seldom. And then there's a set of worshippers who want to go back. But now they got to sign up a week early, which particular mass they're going to and, um, and identify a pew to sit on. So the whole thing has changed for for a company for its customers the way people would consume in the future. And people who are ready for this and have managed and be prepared make use of that opportunity. And for my church, for example, in this case, I think to survival is the constituents donations on a weekly basis, right? So have they're being very digital, you know, My church, unfortunately, was very digital 100% digital. Therefore, they didn't see a huge deep on their collections, which was survival for them. So if you equate that Dave into different businesses, right, it's changed in many different ways. And as you pointed out in that shot, it's different from industry to industry business to business on how you cope up with it, how you prepare for it. Um, how you use technology for your advantage would be the winners and loses, >>you know, And that's a great first of all. That's a great example of houses of worship. And there are many. You're seeing sports now Major League baseball struggling to figure out what to do. It seems like basketball figured out. A lot of people have invested in Palestinians, and so, you know, you know, maybe yoga is not as good in the studio, but it's pretty good. You know, A lot of people bought R V, so there's gonna be some permanent changes, you know, to your to your point. And I wanted to show, you know, we've been thinking about Okay, what's the framework for understanding that fragmentation in the recovery? It's, you know, what is the feasibility of physical distancing? How digital are these these businesses? How essential are these businesses? I mean, there are It's a complicated situation to figure out. So again, the key is point Next has to be really close to its customers. You guys have to be digital in doing that. But are you seeing any specific patterns? Emerge? >>Yeah, I think what we're seeing is, um, you know, people working out what the new normal is right? And then saying, How do I get to that new normal? How do I take the advantage? How do I make use of that opportunity to get better? This is where I think point next services is important to talk about what is. We have got 23,000 experts around the world, right, and there's a substantial portion off advisory faults, right? Who will come and work out with you. What? That new normal A's? And what is the answer? What is the strategy that you want? What is the North Star you want to achieve? And how do you transform your whole company, your environment, into that new normal right? And how do we take you on that journey? Be there for you to taking you through that journey into the new normal to to capitalize on those opportunities? A couple of things I would point out here. Dave, I think, definitely. I think building a platform that's a child and resilient for the future, for any disruption is white, right? I think what the pandemic products is If you have a very agile platform and very resilient for any kind of disruption, you're going to be on a winner. So once you've identified what that new normal for you, I think HP point next really can help you be your trusted partner to get there. In the end, >>you know, pretty kind of BC before covert, when the Cube is doing a lot of live events. Everybody's talking about digital transformation, and of course, there are a couple of means floating around the Internet. One is the big wrecking ball going into the building, where the executives saying, You know, not in my lifetime and then you got Cove in 19 and the wrecking ball coming, and there's another one that I want to share with our audience. You guys have bring this up. It's the It's the It's the survey of who's leading the digital transformation of your company. Is that the CEO? Is that the CTO? Well, actually, no, it's it's covert 19. So this is kind of tongue in cheek. It's sort of a sad, stark reality here, but the truth is that if you're not digital now, you're going to really be in big trouble. And so there's a number of fact factors that we've seen are facets that we've seen in the marketplace clearly work from home security. You know, it's not just, ah, video conferencing, it's it's SD win on and certainly cloud so again, what are you seeing? Maybe really. Start with Cloud. What are you seeing in terms of cloud adoption and acceleration? >>Yeah, So we, uh what we're seeing really is Dave the the same priorities for a company exists, right? To get to a very efficient model, too. More than what it is, a cloud or not, I think what people are looking for is an as a service model, very about cost model for their workloads. So people are really pushing for a hybrid environment because the same, um, things exist. Some workloads are well, you know, suited for a public cloud. Some workloads are suited for an on Prem environment where you have Laden's issues, compliance issues, security issues, right. But what they want is when they have that on Prem environment, it should be as a service, a cloud like environment that you can pay for what you use. So people are really using warning to get into that hybrid environment. What Corbyn has really triggered is to do go on that transformation journey much quicker pace than what they had gone in the past, so the same logic exist. But people want to go through that journey quickly, so you are at the right place, ready for any future disruptions. I think that's what really happened in the marketplace. So we're working with lots of companies are taking them through the journey, identifying which workloads should go there and giving a hybrid environment that satisfies of their future needs. >>So I want to ask you about disruptions because I think it's I think it's a safe bet that while technology has always been a catalyst for disruption, it would appear pretty obvious that that other external factors are gonna gonna create more disruptions in this decade than perhaps technology, not the technology will still be disruptive, but things like pandemics, natural disasters. We've seen social uprising over the over the past couple of weeks. These external factors are really driving other agendas within organizations. And so where does technology fit? What are people who have data centers telling you guys in terms of their priorities and how technology and some of these external factors or maybe blending together? >>Yeah, so sometimes I think during destruction, whether it's a pandemic or, you know, I'm based in Houston way, we're so used to having, you know, floods, right hurricanes. And I think sometimes what people forget is being prepared for a pandemic or the hockey game. Simply pay. Have your candles ready, have your water bottles ready. So when the floods arrive, you at least have something to to rely on and cos continuously worn a preparedness business continue to plan state. Right, That is the number one priority to make sure that you have a business continuity plan that does not affect your business, then secondarily. Okay, um, I want to preserve my cash, and I want to make sure I am prepared and getting ready for the future where the future technology is different to what I had before. And I may not have the experts and the skills for that future technology. This is where the HP point next really helps either give people that expertise, skill set or augment with your teams to get you into that future technology. The third thing I would say is clearly, I think once you got on to that technology, our platform, how do you maintain that, right. How do you continuously optimize that? And you might need training or your people? It's ah, it's a continuous management of HCI, and your next again is available to you either toe optimal continuously optimize your new platform or, you know, educate your people on how to manage their platform. So I think you need to look at it as a continuum you have a business continue to plan? Did you try ons transform into the new environment you wanted to the 13 years Are you continuously optimizing and be ready for the next disruption around the corner? >>You know, I think the point you were making about business continuance of very important and I wonder if you could comment on a lot of CEOs have told us flat out just honestly, our business continuity plans were way to d are focused. And so now we're going to retool those. We are re tooling those It's work from home, which has this, this permanence to it, and it's being able to kind of anticipate some of these changes. The network changes are pretty significant. I have no doubt you guys are seeing that are participating in that sort of, you know, re revised or revitalized business continuity. >>Yeah, and you have to reimagine right? Askew pointed out correctly that it was all disaster. Recovery is all what you had you didn't think about. Hey, you know, maybe 50% off your workforce is not going to come back. And you need a way to collaborate among that workforce, right? Plus, as you pointed out. Connectivity is an issue, and but you got to think it's not just connectivity. You need to be able to enable your works force to be able to collaborate amongst each other, be positive and fanatical about your customers. That's crucial. People who are coming back. Think about it. Right? Um, you know, um, Kayla's access is important. Do we measure The temperature is important. How the team members are, you know, going around in your facility. You have contact Tracy. All that becomes widely important, right? And they they sound very basic, but they become might be important because a >>lot of learnings jammed into the last quarter. Yeah, a lot of a lot of learnings jammed into the last 90 days. Let me ask you if you could summarize for our audience the point next advantage. I mean, why HP point? Next? What do you guys bring? That that's unique and differential from all the other companies out there? >>Yeah, the breadth of point next is is very important. Point next, have got 23,000 employees really dedicated and fanatical about customers and customers. Well, being customers experience. So we are very outcome based on the people >>who who >>are here, who are different in a sense to find out what makes best sense for you and then take you through that transformation and there will be bumps on the road. Dave, Um, you know when you're working with a partner, is the partner really trusted? That will stay with you when there are bumps on the road and and make sure that your end goal is achieved. I think that's crucial. We are not like any other company. We're very, very motivated. Workforce. Very passionate workforce. Who wants to make sure you know customers in goals are achieved, right? So we are not we We look at it in a holistic way. They've compared to anybody else. And we have an extremely trusted partner who's there always with you. >>Last question for people watching this segment. Of course, we have the Discover virtual experience going on any any areas where they should focus on the when they hit the site. Where should they go? Any. Any sessions that you would recommend >>there are because it's work you're there are so many sessions, plenty of sessions, plenty of availability in many, many different areas, definitely if you're interested in what is the new normal connectivity for your employees bringing back employees? You want to look at those areas? There's there's ah ah lot of availability off decisions in the point next side of things that talks about how to cope up with the new normal. I would strongly recommend you look at those things because that gives you allows you to build in a very agile platform, that Brazilian for the next disruption that's going to come in. >>But pretty pretty. Kumar, Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and, uh, and have a great discover. Stay safe. Be well. >>Thank you, Dave. >>Alright, Keep it right there. Everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. The Cube's continuous coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience right back. Right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah,

>> connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, everybody this is Dave Vellante of theCUBE, and welcome back to my CXO series. I've been running this through really since the start of the COVID-19 crisis to really understand how leaders are dealing with this pandemic. Sri Ambati is here, he's the CEO and founder of H20. Sri, it's great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, so this pandemic has obviously given people fits, no question, but it's also given opportunities for companies to kind of reassess where they are. Automation is a huge watchword, flexibility, business resiliency and people who maybe really hadn't fully leaned into things like the cloud and AI and automation are now realizing, wow, we have no choice, it's about survival. Your thought as to what you're seeing in the marketplace. >> Thanks for having us. I think first of all, kudos to the frontline health workers who have been ruthlessly saving lives across the country and the world, and what you're really doing is a fraction of what we could have done or should be doing to stay away the next big pandemic. But that apart I think, I usually tend to say BC is before COVID. So if the world was thinking about going digital after COVID-19, they have been forced to go digital and as a result, you're seeing tremendous transformation across our customers, and a lot of application to kind of go in and reinvent their business models that allow them to scale as effortlessly as they could using the digital means. >> So, think about, doctors and diagnosis machines, in some cases, are helping doctors make diagnoses, they're sometimes making even better diagnosis, (mumbles) is informing. There's been a lot of talk about the models, you know how... Yeah, I know you've been working with a lot of healthcare organizations, you may probably familiar with that, you know, the Medium post, The Hammer and the Dance, and if people criticize the models, of course, they're just models, right? And you iterate models and machine intelligence can help us improve. So, in this, you know, you talk about BC and post C, how have you seen the data and in machine intelligence informing the models and proving that what we know about this pandemic, I mean, it changed literally daily, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, and I think it started with Wuhan and we saw the best application of AI in trying to trace, literally from Alipay, to WeChat, track down the first folks who were spreading it across China and then eventually the rest of the world. I think contact tracing, for example, has become a really interesting problem. supply chain has been disrupted like never before. We're beginning to see customers trying to reinvent their distribution mechanisms in the second order effects of the COVID, and the the prime center is hospital staffing, how many ventilator, is the first few weeks so that after COVID crisis as it evolved in the US. We are busy predicting working with some of the local healthcare communities to predict how staffing in hospitals will work, how many PPE and ventilators will be needed and so henceforth, but that quickly and when the peak surge will be those with the beginning problems, and many of our customers have begin to do these models and iterate and improve and kind of educate the community to practice social distancing, and that led to a lot of flattening the curve and you're talking flattening the curve, you're really talking about data science and analytics in public speak. That led to kind of the next level, now that we have somewhat brought a semblance of order to the reaction to COVID, I think what we are beginning to figure out is, is there going to be a second surge, what elective procedures that were postponed, will be top of the mind for customers, and so this is the kind of things that hospitals are beginning to plan out for the second half of the year, and as businesses try to open up, certain things were highly correlated to surgeon cases, such as cleaning supplies, for example, the obvious one or pantry buying. So retailers are beginning to see what online stores are doing well, e-commerce, online purchases, electronic goods, and so everyone essentially started working from home, and so homes needed to have the same kind of bandwidth that offices and commercial enterprises needed to have, and so a lot of interesting, as one side you saw airlines go away, this side you saw the likes of Zoom and video take off. So you're kind of seeing a real divide in the digital divide and that's happening and AI is here to play a very good role to figure out how to enhance your profitability as you're looking about planning out the next two years. >> Yeah, you know, and obviously, these things they get, they get partisan, it gets political, I mean, our job as an industry is to report, your job is to help people understand, I mean, let the data inform and then let public policy you know, fight it out. So who are some of the people that you're working with that you know, as a result of COVID-19. What's some of the work that H2O has done, I want to better understand what role are you playing? >> So one of the things we're kind of privileged as a company to come into the crisis, with a strong balance and an ability to actually have the right kind of momentum behind the company in terms of great talent, and so we have 10% of the world's top data scientists in the in the form of Kaggle Grand Masters in the company. And so we put most of them to work, and they started collecting data sets, curating data sets and making them more qualitative, picking up public data sources, for example, there's a tremendous amount of job loss out there, figuring out which are the more difficult kind of sectors in the economy and then we started looking at exodus from the cities, we're looking at mobility data that's publicly available, mobility data through the data exchanges, you're able to find which cities which rural areas, did the New Yorkers as they left the city, which places did they go to, and what's to say, Californians when they left Los Angeles, which are the new places they have settled in? These are the places which are now busy places for the same kind of items that you need to sell if you're a retailer, but if you go one step further, we started engaging with FEMA, we start engaging with the universities, like Imperial College London or Berkeley, and started figuring out how best to improve the models and automate them. The SEER model, the most popular SEER model, we added that into our Driverless AI product as a recipe and made that accessible to our customers in testing, to customers in healthcare who are trying to predict where the surge is likely to come. But it's mostly about information right? So the AI at the end of it is all about intelligence and being prepared. Predictive is all about being prepared and that's kind of what we did with general, lots of blogs, typical blog articles and working with the largest health organizations and starting to kind of inform them on the most stable models. What we found to our not so much surprise, is that the simplest, very interpretable models are actually the most widely usable, because historical data is actually no longer as effective. You need to build a model that you can quickly understand and retry again to the feedback loop of back testing that model against what really happened. >> Yeah, so I want to double down on that. So really, two things I want to understand, if you have visibility on it, sounds like you do. Just in terms of the surge and the comeback, you know, kind of what those models say, based upon, you know, we have some advanced information coming from the global market, for sure, but it seems like every situation is different. What's the data telling you? Just in terms of, okay, we're coming into the spring and the summer months, maybe it'll come down a little bit. Everybody says it... We fully expect it to come back in the fall, go back to college, don't go back to college. What is the data telling you at this point in time with an understanding that, you know, we're still iterating every day? >> Well, I think I mean, we're not epidemiologists, but at the same time, the science of it is a highly local response, very hyper local response to COVID-19 is what we've seen. Santa Clara, which is just a county, I mean, is different from San Francisco, right, sort of. So you beginning to see, like we saw in Brooklyn, it's very different, and Bronx, very different from Manhattan. So you're seeing a very, very local response to this disease, and I'm talking about US. You see the likes of Brazil, which we're worried about, has picked up quite a bit of cases now. I think the silver lining I would say is that China is up and running to a large degree, a large number of our user base there are back active, you can see the traffic patterns there. So two months after their last research cases, the business and economic activity is back and thriving. And so, you can kind of estimate from that, that this can be done where you can actually contain the rise of active cases and it will take masking of the entire community, masking and the healthy dose of increase in testing. One of our offices is in Prague, and Czech Republic has done an incredible job in trying to contain this and they've done essentially, masked everybody and as a result they're back thinking about opening offices, schools later this month. So I think that's a very, very local response, hyper local response, no one country and no one community is symmetrical with other ones and I think we have a unique situation where in United States you have a very, very highly connected world, highly connected economy and I think we have quite a problem on our hands on how to safeguard our economy while also safeguarding life. >> Yeah, so you can't just, you can't just take Norway and apply it or South Korea and apply it, every situation is different. And then I want to ask you about, you know, the economy in terms of, you know, how much can AI actually, you know, how can it work in this situation where you have, you know, for example, okay, so the Fed, yes, it started doing asset buys back in 2008 but still, very hard to predict, I mean, at this time of this interview you know, Stock Market up 900 points, very difficult to predict that but some event happens in the morning, somebody, you know, Powell says something positive and it goes crazy but just sort of even modeling out the V recovery, the W recovery, deep recession, the comeback. You have to have enough data, do you not? In order for AI to be reasonably accurate? How does it work? And how does at what pace can you iterate and improve on the models? >> So I think that's exactly where I would say, continuous modeling, instead of continuously learning continuous, that's where the vision of the world is headed towards, where data is coming, you build a model, and then you iterate, try it out and come back. That kind of rapid, continuous learning would probably be needed for all our models as opposed to the typical, I'm pushing a model to production once a year, or once every quarter. I think what we're beginning to see is the kind of where companies are beginning to kind of plan out. A lot of people lost their jobs in the last couple of months, right, sort of. And so up scaling and trying to kind of bring back these jobs back both into kind of, both from the manufacturing side, but also lost a lot of jobs in the transportation and the kind of the airlines slash hotel industries, right, sort of. So it's trying to now bring back the sense of confidence and will take a lot more kind of testing, a lot more masking, a lot more social empathy, I think well, some of the things that we are missing while we are socially distant, we know that we are so connected as a species, we need to kind of start having that empathy for we need to wear a mask, not for ourselves, but for our neighbors and people we may run into. And I think that kind of, the same kind of thinking has to kind of parade, before we can open up the economy in a big way. The data, I mean, we can do a lot of transfer learning, right, sort of there are new methods, like try to model it, similar to the 1918, where we had a second bump, or a lot of little bumps, and that's kind of where your W shaped pieces, but governments are trying very well in seeing stimulus dollars being pumped through banks. So some of the US case we're looking for banks is, which small medium business in especially, in unsecured lending, which business to lend to, (mumbles) there's so many applications that have come to banks across the world, it's not just in the US, and banks are caught up with the problem of which and what's growing the concern for this business to kind of, are they really accurate about the number of employees they are saying they have? Do then the next level problem or on forbearance and mortgage, that side of the things are coming up at some of these banks as well. So they're looking at which, what's one of the problems that one of our customers Wells Fargo, they have a question which branch to open, right, sort of that itself, it needs a different kind of modeling. So everything has become a very highly good segmented models, and so AI is absolutely not just a good to have, it has become a must have for most of our customers in how to go about their business. (mumbles) >> I want to talk a little bit about your business, you have been on a mission to democratize AI since the beginning, open source. Explain your business model, how you guys make money and then I want to help people understand basic theoretical comparisons and current affairs. >> Yeah, that's great. I think the last time we spoke, probably about at the Spark Summit. I think Dave and we were talking about Sparkling Water and H2O our open source platforms, which are premium platforms for democratizing machine learning and math at scale, and that's been a tremendous brand for us. Over the last couple of years, we have essentially built a platform called Driverless AI, which is a license software and that automates machine learning models, we took the best practices of all these data scientists, and combined them to essentially build recipes that allow people to build the best forecasting models, best fraud prevention models or the best recommendation engines, and so we started augmenting traditional data scientists with this automatic machine learning called AutoML, that essentially allows them to build models without necessarily having the same level of talent as these great Kaggle Grand Masters. And so that has democratized, allowed ordinary companies to start producing models of high caliber and high quality that would otherwise have been the pedigree of Google, Microsoft or Amazon or some of these top tier AI houses like Netflix and others. So what we've done is democratize not just the algorithms at the open source level. Now, we've made it easy for kind of rapid adoption of AI across every branch inside a company, a large organization, also across smaller organizations which don't have the access to the same kind of talent. Now, third level, you know, what we've brought to market, is ability to augment data sets, especially public and private data sets that you can, the alternative data sets that can increase the signal. And that's where we've started working on a new platform called Q, again, more license software, and I mean, to give you an idea there from business models endpoint, now majority of our software sales is coming from closed source software. And sort of so, we've made that transition, we still make our open source widely accessible, we continue to improve it, a large chunk of the teams are improving and participating in building the communities but I think from a business model standpoint as of last year, 51% of our revenues are now coming from closed source software and that change is continuing to grow. >> And this is the point I wanted to get to, so you know, the open source model was you know, Red Hat the one company that, you know, succeeded wildly and it was, put it out there open source, come up with a service, maintain the software, you got to buy the subscription okay, fine. And everybody thought that you know, you were going to do that, they thought that Databricks was going to do and that changed. But I want to take two examples, Hortonworks which kind of took the Red Hat model and Cloudera which does IP. And neither really lived up to the expectation, but now there seems to be sort of a new breed I mentioned, you guys, Databricks, there are others, that seem to be working. You with your license software model, Databricks with a managed service and so there's, it's becoming clear that there's got to be some level of IP that can be licensed in order to really thrive in the open source community to be able to fund the committers that you have to put forth to open source. I wonder if you could give me your thoughts on that narrative. >> So on Driverless AI, which is the closest platform I mentioned, we opened up the layers in open source as recipes. So for example, different companies build their zip codes differently, right, the domain specific recipes, we put about 150 of them in open source again, on top of our Driverless AI platform, and the idea there is that, open source is about freedom, right? It is not necessarily about, it's not a philosophy, it's not a business model, it allows freedom for rapid adoption of a platform and complete democratization and commodification of a space. And that allows a small company like ours to compete at the level of an SaaS or a Google or a Microsoft because you have the same level of voice as a very large company and you're focused on using code as a community building exercise as opposed to a business model, right? So that's kind of the heart of open source, is allowing that freedom for our end users and the customers to kind of innovate at the same level of that a Silicon Valley company or one of these large tech giants are building software. So it's really about making, it's a maker culture, as opposed to a consumer culture around software. Now, if you look at how the the Red Hat model, and the others who have tried to replicate that, the difficult part there was, if the product is very good, customers are self sufficient and if it becomes a standard, then customers know how to use it. If the product is crippled or difficult to use, then you put a lot of services and that's where you saw the classic Hadoop companies, get pulled into a lot of services, which is a reasonably difficult business to scale. So I think what we chose was, instead, a great product that builds a fantastic brand, that makes AI, even when other first or second.ai domain, and for us to see thousands of companies which are not AI and AI first, and even more companies adopting AI and talking about AI as a major way that was possible because of open source. If you had chosen close source and many of your peers did, they all vanished. So that's kind of how the open source is really about building the ecosystem and having the patience to build a company that takes 10, 20 years to build. And what we are expecting unfortunately, is a first and fast rise up to become unicorns. In that race, you're essentially sacrifice, building a long ecosystem play, and that's kind of what we chose to do, and that took a little longer. Now, if you think about the, how do you truly monetize open source, it takes a little longer and is much more difficult sales machine to scale, right, sort of. Our open source business actually is reasonably positive EBITDA business because it makes more money than we spend on it. But trying to teach sales teams, how to sell open source, that's a much, that's a rate limiting step. And that's why we chose and also explaining to the investors, how open source is being invested in as you go closer to the IPO markets, that's where we chose, let's go into license software model and scale that as a regular business. >> So I've said a few times, it's kind of like ironic that, this pandemic is as we're entering a new decade, you know, we've kind of we're exiting the era, I mean, the many, many decades of Moore's law being the source of innovation and now it's a combination of data, applying machine intelligence and being able to scale and with cloud. Well, my question is, what did we expect out of AI this decade if those are sort of the three, the cocktail of innovation, if you will, what should we expect? Is it really just about, I suggest, is it really about automating, you know, businesses, giving them more agility, flexibility, you know, etc. Or should we should we expect more from AI this decade? >> Well, I mean, if you think about the decade of 2010 2011, that was defined by software is eating the world, right? And now you can say software is the world, right? I mean, pretty much almost all conditions are digital. And AI is eating software, right? (mumbling) A lot of cloud transitions are happening and are now happening much faster rate but cloud and AI are kind of the leading, AI is essentially one of the biggest driver for cloud adoption for many of our customers. So in the enterprise world, you're seeing rebuilding of a lot of data, fast data driven applications that use AI, instead of rule based software, you're beginning to see patterned, mission AI based software, and you're seeing that in spades. And, of course, that is just the tip of the iceberg, AI has been with us for 100 years, and it's going to be ahead of us another hundred years, right, sort of. So as you see the discovery rate at which, it is really a fundamentally a math, math movement and in that math movement at the beginning of every century, it leads to 100 years of phenomenal discovery. So AI is essentially making discoveries faster, AI is producing, entertainment, AI is producing music, AI is producing choreographing, you're seeing AI in every walk of life, AI summarization of Zoom meetings, right, you beginning to see a lot of the AI enabled ETF peaking of stocks, right, sort of. You're beginning to see, we repriced 20,000 bonds every 15 seconds using H2O AI, corporate bonds. And so you and one of our customers is on the fastest growing stock, mostly AI is powering a lot of these insights in a fast changing world which is globally connected. No one of us is able to combine all the multiple dimensions that are changing and AI has that incredible opportunity to be a partner for every... (mumbling) For a hospital looking at how the second half will look like for physicians looking at what is the sentiment of... What is the surge to expect? To kind of what is the market demand looking at the sentiment of the customers. AI is the ultimate money ball in business and then I think it's just showing its depth at this point. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on, I mean, basically AI is going to convert every software, every application, or those tools aren't going to have much use, Sri we got to go but thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and the great work you guys are doing. Really appreciate your insights. stay safe, and best of luck to you guys. >> Likewise, thank you so much. >> Welcome, and thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for the CXO series on theCUBE. We'll see you next time. All right, we're clear. All right.

>> Starting the record, Dave in five, four, three. Hi, everybody this is Dave Vellante, theCUBE, and welcome back to my CXO series. I've been running this through really since the start of the COVID-19 crisis to really understand how leaders are dealing with this pandemic. Sri Ambati is here, he's the CEO and founder of H20. Sri, it's great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, so this pandemic has obviously given people fits, no question, but it's also given opportunities for companies to kind of reassess where they are. Automation is a huge watchword, flexibility, business resiliency and people who maybe really hadn't fully leaned into things like the cloud and AI and automation are now realizing, wow, we have no choice, it's about survival. Your thought as to what you're seeing in the marketplace. >> Thanks for having us. I think first of all, kudos to the frontline health workers who have been ruthlessly saving lives across the country and the world, and what you're really doing is a fraction of what we could have done or should be doing to stay away the next big pandemic. But that apart I think, I usually tend to say BC is before COVID. So if the world was thinking about going digital after COVID-19, they have been forced to go digital and as a result, you're seeing tremendous transformation across our customers, and a lot of application to kind of go in and reinvent their business models that allow them to scale as effortlessly as they could using the digital means. >> So, think about, doctors and diagnosis machines, in some cases, are helping doctors make diagnoses, they're sometimes making even better diagnosis, (mumbles) is informing. There's been a lot of talk about the models, you know how... Yeah, I know you've been working with a lot of healthcare organizations, you may probably familiar with that, you know, the Medium post, The Hammer and the Dance, and if people criticize the models, of course, they're just models, right? And you iterate models and machine intelligence can help us improve. So, in this, you know, you talk about BC and post C, how have you seen the data and in machine intelligence informing the models and proving that what we know about this pandemic, I mean, it changed literally daily, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, and I think it started with Wuhan and we saw the best application of AI in trying to trace, literally from Alipay, to WeChat, track down the first folks who were spreading it across China and then eventually the rest of the world. I think contact tracing, for example, has become a really interesting problem. supply chain has been disrupted like never before. We're beginning to see customers trying to reinvent their distribution mechanisms in the second order effects of the COVID, and the the prime center is hospital staffing, how many ventilator, is the first few weeks so that after COVID crisis as it evolved in the US. We are busy predicting working with some of the local healthcare communities to predict how staffing in hospitals will work, how many PPE and ventilators will be needed and so henceforth, but that quickly and when the peak surge will be those with the beginning problems, and many of our customers have begin to do these models and iterate and improve and kind of educate the community to practice social distancing, and that led to a lot of flattening the curve and you're talking flattening the curve, you're really talking about data science and analytics in public speak. That led to kind of the next level, now that we have somewhat brought a semblance of order to the reaction to COVID, I think what we are beginning to figure out is, is there going to be a second surge, what elective procedures that were postponed, will be top of the mind for customers, and so this is the kind of things that hospitals are beginning to plan out for the second half of the year, and as businesses try to open up, certain things were highly correlated to surgeon cases, such as cleaning supplies, for example, the obvious one or pantry buying. So retailers are beginning to see what online stores are doing well, e-commerce, online purchases, electronic goods, and so everyone essentially started working from home, and so homes needed to have the same kind of bandwidth that offices and commercial enterprises needed to have, and so a lot of interesting, as one side you saw airlines go away, this side you saw the likes of Zoom and video take off. So you're kind of seeing a real divide in the digital divide and that's happening and AI is here to play a very good role to figure out how to enhance your profitability as you're looking about planning out the next two years. >> Yeah, you know, and obviously, these things they get, they get partisan, it gets political, I mean, our job as an industry is to report, your job is to help people understand, I mean, let the data inform and then let public policy you know, fight it out. So who are some of the people that you're working with that you know, as a result of COVID-19. What's some of the work that H2O has done, I want to better understand what role are you playing? >> So one of the things we're kind of privileged as a company to come into the crisis, with a strong balance and an ability to actually have the right kind of momentum behind the company in terms of great talent, and so we have 10% of the world's top data scientists in the in the form of Kaggle Grand Masters in the company. And so we put most of them to work, and they started collecting data sets, curating data sets and making them more qualitative, picking up public data sources, for example, there's a tremendous amount of job loss out there, figuring out which are the more difficult kind of sectors in the economy and then we started looking at exodus from the cities, we're looking at mobility data that's publicly available, mobility data through the data exchanges, you're able to find which cities which rural areas, did the New Yorkers as they left the city, which places did they go to, and what's to say, Californians when they left Los Angeles, which are the new places they have settled in? These are the places which are now busy places for the same kind of items that you need to sell if you're a retailer, but if you go one step further, we started engaging with FEMA, we start engaging with the universities, like Imperial College London or Berkeley, and started figuring out how best to improve the models and automate them. The SaaS model, the most popular SaaS model, we added that into our Driverless AI product as a recipe and made that accessible to our customers in testing, to customers in healthcare who are trying to predict where the surge is likely to come. But it's mostly about information right? So the AI at the end of it is all about intelligence and being prepared. Predictive is all about being prepared and that's kind of what we did with general, lots of blogs, typical blog articles and working with the largest health organizations and starting to kind of inform them on the most stable models. What we found to our not so much surprise, is that the simplest, very interpretable models are actually the most widely usable, because historical data is actually no longer as effective. You need to build a model that you can quickly understand and retry again to the feedback loop of back testing that model against what really happened. >> Yeah, so I want to double down on that. So really, two things I want to understand, if you have visibility on it, sounds like you do. Just in terms of the surge and the comeback, you know, kind of what those models say, based upon, you know, we have some advanced information coming from the global market, for sure, but it seems like every situation is different. What's the data telling you? Just in terms of, okay, we're coming into the spring and the summer months, maybe it'll come down a little bit. Everybody says it... We fully expect it to come back in the fall, go back to college, don't go back to college. What is the data telling you at this point in time with an understanding that, you know, we're still iterating every day? >> Well, I think I mean, we're not epidemiologists, but at the same time, the science of it is a highly local response, very hyper local response to COVID-19 is what we've seen. Santa Clara, which is just a county, I mean, is different from San Francisco, right, sort of. So you beginning to see, like we saw in Brooklyn, it's very different, and Bronx, very different from Manhattan. So you're seeing a very, very local response to this disease, and I'm talking about US. You see the likes of Brazil, which we're worried about, has picked up quite a bit of cases now. I think the silver lining I would say is that China is up and running to a large degree, a large number of our user base there are back active, you can see the traffic patterns there. So two months after their last research cases, the business and economic activity is back and thriving. And so, you can kind of estimate from that, that this can be done where you can actually contain the rise of active cases and it will take masking of the entire community, masking and the healthy dose of increase in testing. One of our offices is in Prague, and Czech Republic has done an incredible job in trying to contain this and they've done essentially, masked everybody and as a result they're back thinking about opening offices, schools later this month. So I think that's a very, very local response, hyper local response, no one country and no one community is symmetrical with other ones and I think we have a unique situation where in United States you have a very, very highly connected world, highly connected economy and I think we have quite a problem on our hands on how to safeguard our economy while also safeguarding life. >> Yeah, so you can't just, you can't just take Norway and apply it or South Korea and apply it, every situation is different. And then I want to ask you about, you know, the economy in terms of, you know, how much can AI actually, you know, how can it work in this situation where you have, you know, for example, okay, so the Fed, yes, it started doing asset buys back in 2008 but still, very hard to predict, I mean, at this time of this interview you know, Stock Market up 900 points, very difficult to predict that but some event happens in the morning, somebody, you know, Powell says something positive and it goes crazy but just sort of even modeling out the V recovery, the W recovery, deep recession, the comeback. You have to have enough data, do you not? In order for AI to be reasonably accurate? How does it work? And how does at what pace can you iterate and improve on the models? >> So I think that's exactly where I would say, continuous modeling, instead of continuously learning continuous, that's where the vision of the world is headed towards, where data is coming, you build a model, and then you iterate, try it out and come back. That kind of rapid, continuous learning would probably be needed for all our models as opposed to the typical, I'm pushing a model to production once a year, or once every quarter. I think what we're beginning to see is the kind of where companies are beginning to kind of plan out. A lot of people lost their jobs in the last couple of months, right, sort of. And so up scaling and trying to kind of bring back these jobs back both into kind of, both from the manufacturing side, but also lost a lot of jobs in the transportation and the kind of the airlines slash hotel industries, right, sort of. So it's trying to now bring back the sense of confidence and will take a lot more kind of testing, a lot more masking, a lot more social empathy, I think well, some of the things that we are missing while we are socially distant, we know that we are so connected as a species, we need to kind of start having that empathy for we need to wear a mask, not for ourselves, but for our neighbors and people we may run into. And I think that kind of, the same kind of thinking has to kind of parade, before we can open up the economy in a big way. The data, I mean, we can do a lot of transfer learning, right, sort of there are new methods, like try to model it, similar to the 1918, where we had a second bump, or a lot of little bumps, and that's kind of where your W shaped pieces, but governments are trying very well in seeing stimulus dollars being pumped through banks. So some of the US case we're looking for banks is, which small medium business in especially, in unsecured lending, which business to lend to, (mumbles) there's so many applications that have come to banks across the world, it's not just in the US, and banks are caught up with the problem of which and what's growing the concern for this business to kind of, are they really accurate about the number of employees they are saying they have? Do then the next level problem or on forbearance and mortgage, that side of the things are coming up at some of these banks as well. So they're looking at which, what's one of the problems that one of our customers Wells Fargo, they have a question which branch to open, right, sort of that itself, it needs a different kind of modeling. So everything has become a very highly good segmented models, and so AI is absolutely not just a good to have, it has become a must have for most of our customers in how to go about their business. (mumbles) >> I want to talk a little bit about your business, you have been on a mission to democratize AI since the beginning, open source. Explain your business model, how you guys make money and then I want to help people understand basic theoretical comparisons and current affairs. >> Yeah, that's great. I think the last time we spoke, probably about at the Spark Summit. I think Dave and we were talking about Sparkling Water and H2O or open source platforms, which are premium platforms for democratizing machine learning and math at scale, and that's been a tremendous brand for us. Over the last couple of years, we have essentially built a platform called Driverless AI, which is a license software and that automates machine learning models, we took the best practices of all these data scientists, and combined them to essentially build recipes that allow people to build the best forecasting models, best fraud prevention models or the best recommendation engines, and so we started augmenting traditional data scientists with this automatic machine learning called AutoML, that essentially allows them to build models without necessarily having the same level of talent as these Greek Kaggle Grand Masters. And so that has democratized, allowed ordinary companies to start producing models of high caliber and high quality that would otherwise have been the pedigree of Google, Microsoft or Amazon or some of these top tier AI houses like Netflix and others. So what we've done is democratize not just the algorithms at the open source level. Now, we've made it easy for kind of rapid adoption of AI across every branch inside a company, a large organization, also across smaller organizations which don't have the access to the same kind of talent. Now, third level, you know, what we've brought to market, is ability to augment data sets, especially public and private data sets that you can, the alternative data sets that can increase the signal. And that's where we've started working on a new platform called Q, again, more license software, and I mean, to give you an idea there from business models endpoint, now majority of our software sales is coming from closed source software. And sort of so, we've made that transition, we still make our open source widely accessible, we continue to improve it, a large chunk of the teams are improving and participating in building the communities but I think from a business model standpoint as of last year, 51% of our revenues are now coming from closed source software and that change is continuing to grow. >> And this is the point I wanted to get to, so you know, the open source model was you know, Red Hat the one company that, you know, succeeded wildly and it was, put it out there open source, come up with a service, maintain the software, you got to buy the subscription okay, fine. And everybody thought that you know, you were going to do that, they thought that Databricks was going to do and that changed. But I want to take two examples, Hortonworks which kind of took the Red Hat model and Cloudera which does IP. And neither really lived up to the expectation, but now there seems to be sort of a new breed I mentioned, you guys, Databricks, there are others, that seem to be working. You with your license software model, Databricks with a managed service and so there's, it's becoming clear that there's got to be some level of IP that can be licensed in order to really thrive in the open source community to be able to fund the committers that you have to put forth to open source. I wonder if you could give me your thoughts on that narrative. >> So on Driverless AI, which is the closest platform I mentioned, we opened up the layers in open source as recipes. So for example, different companies build their zip codes differently, right, the domain specific recipes, we put about 150 of them in open source again, on top of our Driverless AI platform, and the idea there is that, open source is about freedom, right? It is not necessarily about, it's not a philosophy, it's not a business model, it allows freedom for rapid adoption of a platform and complete democratization and commodification of a space. And that allows a small company like ours to compete at the level of an SaaS or a Google or a Microsoft because you have the same level of voice as a very large company and you're focused on using code as a community building exercise as opposed to a business model, right? So that's kind of the heart of open source, is allowing that freedom for our end users and the customers to kind of innovate at the same level of that a Silicon Valley company or one of these large tech giants are building software. So it's really about making, it's a maker culture, as opposed to a consumer culture around software. Now, if you look at how the the Red Hat model, and the others who have tried to replicate that, the difficult part there was, if the product is very good, customers are self sufficient and if it becomes a standard, then customers know how to use it. If the product is crippled or difficult to use, then you put a lot of services and that's where you saw the classic Hadoop companies, get pulled into a lot of services, which is a reasonably difficult business to scale. So I think what we chose was, instead, a great product that builds a fantastic brand, that makes AI, even when other first or second.ai domain, and for us to see thousands of companies which are not AI and AI first, and even more companies adopting AI and talking about AI as a major way that was possible because of open source. If you had chosen close source and many of your peers did, they all vanished. So that's kind of how the open source is really about building the ecosystem and having the patience to build a company that takes 10, 20 years to build. And what we are expecting unfortunately, is a first and fast rise up to become unicorns. In that race, you're essentially sacrifice, building a long ecosystem play, and that's kind of what we chose to do, and that took a little longer. Now, if you think about the, how do you truly monetize open source, it takes a little longer and is much more difficult sales machine to scale, right, sort of. Our open source business actually is reasonably positive EBITDA business because it makes more money than we spend on it. But trying to teach sales teams, how to sell open source, that's a much, that's a rate limiting step. And that's why we chose and also explaining to the investors, how open source is being invested in as you go closer to the IPO markets, that's where we chose, let's go into license software model and scale that as a regular business. >> So I've said a few times, it's kind of like ironic that, this pandemic is as we're entering a new decade, you know, we've kind of we're exiting the era, I mean, the many, many decades of Moore's law being the source of innovation and now it's a combination of data, applying machine intelligence and being able to scale and with cloud. Well, my question is, what did we expect out of AI this decade if those are sort of the three, the cocktail of innovation, if you will, what should we expect? Is it really just about, I suggest, is it really about automating, you know, businesses, giving them more agility, flexibility, you know, etc. Or should we should we expect more from AI this decade? >> Well, I mean, if you think about the decade of 2010 2011, that was defined by software is eating the world, right? And now you can say software is the world, right? I mean, pretty much almost all conditions are digital. And AI is eating software, right? (mumbling) A lot of cloud transitions are happening and are now happening much faster rate but cloud and AI are kind of the leading, AI is essentially one of the biggest driver for cloud adoption for many of our customers. So in the enterprise world, you're seeing rebuilding of a lot of data, fast data driven applications that use AI, instead of rule based software, you're beginning to see patterned, mission AI based software, and you're seeing that in spades. And, of course, that is just the tip of the iceberg, AI has been with us for 100 years, and it's going to be ahead of us another hundred years, right, sort of. So as you see the discovery rate at which, it is really a fundamentally a math, math movement and in that math movement at the beginning of every century, it leads to 100 years of phenomenal discovery. So AI is essentially making discoveries faster, AI is producing, entertainment, AI is producing music, AI is producing choreographing, you're seeing AI in every walk of life, AI summarization of Zoom meetings, right, you beginning to see a lot of the AI enabled ETF peaking of stocks, right, sort of. You're beginning to see, we repriced 20,000 bonds every 15 seconds using H2O AI, corporate bonds. And so you and one of our customers is on the fastest growing stock, mostly AI is powering a lot of these insights in a fast changing world which is globally connected. No one of us is able to combine all the multiple dimensions that are changing and AI has that incredible opportunity to be a partner for every... (mumbling) For a hospital looking at how the second half will look like for physicians looking at what is the sentiment of... What is the surge to expect? To kind of what is the market demand looking at the sentiment of the customers. AI is the ultimate money ball in business and then I think it's just showing its depth at this point. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on, I mean, basically AI is going to convert every software, every application, or those tools aren't going to have much use, Sri we got to go but thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and the great work you guys are doing. Really appreciate your insights. stay safe, and best of luck to you guys. >> Likewise, thank you so much. >> Welcome, and thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for the CXO series on theCUBE. We'll see you next time. All right, we're clear. All right.