>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update, of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives, we did a deep dive on some of the technology. And now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executive talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program I have two guests from PLM insurance. First, sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. All right. So BJ, just for our audience that does not know, Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history, obvious with the name, it's in the insurance business but help us understand, you know, what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. >> Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around for under 125 years, we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year. This February Actually, we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty. And we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand. And we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few if not only one, left that does not offer insurance on mutual space >> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware, cause you're here, talk to us about what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM. >> So I've been without Pennsylvania Lumbermens for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers, and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set. And since then we've been moving little by little to the cloud. We have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now, we have a small data center in Philadelphia that is an on prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, why have cloud data center as a service model with the VMware Certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. >> Excellent. Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR In this case that you're using. That hybrid model, help tease that out. BJ will Start with you. And I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. >> Sure, I mean, you know, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity, while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss is just... it's not an option. You can't afford to be down, you can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery, or at least the concept of that helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us, is to maintain business continuity and you know, with our lean staff at the same time. >> Echoing BJ a bit, having an on prem solution and really, to BJ'S point about our lean staff, It made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really, really helped that benefit our team as a whole. >> All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand how you made the decision to go down this path. >> So I can give you a quick... a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA. We occupied two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating. And we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for co location type vendor, and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction for since 2015. We've had their, I call it kind of co lo, plus data centers as a service model, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years and disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. >> Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with Site Recovery Manager. Again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And, yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. >> Yeah, maybe follow up on that, you've been a VMware customer for a number of years, you're familiar with the tooling, and everything else like that. So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out? >> So, I will guess so, absolutely, there was a good portion from when we started, so you have to kind of put it in perspective, because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, that was our data recovery site with action. So we had a two fold project, we were going into a contract year, a renewal year. And Faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018, was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019. As far as kicking off the call on how we are going to actually do the project. Work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September 17th actually 2019 so I'll just kind of highlight though, in that process, that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. >> Okay, and PJ after having done this, we've now got DR as a Service, what are the hero numbers? Have you reduced their cost savings loannes, How do you report up? The success or result of what you've done so far? >> Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiation, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we're running basically on a pillow type environment with with Baxter. and then we had a circuitry call, so we had a point to point line that would run out to, actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we that cost as well. So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit And we got we offloaded some resource costs. So, like I said about a roughly about a 20% cost savings. >> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously, there's got to be a little bit of changes to how you manage things, automation is, has been hot for years, but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So, how is this deployment, changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? >> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit, just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware cloud for our disaster recovery solution, It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company, we found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource, so that that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as the day to day functioning where we go about doing things up, it really took things off my plate, off the rest of the teams plate And just really, really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our, our infrastructure and our data being secured. >> All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you'd share? Or there's also some updates coming, taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon? I'll let you choose maybe BJ, we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave as to that those final words that you would share with your peers >> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team, is to ensure the company's technology needs, will be met after, in the event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So, in the case of the cloud for us, is maintaining business continuity while reducing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean, like I had stated before. And one of the most important things and this is not just about disaster recovery, but establishing good partnerships with vendors, is absolutely imperative. Because I don't care how big your shop is, and again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with them. >> And I would say, make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative. Get it, you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test test test, you can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. >> All right, Well, David, BJ, thank you so much for joining us appreciate you sharing your your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman And thank you as always for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. Live cube coverage here in Atlanta. This is the keeps coverage of Ansible Fest. This is red hat and suppose two days of live coverage. They had a contributor day yesterday before the conference all being covered by the cube. I'm John furrier, Miko Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Chris Gardner, principal analyst at Forrester Gardner. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. See you. Good to talk to you. Hey, analyzing the players in this space is really challenging. You've got a new wave that came out a few months ago. Yep. Laying it all out. Um, certainly the world changed. You go back eight years. Cloud was just hitting the scene on premises. Look good. Data's Stanley was rocking. You're doing network management, you're doing some configuration management now you've got observability, you've got automation apps. The world's changing big time. What's your take? What's this? I mean, it's interesting because the prior versions of that wave focused entirely on configuration management and the feedback I got was, um, the world's a lot bigger than that, right? >>And we have to talk about platforms and you heard it this morning during the keynote about Redhat moving towards an platform and automation platform. And my definition of a platform is things like configuration management, hybrid cloud management, all the various types of automation and orchestration need to be there. But you also need compliance. You need governance, you need the ability to hopefully make a call as to what is actually occurring and have some intelligence behind the automation. And obviously you need the integrations. It's not a situation to simply have as many people as possible, although that's nice as many vendors you work with. But to have real relationships, if you have Microsoft working on automation code with you, if, if Amazon working on automation code with you, that makes a true platform, right? It's John said earlier day a platform needs to be an enabler. And we've even said, if you can't build on top of this, like the collections that Ansible announced here seems like it might fit under that definition. >>And there's an old joke that everything becomes a platform eventually. Right? Um, but I think that, I think it bears it. There's some merit in this one. Um, the other thing is that I'm seeing a lot of folks want a holistic automation solution and the only way you're going to do that is to have a platform that you can build things on top of it and connect the pieces and provide the proper governance. So, um, I'm mostly in agreement with the definition that's been described here and I think you could tackle different ways. Uh, and all the vendors in the space are certainly doing that. Definitely platform thinking is different. Um, you know, the easy way to look at it and the old big data space do, we'll use to cover that was a tool versus a platform, you know, tools, a hammer, everything looks like a nail, did great things. >>One thing great are a few things. Good platform is more of a systems thinking. Yes, yes. And you've got glue layers, you've got data. So it's really more of that systems thinking that separates the winners from the losers, at least at our opinion. Absolutely. I mean, when you looked at who was the leaders in my wave, it wasn't the basics of automating or orchestration and configuration management, they all had that. The, the ones that were winners, where can I do compliance in a different way? Can I actually have people come into the system that aren't it people and make a call on some of these things? Can I apply AI and machine learning to some of this? Can I make some recommendations and hopefully direct people in the right, you know, the way they should go. And you know, the folks that were able to do that Rose to the top, the folks that weren't were average and below. >>Yeah. Chris bring us inside to some of the competitive dynamics here. We understand that, you know, there's a lot of open source here and therefore everybody holds hands and things can buy y'all. But, you know, there's, you know, product tools, there's the public clouds and what they do. And then, you know, Ansible, uh, you know, fit, fits in a lot of different places. Yeah. It's, it's a bit ironic because, uh, you know, this is one of those waves where, and it's very rare that everyone was sitting was, was at least preaching kumbaya. They are all saying that they were friendly with one another. And, and, uh, quite frankly, I, I tend to believe it. We're in a situation right now where you can't get by, especially in a hybrid cloud world. We are going to have resources that live in multiple, you know, AWS and Azure, but also on premises and at the edge. You need to have these integrations. You need to be able to talk to one another. So, um, that said, there's certainly a lot of coopertition going on where people are saying, if I can integrate these tools better, if I could provide a better governance layer, if I can again, hand things off to the enterprise in a way that has not been handed off before that I don't even have to go through an INO group and infrastructure operations group, those are willing, could be the ones that truly succeed in this space. >>Software defined data center, software defined cloud, everything software defined. Yep. These abstraction layers, data and software. We had a guest on the cube a week ago saying, data's the new software I get. Okay, it's nice, nice gimmick. But if you think about it, this abstraction layer, it's like a control plan. Everyone wants to go for these control planes, which is a feature of platform. As this automation platform becomes ultimately the AI platform, how do you see it evolving and expanding? Because you see organic growth, you see certainly key positions, 6 million stars on get hub. I mean, it's running the plumbing. I mean, come on. Like it's not, it's not like it's just some corner case. >>Yeah, yeah. Infrastructure. Yeah. I mean, you know, in an idealistic way, I'd like to see, we us resolve on singular holistic platforms for enterprises. The reality is that's not not the way you can do it today. What I do try to help clients do is at least rationalize their portfolio. If they have 12 different automation products they're running, chances are that's not the best idea. Um, I've actually had situations where someone will say to me, um, I'm running Ansible in one portion of my organization and chef and another, and I say, well, it's some, they do similar things. And the reason for it was because they were stood up organically. Each group kind of figured out the things along the way. And I have to at least guide them and say, you know, where are the similarities? Where can you potentially, you know, move some stuff from there. >>But the cloud discussion, you know, always debate upon, you know, multi-cloud, Seoul cloud, ultimately the workload needs something underneath. And I think workload definition dictates kind of what might be underneath. So it might be okay to have a couple, you know, automation platforms or it could be great to have one. I mean, this is really the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the eye of the, >>yeah, in my view. Um, I, I've been an analyst for a couple of years before that I was doing this stuff for a living. I have the worst scars and in my view it's, it's not even a matter of how many tools you use. It's putting the workload where it belongs, that matters. And if you could do that with fewer tools, obviously that from an operational level that makes life a lot easier. Um, but I'm not going to say to somebody, you know, completely dismantle your entire automation and orchestration workflow just because I think this one tool is better. Let's talk about how we can, >>that's the worst case scenario because if you have to dictate workloads based on what tool you have, that's supposed to be the other way around. >>Yes. Setting up a nuclear bomb in the data center or in the cloud has never worked. Note to self, don't do that. Yes. One of the interesting conversations we've already been having here at the show is that the tool is actually helping to drive some of the cultural change in collaboration. So, you know, what are you finding in your research? How is that, you know, kind of this admin role and you know, to the cloud in applications. You know, it's interesting. I, we continued to beat the drum that these folks are becoming developers, but we've been beating that drum for a decade now and quite frankly we had to continue to beat it. But what I think is more even more interesting is we have groups starting to pop up in our research that are separate from it, that focus on automation in a way that no one has done before. >>Some we went into it saying, Oh, that's a center of excellence, right? And the teams that we talked to said no, do not call us a center of excellence. A two reasons. One is that term is tainted. Uh, but secondly, we're not one team. There's multiple automation teams. So we're actually starting to call these groups, strike teams that come in and standardize and say, okay, I have a lead architect, a lead robot architects say it's around infrastructure automation. I'm going to standardize across the board and when other groups need to come on board, I have the principles already laid out. I have the, the process is already laid out. I come in, I accelerate that, I set it up and then I back off. I don't own the process and I'm not part of it either. I T's got operations of its own that's got to worry about. >>I'm going between the two and when we talk to especially the fortune 100 they are setting these groups up. Now when I ask them what do you called them? They don't have a name yet, so I think strike team sounds sexy, but ultimately this is not like a, a section of it that's been severed off and becomes this role. It's a completely true committee. I yeah. Oh yeah. I want our falls slow process. Exactly, exactly. And it better fits what the role is. The role is to come in, nail the process, get it automated and the get out. It's not to stand there and be a standards body forever. Um, there's certainly some groups that in some types of automation like RPA where you want them to stick around because you may want them to manage the bots. There's a whole role called bot masters, which is specifically for that role. But most of the time you want them to be part of that process and then you know, hand it back off. >>Yeah. We've seen some interesting patterns. I want to get your thoughts on this as a little bit of a non-sequitur. Want to bring it in, but in the security space you seeing a CSOs chief information security officers building their own stacks internally, they're picking one cloud, Amazon or Azure and they're building all in maybe some hedge with some people working on some backup cloud, but they don't want to fork their talent all on one cloud and they cause they need to be bad ass responsive strike teams for security pressure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not as critical with the security side with automation, but certainly relevance. Is that the same thing going on here with this development Durham, this being continued to be as much more around core competency and building internally stacks and building some standards? >>I I, I think it is, and you know what's interesting too is that I work with, I'm on the infrastructure and operations team at Forrester. I talk with INO people all day long, but I work alongside the security team and I said to them a couple of years ago, um, you guys are going to have to get your hands dirty with this stuff that I cover. You guys have to know infrastructure, automation, API APIs, you need to know how to code these things. And I said, are you comfortable telling your sec ops folks, your clients that they go, no, by all means they have to be part of this. So they're okay with them talking to me, talking to them and saying that you need to be part of the infrastructure design process and need to be part of this decision making process. Right. Um, which is different than their sec ops role used to be. So my point is, is that these worlds are not that dissimilar as some people might think they are sec dev ops or whatever we're going to call it. We keep tacking letters onto this thing, uhm, is a actual discipline. And it is a reality in most organizations I talked to the people should. >>So a system has all of these things as data across the system. They have high blood subsystem you're talking about and yet it's this holistic system security and data. Yeah. >>And we're in a world now, especially around things like edge computing where data gravity matters. So all these pieces, you know, it's, if you go back to the old school kind of computer science folks from the, you know, 50 sixties and seventies, they're like, this is not new. We've been thinking systems thinking for awhile, but I think we're finally at a place where we're actually now breaking down the silos that we've been championing to do. So for, >>I got to ask you the analyst questions since you're watching the landscape. Sue wants to jump in, but I want to get this out. So observability became a category at a network management. I mean, network management was like this boring kind of plotting along white space. I mean, super important. People need to do network management. Then in comes the cloud becomes a data problem. Whether it's observability you get to microservices, you got security signal FX, all these companies going public. Um, well a lot of M and a activities basically large segment, a lot of frothiness automation feels like it's growing to be big. Is there startup opportunities here? If, if platforms are becoming being a combination of things, is there room for startups and if so, what would you say? Um, those stars would look like? There are, I think >>what we're seeing is, and it speaks to the observer, observe the word you just said. Um, uh, I can, I can S I can know what it is, but I can't say it. Um, we're seeing the APM vendors move down the stack. We're seeing the infrastructure monitoring vendors move up the stack and in the middle we're seeing them both try to automate the same things. Um, you cannot pull off some of the infrastructure as code automation that we need to pull off without observability, but you can't get that observability unless you are able to pull it from the top of the stack. Um, what we're going to see is consolidation and we're already starting to see it, um, where you're gonna have different groups come together and say, why did have to tools to do this? Why not do one? Um, the reason why you do multiple tools today is because no one is truly strong at the entire stack. >>A lot of the folks that are going down the stack to say that they're not quite infrastructure automation players just yet, but watch this space, they will eventually, Oh, this change happening. Absolutely. Startups getting funded. Do you think there's opportunity to take some territory down? If there's any opportunity? And, and I'm, I'm pushing for this, it's in the AI AI ops space when it comes to these things is actually going beyond where we stand today. So I want to be clear that, um, AI ops is a great concept. The reality of is that we're still a ways away from being practical. I'd like to see not just recommendations from these tools that the startups are providing, but actually trust in them to make the changes necessary. So Chris, it sounds like the antibody automation platform announcement today fits with what you've been saying for the last couple of years. >>So the question is, what's next? Where does the Ansible need to mature and expand and you know, what, what are users asking for that Ansible is not doing today? So a couple things. Um, they did okay, but not fantastic at infrastructure modeling. Ansible. They did okay, but not amazing at what we call comprehension, which is making a call as to, you know, using AI and machine learning to make a call and what the infrastructure layers should look like. To be Frank, no one did really well in that one. So not too, not too bad on that. Um, and the other thing is they need to improve slightly. Is there integration story? They actually have a really good one. You see all the folks that are here. Um, it's just, it's, it's just as hair away from being the best. They're not quite there yet. So, and when, again, when I mean integrations, I don't mean having a laundry list of vendors you work with. >>I mean actually working with them to build code and you saw that this morning where there's the best, uh, right now surprisingly is VMware, but for you Morris built that relationship off for a long time. Um, they work right alongside Microsoft and Google and all these folks to build the code together in the industry. Uh, I think the darkest source of all is probably, and it remains to be seen if they can actually do something that is HashiCorp. Um, Terraform is an interesting player in this entire space. I actually included them in our wave on infrastructure automation platforms and you can argue is it even an automation platform? Quite frankly. Um, uh, I think HashiCorp itself was trying to figure out exactly what it is. But the bottom line is it's got tremendous Mindshare and it works well. So I think that if you watch, if you see the strategy going forward and look at, you know, what they're putting their investments into, they could become a really serious damaging player in this space. Chris Gardner, thanks for coming on the cube, sharing your insights and your research at Forrester forced wave. Check it out. Just came out a couple of months ago. Uh, infrastructure automation platforms. Q three 2019. Chris Gardner, the author here in the Q, breaking it down. I'm John furrier. There's too many men. We'll be back with more after the short break. Thank you.

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day two of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend, and we've got another CUBE alumni joining us, Dana Gardner, President and Principle Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. >> Sorry, my language skills are declining on day two. >> It's been a long day. >> It has been a long day. We've had, speaking of, had a lot of great conversations with Citrix Execs, customers, analysts over the last day and a half. People are very excited about what Citrix is doing with intelligence, experience, and really helping businesses to transform their workforces. But you have been following Citrix for a long time. >> Yes. >> So, talk to us about some of the early days back in the 90's. I'd love to get your perspectives on what you saw back then and what your thoughts are about some of the things that they're announcing at this event. >> Sure, well back in 1995-1996, the internet was still the new kid on the block, and browsers were kind of cool but, how would they ever help a business? And then, along comes this company that says, "Oh, we're not going to deliver things through a browser, we're going to deliver the whole app experience, apps that you're familiar with, your Windows-based apps over the wire. Over the internet protocol." Wow, so I remember at Internet Expo in New York at the Javits Center, Ed Iacobucci, The co-founder of Citrix got up there and explained how, yeah, we're going to deliver apps. And basically what they were describing is cloud computing as we know it today. Wow, it was very interesting, but we all kind of look at him like he was a little crazy. (host laughing) Yes. >> And, that's been a long time, man. Citrix has made a name for itself since then. You know, the day I was talking to David Hansel, yesterday and I said, "You know what, Citrix is a verb. I'm going to Citrix in an application. They established something for themselves." And, ironically, on stage yesterday he said, "85 percent of the IT budget goes to keeping the lights on." And I would firmly, as pre-kenote yesterday I'd say, you know what Citrix is firmly in that 85 percent of, they are rock, fast, hard technology partner, but they're in that 85 percent. But this intelligent experience I think kind of pushes them into that 15 percent of innovation. What did you think about yesterday's announcement? >> Well, based on my memory from 1996, I think it's consistent. That they're looking for something that's two or three years, maybe more out that will mature then. But they're not afraid of tackling it now. They had some really strong established businesses, but they're not resting on their laurels. They're looking at, I think a problem that almost everybody can identify with. In the past, their problems were people they could identify with in IT. The end user wasn't aware that anybody was Citrixing behind the scenes. Now, they're identifying issues that people have with work. The fact they were taking apps and services from multiple clouds, multiple data centers some of them our own company, some of our partners, some across an ecosystem or a supply chain, and it's becoming rather crowded. Disenfranchised. Fragmented. And people, I think are struggling to keep up with that amount of diversity. So, we're dealing with, yet again a heterogeneity problem, a reoccurring problem in technology. And Citrix is identifying with something that's a higher elevation than they had in the past. So, they're not addressing just IT although, that's where the actions going to take place to solve some of these problems. But they're focused on just about all of us. Whether we're working in a small, two or three person mom and pop shop or a 30,000 seat enterprise. >> And they've also done this pivot in the last, what we've heard in the last 24 hours, of really being positioned to the general user. Something that I didn't know until yesterday was that the majority of enterprise software has been designed for power users, which is one percent of the users. And so, they've really made that positioning pivot yesterday to, this is for the Marketing Managers, somebody in supply chain who has a day that is bombarded with seven to ten apps. They're losing hours and hours of productivity a week. You can look at that in terms of the amount of dollars that's being spent or wasted. But really making this, bringing those tasks to the user, those actions to the user. Rather than forcing the users to go out to all the different apps, put those pieces together. Oh, and then trying to get back to our actual day-to-day function. >> Right, we wouldn't have to talk about user experience if these things had been designed properly in the first place. It's a bit myopic on behalf of the IT power designer, that they often craft the product for themselves. That, this is still the dark arts behind the curtain thinking. It's very difficult for a highly efficient, productive IT group to create something for a non-IT audience. And I don't blame them, but it has to happen. It's going to happen one way or the other. So, we've seen companies that have taken extraordinary steps on usability, Apple computer is probably the poster child for this. Look at where it got them. There were lots of mobile phones around ten years ago, before the iPhone. Why did the iPhone become so popular, so dominant? Because of the usability. So, Citrix is I think, perhaps doing IT a favor by getting out in front of this. But still, if we're going to get IT in the hands of all people for productivity, what I look to is a fit-for-purpose mentality. No more, no less. You can't design it as if it's your own baby and your own special design, I don't know, once in a lifetime opportunity to strut your stuff. It has to be fit-for-purpose and it can't just be monolithic, where we're looking at little bits and pieces. So, the software's recent acquisition that Citrix made is going to be able to start picking out productivity units, for lack of a better term, from different applications, assimilate those in an environment, the workspace, where the productivity, the work flow, the goal of accomplishing business outcomes comes first and foremost. >> So Dana, let's talk a little bit about, you know the next level. Because it's broken. Even when you look at modern applications, one of the applications they showed on stage yesterday, was a cloud application. Salesforce. I mean, we know a people who make a good deal of money simplifying Salesforce, which is a born in the cloud application. This isn't just about cloud versus legacy, this is about end-user experiences, and end-users using applications in a way that makes them productive. One of the things that caught me as soon as Citrix said that they want to be the future of work, I tweeted out, "Well, you can't be the future of work unless you start to automate processes," and boom, intelligent experience. And the first thing that came to my mind was when we attended an event a couple weeks ago for RPA, Robotic Process Automation tool, that was very user-centric, but used the term "bots". Robots, sulfer robots that did the job. Citrix only used the term, "bots" once yesterday. What's your sense, is this a competitive solution to those partners? Or is this more of a complementary solution? >> I think Citrix is correctly trying to keep the horse in front of the cart and not the other way around. We have to look at work as flows of productivity first, and not conforming to the app second. But to get out in front and say, "Oh, it's all going to be animated and the robot will tell you what to do," I think does a disservice. So, let's take first things first. But let's not also lose track of the fact that by elevating work to a process and not just being locked into one platform, one cloud, one set of microservices on one framework, that we have the opportunity to integrate in analytics along the whole path. From beginning to end. And that we can even have the context of what you're doing feed back into how the analytics come at you. And reinforce one another. So, we need to get the process stuff set first. we need to recognize that people need to rethink getting off a desktop, getting out of email, looking at the full process. Looking at working across organizational boundaries. So, extra enterprise, supply-chain interactions, contingent workforce. Then, bring in analytics. So, first things first but it's going to be a very interesting mash-up when we can elevate process, get out of sort of silos, manage that heterogeneity and inject intelligence and context along the way. That changes the game. >> So, you've seen the workforce dramatically transform throughout your career. There are five generations of people in the workforce today. Madeleine Albright, there she was on stage this morning, 82 years old. I thought that was, what an inspiration? But companies have different generations, different experiences, different experiences with technology, differing expectations. What, in your opinion, did you hear yesterday from Citrix that is going to help businesses enable five different generations to be as productive as they want to be. >> Right, it's an extension of what Citrix has been doing for decades, and it's allowing more flexibility into where you are is accommodated. What device you're using can be accommodated. The fact that you want to be outside your home office but secure can be accommodated. So, what I heard was instead of locking in an application mentality, where everybody has to learn to use the same app, we need to have flexibility. And it's not just ages and generations. It's geographics, it's language, it's culture. People do business and they do work differently around the world. And they should be very well entitled to continue to do that. So, we need to create the systems that adjust to the people and read the people's work habits. And then reinforce them rather than force them into, let's say a monolithic ERP type of affair. And we've know that a large percentage of ERP projects over the years have failed. And it's not that the technology doesn't work, it's that sometimes, you can put a round peg in a square hole. >> Wow, speaking of round peg, square hole, IT, you know, they're preaching to the choir I think on this piece. You know, we want thing to be simpler. We want to get engaged. We want to solve this problem. But, is Citrix talking to the wrong audience when it comes to process automation? To your point, you have to have the large view of it, and a lot of timeS, especially folks at this conference, may not have the large view. How does Citrix get to the CMO's the COO's, the process people versus the technology folks. >> I think that's a significant challenge. Keith and I recorded a podcast with David Henchel earlier today and it'll be out in a few weeks on Briefings Direct, and I asked him that, I said, "You're well-known in the IT department. They use a verb, they're Citrixing. The end user, not so much. But if you're going to impact work as you intend to and as you've laid out here at Synergy, you do need to become more of a household word, and you need to brand and you need to impact." And we know one of the hardest things to do is to get people to change their behavior. You don't do that behind the scenes. In some ways, Citrix has been very modest. They haven't been the Citrix inside, they haven't branded and gone to market with. They've usually let their partners like Microsoft and now even Google Cloud be on the front page, even as they're behind the scenes. But I think they need to think a little bit differently. If they're going to impact people, people need to understand the value that Citrix is bringing. But identifying themselves as they have at this show with work and productivity issues, usability and intelligence will start that process. But I do think they can go further on their go-to-market and not just bring this message to their sales accounts, but to a larger work productivity, human capital management enterprise architect type of base. >> And they are making those impacts. Keith and I today have already spoken with their three innovation award nominees. There were over a thousand nominations. And we spoke with Schroders, which is a wealth management company based out of the UK and how they have been able, a 200 year old company, to really transform their culture with Citrix's workspace was, it was done so strategically, so methodically. But how they enabled that and a seamless integration in terms of their customer experience and engagement with their wealth managers was really compelling. Not only are they able to retain their probably longstanding wealth management clients, but they have the ability now, and the technology capabilities to allow their people to work remote three days a week if they want to or from wherever, and actually work on getting new clients. So, the business impact is really clear. We also spoke with Indiana University. They have gone from just enabling the students on the seven campuses to 130,000 plus across campuses online. They're enabling sight impaired people to also, by virtualization, have access to computer technology. So, you're talking about going from tens of thousands to a ten X at a minimum multiplier, and enabling professors to have conversations and hold classes with people in Budapest. Big impact. >> So Lisa, you're bringing up the point that user experience isn't just employing experience, it's end user and-- >> Absolutely >> Consumer experience. If you're going to do this and do it right, don't consider it just for your employees. It's for reaching out to the very edge of the markets, and that includes consumers and students and mom and pop shops and everything in-between. So when you do this right, and not only will you be delivering intelligence and context to your employees, you'll be able to start to better serve your customers. And that's what digital transformation is really about. >> It is, and the cultural transformation that Citrix is undergoing and that they're enabling their businesses to achieve, like the two we just talked about, are critical catalysts for digital transformation. But to me, employee experience and customer experiences are hand in hand because every employee, whatever function you're in, in some way you're a touchpoint to the customer. If you're in retail, you're presenting a shop-able moment as often as you can. But you also are dealing with customers who have choice to turn and go to another provider of that product or service. So, having those employees not only be satisfied, but have the tools that they need and the intelligence to deliver the content. >> So, I'd be happy to go to a brick and mortor shop. I'll walk in there physically if they can help me in the shopping experience be smarter, but if I can do it online in my bedroom on my browser, then I'll do it there. So it's no so much the interface or even the place anymore, it's who's going to give me the information to make the right decision and make me feel confident that I'm spending my money the most productively. Whether I'm a consumer or a business. So B-to-B. That's what's going to be the killer app, is the smart decision making, and the experience of bringing the right information, right place, right time. That's key. And that's what Citrix has repositioned itself for. I think it's really quite a dramatic shift for the company but they've done it before. >> Well, Dana it's been great having you back on theCUBE unpacking this. It's been an exciting day and a half for us and we look forward to having you back on theCUBE sometime soon. >> My pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. We are in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And we have a couple of guests joining us now from the A-Team, cue the music rights too. We've got Phoebe Goh, Cloud architect from NetApp, and we've got Paul Stringfellow, one of our CUBE alumni, technical director of Gardner Systems, one of NetApp's partners. Guys thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> In your matching outfits! >> Thank you for having us. >> So first of all, this morning, before the general session started, I saw both of you on camera talking a little bit about the A-Team. For our audience who might not be familiar with that, I know it's been around for five years. Phoebe, talk to us a little bit about the A-Team, who composes it, obviously we've got a channel partner, it's not just NetAppians, but give our viewers a little bit of an overview of the A-Team. >> NetApp really appreciates our advocates from channel partners and also from our customers. We really love hearing from them, and we also love giving them back information about what we do, and where we're going with our vision and our strategy. So, we have channel partners on the A-Team as well as customers, and technical advisors from NetApp, such as myself, and we get together every now and then at events like Insight, and we also bring them to Sunnyvale where they are given some information about what's coming up with our strategy. >> And this is a small group of about maybe 30 people. Paul how long have you been part of the A-Team, and what has that, what you have learned from some of the other folks that are on that team? >> It's a great question, I've been a part of the team for three years, and it's kind of a symbiotic relationship almost in that it kind of works both ways. I think there's lots of value for NetApp in the partnership, in that they get to hear kind of from channel partners on the street, about what people actually think of their technology. It also works in that we get to see quite a lot of pre-release information, and it gives us the opportunity to feed back to NetApp directly from the things that we see out in the channel about what customers actually want, and then we can feed that back into NetApp, and we've seen over kind of the five years of the team, we've seen product strategies change, we've seen new products come to market, because of that direct feedback. And then from our side, when we talk to our customers, there's real value in being able to say that we've got that direct relationship with NetApp, we've got that access to their executives, and access to their research team. It works really well both ways for us. >> In the keynote this morning, we heard George Kurian talk about digital transformation, and one of those pieces is that hybrid multi cloud is the defacto IT architecture, Paul I would love to get your feedback as a channel partner, what this kind of hybrid multi cloud means to your customers, means to your business. >> So I think the idea of hybrid I think, it's different for a lot of people, so in lots of cases, hybrid for some organizations may be that their entire data center remains on prem within their own walls, however they might be using a software service, an Office 365, they may be using a Dropbox, and I don't think kind of the definition that George was talking about this morning when he talked about hybrid cloud. My little take on what George talked about as well with hybrid cloud , I think he's understanding that it exists, understand that public cloud is a thing, that the Azures, that the AWSs, the Googles, play a part in a way that some organizations are working. That's not necessarily the way your organization wants to work, so understanding that it's there, designing an architecture that recognizes that, and makes sure that if you ever want to use those kind of services in the future, that you'll be able to do so, but it's equally valid to say, actually, public cloud isn't for us. As long as you make that as a decision, and don't just fall into it because you've not really thought about it, that's a perfectly valid strategy. >> I really agree with what you were saying. So often when we talk about hybrid and multi-cloud, we're talking about infrastructure. >> Paul: Yep. >> And there's more than just infrastructure, a thing that I've been saying for a few years, let's follow the applications, and even more importantly, let's follow the data. I love we get some international viewpoints here because sometimes North America, it's like oh let's talk only about public cloud and seems to be kind of a monolithic thing. Phoebe, I would love to get your viewpoint, what are you hearing from customers when they talk about cloud, what does that mean for them, and how's NetApp and NetApp's channel partners helping them sort through this new future? >> Definitely, our customers and our channel partners are talking a lot about cloud, creating, adding agility to their business, allowing them to move faster, and to be more flexible, and what NetApp is looking to do is really enable that and speed that up for, no matter where you are in the globe, whether you're in Australia, or in America, or in Europe, that you can achieve those business outcomes that you really want, and we know that the cloud is going to help us get there, so we really want to help them use the data the best ways, and use the technology that makes sense for the business to be able to get to public cloud. >> How are you hearing, a lot of the messaging coming out, NetApp is data driven, it's the data authority, lot of transformation that NetApp's undergone in its 26 year history, I'd love to get your both of your perspectives before we wrap here about how are customers embracing that as looking to NetApp and its ecosystem partners to help them embrace this hybrid multi-cloud environment in which they live, and look at NetApp as part of their core cloud strategy, rather than data management storage? >> I'm actually really excited about this because I love collaborating and talking our customers and our partners, and what I find is that they're coming to us and saying, "Wow, we didn't know you guys did that, and "you're not even, you're not selling us something, you're "really helping us get there." We're having a conversation about how we can really get there, get to their business outcomes, rather than trying to push a product, where I find that we get to have really collaborative conversations, Paul? >> Actually, I couldn't agree more, I think that what data fabric, what this kind of hybrid cloud model means to our customers, is it opens up a much wider conversation. We're not having a conversation about storage, we're not talking to a partner saying, would you like to buy some NetApp, as a customer, because that can be, that's a yes no, I use something else, I'm not interested in NetApp or I'd love to buy some NetApp. Actually, if we can have a data conversation that talks about how do you want to use this, what are the business outcomes that you'd like to achieve, what is it you are trying to do as a business, let's help data be part of that transformation. >> Guys, thanks so much for stopping by having a quick convo, especially Phoebe since you've been in Vegas for four days already, and your voice is hanging on by a thread. Paul, Phoebe, thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, pleasure, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, from Las Vegas NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

from New York it's the cube covering blockchain week now here's John furry hello everyone welcome back to this special cube exclusive on the water coverage of the awesome cryptocurrency event going on this week blockchain week New York City D central Anthony do re oh seven a big special event launching some great killer products me up to cube alumni that we introduced at polycon 2018 Genevieve Dec Monroe and Jeromy Gartner great to see you guys thanks for having us so you guys look fabulous you look beautiful you're smart we're on a boat we're partying it feels like Prague it feels like prom feels like we are at the top of another bubble couldn't feel better five more boat parties and then the bubbles officially at the top but we're only had the first boat party well the real existential question is what do we view next you know we've we've graduated from nightclubs and strip clubs and now two super yachts like do we go on a spaceship neck's or a Boeing Jets yeah I mean the options are somewhat limited in how we scale up the crypto parties I actually heard today one of my clients is launching in space a crypto mining operation that's fueled by solar power so we might be going to space Elon Musk wants to get involved I agree like where are we going you guys are awesome I love the creative so this party to me is really a testament of the community talk about the community I see polycon was great in Puerto Rico they had restart week and that but I heard these guys saying here at the central that the community's fragmented is the community fragmented seems like it's not out there or just only one pocket of the community I think the community so we have 10,000 people at consensus okay so these are 10,000 people that have gone down the rabbit hole and they're all at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan kind of going like how'd you get involved why are you here 10,000 people is a lot but I think that yeah we're we're at the decentral party so some of the yeast communities are being fragmented but I think we're having like infrastructure built to kind of connect the broader world to the things whether it's custodial services whether it's like tonight the jocks 2.0 wallet and you know everything that's getting involved there I don't know Jeremy Jeremy it's like an international traveler so you Carly Jeremy it's 100 percent in an echo chamber more importantly rabbit holes are like dark and confusing places that there are they're winding and a lot of people are here for very different reasons and thus when you have all these new entrants to the industry to this technology here for all these different reasons of course you have some fragmentation you know in many regards the ideological and philosophical roots of Bitcoin and blotchy technology have been lost son on many of the new entrants and and so it takes time to get to the point where we're all winding I think different blockchains and different applications of this technology will have different kind of approaches to how people think about investors always gonna be pragma because this is a massively growing industry that touches upon every kind of business and governmental and non-governmental it's actually fragmentation is a relative chairman is Genevieve you I saw you and you guys are working with things from cannabis coin I think you had to cannabis cabin this week in New Yorker yeah we're doing that tomorrow night actually so crypto and cannabis are two the hottest millennial sectors right and so we kind of like to say Agri capital we like to dance on the edge of chaos I actually found out about a cannabis company in Vancouver so just outside Vancouver that is using a crypto mining operation and all the excess heat that is coming off that to power a grow-op so we're literally at the intersection of crypto and cannabis not just for our handling money but handling energy in a different way which is so fast that's real mission impact investing right there you know using energy to grow weed that's the Seidel impact isn't it good bad I mean even as you look at it you know better cannabis healthy cannabis is a mission people look care about we're helping people's wallets and we're helping people's minds right in like ways that the government banks and pharmaceutical companies are fighting against so you know if you can't beat them join them so I welcome Astra Zeneca and the Bank of Canada to come on board our mission this is specially turning into a cube after dark episode Jeremy I gotta get your thoughts on these industries because look at cannabis we joke about it but that's an example of another market this zilean markets that are coming online that are gonna be impacted so fragmentation is a relative terms but hey look at it I mean energy tech is infrastructure tech and solid that's what I'm concerned about who nails the infrastructure for network effects and what's the instrumentation for that that's the number one question that is essential question for the protocols whether it's Theory amore Bitcoin oreos Definity so forth the protocol that provides the strongest and and most adaptable and infrastructure and foundational technology is going to be one of the main ones are those will be the main winners and so the names I mentioned they're up there they're very competitive but it's anybody's game right now I think any blockchain can come along right now and be the winner a decade from now and for entrepreneurs represents a challenge because you have to figure out what blocks came to go build on this is why I am big on investing in interoperable Ledger's technologies that enable the kind of transfer smart contracts and crypto assets between blockchains it's a great great segue let's just get an update since we last talked what are you working on what are you investing in what's new in your world share the update on strangers so now my fund is officially launched where how much we launched with just over 15 million dollars and amazingly we launched at the perfect time we're already up 55% and we got making an investment for a venture fund we actually did the exact WA T investment which transferred over from my personal investment portfolio but doing great I have really run the gamut in terms of investments we're making on the equity side of things and in crypto assets but what we're seeing is really accomplished entrepreneurs coming to this space continue actually more optimism than I had felt at polygon poly car and I was like this market needs to correct in a real way today I think that Corrections been prolonged if we were gonna feel a lot of pain it was gonna be two months ago but instead I think it's gonna be one to three years before the market goes through the correction that we need to see for the real shakeout to happen because so many of these teams that I think are garbage have so much money yeah and they're just floating around they got has worked their way out it's just like a bad burrito at some point it's got a pass Genevieve what are you working on I'll see you've got grit capital what's the update on your end what's new yeah amazing actually literally tonight probably about 60 minutes ago my business partner and I signed one of the fastest-growing exchanges in Canada called Einstein exchanges of quiet so these guys have only ever raised like one and a half million u.s. and they're the biggest exchange in Canada by sign ups active accounts so they're probably doing like almost a hundred million in top-line transaction volumes and they're probably never going public somebody's probably gonna buy them but we're gonna be marketing them across the country getting customers I mean the tagline is it doesn't take I'm Stein to open an account it shouldn't take n Stein it by Bitcoin you can literally get this account set up in under 60 seconds so they're vampires ease-of-use surety reducing the steps it takes to do it and get it up and running fast absolutely like my dad could do it and like alright so we say now follow you on Instagram and Facebook which is phenomenal by the way I got a great lifestyle what's the coolest thing you've done since we last talked to Polycom Wow polycon was kind of a high really peaked and then everyone got sick like our team got said polymath untraceable cuz everybody just got the flu yeah we were like on adrenaline and we kept going ah what's the coolest thing that we've done since then I think it's signing up like cool companies like Einstein we also signed a big cannabis company in Colombia called Chiron they're about to go public I don't know Cole what do you think I don't know maybe what's the coolest thing you've done travel what's your good so last night Jeremy and I just met we're together on a blockchain Research Institute project that Sonova Financial is backing and meeting him so you guys working together on a special project right now how's that going what's that about JCO which is a new sort of financial services firm they're creating what it could effectively be understood as a compliant coin offering that is available to more than just accredited investors and that's they're making ico something that falls within the pre-existing regulatory framework and also accessible to your average Joe which I think it's really important if we're going to follow the initial vision for both blockchain technology and offerings all right final question I know you guys want to get back to your dancing and schmoozing networking doing big deals having fun what is blockchain New York we call about we could pop chain we here in New York what the hell's happening there's been a lot of events what's your guy's assessment of you observed and saw anything can you share for the people who didn't make it to New York or not online reading all the action what's happened so as someone that did not attend consensus spoke at three other events or speaking at three other events I can say with certainty that the New York box chain week has been about bringing together virtually everyone in the industry to connect and kind of catch up with one another which is really important we we don't have that many events Miami was too short the industry's gotten too big but having a full week of activities in New York City has enabled me to kind of foster relationships are oh I yeah man get a lot of work John well I've gotten so much work done I haven't had to actually be a date conferences to reconnect with just about everyone that I want to industry that's really special Genevieve what is your observation what have you observed share some in anecdote some insight on what happened this week I know fluid he started I saw Bilt's I was just chatting with him about it it was started in over the weekend it's gone up and we're now into Thursday tomorrow coming up well I don't think it's a coincidence that Goldman Sachs came out today and said that they were launching some sort of digital currency marketing yeah exactly using the power of the 10,000 people i consensus but yeah i know i agree with what jeremy says it's not really about being at consensus it's about what happens like behind closed doors it's all these decentralized parties that are happening yeah open doors but like it's you know like we hosted a core capital asset we had a hundred people in a suite at the dream hotel and it was just like you put the biggest CEOs of the mining companies in the world together and like put those with investors in a room it's like you know 100 people and that's where the deals happen it's not like in the big you know huge auditorium where like nobody looks at each other and everyone's on their phone well I gotta tell you how do we know we the Entrepreneurship side is booming so I totally love the entrepreneurial side check check check access to capital new kinds of business model stuff economics so we reported on all that to me the big story is Wall Street in New York City has been kind of stuck the products kind of like our old is antiquated like the financial products and like that's why Goldman's coming out they got nothing what they don't have anything what are they got so you see in a stagnant they got a traditional product approximately nothing really like new fresh so you got in comes crypto just do a crypto washer so I think I see the New York crowd going this is something that is exciting and we could product ties potentially so I don't think they know yet what that is but I think some of the things that are going on you guys I like I like so I my dad's always the kind of barometer to this whole thing and he's like when are they gonna come out with like a Salesforce stock column for the blockchain right like some sort of application that it doesn't matter if you're like illegal if you're like in investment banking like some sort of pervasive application that just goes wild you have that yet what is that happening Jeremy Jeremy did the date was it's the Netscape moment if you will the moment that blotching technology becomes tangible and now and in retrospect a few years out we may decide that's great for all the young browsers is a browser the original browse for the Internet that was that moment may have already happened we don't really know it maybe it been something like a theory a more augered you know something where there's a use case but people haven't wrapped their heads around it yet but if that hasn't happened yet it's coming it's where we're on the cusp of it because people know what bitcoin is they've heard of the blockchain it is part of the zeitgeist now and and that cultural relevance it's so important for having that Netscape moment Jeremy Jeremy thanks so much to spend the time here on the ground on the water for our special cube coverage of blockchain week new york city consensus you had all kinds of different events you had the crypto house where we were at tons of fluidity conference all this stuff going on good to see you guys you look great thanks for sharing the update here and the cube special coverage I'm John Faria thanks for watching Thanks

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau, in the Bahamas, it's The Cube. Covering Polycon '18. Brought to you by PolyMath. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube's live coverage in the Bahamas of Polycon '18, put on by PolyMath and Grit Capital. And a special guest who just did a walk-by, fly-by, The Cube wanted to bring him in, Jeremy Gardner. We've chatted with him all week, influencer, entrepreneur, venture capitalist now, been involved in crypto, dropped out of college, luminary in the industry, young gun, great to have you on The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> That is the most honorific title I've ever received. >> We like to shoot the shit around here on The Cube. Seriously, though, you have a big following in the community, well respected, I mean, a lot of cool things going on. A lot of young people working on projects, you're one of them. A lot of old people coming in, that have skills, whether it's cryptography or the other ecosystems, interesting blend. You've also worked on the Augur project, which has been highly successful. It's been a great case, and I hear people point to it all the time, say, "Love that concept", but a lot of cool tech. And you're at Ausum Ventures right now, that you're running. What's your take right now? I want to get into some specifics on some tech questions, but, you know, you're out there, you've done some things, you're in the middle of it, you get a fresh perspective. What's going on? What's your view and how do you see it playing out in this business? >> What we see occurring in 2018 is an incredible maturation of the industry. We've gone from Bitcoin to cryptocurrencies to blockchain technology, to this concept of smart contracts and de-centralized applications, to this ICO fad, to now what we're seeing here at this conference, which is the emergence of security tokens. And this evolution represents the broadening of the blockchain economy as a whole. From something that once was this niche little kind of ideological technology to something that is totally global, and perhaps as big as the internet, if not bigger. And that maturation is really important, because as the market matures, a lot of the scams that we've seen in years past will begin to fade away. That being said, I think we're going to need to see a real shake-out in the industry, a bloodbath in the markets where a lot of these poorly formulated tokens, crypto assets, disappear before we see a really blossoming crypto economy. >> It's like you got to clear the digestive tract of all the bad food you ate. I mean, you got to kind of get it out. >> Exactly, it's a purge. There's so much toxic crap in this industry today, it has to disappear before we can really evolve into something that rivals Wall Street. >> Yeah, and it's early on, too. I got to say, we've seen many waves in our day, Cube, we cover it. What I like about what's happening now is you've got an ecosystem forming, you've got people like yourself who are putting out statements like that, which is, quite frankly, a signal. And people need to speak up right now, because we've got to identify the bad stuff. So the ecosystem's forming. >> Well, it can be hard to do that when you're making a lot of money on crap. I mean, I've missed out on a lot of money-making opportunities 'cause I've been ideologically pure. I've only invested in projects that I truly believe will change the world. That can be limiting. And I don't blame people that kind of set aside ethics or quality projects for a greater profit mode, I'm a big believer in capitalism, but fundamentally, that mentality has to go in order for us to take this technology to the next stage. >> Okay, money making's going to happen, there's going to be some high flyers, and some are going to be legitimately good intentions that may turn out to be crap, and then there's going to be total crap, which starts out to be a scam, anyway. >> Right. >> How do you look at those signals? I mean, obviously you want to look for trajectory and community and tokens. How do you look at it? Is it underpinnings of the tech? Is there a business model? What's your view on how to look for those potential trajectories? >> In my view, it's just like venture capital. It starts with the team every single time. Team, team, team, then concept, then market, then tech. I mean, the tech changes, the code's constantly being updated. I'm not a coder; it's something that can evolve, it's something that, once you raise capital, you can have better technologists building out your tech stack. That doesn't really concern me. It's, is this team going to execute, are they going to be able to iterate in a fast-moving business environment in which the tides are always turning, regulators are always doing different things? Are you going to be able to adapt and evolve, and are you going to work together as a team? I take teams out to dinner, I see how they interact with one another. Do they have symbiosis, or are they kind of antagonistic? If they have an antagonistic relationship, it doesn't matter how good the concept is, how great the tech is, because the team won't stay together. And I don't want to have to make those sorts of bets on who's going to be the winning player. I'll stay in touch with the team, but I'll rarely make that investment. >> Yeah, they got to be ready for battle together. They've got to get down and dirty. >> So I hold teams paramount in early-stage investing, which is all I do. >> Awesome. So what are you excited about today, right now? What are you looking at, what's floating your boat, what's getting you excited, what's the specific-- >> So, Augur's about to go on the mainnet, so it's going to be the first truly de-centralized, consumer facing, de-centralized application. Very exciting. I think it could change the world of finance forever, and the way we predict the future. So it's mainnet going live, and then three months after that, hopefully the actual platform going fully live. It's still the most exciting project in the crypto-space, in my view. Even though I've been involved for a couple of years. I am an advisor to Basecoin, which is wrapping up its presale right now. Basecoin is an algorithmic stable coin that today maintains parity with the dollar, and it, I think, is going to be one of the most necessary components. It, or another stable coin, will be one of the most necessary components of creating a true crypto-economy. 'Cause if you look at most of the blockchain applications today, most of them are using these volatile crypto-assets as forms of payments and transactions, and that doesn't work for your average consumer, or even for large enterprises. People do not like volatility. It's a compounding risk factor for almost any sort of transaction. And so for us to have a real robust crypto-economy, we need a stable coin. My bets are on Basecoin, but I'm rooting for all the teams. Because whoever does this, and it may be multiple teams, will have unlocked one of the biggest problems that effects crypto-assets today, which is volatility. >> And liquidity is also a concern, people want to get liquid. That's also a dynamic of why token economics works, is you don't have the process of going public. You can do a little bit of funding and liquidity. Talk about the liquidity impact. >> Yeah, I mean, look. ICOs and token sales are this fabulous way to democratize finance and raise capital, especially for de-centralized applications and new protocols. They really can't take a traditional fundraising mechanism. That being said, if you are trying to create any sort of payment token, which I would never encourage anyone to do, but if you are, like a lot of these utility tokens, their point is for the purpose of payments. And that's idiotic to me, 'cause you're going to do what? Raise $30 million, maybe $100 million? Let's say $200 million. What's the volatility on that going to be daily, or annualized? It's insane, it will never be adopted by consumers. And furthermore, anyone that tries to create a payment token for their specific application, what they're not recognizing is someone's going to have to go to Coinbase, buy Bitcoin, send it to Poloniex, buy their token, send it to the application, just to make a payment? No way! >> Yeah, too complex. Credit cards are always going to beat that out, or Bitcoin and ether. >> Alright, so I've heard on The Cube here, and I've also heard in the hallway, a consistent theme I want to get your reaction to. This marketplace of having de-centralized apps, and blockchain, and cryptocurrency kind of dynamic really disrupts areas that have a lot of slack, or lag, or unused resource. It could be a physical asset, could be computers in the data center doing P2P stuff, and that this market busts down those inefficiencies, creates efficiency, that's the arbitrage. >> It can. >> Your reaction to that. >> It can, but like I say, how do you get access to those tokens? So the rise in security exchanges, security token exchanges, and more robust crypto-asset exchanges, will potentially enable that right now. But unless you have an easy way to buy and store those tokens that are freeing up illiquid assets in a dynamic manner, tokenizing assets isn't very useful. You know, with Blockchain Capital, my last venture fund, we created the first liquid venture fund. It was actually the first security token ever. And the problem that we ran into was everyone was excited, we created this liquid, limited-partner interest in a venture fund, but the problem was there was no place to trade it or sell it. And so, despite the nav of the fund going up, the price of the token remained the same, 'cause there was no liquid exchange. So you need a liquid place for the exchange of value in order for the liquidization of these assets to occur. Furthermore, I think more important than that point is that blockchains are fundamentally the largest technological disintermediator that has ever existed in human history. Even, since the beginning of time, pretty much, we have always relied on middlemen, whether they're banks or governments or tribal councilmen, to mitigate any sort of transaction. With blockchains, we can now have truly trustless transactions, and disintermediate trillions of dollars' worth of middlemen and trolls under the bridge. And that's the most revolutionary component of this technology. >> That's awesome. I want to get one quick question in, we're tagged for time. This rise of the security token has been a great innovation. We've seen great traction because of the security token, we're seeing PolyMath doing a lot of people looking at this as a stabilization. What does it do to the utility token? Does it change the nature of the utility token? Will utility token have a life that's not a monetizable thing? Will it still trade? What's your view and vision on the role of the utility token now that the security token has been established as a viable mechanism? >> So look, when we were building Augur, we did not want to issue a token. ICOs were really scary back then, but we realized, in order to have a truly de-centralized prediction market platform, we had to have a second token. One that wasn't used for payments, but that created a de-centralized consensus in our network. And so we created the first utility token ever. And back then, I was like, oh, this is novel, this is cool. We tried selling it to people; No one really got it. But then, it seems like we went and opened up Pandora's Box. All of a sudden, utility tokens flourished in the past two years, as this means to raise capital. The problem was, nobody was thinking beyond that capital raise. And so most of those utility tokens would have been much better as security tokens. They didn't actually provide much utility. And so I think those tokens, that 99%, 98% of utility tokens that have come out in the past two years, that didn't actually have true utility, those will go, you know. >> Yeah, I think it's some interesting conversation. I want to follow that up when we get back to the Bay Area. This is super important, I really love the idea that you're kind of teasing out. I see utility tokens having an instrumental role in governance consensus, other community dynamics, which might have its own value. I don't know yet what it looks like, but we'll certainly follow up. >> Absolutely, and security tokens will be the largest crypto-asset in the next two to three years. >> Jeremy Gardner, great conversation. Love the young guns, man. They're so smart, great to have you on, us old guys, we're just trying to keep up with these young guns. Back with more live coverage after this short break. Good job, man. >> My pleasure, man. >> You're awesome, dude. Alright. Hey, when we get back, I really want to get, I think the utility, I think the dual-token model is the way to go. Security, and >> I didn't think it would, but right now, the problem is most utility tokens-- (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. We are joined by Shelia Fitzpatrick, she is the Chief Privacy Officer of NetApp, and Paul Stringfellow who is a Technical Director at Gardner Systems. Shelia, Paul, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for inviting us. >> So, I want to talk about data privacy. The general data protection regulation, the EU's forthcoming laws, GDPR, are going to take effect in May of next year. They represent a huge fundamental change about the way that companies use data. Can you just set the scene for our viewers and explain what these changes mean? >> Sure, happy to. As you said, GDPR is the newest regulation, it will replace the current EU directive, goes into effect May 25th of 2018. It has some fundamental changes that are massively different than any other data privacy laws you've ever seen. First and foremost, it is a legal, compliance and business issue as opposed to a technology issue. It's also the first extra-territorial regulation, meaning, it will apply to any organization anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not they have a presence in Europe. But if they provide goods and services to an EU resident, or they have a website that EU residents would go to to enter data, they are going to have to comply with GDPR, and that is a massive change for companies. Not to mention the sanctions, the sanctions can be equal to 20 million Euro or 4% of a company's annual global turnover, pretty phenomenal sanctions. There are a lot of fundamental changes, but those are probably the biggest right there. >> What are some of the biggest challenges that companies are... I mean, you talked about the threat of sanctions and just the massive implications of what companies need to do to prepare? >> To really prepare, as I'm talking to customers, they really need, unfortunately a lot of companies are just thinking about security. And they're thinking, well as long as we have encryption, as long as we have tokenization, as long as we're locking down that data, we're going to be okay. I'm saying, no. It first and foremost starts with building that legal compliance program. What does your data privacy program look like? What personal data are you collecting? Why are you collecting it? Do you have the legal right to collect it? Part of GDPR requires unambiguous, explicit, freely-given consent. Companies can no longer force or imply consent. A lot of times when you go on to websites the terms and conditions are so impossible to understand that people just tick the box (laughs). Well, under GDPR, that will no longer be valid because it has to be very transparent, very easily understandable, very readable. And people have to know what organizations are doing with their data. And it puts ownership and more control of data back into the hands of the data subject, as opposed to the organizations that are collecting data. SO those are some of the fundamental changes. For the Cloud environment, for instance, for a lot of big hyperscalers, GDPR now puts obligations on data processors which is very different from the current regulation. SO that's going to be a fundamental change of business for a lot of organizations. >> Now, is it just customers or is it customers and employees as well? >> It's customers, employees, suppliers, it's any personal data that an organization collects, regardless of the relationship. >> SO what does it mean? Does it mean that I'm renting your data? Does it mean that I, 'cause you now own it, it's not me owning it. >> I own it, that's right. >> What are some of the implications of how folks are going to monetize some of these resources? >> SO what it actually means is, as an organization that's collecting data, you have to have a legal and valid business reason for needing that data. SO part of GDPR requires what's called, data minimization. You should only be collecting the minimal amount of data you need in order to provide the service you're going to provide, or manage the relationship you're going to manage. And you are never, as an organization, the owner of that data, you're the data steward. I am giving you permission to use my data for a very specific reason. You can't take liberties with that data. You can't do, what I call, scope-creep which is, once you have the data, "Oh, I can do whatever I want "with that data," no you can't. Unless I have consented to it, you cannot use that data. And so, that is going to be a major change for organizations to deal with and it doesn't matter if it's your employee data, your customer data, your partner data, your alternative worker data, your supplier data. Whose ever data you have, you better be transparent about that data. >> Shelia, you haven't once mentioned technology. Paul, what does this mean from a technology perspective? >> I suppose it's my job to mention technology? >> As Shelia will tell you, the GDPR, it should not be driven by IT. Because it's not an IT problem, it's absolutely a legal and compliance issue. However, I think there's a technology problem in there. So for lots of things that Shelia is talking about, in terms of understanding your data, in terms of being able to find data, being able to remove data when you no longer need to use it, that's absolutely a technology problem. And I think, actually, maybe something you won't hear said very often, I'm a real fan of GDPR, I think a it's long overdue it's probably because Shelia's been beating me round the head for the last 12 months >> I have. >> about it. But, I think it's one of those things that's long overdue to all of us within enterprises, within business, who hold and look after data. Because what we've done, traditionally, is that we just collected tons and tons of data and we bought storage 'cause storage could be relatively cheap, we're moving things to the Cloud. And, we've got absolutely no control, no management, no understanding of what the data is, where it is, who has access to it? Does anybody even access it, I'm paying for it, does anybody even use it? And I think what this is, for me, if GDPR wasn't a regulatory thing that we had to do, I think it's a set of really good practices that, as organizations, we should be looking to follow anyway. And technology plays a small part in that, it will enable organizations to understand the data better, it will enable those organizations to be able to find information as and when they need it. When somebody makes a subject access request, how are you going to find that data without appropriate technology? And I think, first and foremost, it's something that is forcing organizations to look at the way they culturally look after data within their business. This is no longer about, "Let me just keep things forever and I won't worry about it." This is a cultural shift that says data is actually an asset in your business. And as Shelia actually mentioned before, and something I'll pinch in future, the data is not mine, I'm just the custodian of that data while you allow me to be so. So I should treat that like anything else I'm looking after on your behalf. SO I think it's those kind of fundamental shifts that will drive technology adoption, no doubt, to allow you to do that, but actually, it's much more of a cultural shift in the way that we think of data and the way that we manage data in our businesses. >> Well you're talking about it as this regulation that is long overdue, and it will cause this cultural shift. So what will be different in the way that companies do business and the way that they treat their customer data, and their customer's privacy? And their employee's privacy, too, as you pointed out? >> Well, and part of the difference is going to be that need for transparency. So companies are going to have to be very upfront about what they're doing with the data, as Paul said. You know, why are they collecting that data, and they need to think differently about the need for data. Instead of collecting massive amounts of data that you really don't need, they need to take a step back and say, "This is the type of relationship "I'm trying to manage." Whether it's an employment relationship, whether it's a customer relationship, whether it's a partner relationship. What is the minimum amount of information I need in order to manage that relationship? So if I have an employee, for instance, I don't need to know what my employee does on their day off. Maybe that's a nice thing to know because I think well, maybe we can offer them a membership to a gym because they like to work out? That's not a must-have, that's a nice-to-have. And GDPR is going to force must-haves. In order to manage the employment relationship I have to be able to pay you, I have to be able to give you a job, I have to be able to provide benefits, I have to be able to provide performance evaluations and other requirements, but if it's not legally required, I don't need that data. And so it's going to change the way companies think about developing programs, policies, even technology. As they start to think about how they're developing new technology, what data do they need to make this technology work? And technology has actually driven the need for more privacy laws. If you think about IoT, artificial intelligence, Cloud. >> Mobile. >> Absolutely. Great technology, but from a privacy perspective, the privacy was never a part of the planning process. >> In fact, in many respects it was the exact opposite. There were a whole bunch of business models, I mean if you think about it in the technology industry, there's two fundamental business models. There's the ad-based business model, which is, "Give us all your data "and we'll figure out a way to monetize it." >> Absolutely. >> And there's a transaction-based business model which says, "We'll provide you a service "and you pay us, and we promise to do something "and only something with your data." >> Absolutely. >> It's the difference between the way Google and Facebook work, and say, Apple and Microsoft work. SO how is this going to impact these business models in ways of thinking about engaging customers at least where GDPR is the governing model? >> Well, it is going to force a fundamental change in their business model. SO the companies that you mentioned, that their entire business model is based on the collection and aggregation of data, and in some cases, the selling of personal data. >> Some might say screwing you. >> Some might definitely say that, especially if you're a privacy attorney, you might say that. They offer fabulous services and people willingly give up their privacy, that's part of the problem, is that they're ticking the box to say, "I want to use Facebook, I want to use Twitter, "I want to use LinkedIn "because these are great technologies." But, it's the scope-creep. It's what you're doing behind the scenes that I don't know how you're using my data. SO transparency is going to become more and more critical in the business model and that's going to be a cultural, as Paul said, a cultural shift for companies that their entire business model's based on personal data. They're struggling because they're the companies that, no matter what they do, they're going to have to change. They can't just make a simple, change their policy or procedure, they have to change their entire business model to meet the GDPR obligations. >> And I think from, like Shelia says there, and obviously GDPR's very much around, kind of, private data. Well, the conversation we're having with our customers is, is a much wider scope than that, it is all of the data that you own. And it's important, I think, organizations need to stop being fast and loose with the information that they hold because not only is the private information about those people there that, you know, me and you, and that we don't want that necessarily leaked across the well to somebody who might look to exploit that for some other reason. But, that might be, business confidential information, that might be price list, it might be your customer list. And, at the moment, I think in lots of organizations we have a culture where people from top to bottom in an organization don't necessarily understand that. SO they might be doing something where, we had a case in UK recently where some records, security arrangements for Heathrow Airport were found on a bus. So somebody copied them to a USB stick, no encryption, somebody copied it to a USB stick, thought it was okay to take home and leave in the back of, probably didn't think it was okay to leave in the back of the taxi, but certainly thought it was okay to take that information home. And you look at that and think, well, what other business asset that that organization held would they have treated with such disdain, almost to say "I just don't care, this is just ones and zeroes, "why would I care about it?" It's that shift that I think we're starting to see. And I think it's that shift that organizations should have taken a long time ago. We talk to customers, and you hear of events like this all the time, data is the new gold, data is the new precious material of your choice. >> Which it really isn't. It really isn't, here's why I say that because this is the important thing and leads to the next question I was going to ask you. Every asset that's ever been conceived follows the basic laws in economic scarcity. Take gold, you can apply to that purpose, you can make connectors for a chip, or you can use it as a basis for making jewelry or some other purpose. But, data is fungible in so many ways. You can connect it and in many respects, we talked about it a little bit earlier, the act of making it private is, in many respects, the act of turning it into an asset. SO one of the things I want to ask you about, if you think about it, is that, there will still be a lot of net new ways to capture data that's associated with a product or service in a relationship. SO we're not saying that GDPR is going to restrict the role that data plays, it's just going to make it more specific. We're still going to see more IoT, we're still going to see more mobile services, as long as the data that's being collected is in service to the relationship or the product that's being offered. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, one of the things that I always say is that, GDPR's intent is not stop organizations from collecting data, data is your greatest asset, you need data to manage any kind of relationship. But, you're absolutely right in what it's going to do is force transparency, so instead of doing things behind the scenes where nobody has any idea what you're doing with my data, companies are going to have to be extremely transparent about it and think about how it's being used. You talked about data monetization, healthcare data today is ten times more valuable than financial data. It is the data that all hackers want. And the reason is, is because you take even aggregate and statistical information through, say trial clinics, information that you think there's no way to tie it back to a person, and by adding just little elements to it, you have now turned that data into greater value and you can now connect it back to a person. SO data that you think does not have value, the more we add to it and the more, sort of, profiling we do, the more valuable that data is going to become. >> But it's even more than that, right? Because not only are you connecting it back to a person, you're connecting it back to a human being. Whereas financial data is highly stylized, it's defined, it's like this transaction defining, and there's nothing necessarily real about it other than that's the convention that we used to for example, do accounting. But, healthcare data is real. It ties back to, what am I doing, what drugs am I taking, why am I taking them, when am I visiting somebody? This is real, real data that provides deep visibility into the human being, who they are, what they face, and any number of other issues. >> Well, if you think about GDPR, too, they expanded the definition of personal data under GDPR. SO it now includes data, like biometric and genetic information that is heavily used in the healthcare industry. It also includes location data, IP information, unique identifiers. SO a lot of companies say, "Well, we don't collect personal data "but we have the unique identifiers." Well, if you can go through any kind of process to tie that back to a person, that's now personal data. SO GDPR has actually the first entry into the digital age as opposed to the old fashioned processing. Where you can now take different aspects of data and combine it to identify a human being, as you say. >> So, I got one more question. This is something of a paradox, sorry for jumping in, but I'm fascinated by this subject. Something of a paradox. Because the act of making data private, at least to the corporation, is an act of creating an asset, and because the rules of GDPR are so much more specific and well thought through than most rules regarding data, does it mean that companies that follow GDPR are likely, in the long run, to be better at understanding, taking advantage of, and utilizing their data assets? That's the paradox. Most people say, "I need all the data." Well, GDPR says, "Maybe you need to be more specific "about how you handle your data assets." What do you think, is this going to create advantages for certain kinds of companies? >> I think it absolutely is going to create advantages in two ways. One, I see organizations that comply with GDPR as having a competitive advantage. Because, number one it goes down to trust. If I'm going to do business with Company A or Company B, I'm going to do business with the company that actually takes my personal data seriously. But, looking' at it from your point of view, absolutely. As companies become more savvy when it comes to data privacy compliance, not just GDPR, but data privacy laws around the world, they're also going to see more of that value in the data, be more transparent about it. But, that's also going to allow them to use the data for other purposes, because they're going to get very creative in how having your data is actually going to benefit you as an individual. SO they're going to have better ways of saying, "But, by having your data I can offer you these services." >> GDPR may be a catalyst for increased data maturity. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I wanna ask you about the cultural shift. We've been talking so much about it from the corporate standpoint, but will it actually force a cultural shift from the customer standpoint, too? I mean, this idea of forcing transparency and having the customer understand why do you need this from me, what do you want? I mean, famously, Europeans are more private than Americans. >> Oh much so. As you've said, "Just click accept, okay, fine, "tell me what I need to know, "or how can I use this website?" >> Well, the thing is that, it's not necessarily from a consumer point of view, but I do think it's from a personal point of view from everybody. SO whether you work inside an organization that keeps data, that's starting to understand just how valuable that data might be. And just to pick up on something, that just to pop at something you were saying before, I think one of the other areas where this has business benefit is that that better and increased management and maturity, actually I think is actually a great way, that better maturity around how we look after our data, has huge impact. Because, it has huge impact in the cost of storing' it, if we want to use Cloud services why am I putting things there that nobody looks at? And then, looking at maintaining this kind of cultural shift that says, "If I'm going to have data in my organization, "I'm no longer going to have it on a USB stick "and leave it in the back of a cab "when it's got security information "of a global major airport on it. "I'm going to think about that "because I'm now starting to understand." And this big drive about, people starting to understand how the information that people keep about you has a potential bigger impact, and it has a potential bigger impact if that data, yeah, we've seen data breach, after data breach after data breach. You can't look at the news any day of the week without some other data breach and that's partly because, a bit like health and safety legislation, GDPR's there because you can't trust all those organizations to be mature enough with the way that we look after our data to do these things. SO legislation and regulations come across and said, "Well, actually this stuff's really important "to me and you as individuals, "so stop being fast and loose with it, "stop leaving it in the back of taxis, "stop letting it leak out your organization "because nobody cares." And that's driving a two-way thing, here, it's partly we're having to think more about that because actually, we're not trusting organizations who are looking after our data. But, as Shelia said, if you become an organization that has a reputation for being good with the way they lock their data, and look after data, that will give you a competitive edge alongside, actually I'm being much more mature, I'm being much more controlled and efficient with how I look after my data. That's got big impact in how I deliver technology and certainly, within a company. Which is why I'm enthusiastic about GDPR, I think it's forcing lots and lots of long-overdue shift in the way that we, as people, look after data, architect technology, start to think about the kind of solutions and the kind of things that we do in the way that we deliver IT into business and enterprise across the globe. >> I think one of the things, too, and Paul brought it up, is he mentioned security several times. And, as Paul knows, one of my pet peeves is when companies say, "We have world-class security, "therefore we're compliant with GDPR." And I go, "Really, so you're basically locking down data "you're not legally allowed to have? That's "what you're telling me." >> Like you said earlier, it's not just about having encryption everywhere. >> Exactly, and it's funny how many companies say "Well, we're compliant with GDPR "because we encrypt the data." And I go, "Well, if you're not legally allowed "to have that data, that's not going to help you at all." And, unfortunately, I think that's what a lot of companies think, that as long as we're looking at the security side of the house, we're good. And they're missing the whole boat on GDPR. >> It's got to be secure. >> It's got to be secure. >> But-- >> You got to legally have it first. >> Exactly. The chicken and the egg. >> But, what's always an issue with security, around data and the stuff that Shelia talked about is quite a lot, is that one of the risks you have, is you can have all the great security in the world but, if the right person with the right access to the right data has all the things that they should have, that doesn't mean that they can't steal that data, lose that data, do something with that data that they shouldn't be doing, just because we've got it secured. SO we need to have policies and procedures in place that allow us to manage that better, a culture that understands the risk of doing those kinds of things, and maybe, alongside technologies that identify, unusual use of data are important within that. >> Well, Paul, Shelia, thank you so much for coming on the show, it's been a fascinating conversation. >> Thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight here in Berlin in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, beautiful cloud community, and welcome back to AWS reInvent. It is day four here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My voice can feel it, clearly. I'm Savannah Peterson with my co-host Paul Gillin. Paul, how you doing? >> Doing fine, Savannah. >> Are your feet about where my voice is? >> Well, getting little rest here as we have back to back segments. >> Yeah, yeah, we'll keep you off those. Very excited about this next segment. We get to have a chat with one of our very favorite analysts, Keith Townsend. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Savannah Page. I'm going to use your south names, Savannah Page. Thank you for having me, Paul. Good to see you again. It's been been too long since CubeCon Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Well at that beautiful lisp, love that. Keith, how's the show been for you so far? >> It has been great. I tweeted it a couple of days ago. Amazon reInvent is back. >> Savannah: Whoo! Love that. >> 50, 60 thousand people, you know? After 40 thousand, I stop countin'. It has been an amazing show. I don't know if it's just the assignment of returning, but easily the best reInvent of the four that I've attended. >> Savannah: Love that. >> Paul: I love that we have you here because, you know, we tend to get anchored to these desks, and we don't really get a sense of what's going on out there. You've been spending the last four days traversing the floor and talking to people. What are you hearing? Are there any mega themes that are emerging? >> Keith: So, a couple of mega themes is... We were in the Allen session with Adam, and Adam bought up the idea of hybrid cloud. At the 2019 show, that would be unheard of. There's only one cloud, and that's the AWS cloud, when you're at the Amazon show. Booths, folks, I was at the VMware booth and there's a hybrid cloud sign session. People are talking about multicloud. Yes, we're at the AWS show, but the reality that most customers' environments are complex. Adam mentioned that it's hybrid today and more than likely to be hybrid in the future in Amazon, and the ecosystem has adjusted to that reality. >> Paul: Now, is that because they want sell more outposts? >> You know, outpost is definitely a part of the story, but it's a tactile realization that outposts alone won't get it. So, you know, from Todd Consulting, to Capgemini, to PWC, to many of the integrations on the show floor... I even saw company that's doing HP-UX in the cloud or on-prem. The reality is these, well, we've deemed these legacy systems aren't going anywhere. AWS announced the mainframe service last year for converting mainframe code into cloud workloads, and it's just not taking on the, I think, the way that the Amazon would like, and that's a reality that is too complex for all of it to run in the cloud. >> Paul: So it sounds like the strategy is to envelop and consume then if you have mainframe conversion services and HP-UX in the cloud, I mean, you're talking about serious legacy stuff there. >> Keith: You're talking about serious legacy stuff. They haven't de-emphasized their relationship with VMware. You know, hybrid is not a place, it is a operating model. So VMware cloud on AWS allows you to do both models concurrently if you have those applications that need layer two. You have these workloads that just don't... SAP just doesn't... Sorry, AWS, SAP in the cloud and EC2 just doesn't make financial sense. It's a reality. It's accepting of that and meeting customers where they're at. >> And all the collaboration, I mean, you've mentioned so many companies in that answer, and I think it's very interesting to see how much we're all going to have to work together to make the cloud its own operating system. Cloud as an OS came up on our last conversation here and I think it's absolutely fascinating. >> Keith: Yeah, cloud is the OS I think is a thing. This idea that I'm going to use the cloud as my base layer of abstraction. I've talked to a really interesting startup... Well actually it's a open source project cross plane of where they're taking that cloud model and now I can put my VMware vsphere, my AWS, GCP, et cetera, behind that and use that operating model to manage my overall infrastructure. So, the maturity of the market has fascinated me over the past year, year and a half. >> It really feels like we're at a new inflection point. I totally agree. I want to talk about something completely different. >> Keith: Okay. >> Because I know that we both did this challenge. So one of the things that's really inspiring quite frankly about being here at AWS reInvent, and I know you all at home don't have an opportunity to walk the floor and get the experience and get as many steps as Paul gets in, but there's a real emphasis on giving back. This community cares about giving back and AWS is doing a variety of different activations to donate to a variety of different charities. And there's a DJ booth. I've been joking. It kind of feels like you're arriving at a rave when you get to reInvent. And right next to that, there is a hydrate and help station with these reusable water bottles. This is actually firm. It's not one of those plastic ones that's going to end up in the recycled bin or the landfill. And every single time that you fill up your water bottle, AWS will donate $3 to help women in Kenya get access to water. One of the things that I found really fascinating about the activation is women in sub-Saharan Africa spend 16 million hours carrying water a day, which is a wild concept to think about, and water is heavy. Keith, my man, I know that you did the activation. They had you carrying two 20 pound jugs of water. >> Keith: For about 15 feet. It's not the... >> (laughs) >> 20 pound jugs of water, 20 gallons, whatever the amount is. It was extremely heavy. I'm a fairly sizeable guy. Six four, six five. >> You're in good shape, yeah. >> Keith: Couple of a hundred pounds. >> Yeah. >> Keith: And I could not imagine spending that many hours simply getting fresh water. We take it for granted. Every time I run the water in the sink, my family gets on me because I get on them when they leave the sink water. It's like my dad's left the light on. If you leave the water on in my house, you are going to hear it from me because, you know, things like this tickle in my mind like, wow, people walk that far. >> Savannah: That's your whole day. >> Just water, and that's probably not even enough water for the day. >> Paul: Yeah. We think of that as being, like, an 18th century phenomenon, but it's very much today in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. >> I know, and we're so privileged. For me, it was just, we work in technology. Everyone here is pretty blessed, and to do that activation really got my head in the right space to think, wow I'm so lucky. The team here, the fabulous production team, can go refill my water bottle. I mean, so simple. They've also got a fitness activation going on. You can jump on a bike, a treadmill, and if you work out for five minutes, they donate $5 to Fred Hutch up in Seattle. And that was nice. I did a little cross-training in between segments yesterday and I just, I really love seeing that emphasis. None of this matters if we're not taking care of community. >> Yeah, I'm going to go out and google Fred Hutch, and just donate the five bucks. 'Cause I'm not, I'm not. >> (laughs) >> I'll run forever, but I'm not getting on a bike. >> This from a guy who did 100 5Ks in a row last year. >> Yeah. I did 100 5Ks in a row, and I'm not doing five minutes on a bike. That's it. That's crazy, right? >> I mean there is a treadmill And they have the little hands workout thing too if you want. >> About five minutes though. >> Savannah: I know. >> Like five minutes is way longer than what you think it is. >> I mean, it's true. I was up there in a dress in sequence. Hopefully, I didn't scar any anyone on the show floor yesterday. It's still toss up. >> I'm going to take us back to back. >> Take us back Paul. >> Back to what we were talking about. I want to know what you're hearing. So we've had a lot of people on this show, a lot of vendors on the show who have said AWS is our most important cloud partner, which would imply that AWS's lead is solidifying its lead and pulling away from the pack as the number one. Do you hear that as well? Or is that lip service? >> Keith: So I always think about AWS reInvent as the Amazon victory lap. This is where they come and just thumb their noses at all the other cloud providers and just show how far ahead they're are. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon's keynotes, so I hadn't watched it yet, but at that keynote, this is where they literally take the victory lap and say that we're going to expose what we did four or five years ago on stage, and what we did four or five years ago is ahead of every cloud provider with maybe the exception of GCP and they're maybe three years behind. So customers are overwhelmingly choosing Amazon for these reasons. Don't get me wrong, Corey Quinn, Gardner folks, really went at Adam yesterday about Amazon had three majors outages in December last year. AWS has way too many services that are disconnected, but from the pure capability, I talked to a born in the cloud data protection company who could repatriate their data protection and storage on-prem private data center, save money. Instead, they double down on Amazon. They're using, they modernize their application and they're reduced their cost by 60 to 70%. >> Massive. >> This is massive. AWS is keeping up with customers no matter where they're at on the spectrum. >> Savannah: I love that you use the term victory lap. We've had a lot of folks from AWS here up on the show this week, and a couple of them have said they live for this. I mean, and it's got to be pretty cool. You've got 70 thousand plus people obsessed with your product and so many different partners doing so many different things from the edge to hospital to the largest companies on earth to the Israeli Ministry of Defense we were just talking about earlier, so everybody needs the cloud. I feel like that's where we're at. >> Keith: Yeah, and the next step, I think the next level opportunity for AWS is to get to that analyst or that citizen developer, being able to enable the end user to use a lambda, use these data services to create new applications, and the meanwhile, there's folks on the show floor filling that gap that enable develop... the piece of owner, the piece of parlor owner, to create a web portal that compares his prices and solutions to other vendors in his area and adjust dynamically. You go into a restaurant now and there is no price menu. There's a QR code that Amazon is powering much of that dynamic relationship between the restaurateur, the customer, and even the menu and availability. It's just a wonderful time. >> I always ask for the print menu. I'm sorry. >> Yeah. You want the printed menu. >> Look down, my phone doesn't work. >> Gimme something I could shine my light on. >> I know you didn't have have a chance to look at Vogel's keynote yet, but I mean you mentioned citizen developer. One of the things they announced this morning was essentially a low code lambda interface. So you can plug, take your lamb dysfunctions and do drag and drop a connection between them. So they are going after that market. >> Keith: So I guess I'll take my victory lap because that was my prediction. That's where Amazon's next... >> Well done, Keith. >> Because Lambda is that thing when you look at what server list was and the name of the concept of being, not having to have to worry about servers in your application development, the logical next step, I won't take too much of a leap. That logical first step is, well, code less code. This is something that Kelsey Hightower has talked about a lot. Low code, no code, the ability to empower people without having these artificial barriers, learning how to code in a different language. This is the time where I can go to Valencia, it's pronounced, where I can go to Valencia and not speak Spanish and just have my phone. Why can't we do, at business value, for people who have amazing ideas and enable those amazing ideas before I have to stick a developer in between them and the system. >> Paul: Low-code market is growing 35% a year. It's not surprising, given the potential that's out there. >> And as a non-technical person, who works in technology, I've been waiting for this moment. So keep predicting this kind of thing, Keith. 'Cause hopefully it'll keep happening. Keith, I'm going to give you the challenge we've been giving all of our guests this week. >> Keith: Okay. >> And I know you're going to absolutely crush this. So we are looking for your 32nd Instagram real, sizzle hot take, biggest takeaway from this year's show. >> So 32nd Instagram, I'll even put it on TikTok. >> Savannah: Heck yeah. >> Hybrid cloud, hybrid infrastructure. This is way bigger than Amazon. Whether we're talking about Amazon, AWS, I mean AWS's solutions, Google Cloud, Azure, OCI, on-prem. Customers want it all. They want a way to manage it all, and they need the skill and tools to enable their not-so-growing work force to do it. That is, that's AWS reInvent 2019 to 2022. >> Absolutely nailed it. Keith Townsend, it is always such a joy to have you here on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us >> Savannah Page. Great to have you. Paul, you too. You're always a great co-host. >> (laughs) We co-hosted for three days. >> We've got a lot of love for each other here. And we have even more love for all of you tuning into our fabulous livestream from AWS reInvent Las Vegas, Nevada, with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. I'm John furry with the cube. We're here, live on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the Bellevue Hilton for thes marketplace seller conference. It's kind of like the one and a half inaugural event. They have their first event in 2019, and now with the pandemic, they're re rebooting it, but it's really all about AWS's marketplace and partner network coming together, creating an experience for how people will be buying software and how people will be selling through with their ecosystem. I'm Jennifer, the cube we're here with Megan. Fontain, who's the VP of cloud seek. Who's a seller and partner of AWS making great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thank you so much. It's, it's nice to be back in person and it's great to be with you. >>So watching the progression of how Amazon web services is evolving the marketplace and the partner network, you're starting to see some patterns. One is, I'll say they have their own stuff, and they're addressing that in the room, but they're really letting the thousand flowers bloom in the ecosystem. You hear that every year reinvent, even when Andy Jesse who's now the CEO of Amazon would say, no, we want the best of breed. Best product wins. Adam. Celeste's the same view, new leadership here, the combination of APN partner network with the marketplace now partner organization, APO is the big news. They're open. They're building an API service layer between their old marketplace to create this new model here. What's your, what's your, what's your take? What's your seller view? >>Yeah, so our marketplace and APN journey started with AWS about three years ago. And I think something that was the most profound to me out of the keynote this morning was that Chris Gus, who runs the API organization for ISVs talked about marketplace as the automation layer for how AWS will partner going forward. So an independent software vendor likes, we see that as opening up the door for two things. One, we get to leverage the great global scale and platform of AWS, but then secondly, it really brings together this idea that we will sell together to the end customer through the marketplace. And we will also sell as partners through co-sell and APM. >>You know, I love these kind of new, new development models around channel partners, ISVs at the end of the day, buyers are buying software. Yes. And they're cloud they're on a cloud journey. You're the VP of cloud at the company, your company seek take a minute to explain what your company's known for, what you guys do, your relationship with the market. You're an ISV. Yeah. Where are you guys? Cuz you guys ha have a good thing going on here. What do you guys do? What are you known for >>Sure. So seek is market leading software for advanced analytics for the manufacturing industry. So we're squarely in that industry. ISV, we sell SAS solutions to business buyers who want two things. One is they want technology that they can deploy quickly in their organizations drive that great business value ROI that drives the next level of investment in technology seeks unique offering in marketplace is that we've solved a lot of the challenges around that operational data in manufacturing. So manufacturing the industry, it's going through massive transformation, supply chain, disruption, or coming out of that, the globalization of manufacturing. And yet they have data that they've stored for 20, 30 years, that they're still in the first generation of trying to gain insights from. So that's why seek exists. It's really to bring the insights outta that data and then help the manufacturing customers we work with. Get to the cloud. >>What's interesting. I like your perspective and I want to follow up on that because data analytics used to be this thing. Well, I got a database. Yeah. You hosted on some storage and you got structured data, unstructured data. Okay. You got scale. But now you've got data platforms. You've got data mesh. I think Gardner actually has a different term, but gets a whole nother conversation. Data platforms are diverse. Yeah. They're pervasive. They're part of core infrastructure in cloud. It's not like a point solution anymore. It's gotta be integrated and customers are trying to work on, this is one of the hardest problems today. Yeah. In cloud transformation is the data layer, the relationship to other services. Yeah. >>So the Dataverse common data models. How APIs will interact with data. The trend there though is something that it is the ecosystem that will bring value to customers because no database is gonna serve every need. Right. And you think about the data layer. It really has to solve the problems whereby any application, any user, any insight can be generated almost seamlessly. And we're really on the first wave of that journey. But I think a, an element for seek that we certainly understand with our customers is that data alone is not an end objective, right? If it doesn't lead to a decision and an action and a workflow that humans can take to go drive and improvement in their business process, then you haven't tapped into the, you know, value of that technology >>When a buyer comes to the marketplace. Yeah. And they see your listing and solutions. Yes. What are they getting? What are they, what, what are they buying? >>So for seek, we've radically simplified that we, we really embrace this idea of simplification. We just sell, seek. So we have one seat listing in the AWS marketplace, all applications of seek they're all available there. We really leaned into the enterprise procurement models. So private offers are how we do the most of our business on marketplace. And it really went from a stage of experimentation where couple of customers, you know, what is this marketplace? Maybe we'll buy a few of our business applications there all the way through to now we're starting to see the demand side come through for customers where it's not just their security software or their DevOps or infrastructure software. They wanna buy solutions like seek including line of business buyers through a common catalog in the marketplace. >>Great. So I wanna ask you, cuz I want to give you the opportunity to give the pitch, the customer watching right now. Yeah. What's the pitch. Why seek, why this listing? Why should they hit the purchase button? I wish it was that easy. Why should they, why should they what's the pitch? Sure. >>So the first thing is seek through marketplace is a five clicks on three screens procurement experience. So compare that to months and months of back and forth with contracts and purchase orders and vendor set up, this is five less than five minutes, few screens, couple of clicks. And you can buy a multi-year subscription of seek to cover your entire enterprise. The second pitch is that it's a SaaS application that now can be deployed within hours. And then your users, your insights, your value is starting within the first couple hours. This is not a heavy lift it project. That's gonna take months. And then lastly seek specifically. So seek, because we're validated in the marketplace has been well architected for AWS cloud. We have that, you know, stamp of credibility. And we are leading in this space for manufacturing organizations who want cloud native secure software for analytics on their operational data. >>That's awesome. And customers have the challenge when they think about data, the use case security, yes governance, there's a variety of different use cases. What are you seeing as the top three use cases for C? >>So on the there's two lines of that question. The first is really the line of business use cases. And those are all about what outcome are we gonna drive? Are we gonna approve efficiency in your factory? Are we gonna reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Those are the kinds of use cases on the business side that that seek works with our customers on, on the it side. They wanna know that we can access data securely, that we can be part of an ecosystem where they can bring in aerations and algorithms and machine learning and new applications. And they also wanna know that we are sustainable. So meaning that we're driving constant innovation that is easy for them to consume and to gain access, to, to drive the next level of >>Improvement. My final AWS marketplace seller question is, yeah. How does the procurement process through marketplace help you and your customers what's in it for them? What value do the, does the customer get going through AWS procuring? >>So there's really really three. The first is you get a validated set of a catalog of solutions, right? That AWS says, you know, we undergo a rigorous process technically and commercially to be in the marketplace. The second thing for procurement effect of for procurement professionals is that they can leverage their cloud committed spend with AWS. So as they commit more expense and spend with AWS, now these marketplace purchases can be credited to that committed expense. We found that brings it and the business together with procurement to really work more collectively on that. And then the third piece is, imagine buying software where you don't need legal, you know, back and forth, back and forth because we're using a standard doula that thousands of other software companies are using in the marketplace today. >>I thought the keynote had a great line. We are not just a website of a catalog. We are a API service layer. Yes. With automation, more like a C I C D pipe lining. Yes. Of software. Yeah. And we are hearing more and more about software supply chain, more about scaling. This is kind of the future of procurement. Why wouldn't you buy direct, pick a few buttons and assemble your solutions at scale. >>There's some amount of tenant consequences that we've really learned as well. It brings it and the business closer together. So the it person wants to know, well, what is this seek, you know, piece of my AWS invoice. And so they get more engaged earlier in the process with procurement, with the business. And we've actually found that it brings internally for our customers, more people to the seat at the table around what are the applications and how will they govern them across the enterprise. >>Megan, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me here at the, at the conference, the seller S marketplace. I have to ask you, we were talking before we came on camera, you made a comment. I'd like you to share this comment with some commentary. You said I'm the VP of cloud transformation. And in the future that might title might not exist. Explain what you mean there, cuz I think this is kind of a telling moment about where we are at this point in the industry. >>Sure. So maybe it's, maybe it's funny to sort of envision a future where your role doesn't exist. But I think, you know, it's a to innovators do that, right? And for us we're a software company. That's going through the transition on-prem to SAS, you know, cloud native sets of applications, but in the pretty near term fore, really the next two years, all of our business will be SaaS and cloud. And so we won't need a separate VP or a separate team or separate function. It will just be how the business operates. >>Megan, thanks for running cue, Meghan bine, who is SI, she's a cloud VP of cloud transformation, VP of cloud, and she's successful. The title will go away and she'll move on to some other great valuable things like running the business. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Okay. This is a cube here in Seattle. We're covering the eights marketplace seller conference. Part of APN merging with Amazon marketplace now called the APO Amazon partner organization. I'm John ER, with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell technologies, world 2022. We're live in Vegas. Very happy to be here. Uh, this is the cubes multi-year coverage. This is year 13 for covering either, you know, EMC world or, uh, Dell world. And now of course, Dell tech world. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here with longtime Cub alum cube guest, Steve Kenon, the storage Alchemist, who's, uh, Beckett, Dell, uh, and his data protection role. And Tony Bryson is the chief information security officer of the town of Gilbert town in Arizona. Most, most towns don't have a CISO, but Tony, we're a thrilled, you're here to tell us that story. How did you become a CISO and how does the town of Gilbert have a CISO? >>Well, thank you for having me here. Uh, believe it or not. The town of Gilbert is actually the fourth largest municipality in Arizona. We serve as 281,000 citizens. So it's a fairly large enterprise. We're a billion dollar enterprise. And it got to the point where the, uh, cybersecurity concerns were at such a point that they elected to bring in their first chief information security officer. And I managed to, uh, be the lucky gentleman that got that particular position. >>That's awesome. And there's a, is there a CIO as well? Are you guys peers? Do you, how what's the reporting structure look like? >>We have a chief technology officer. Okay. I report through his office mm-hmm <affirmative> and then he reports, uh, directly to the town executive. >>So you guys talk a lot, you I'm sure you present a lot to the, to the board or wherever the governance structure is. Yeah, >>We do. I, I do quarterly report outs to the, I report through to the town council. Uh, let them know exactly what our cyber security posture is like, the type of threats that we're facing. As a matter of fact, I have to do one when I return to, uh, Gilbert from this particular conference. So really looking forward to that one, cuz this is an interesting time to be in cyber security. >>So obviously a sea. So Steve is gonna say, cyber's the number one priority, but I would say the CTO is gonna say the, say the same thing I would say the board is gonna say the same thing. I would also say Steve, that, uh, cyber and cyber resilience is probably the number one topic here at the show. When you walk around and you see the cyber demonstrations, the security demonstrations, they're packed, it's kind of your focus. Um, it's a good call. >>Yeah. <laugh> I'm the luckiest guy in storage, right? <laugh> um, yeah, there hasn't I in the last 24 months, I don't think that there's been a, a meeting that I've been to with a customer, no matter who's in the room where, uh, cyber resiliency, cybersecurity hasn't come up. I mean, it is, it is one of the hot topics in last night. I mean, Michael was just here. Uh, Michael Dell was just here last night. He came into the showroom floor, he came back, he took a look at what we were offering for cyber capabilities and was impressed. And, and so, so that's really good. >>Yeah. So I noticed, you know, when I talked to a lot of CIOs in particular, they would tell me that the pre pandemic, their cyber resiliency was very Dr. Focused, right. They really, it really wasn't an organizational resilience. It was a, if there's an oh crap moment, they could get it back in theory. And they sort of rethought that. Do you see you that amongst your peers, Tony? >>I think so. I think that people are quickly starting to understand that you just can't focus on, in, on protecting yourself from something that you think may never happen. The reality is that you're likely to see some type of cyber event, so you better be prepared for it. And you protect yourself against that. So plan for resiliency plan with making sure that you have the right people in place that can take that challenge on, because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when >>I would imagine. Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this, that, you know, the data protection business used to be, we used to call it backup in recovery and security, which is a whole different animal, but they're really starting to come together. It's kind of an Adjay. I, I know you've got this, uh, Maverick report that, that you want to talk about. What, what is that as a new Gartner research? I, I'm not familiar with it. >>Yeah. So it's some very interesting Gartner research and what I think, and I'd be curious to, Tony's take on, especially after that last question is, you know, a lot of people are, are spending a lot of money to keep the bad actors out. Right. And Gardner's philosophy on this whole, um, it's, it's, you're going to get hacked. So embrace the breach, that's their report. Right. So what they're suggesting is you're spending a lot of money, but, but we're witnessing a lot of attacks still coming in. Are you prepared to recover that when it happens? Right. And so their philosophy is it's time to start thinking about the recovery aspects of, you know, if, if they're gonna get through, how do you handle that? Right. >>Well, so you got announcements this week, big one of the big four, I guess, or big five cyber recovery vault. It's been, you're enhancing that you guys are talking things like, you know, air gaps and so forth. Give us the overview of the news there. >>Yeah. So there's, uh, cyber recovery vault for AWS for the cloud. There is, uh, a lot of stuff we're doing with, uh, cyber recovery vault for, uh, Aw, uh, Azure also, right along with the cyber sense technology, which is the technology that scans the data. Once it comes in from the backup to ensure that it clean and can be recovered and you can feel confident that your recoveries look good, right? So now, now you can do that OnPrem, or you can do it through a colo. You can do it with in the cloud, or you can, uh, ask Dell technologies with our apex business services to help provide cyber recovery services wherever for you at your co at yet OnPrem or for you from the cloud. So it's kind of giving the customer, allowing them to keep that freedom of choice of how they want to operate, but provide them those same recovery capabilities. >>So Tony, give us paint us a picture without giving away too much for the bad guys. How, how you approach this, maybe are you using some of these products? What's your sort of infrastructure look like? >>Yeah. Without giving away the state secrets, um, we are heavily invested in the cyber recovery vault and cyber sense. Uh, it plays heavily in our strategy. We wanna make sure we have a safe Harbor for our data. And that's something that, that the Dell power protect cyber recovery vault provides to us. Uh, we're exceptionally excited about the, the development that's going on, especially with apex. We're looking at that, and that has really captured our imagination. It could be a game changer for us as a town because we're, we're a small organization transitioning to a midsize organization and what apex provides and what the Dell cyber recovery vault provides to us. Putting those two together gives us the elasticity we need as a small organization to expand quickly and deal with our internal data concerns. >>So cyber recovery as a service is what you're interested in. Let me ask you a question. Are you interested in a managed service or are you interested in managing it yourself? >>That's a great question, personally. I would prefer that we went with managed services. I think that from a manager's perspective, you get a bigger bang for the buck going with managed services. You have people that work with that technology all the time. You don't have to ramp people up and develop that expertise in house. You also then have that peace of mind that you have more people that are doing the services and it acts as a force multiplier for you. So from a dollar and cents perspective, it's the way that you want to go. When I start talking to my internal people, of course, there's that, that sense of fear that comes with the unknown and especially outsourcing that type of critical infrastructure, the there's some concern there, but I think that with education, with exposure, to some of the things that we get from the managed service, it makes sense for everybody to go that >>Route and, and you can, I presume sort of POC it and then expand it and then get more comfortable with it and then say, okay, when it's hardened and ready now, this is the, the Def facto standard across the organization. >>I suspect we'll end up in a hybrid environment to begin with where we'll some assets on site, and then we'll have some assets in the cloud. And that's again, where apex will be that, that big linchpin for us and really make it all work. How >>Important are air gaps? >>Oh, they're incredibly, incredibly, uh, needed right now. You cannot have true data of security without having an air gap. A lot of the ransomware that we see moves laterally through your organization. So if you have, uh, all your data backed up in the same data center that your, your backups and your primary data sources are in odds are they're all gonna get owned at the same time. So having that air gap solution in there is critical to having the peace of mind that allows the CISO to sleep at night. >>I always tell my crypto and NFT readers, this doesn't apply to data centers. You gotta air back air, air gap, your crypto, you know, when you're NFT. So how do you guys Steve deal with, with air gap? Can you explain the solutions? >>So in the, in the cyber recovery vault itself, it is driven through, uh, you've got one, uh, power protect, uh, appliance on one, one side in your data center, and then wherever your, your, your vaulted area is, whether it be a colo, whether it be on pre wherever it might be. Uh, we create a connection between between the two that is one directional, right? So we send the data to that vault. We call it the vault and, you know, we replicate a copy of your backup data. Once it lives over there, we make a copy of that data. And then what we do is with the cyber sense technology that Tony was talking about, we scan that data and we validate it against, with a whole cyber sense is built on IML machine learning. We look at a couple hundred different kind of profiles that come through and compare it to the, to the day before as backup and the day before that and understand kind of what's changing. >>And is it changing the right way? Right? Like there might be some reasons it it's supposed to change that way. Right. But things that look anomalous, we send up a warning when we let the people know that, you know, whoever's monitoring, something's going on. You might want to take a look. And then based on that, if there's whatever's happening in the environment, we have the ability to then recover that data back to the, to the original system. You can use the vault as a, as a clean room area, if you want to send people to it, depending on kind of what's going on in, in, in your main data center. So there's a lot of things we do to protect that. Do >>You recommend, like changing the timing of when you take, you know, snapshots or you do the same time every day, it's gotta create different patterns or >>I'll tell you that's, that's one thing to keep the, keep the hackers on their tow, right? It it's tough to do operationally, right? Because you kind that's processes. But, but the reality is if you really are that, uh, concerned about attacks, that makes a lot of sense, >>Tony, what's the CISOs number one challenge today? >>Uh, I, it has to be resilience. It has to be making sure your organization that if or when they get hit, that you're able to pick the pieces back up and get the operation back up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure that the, the mission critical data is immediately, uh, recoverable and be able to be put back into play. >>And, and what's the biggest challenge or best practice in terms of doing that? Obviously the technology, the people, the process >>Right now, I would probably say it's it's people, uh, we're going through the, the, um, a period of, of uncertainty in the marketplace when it comes to trying to find people. So it is difficult to find the right people to do certain things, which is why managed services is so important to an organization of our size and, and what we're trying to do, where we are, are incorporating such big ideas. We need those manager services because we just can't find the bodies that can do some of this work. >>You got an interesting background, you a PhD in psychology, you're an educator, you're a golf pro and you're a CISO. I I've never met anybody like you, Tony <laugh>. So, thanks for coming on, Steve, give you the last word. >>Well, I think I, I think one of the things that Tony said, and I wanted to parlay this a little bit, uh, from that Gartner report, I even talked about people is so critical when it comes to cyber resiliency and that sort of thing. And one of the things I talked about in that embraced the breach report is as you're looking to hire staff for your environment, right, you wanna, you know, a lot of people might shy away from hiring that CSO that got fired because they had a cyber event. Right, right. Oh, maybe they didn't do their job. But the reality is, is those folks, because this is very new. I mean, of course we've been talking about cyber for a couple of years, but, but getting that experience under your belt and understanding what happens in the event. I mean, there are a lot of companies that run things like cyber ranges, resiliency, ranges to put people through the paces of, Hey, this is what have happens when an event happens and are you prepared to respond? I think there's a big set of learning lessons that happens when you go through one of those events and it helps kind of educate the people about what's needed. >>It's a great point. Failure used to mean fire right in this industry. And, and today it's different. The adversary is very well armed and quite capable and motivated that learning even during, even when you fail, can be applied to succeed in the future or not fail, I guess there's no such thing as success in your business. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very >>Much. >>All right. And thank you for watching the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. This is Dave Valenti. We'll be back with John furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson. Two days of wall to wall coverage left. Keep it with us.

>>Hey guys, and gals. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with about 2,500 folks. Very excited to be back in person. I can assure you that is the vibe that is here to be. You joins me next to the managing director at KPMG Toby. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Isn't it great to be back? I know it feels so normal. We were talking before we went live, that it feels normal. >>It does. It does. And it feels great. And after a great kickoff with, uh, with Rob >>Fantastic, Rob Bernstein has, and Barbara Corcoran, Rob has probably the highest energy of a CEO that I've ever gotten to work with. So you always know you're in for a good high energy conversation. Then Barbara Corcoran coming in, Jon Taffer with bar rescue is it's a, been a great morning so far. So you let's talk about you, you specialize in digital transformation within the procurement and the contract management spaces. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, uh, I love helping folks to re-imagine their, uh, operating models to solve today's challenges. And there are so many challenges coming out in this post COVID world, um, that many of our clients are dealing with. And, and I'm never short on phone calls and, you know, uh, from, from my clients reaching out for help, um, to really figure out how to retool, um, and, and, and really help themselves to transform, to be able to address the, the, the changes to come. >>I heard a really smart description of the last two years today, compressed transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation for years, and then we've also been talking about it's acceleration during the COVID era, but the compressed transformation, I thought that's probably something that's here to stay. Nobody's going to want access to older, less data slower. >>Yep. >>They're just not >>A hundred percent. What >>Are some of the trends that you've observed in your role in the last couple of years? >>Yeah, I, I absolutely believe that folks that took advantage of that digital transformation pre pandemic have actually been able to fare much better than those that have held off on those investments. Um, for whatever reasons, you know, there are always different priorities, but those that have actually gotten that journey started, um, pre pandemic have definitely fared, uh, for, well, I think the trends that I'm seeing today, the CPO's challenge, um, and there are many challenges, um, but you know, the, you know, coming out of the, uh, post COVID era, you are now recovering and ramping up production as a result, your buying activities increasing, right. Um, and, and other ways other than increasing, um, activity. There's also the changing of requirements. So, you know, the folks in the front office are looking at new technologies to innovate new products and services, and that's going to change what the, the mix of the skills and resources that you need in the back office. >>Um, in addition to that, um, there are other requirements like ESG. And so as you're thinking about retooling and being able to, um, buy more sustainably or drive diversity, um, with the spend that you have, that's also changing the skill mix that you have. And I think on top of speak, uh, on top of that, um, the skills and the talent, we are dealing with the, a unfortunate situation that many companies are with the, uh, you know, the great resignation where the talent is, has as quickly exited the workforce. Um, and, uh, and, and with the demand increasing and changing, that puts everyone in a tough spot. And so those are really the big challenges that I've seen with the clients. Most recently, as we're coming out of COVID >>Of your customer conversations, escalated up the C-suite you talk, you mentioned the chief procurement officer. If we think of every company, these days has to be a data company to be successful. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around. Are you noticing that from a supply chain perspective within procurement and contract management, is that escalating the C-suite to be much more of a C-suite or board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what folks have realized in many of their, even the earlier digital transformation efforts, it was very geared around automating and streamlining transactions and processes, not so much putting data at the core. Yes, you would get intelligence out of that, but we hadn't architected your entire organization around data and good quality data and what is needed, um, to be able to actually translate that data to meaningful insights, to make the decisions or drive, um, visibility within to your, into your supply chain. Um, so when you think about things that are, um, such as ESG, where you really need to know, um, your tier one, tier two tier three suppliers, and all the impacts that that has, um, in order to drive to those, um, ESG objectives that you're telling your investors, you're telling your customers, and you're telling your, um, your employees about it's very important. You have to be centered around data and be able to be able to see their entire supply chain. And if you weren't, if you weren't architected to do so, doing it as an afterthought is very costly because you've already made those investments >>Very costly. And also, I mean, from a business perspective, I think, you know, we, we talk so often Toby and you probably do as well about it, business alignment. It's one of those, it's like digital transformation. It's almost a buzzword if you will, but it's critical because I'm seeing a lot of data and research from, from folks like Gardner that are showing that massive percentages of businesses believe that the technology is really the driver and the fuel of the business going forward. So no longer can it and lines of business be separated. >>Yeah, I, I totally agree. I actually think that when I mentioned about new skills, if you think about the next generation and the new operating models, um, uh, you know, the, the, the new folks coming out of college have to have that skill set because process and technology are, are, are completely linked. Um, and I think that the organizations, the future and the sick, the most successful ones will know how to actually be more human centric and be able to harness the data through the technologies. So I'll actually allow you and I to do what we do best, right, which is collaborate and negotiate deals work on our relationship versus focused on the technology or entering data into forms and all the administrative components that, uh, many of my clients are plagued with today, >>Collaboration, I think has maybe become even more important in the last two years that we've been so limited about how to collaborate. Thankfully, we have a lot of technologies to do that, but when I think of Coupa collaboration, community are two words that jump out. Talk to me a little bit about from an, a partnership perspective alignment there with the collaborative spirit at KPMG. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for, for us, uh, I recently just presented on a very similar topic that nothing great in business is done by a single person. And it takes partners to be able to drive the innovation needed to solve the new challenges of tomorrow. And, and I see our relationship with that. You know, they offer a platform, they offer a method to get access to the data and simplify it in a way for our clients so that they can focus on the relationships and driving the collaboration with their suppliers. And, and I think that that's, that's the thought leadership, uh, in partnership with, uh, with them that we'd like to bring to the table. >>Speaking of alignment between KPMG and Qubit. Talk to me a little bit about ESG as, as sort of a new initiative within KPMG. Talk to me a little bit about that. And what's some of the high level objectives are >>Absolutely. Um, I wouldn't say that it's, it's, it's new. I think it's always been there and there's always been a focus, but I think the recent events and with the regulatory environment changing as well, and as with consumers, consumer behavior, driving and investor community driving towards, um, uh, ESG, I think that is quickly changing how companies are prioritizing that within the Mo amongst everything else that they have. And as a result, I think the CPO's role in that equation is ever so important when it comes to delivering and operationalizing ESG. >>I imagine it, the CPS role must be a lot more strategic these >>Days >>Because they really have to be kind of a transformation change agent. >>Yeah. And actually in most cases, the CPO is perfect for that because that's been their role, um, in, uh, in, in, uh, in many cases before. Um, and I think, yeah, this is just yet another dimension that they didn't have to attack and, and incorporate into the, uh, into the process of selecting the right partner or the right supplier within their, um, within the, uh, with, with who they want to onboard for, for the company. >>Got it. Okay. Let's talk about advice now for companies that are either in the early stages of the supply chain transformation really digitizing, how do they get started? Is it too late for some? >>No, I don't think it's ever too late. I don't think, I, I think, um, I don't think it's too late, you know, and especially with the very big focus on digital and tech these days, sometimes being the late, being late to the game allows folks to actually work out the kinks for, you know, the bleeding edge technologies. And so that makes it even less risky for them to adopt in, in many cases. Um, that's, that's, uh, that, that's what we've seen, but, you know, I think the advice is get educated, uh, really just understand as much as you can around what other people are doing. Are there other, um, uh, peer group, uh, companies like yours, you know, like themselves that are actually going through the transformation or have gone before and just kind of understand what were the drivers of that strategy and what were the outcomes that you can learn from them, get help from externals. >>Um, and whether they be technology partners, consultants, and actually hiring new skills and bringing in new perspectives to help you to own and drive that strategy important. This is super important and you can't outsource these things, right. This needs to come from within, especially when you think about things as purposeful and impactful as ESG. Um, those, those cannot be outsourced. Um, and I think those would be the, uh, the kind of the two key things. Um, but I always also say, um, take an outward in approach, as you're thinking about your new strategy, focus on what your employees are saying about, you know, your supply chain and how easy it is to actually understand and, and work within your supply chain. Talk to your suppliers, talk to your internal business partners, to really reflect and understand how do you make this process as easy as possible for them to comply with. >>I think one of the things I was reading, uh, in preparation for coming here is that some, some survey, a survey that that Cooper did of about 800 decision makers. And one of the things that was overwhelming as a theme is that a lot of organizations don't feel that they have the right data visibility to drive an ESG strategic initiative. So what Coupa does providing that visibility and the ability to collaborate and share across the community is, seems to be something that's going to be a business critical must have going forward. >>Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, many, uh, many of our clients operate under, you know, uh, not under like mandates or compliance, driven, um, kind of policies in the commercial world, many cases you have to influence the buying behavior. And so you can't do that without data. I'd like to think in this day and age presented with the right supplier options with them at the right point in time, you're able to influence and drive the spend to diverse candidates, sustainable options, you know, and there's, you know, not just savings, not just the lowest cost option, but there's so many other things to consider in this day and age. And I think that's where it's so important to be able to have a platform like Hoopa, to be able to gather that data acquire external sources of data, such as ESG related data and make that to, um, to, to all parties, um, and be that source of truth so that you can drive the >>Here's some truth. And also even something that was talked about this morning during the keynote is accountability. And have you heard Jon Taffer from bar rescue talking this morning, but he was talking about an 120 bar rescues. He goes, I've never met one person that has admitted from day one of the four days. They shoot that I'm responsible for the reason that my business is not successful. He goes, everybody has an excuse. There's no accountability until you really force someone to take probably that hard look in the mirror that they don't want to take, but that accountability within organizations within an overall business is critical. >>Yeah, I think, uh, I absolutely believe that went away to solve that is providing the data and making it available. And, um, and really once again, I think it goes back to driving that behavior that you want. And I think it starts with, uh, with, with leadership and I think the accountability, accountability of leadership, and to be able to drive that type of culture within your organization. Um, but absolutely you need data to be able to do that and, and be able to monitor that as well, you know, as a leader to make sure that that accountability is appropriately distributed. >>Right. But one of the things, I mean, I think patients has been in short supply the last two years have been, we've learned that. I think also that another thing we've learned is that access to real-time data is no longer, oh, then that would be great. It's you've got to have that for your business to be differentiated because the, you know, if we think about the consumer side, the consumers are so vocal on things like social media, if the experience isn't tailored, personalized and instantaneous, We have a very short Rob talked about the very short attention span that his kids have. I'm like three minutes. We don't even have that in business or on the consumer side. I don't think. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I see that in my kids and what he said today was, was spot on. Um, so, you know, when I think about my career and where I'm at, and he said the same thing, I mean, our kids are coming into the, there'll be in procurement organizations very soon, sooner than, you know, then, then I like to admit. Um, and as a result, I think that, um, we talked a bit about talent shortage and the challenge with keeping talent. And I think that what you had just expressed is very important is that that experience for the employee, but you come into a workforce and they expect you to have these quick turnarounds, but you've, you offered them tools that require spreadsheets and old archaic systems to be able to solve today's challenges. I think that you're not going to be able to retain your talent right along. Right. >>That's a great point. That's an absolutely fantastic point. Last question for you before we wrap here is so the changes that organizations need to make with respect to being prepared for ESG reporting requirements that are coming down the pike, obviously being, having a data strategy has got to be one of us. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think we, many procurement organizations were really geared around savings and a very compliance, driven manner. And when you think about ESG, I think you gotta be very data-driven. Um, and so that should be a priority focus of how do you retool yourself to be able to acquire mass amounts of data, figuring out where you need to go, um, to get that data, whether they be third parties, whether they be directly from the supplier, um, and be able to aggregate it and provide the insight into those reporting standards that are required. Um, and then to be able to actually measure progress along those sustainability or diversity goals that it might be established at, at, at the leadership level. So I think it's coming down the pike. It's a matter of time. I think it's, I think it's, uh, you know, it's something that I've been waiting for to see. Um, and it's interesting to see how, uh, how quickly that it's, it's come down. Um, but I think with the regulatory compliance coming down, um, this is going to be moving very quick and people need to get ready. >>That's good. They need to be ready. Excellent to be thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you were doing at KPMG, what it's doing with Kupa and how organizations really should be thinking about and approaching supply chain, digital transformation. We appreciate your insights. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For Toby, you I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube in Las Vegas at Cooper inspire 2022 stick around. My next guest will join me shortly.

>>Hello everyone. And welcome to the cubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase open cloud innovations. This is season two episode one of our showcase ongoing series. We're covering very exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. And we're going to be talking about the open source community. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And today I'm excited to be joined by Robbie, Myra, the head of product and partner marketing at sneak. Robbie's here to talk with me about developer security for your digital transformation. Robbie, it's great to have you on the cube. >>Thanks Lisa. Nice to be here. >>So talk to me about what's going on in developer land. They're under a lot of pressure. A lot of them are building apps with open source, but what does sneak seeing from the developers lens >>From the developer's lens? There's a lot of pressure to build fast and that's probably the biggest challenge, right? We're in a world of digital transformation where everybody's trying to compete no matter what industry you're in, right on the technology and on the quality of your software or the capabilities of your software, which puts a lot of pressure on developers to build fast. That causes them to do a few things. One, it causes them to build, to develop in a way where they're doing constant iteration and so models that would have enabled a security check to come in at the end, aren't working anymore because they don't have time for those security checks. And it also causes them to do a good thing, which is to leverage other people's code when they can like open source. So they can just focus on, on their own functionality. And that's true, whether they're building new functionality or modernizing legacy applications by moving them to the cloud. >>So it's a high percentage of, of app code 80 to 90% is open source. Then that opens up. Talk to me about w where the vulnerabilities are and how you guys help customers and developers address that. >>Yeah, the vulnerabilities can be anywhere, but the key is that that point, right? If you're using open source in a typical application, 80 to 90 plus percent of the lines of code in that application are going to be open source code, their code. Somebody else wrote that you don't have a direct relationship with, and yet you own the risk that whatever they may have, whatever vulnerabilities may be in their code, you now own that risk. So what we're trying to do with sneakers, trying to do is enable developers to leverage open source, but do that securely. And then we also help them with the 10% that they rent as well, and, and do that all in one really easy environment for a developer that fits into their workflow and into their daily life. >>So security should shift left. I've had the chance to talk with a couple of, do you call them sneakers sneakers? Oh, you do a couple of sneakers recently. We've talked about security shifting lab. That's not a new concept, but I'd love to dig in more to how sneak and AWS do that. And I'm also curious if what you're doing helps. We've talked about the cybersecurity skills got for a long time. Now, just what you guys do, help address that >>It does because it's really leveraging a resource that, that is there, right? There's the number of developers worldwide is growing from, depending on who you believe for these numbers and their estimated numbers, right? But 25 million to 50 million over roughly a five-year period that's already started. So we're somewhere in the 30 now, right? Meanwhile, the security jobs, there's something like 9 million cyber security people in the world, and that's all cyber security roles. It's a much shorter, a smaller chunk that are application security folks. And there's three and a half million unfilled cybersecurity roles. So you can't get cyber security people and keep using the current model you're using. But just scale it linearly, you have to change things. And sneaks belief is the way you change things is you have the developers be part of your security solution, which means they need to have the ability to not only develop, but to develop securely. And that's our concept of developer security. We build tools and a platform that enables developers to be the first part of the security solution and enable security teams rather than individually auditing and fixing things to develop a process, govern the process, guide the development teams, but let the developers own that first step of security. And that's really how you solve that scale problem. >>When you're talking with customers, is this kind of a better together scenario, developers and security folks? Are you helping them align culturally because this is a change? >>Absolutely. I think one of the biggest misconceptions out there is that there's a tension between security and development. And I think that's because organizationally there might be right. Security is responsible for risk and developers responsible for speed of innovation and the faster you innovate, potentially there's more risk. So there might be some organizational tension, but at the human level, people understand each other, they understand the pressures that the other one's going through. They just don't have an easy way to work together. And if you can help them get that, then they, it really takes off it. The relationships form they'll build human to human programs like security champion programs and things to, to integrate the teams because they're both going after the same goal, both sides want to build awesome technology and grow in whatever market they're in. >>Right. And of course, with the need to do that at today's markets speed and scale is a great thing that you guys are doing to facilitate that collaboration. And of course the security let's kind of take a double-click now into the different integrations that sneek has with AWS services. I know there's quite a few, >>There's quite a few. The biggest one, probably the easiest one for the integrations is the native integration that we have with code pipeline. So it makes it easy for developers as they're finishing their builds and deploying to have an automatic security check that comes in, understands if there's things that need to be fixed before this really should be released, and then they can fix it and go forward. But we integrate across with our API across a lot of other services, ECR EKS code builder, so that wherever the developer is working, there's a way for us to integrate with them as they're building across their AWS development process. >>Okay. So giving them plenty of opportunity, let's dig into the platform. Talk to me about the platform, how it's really aimed at developers. You alluded to this a little bit, but I'd like to kind of take a double-click into the technology. >>Sure. That the platform, it, part of it is that idea of it we've wrapped it all as a developer tool. But the thing that makes sneak unique in this is not only we have the idea that we wanted to shift left in time, but we wanted to shift left in ownership. So the developers are primary user and we built a tool that is a developer tool that happens to do security. And we've extended that tool into a platform by enabling it to connect into the developers tools, sharing information, across different elements of what it securing. So for example, the open source that we're scanning for you and testing to find for vulnerabilities, we're also looking at the vulnerabilities in your code and where they may overlap or intersect. We can adjust priorities so that you might not need to fix something. Let's say you're using an open source, vulnerable, a package that has a vulnerability, but your code is never going to access that you don't need to fix it. >>So you can prioritize that one lower, right? Same thing with Kubernetes and containers. You may have a container vulnerability, but the way you're going to leverage the container that won't be used so we can adjust the priority to make it easy for the developer. And that's the other big thing that's different about a developer security platform than a typical security tool. A typical security tool is an audit tool it's designed to output. Here are all the things you have a problem with a developer security tool is a fixing tool. It's just defined as a, here are the problems you have developed with here's how you fix it and go back to building on that. That prioritization is a big part of that, because you can say, here's what you don't need to worry about. And then you can focus the rest of your energy on helping developers fix the problem either by giving them really good advice or automating it for them and saying, Hey, here's a button click that will generate a pull request. And your problem is this fixed. >>It must go a long way to improving developer productivity, one facilitating that speed and the agility with which they need to work, but also from a developer kind of crowd sourcing, crowd swell perspective. I imagine, talk to me about what some of the voices are, the developers that are in your community. What are some of the things that they're saying in terms of how much faster they're able to work, they're able to get those priorities established with automation so much faster? >>Well, that's the biggest thing. Is there a, the productivity gain happens because of the benefit of shift left, right? You're testing earlier. You're finding it at an earlier time when it's easier to fix, but that's because they're the ones doing it, right. If they're waiting to hand off to an auto report and then it comes back, even if somebody is, is giving them them audit faster, it's still after they've moved on. And the other way people try to solve it as well. They'll say, well, I'll take a security tool then to hand it to the developer and they can run it. But so developers are not security experts. So the tool needs to understand what they know and what they don't know, and, and working in an upload. And that's what developers generally say to us because sneak makes it easy to work, but also focuses on the fix and helps them guide them to that, to that answer. Then they're able to go much faster when we're evaluated by companies who are looking for a security solution. If the developers get involved in that evaluation, they'll choose sneak. >>So I'm curious a little bit about as, as the head of product marketing, I'm thinking customer advisory boards, things like that. What's the collaboration like between sneak and the developers to really tune and push the technology forward. I imagine it's quite collaborative, >>Quite collaborative and it's across a lot of, of spectrum. So we do have a customer advisory board and that's generally leaders, right? That's either security leaders or development leaders or operations leaders who are in that advisory board. And they're giving us input on things they need for program-wide governance or program wide adoption. We also have a developer community where we're talking directly to developers and that's where we get a lot of, Hey, here's how I could use this better as a developer. And that guides where we focus features that help developers work better, whether it's integrations with our IDs or whether it's the way we present information, help them prioritize. And then the third part is we have a lot of people using the tool because it has a free model, right? We're as a developer tool, we have a freemium model. There's a level of sneak that developers can use that they don't need to pay for. That's not a temporary trial, it's forever. If you want to use it at that level and we can observe what they're doing. So that observability gives us another insight into where folks get challenged run into, to struggles. And then we can look to address those in our roadmap as well. So, so all of that together really helps us drive the product forward. >>What is the perspective from the analyst view? You talked a little bit about the perspective from the customer. We'll get into a customer story in a bit, but I'd love to know what are the gardeners saying? >>Well, Gardner especially put us, we debuted in their magic quadrant for application security last year. And we did David as a visionary and sort of the highest part of the visionary quadrant you could get in before you crossed over into leader, which is kind of unheard of for a first time into the, into the quadrant. And the main reason for that is that they have built the way those, those magic quadrants are built is they have key capabilities and then they score companies against key capabilities and they weight those capabilities, you know, by order of importance. And Gardner has started to put some of this notion of developer security and cross cloud native application security into those key capabilities. And those tend to align really well with what sneakers. So they have a, for example, a software composition, which is sort of open source security analysis, where first, w w w where the top ranking in that, where the top ranking and container security, where the top ranking and developer enablement. So that's pulling us, they are so-so Gardner and the analyst community is seeing this same demand coming from their customers. And that's really aligning to where our vision is. >>And in terms of kind of propelling that vision forward, the voice of the customer, the voice of the analyst, aligning with what you guys are doing to kind of lead the vision going forward. I want to get into some of the intelligence before we kind of break into a customer example. Talk to me a little bit about snakes security intelligence, what the key capabilities are, and some customers that are leveraging it. Sure. >>The biggest thing is with all the developer tool wrapping that needs to be in this product than it is a developer tool. It's got a developers heart, but it has to have a security brain because it still is a security tool. There are some developer tools. We try to have little check the box capabilities of security and they'll crowdsource for vulnerabilities potentially. But if you're doing this, you need to make sure that all the vulnerabilities that could be found are in the database to be able to be found that the database is comprehensive, that it's timely. They get in very quickly that it's accurate. You don't waste time on false positives because that will turn developers off faster than anything. And that it's actionable. So when it does find something, it helps you go forward with it. And that's where sneaks really focused on. So we collect data from multiple public sources. >>We also have a fairly large proprietary research team that curates that information determines what needs to go in. Sometimes we'll adjust priorities. And we also get a lot of contributions from other sources like community contributions. Again, that big free user base of ours is giving us input academia. Open source groups are also in their social media trends. So if we see something trending on Twitter, then that'll not only get it into the database, but it'll drive prioritization. And that's a big part of what's in sneak Intel, which is the name we use for our vulnerability database. We also have a machine learning algorithm. That's constantly looking at all the code in public, in public applications and repositories. And we use that to train for our own proprietary code testing tool, but it also just gets a lot of it finds things there as well. So it brings a really good source of information that helps people make sure you're finding the vulnerabilities, you're prioritizing them correctly and fixing them. And so Amazon's one who is the, you know, one of the folks that using that tool where one of the primary sources of, of Amazon inspector for open source vulnerabilities, as well as a bunch of other security companies like rapid seven tenable and, and others. >>One of the things I was reading from, I'm always kind of looking at the differentiators and I'm sure you are as the head of product marketing and partner marketing, but it sounds like the database can, is, is a key differentiator finding vulnerabilities up to what is it? 46 days faster than competitors. >>Yeah. I mean, faster than especially public sources, which are the easier ones to, to know how you're doing against, but that's a big part of us. So when I talked about those categories, that's really what we measure ourselves against. How are we doing in terms of comprehensive? Do we have the vulnerabilities that we should have? So we have over four times the number of vulnerabilities as the next largest publicly available database, we find them faster, so timely. So that's at 46 days getting it in faster or faster than other public sources, they get into our solution and then accuracy. Again, we, it's not a stat we can test because you can't test it just from the database. You have to run the tools of our, of others in this space. And we don't have those, but making sure that you're not hitting a lot of false positives is a big part of it as well. >>Got it. Okay. And we only have a couple minutes left, but there's two more areas that I want to dig into with you just crack crack. The surface one is log four, shallow was reading. Snake says this. We were the perfect solution at the perfect time. Unpack that for me in the next minute or so. >>Yeah. And that's a bit, and it kind of wraps back to what we were talking about earlier. Everybody's using open source. If you're in the Java world, a lot of folks had logged for shell and we're using lock for shell for logging as a part of their, as a part of their applications. And so a lot of our customers, I think it was over 30%, 36% of our paying customers had the vulnerability. And you would only have the vulnerability of your Java. So it's a very large percentage of our Java using my customers had the vulnerability, but because they were using sneak, they were able, once we put it in the database, which we did the day, it was disclosed, they were able to find it and fix it very quickly. So 91% of our customers fixed that vulnerability in just two days, 98%, because this was a rolling thunder event, right. There was a vulnerability. And then there was a second vulnerability in the, in the fix. And then there was a vulnerability, even in the fix of that. So the second vulnerability that came out because everybody had been ready for it from the first time 98% picks within two days. Whereas the median number of days to generally fix a vulnerability is over two months. So really fast addressing the solution. >>So those are really impressive. And speaking of stats, I wanted to get into just really quickly a case study that really shows that lasting is one of your customer. One of your many customers, big developer community there about 3,500 developers. Give me some kind of the high level of business outcomes that at Lasagne is, is, is achieving thanks to sneaky. >>Yeah. I mean the biggest one is that almost 99% of their applications are deployed in containers. So being able to have the containers tested for vulnerabilities as they're being deployed before they're being deployed is huge for them to reduce the risk of a vulnerability. They, they had a 65% reduction in high severity container volumes a few months after using sneak across all those developers, which really reduces your, your risk profile of your, of your cloud native applications. They're obviously a big AWS user as well. So, so for them, that was the big thing. And again, it goes to that scale, right? They've got 3 3500 developers, more than 3,500 developers. If you try to go through the security team and have the security team fixing all those things, you'll just never catch up. >>Got it. Last question. Where can I get this available through the AWS market prays marketplace? You mentioned the freemium model, give folks kind of a direction on where to go. >>Yeah. So I would say if you are a, if you're someone in the security team, if you're a buyer, the AWS marketplace is a great place to go because you can probably leverage your existing spend commits with AWS. It's easy to purchase, easy billing, et cetera. If you're a developer, then there is this free version where you might go and just start using it and get comfort for it. And if you are a buyer, talk to your developers because there's a pretty good chance. Someone in your company, that's a developer is already using. Sneak will be comfortable with it. These solutions are only successful. If the developers actually use it, you can't shift left unless the developers pick it up and use it. So using the one that developers are already using is probably a good idea. >>Awesome. Robbie, this has been a great conversation, so much momentum at snake. You're the third sneaker I'd gotten to speak to you in the last month and I have, it's pretty exciting, but thanks for walking us through the technology, the capabilities, the differentiators, the voice of the customer, the voice of the analyst, we appreciate your insights and your time. And we look forward to next time we talk to you. >>Terrific. Lisa, I look forward to it as well, but there's a lot more Smith sneakers to go through before you get back to me again. I guess >>I look forward to adding to my repertoire of sneaker interviews, Ravi. Thanks so much. Thank you for Ravi Myra. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube interview as part of the AWS startup showcase. Stick around more great content coming up next.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic has changed the way we think about and predict the future. As we enter the third year of a global pandemic, we see the significant impact that it's had on technology strategy, spending patterns, and company fortunes Much has changed. And while many of these changes were forced reactions to a new abnormal, the trends that we've seen over the past 24 months have become more entrenched, and point to the way that's coming ahead in the technology business. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome our partner and colleague and business friend, Erik Porter Bradley, as we deliver what's becoming an annual tradition for Erik and me, our predictions for Enterprise Technology in 2022 and beyond Erik, welcome. Thanks for taking some time out. >> Thank you, Dave. Luckily we did pretty well last year, so we were able to do this again. So hopefully we can keep that momentum going. >> Yeah, you know, I want to mention that, you know, we get a lot of inbound predictions from companies and PR firms that help shape our thinking. But one of the main objectives that we have is we try to make predictions that can be measured. That's why we use a lot of data. Now not all will necessarily fit that parameter, but if you've seen the grading of our 2021 predictions that Erik and I did, you'll see we do a pretty good job of trying to put forth prognostications that can be declared correct or not, you know, as black and white as possible. Now let's get right into it. Our first prediction, we're going to go run into spending, something that ETR surveys for quarterly. And we've reported extensively on this. We're calling for tech spending to increase somewhere around 8% in 2022, we can see there on the slide, Erik, we predicted spending last year would increase by 4% IDC. Last check was came in at five and a half percent. Gardner was somewhat higher, but in general, you know, not too bad, but looking ahead, we're seeing an acceleration from the ETR September surveys, as you can see in the yellow versus the blue bar in this chart, many of the SMBs that were hard hit by the pandemic are picking up spending again. And the ETR data is showing acceleration above the mean for industries like energy, utilities, retail, and services, and also, notably, in the Forbes largest 225 private companies. These are companies like Mars or Koch industries. They're predicting well above average spending for 2022. So Erik, please weigh in here. >> Yeah, a lot to bring up on this one, I'm going to be quick. So 1200 respondents on this, over a third of which were at the C-suite level. So really good data that we brought in, the usual bucket of, you know, fortune 500, global 2000 make up the meat of that median, but it's 8.3% and rising with momentum as we see. What's really interesting right now is that energy and utilities. This is usually like, you know, an orphan stock dividend type of play. You don't see them at the highest point of tech spending. And the reason why right now is really because this state of tech infrastructure in our energy infrastructure needs help. And it's obvious, remember the Florida municipality break reach last year? When they took over the water systems or they had the ability to? And this is a real issue, you know, there's bad nation state actors out there, and I'm no alarmist, but the energy and utility has to spend this money to keep up. It's really important. And then you also hit on the retail consumer. Obviously what's happened, the work from home shift created a shop from home shift, and the trends that are happening right now in retail. If you don't spend and keep up, you're not going to be around much longer. So I think the really two interesting things here to call out are energy utilities, usually a laggard in IT spend and it's leading, and also retail consumer, a lot of changes happening. >> Yeah. Great stuff. I mean, I recall when we entered the pandemic, really ETR was the first to emphasize the impact that work from home was going to have, so I really put a lot of weight on this data. Okay. Our next prediction is we're going to get into security, it's one of our favorite topics. And that is that the number one priority that needs to be addressed by organizations in 2022 is security and you can see, in this slide, the degree to which security is top of mind, relative to some other pretty important areas like cloud, productivity, data, and automation, and some others. Now people may say, "Oh, this is obvious." But I'm going to add some context here, Erik, and then bring you in. First, organizations, they don't have unlimited budgets. And there are a lot of competing priorities for dollars, especially with the digital transformation mandate. And depending on the size of the company, this data will vary. For example, while security is still number one at the largest public companies, and those are of course of the biggest spenders, it's not nearly as pronounced as it is on average, or in, for example, mid-sized companies and government agencies. And this is because midsized companies or smaller companies, they don't have the resources that larger companies do. Larger companies have done a better job of securing their infrastructure. So these mid-size firms are playing catch up and the data suggests cyber is even a bigger priority there, gaps that they have to fill, you know, going forward. And that's why we think there's going to be more demand for MSSPs, managed security service providers. And we may even see some IPO action there. And then of course, Erik, you and I have talked about events like the SolarWinds Hack, there's more ransomware attacks, other vulnerabilities. Just recently, like Log4j in December. All of this has heightened concerns. Now I want to talk a little bit more about how we measure this, you know, relatively, okay, it's an obvious prediction, but let's stick our necks out a little bit. And so in addition to the rise of managed security services, we're calling for M&A and/or IPOs, we've specified some names here on this chart, and we're also pointing to the digital supply chain as an area of emphasis. Again, Log4j really shone that under a light. And this is going to help the likes of Auth0, which is now Okta, SailPoint, which is called out on this chart, and some others. We're calling some winners in end point security. Erik, you're going to talk about sort of that lifecycle, that transformation that we're seeing, that migration to new endpoint technologies that are going to benefit from this reset refresh cycle. So Erik, weigh in here, let's talk about some of the elements of this prediction and some of the names on that chart. >> Yeah, certainly. I'm going to start right with Log4j top of mind. And the reason why is because we're seeing a real paradigm shift here where things are no longer being attacked at the network layer, they're being attacked at the application layer, and in the application stack itself. And that is a huge shift left. And that's taking in DevSecOps now as a real priority in 2022. That's a real paradigm shift over the last 20 years. That's not where attacks used to come from. And this is going to have a lot of changes. You called out a bunch of names in there that are, they're either going to work. I would add to that list Wiz. I would add Orca Security. Two names in our emerging technology study, in addition to the ones you added that are involved in cloud security and container security. These names are either going to get gobbled up. So the traditional legacy names are going to have to start writing checks and, you know, legacy is not fair, but they're in the data center, right? They're, on-prem, they're not cloud native. So these are the names that money is going to be flowing to. So they're either going to get gobbled up, or we're going to see some IPO's. And on the other thing I want to talk about too, is what you mentioned. We have CrowdStrike on that list, We have SentinalOne on the list. Everyone knows them. Our data was so strong on Tanium that we actually went positive for the first time just today, just this morning, where that was released. The trifecta of these are so important because of what you mentioned, under resourcing. We can't have security just tell us when something happens, it has to automate, and it has to respond. So in this next generation of EDR and XDR, an automated response has to happen because people are under-resourced, salaries are really high, there's a skill shortage out there. Security has to become responsive. It can't just monitor anymore. >> Yeah. Great. And we should call out too. So we named some names, Snyk, Aqua, Arctic Wolf, Lacework, Netskope, Illumio. These are all sort of IPO, or possibly even M&A candidates. All right. Our next prediction goes right to the way we work. Again, something that ETR has been on for awhile. We're calling for a major rethink in remote work for 2022. We had predicted last year that by the end of 2021, there'd be a larger return to the office with the norm being around a third of workers permanently remote. And of course the variants changed that equation and, you know, gave more time for people to think about this idea of hybrid work and that's really come in to focus. So we're predicting that is going to overtake fully remote as the dominant work model with only about a third of the workers back in the office full-time. And Erik, we expect a somewhat lower percentage to be fully remote. It's now sort of dipped under 30%, at around 29%, but it's still significantly higher than the historical average of around 15 to 16%. So still a major change, but this idea of hybrid and getting hybrid right, has really come into focus. Hasn't it? >> Yeah. It's here to stay. There's no doubt about it. We started this in March of 2020, as soon as the virus hit. This is the 10th iteration of the survey. No one, no one ever thought we'd see a number where only 34% of people were going to be in office permanently. That's a permanent number. They're expecting only a third of the workers to ever come back fully in office. And against that, there's 63% that are saying their permanent workforce is going to be either fully remote or hybrid. And this, I can't really explain how big of a paradigm shift this is. Since the start of the industrial revolution, people leave their house and go to work. Now they're saying that's not going to happen. The economic impact here is so broad, on so many different areas And, you know, the reason is like, why not? Right? The productivity increase is real. We're seeing the productivity increase. Enterprises are spending on collaboration tools, productivity tools, We're seeing an increased perception in productivity of their workforce. And the CFOs can cut down an expense item. I just don't see a reason why this would end, you know, I think it's going to continue. And I also want to point out these results, as high as they are, were before the Omicron wave hit us. I can only imagine what these results would have been if we had sent the survey out just two or three weeks later. >> Yeah. That's a great point. Okay. Next prediction, we're going to look at the supply chain, specifically in how it's affecting some of the hardware spending and cloud strategies in the future. So in this chart, ETRS buyers, have you experienced problems procuring hardware as a result of supply chain issues? And, you know, despite the fact that some companies are, you know, I would call out Dell, for example, doing really well in terms of delivering, you can see that in the numbers, it's pretty clear, there's been an impact. And that's not not an across the board, you know, thing where vendors are able to deliver, especially acute in PCs, but also pronounced in networking, also in firewall servers and storage. And what's interesting is how companies are responding and reacting. So first, you know, I'm going to call the laptop and PC demand staying well above pre-COVID norms. It had peaked in 2012. Pre-pandemic it kept dropping and dropping and dropping, in terms of, you know, unit volume, where the market was contracting. And we think can continue to grow this year in double digits in 2022. But what's interesting, Erik, is when you survey customers, is despite the difficulty they're having in procuring network hardware, there's as much of a migration away from existing networks to the cloud. You could probably comment on that. Their networks are more fossilized, but when it comes to firewalls and servers and storage, there's a much higher propensity to move to the cloud. 30% of customers that ETR surveyed will replace security appliances with cloud services and 41% and 34% respectively will move to cloud compute and storage in 2022. So cloud's relentless march on traditional on-prem models continues. Erik, what do you make of this data? Please weigh in on this prediction. >> As if we needed another reason to go to the cloud. Right here, here it is yet again. So this was added to the survey by client demand. They were asking about the procurement difficulties, the supply chain issues, and how it was impacting our community. So this is the first time we ran it. And it really was interesting to see, you know, the move there. And storage particularly I found interesting because it correlated with a huge jump that we saw on one of our vendor names, which was Rubrik, had the highest net score that it's ever had. So clearly we're seeing some correlation with some of these names that are there, you know, really well positioned to take storage, to take data into the cloud. So again, you didn't need another reason to, you know, hasten this digital transformation, but here we are, we have it yet again, and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. >> You know, that's a really good point. I mean, it's not necessarily bad news for the... I mean, obviously you wish that it had no change, would be great, but things, you know, always going to change. So we'll talk about this a little bit later when we get into the Supercloud conversation, but this is an opportunity for people who embrace the cloud. So we'll come back to that. And I want to hang on cloud a bit and share some recent projections that we've made. The next prediction is the big four cloud players are going to surpass 167 billion, an IaaS and PaaS revenue in 2022. We track this. Observers of this program know that we try to create an apples to apples comparison between AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba in IaaS and PaaS. So we're calling for 38% revenue growth in 2022, which is astounding for such a massive market. You know, AWS is probably not going to hit a hundred billion dollar run rate, but they're going to be close this year. And we're going to get there by 2023, you know they're going to surpass that. Azure continues to close the gap. Now they're about two thirds of the size of AWS and Google, we think is going to surpass Alibaba and take the number three spot. Erik, anything you'd like to add here? >> Yeah, first of all, just on a sector level, we saw our sector, new survey net score on cloud jumped another 10%. It was already really high at 48. Went up to 53. This train is not slowing down anytime soon. And we even added an edge compute type of player, like CloudFlare into our cloud bucket this year. And it debuted with a net score of almost 60. So this is really an area that's expanding, not just the big three, but everywhere. We even saw Oracle and IBM jump up. So even they're having success, taking some of their on-prem customers and then selling them to their cloud services. This is a massive opportunity and it's not changing anytime soon, it's going to continue. >> And I think the operative word there is opportunity. So, you know, the next prediction is something that we've been having fun with and that's this Supercloud becomes a thing. Now, the reason I say we've been having fun is we put this concept of Supercloud out and it's become a bit of a controversy. First, you know, what the heck's the Supercloud right? It's sort of a buzz-wordy term, but there really is, we believe, a thing here. We think there needs to be a rethinking or at least an evolution of the term multi-cloud. And what we mean is that in our view, you know, multicloud from a vendor perspective was really cloud compatibility. It wasn't marketed that way, but that's what it was. Either a vendor would containerize its legacy stack, shove it into the cloud, or a company, you know, they'd do the work, they'd build a cloud native service on one of the big clouds and they did do it for AWS, and then Azure, and then Google. But there really wasn't much, if any, leverage across clouds. Now from a buyer perspective, we've always said multicloud was a symptom of multi-vendor, meaning I got different workloads, running in different clouds, or I bought a company and they run on Azure, and I do a lot of work on AWS, but generally it wasn't necessarily a prescribed strategy to build value on top of hyperscale infrastructure. There certainly was somewhat of a, you know, reducing lock-in and hedging the risk. But we're talking about something more here. We're talking about building value on top of the hyperscale gift of hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx. So in addition, we're not just talking about transforming IT, which is what the last 10 years of cloud have been like. And, you know, doing work in the cloud because it's cheaper or simpler or more agile, all of those things. So that's beginning to change. And this chart shows some of the technology vendors that are leaning toward this Supercloud vision, in our view, building on top of the hyperscalers that are highlighted in red. Now, Jerry Chan at Greylock, they wrote a piece called Castles in the Cloud. It got our thinking going, and he and the team at Greylock, they're building out a database of all the cloud services and all the sub-markets in cloud. And that got us thinking that there's a higher level of abstraction coalescing in the market, where there's tight integration of services across clouds, but the underlying complexity is hidden, and there's an identical experience across clouds, and even, in my dreams, on-prem for some platforms, so what's new or new-ish and evolving are things like location independence, you've got to include the edge on that, metadata services to optimize locality of reference and data source awareness, governance, privacy, you know, application independent and dependent, actually, recovery across clouds. So we're seeing this evolve. And in our view, the two biggest things that are new are the technology is evolving, where you're seeing services truly integrate cross-cloud. And the other big change is digital transformation, where there's this new innovation curve developing, and it's not just about making your IT better. It's about SaaS-ifying and automating your entire company workflows. So Supercloud, it's not just a vendor thing to us. It's the evolution of, you know, the, the Marc Andreessen quote, "Every company will be a SaaS company." Every company will deliver capabilities that can be consumed as cloud services. So Erik, the chart shows spending momentum on the y-axis and net score, or presence in the ETR data center, or market share on the x-axis. We've talked about snowflake as the poster child for this concept where the vision is you're in their cloud and sharing data in that safe place. Maybe you could make some comments, you know, what do you think of this Supercloud concept and this change that we're sensing in the market? >> Well, I think you did a great job describing the concept. So maybe I'll support it a little bit on the vendor level and then kind of give examples of the ones that are doing it. You stole the lead there with Snowflake, right? There is no better example than what we've seen with what Snowflake can do. Cross-portability in the cloud, the ability to be able to be, you know, completely agnostic, but then build those services on top. They're better than anything they could offer. And it's not just there. I mean, you mentioned edge compute, that's a whole nother layer where this is coming in. And CloudFlare, the momentum there is out of control. I mean, this is a company that started off just doing CDN and trying to compete with Okta Mite. And now they're giving you a full soup to nuts with security and actual edge compute layer, but it's a fantastic company. What they're doing, it's another great example of what you're seeing here. I'm going to call out HashiCorp as well. They're more of an infrastructure services, a little bit more of an open-source freemium model, but what they're doing as well is completely cloud agnostic. It's dynamic. It doesn't care if you're in a container, it doesn't matter where you are. They recently IPO'd and they're down 25%, but their data looks so good across both of our emerging technology and TISA survey. It's certainly another name that's playing on this. And another one that we mentioned as well is Rubrik. If you need storage, compute, and in the cloud layer and you need to be agnostic to it, they're another one that's really playing in this space. So I think it's a great concept you're bringing up. I think it's one that's here to stay and there's certainly a lot of vendors that fit into what you're describing. >> Excellent. Thank you. All right, let's shift to data. The next prediction, it might be a little tough to measure. Before I said we're trying to be a little black and white here, but it relates to Data Mesh, which is, the ideas behind that term were created by Zhamak Dehghani of ThoughtWorks. And we see Data Mesh is really gaining momentum in 2022, but it's largely going to be, we think, confined to a more narrow scope. Now, the impetus for change in data architecture in many companies really stems from the fact that their Hadoop infrastructure really didn't solve their data problems and they struggle to get more value out of their data investments. Data Mesh prescribes a shift to a decentralized architecture in domain ownership of data and a shift to data product thinking, beyond data for analytics, but data products and services that can be monetized. Now this a very powerful in our view, but they're difficult for organizations to get their heads around and further decentralization creates the need for a self-service platform and federated data governance that can be automated. And not a lot of standards around this. So it's going to take some time. At our power panel a couple of weeks ago on data management, Tony Baer predicted a backlash on Data Mesh. And I don't think it's going to be so much of a backlash, but rather the adoption will be more limited. Most implementations we think are going to use a starting point of AWS and they'll enable domains to access and control their own data lakes. And while that is a very small slice of the Data Mesh vision, I think it's going to be a starting point. And the last thing I'll say is, this is going to take a decade to evolve, but I think it's the right direction. And whether it's a data lake or a data warehouse or a data hub or an S3 bucket, these are really, the concept is, they'll eventually just become nodes on the data mesh that are discoverable and access is governed. And so the idea is that the stranglehold that the data pipeline and process and hyper-specialized roles that they have on data agility is going to evolve. And decentralized architectures and the democratization of data will eventually become a norm for a lot of different use cases. And Erik, I wonder if you'd add anything to this. >> Yeah. There's a lot to add there. The first thing that jumped out to me was that that mention of the word backlash you said, and you said it's not really a backlash, but what it could be is these are new words trying to solve an old problem. And I do think sometimes the industry will notice that right away and maybe that'll be a little pushback. And the problems are what you already mentioned, right? We're trying to get to an area where we can have more assets in our data site, more deliverable, and more usable and relevant to the business. And you mentioned that as self-service with governance laid on top. And that's really what we're trying to get to. Now, there's a lot of ways you can get there. Data fabric is really the technical aspect and data mesh is really more about the people, the process, and the governance, but the two of those need to meet, in order to make that happen. And as far as tools, you know, there's even cataloging names like Informatica that play in this, right? Istio plays in this, Snowflake plays in this. So there's a lot of different tools that will support it. But I think you're right in calling out AWS, right? They have AWS Lake, they have AWS Glue. They have so much that's trying to drive this. But I think the really important thing to keep here is what you said. It's going to be a decade long journey. And by the way, we're on the shoulders of giants a decade ago that have even gotten us to this point to talk about these new words because this has been an ongoing type of issue, but ultimately, no matter which vendors you use, this is going to come down to your data governance plan and the data literacy in your business. This is really about workflows and people as much as it is tools. So, you know, the new term of data mesh is wonderful, but you still have to have the people and the governance and the processes in place to get there. >> Great, thank you for that, Erik. Some great points. All right, for the next prediction, we're going to shine the spotlight on two of our favorite topics, Snowflake and Databricks, and the prediction here is that, of course, Databricks is going to IPO this year, as expected. Everybody sort of expects that. And while, but the prediction really is, well, while these two companies are facing off already in the market, they're also going to compete with each other for M&A, especially as Databricks, you know, after the IPO, you're going to have, you know, more prominence and a war chest. So first, these companies, they're both looking pretty good, the same XY graph with spending velocity and presence and market share on the horizontal axis. And both Snowflake and Databricks are well above that magic 40% red dotted line, the elevated line, to us. And for context, we've included a few other firms. So you can see kind of what a good position these two companies are really in, especially, I mean, Snowflake, wow, it just keeps moving to the right on this horizontal picture, but maintaining the next net score in the Y axis. Amazing. So, but here's the thing, Databricks is using the term Lakehouse implying that it has the best of data lakes and data warehouses. And Snowflake has the vision of the data cloud and data sharing. And Snowflake, they've nailed analytics, and now they're moving into data science in the domain of Databricks. Databricks, on the other hand, has nailed data science and is moving into the domain of Snowflake, in the data warehouse and analytics space. But to really make this seamless, there has to be a semantic layer between these two worlds and they're either going to build it or buy it or both. And there are other areas like data clean rooms and privacy and data prep and governance and machine learning tooling and AI, all that stuff. So the prediction is they'll not only compete in the market, but they'll step up and in their competition for M&A, especially after the Databricks IPO. We've listed some target names here, like Atscale, you know, Iguazio, Infosum, Habu, Immuta, and I'm sure there are many, many others. Erik, you care to comment? >> Yeah. I remember a year ago when we were talking Snowflake when they first came out and you, and I said, "I'm shocked if they don't use this war chest of money" "and start going after more" "because we know Slootman, we have so much respect for him." "We've seen his playbook." And I'm actually a little bit surprised that here we are, at 12 months later, and he hasn't spent that money yet. So I think this prediction's just spot on. To talk a little bit about the data side, Snowflake is in rarefied air. It's all by itself. It is the number one net score in our entire TISA universe. It is absolutely incredible. There's almost no negative intentions. Global 2000 organizations are increasing their spend on it. We maintain our positive outlook. It's really just, you know, stands alone. Databricks, however, also has one of the highest overall net sentiments in the entire universe, not just its area. And this is the first time we're coming up positive on this name as well. It looks like it's not slowing down. Really interesting comment you made though that we normally hear from our end-user commentary in our panels and our interviews. Databricks is really more used for the data science side. The MLAI is where it's best positioned in our survey. So it might still have some catching up to do to really have that caliber of usability that you know Snowflake is seeing right now. That's snowflake having its own marketplace. There's just a lot more to Snowflake right now than there is Databricks. But I do think you're right. These two massive vendors are sort of heading towards a collision course, and it'll be very interesting to see how they deploy their cash. I think Snowflake, with their incredible management and leadership, probably will make the first move. >> Well, I think you're right on that. And by the way, I'll just add, you know, Databricks has basically said, hey, it's going to be easier for us to come from data lakes into data warehouse. I'm not sure I buy that. I think, again, that semantic layer is a missing ingredient. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. And to your point, you know, Snowflake's got the war chest, they got the momentum, they've got the public presence now since November, 2020. And so, you know, they're probably going to start making some aggressive moves. Anyway, next prediction is something, Erik, that you and I have talked about many, many times, and that is observability. I know it's one of your favorite topics. And we see this world screaming for more consolidation it's going all in on cloud native. These legacy stacks, they're fighting to stay relevant, but the direction is pretty clear. And the same XY graph lays out the players in the field, with some of the new entrants that we've also highlighted, like Observe and Honeycomb and ChaosSearch that we've talked about. Erik, we put a big red target around Splunk because everyone wants their gold. So please give us your thoughts. >> Oh man, I feel like I've been saying negative things about Splunk for too long. I've got a bad rap on this name. The Splunk shareholders come after me all the time. Listen, it really comes down to this. They're a fantastic company that was designed to do logging and monitoring and had some great tool sets around what you could do with it. But they were designed for the data center. They were designed for prem. The world we're in now is so dynamic. Everything I hear from our end user community is that all net new workloads will be going to cloud native players. It's that simple. So Splunk has entrenched. It's going to continue doing what it's doing and it does it really, really well. But if you're doing something new, the new workloads are going to be in a dynamic environment and that's going to go to the cloud native players. And in our data, it is extremely clear that that means Datadog and Elastic. They are by far number one and two in net score, increase rates, adoption rates. It's not even close. Even New Relic actually is starting to, you know, entrench itself really well. We saw New Relic's adoption's going up, which is super important because they went to that freemium model, you know, to try to get their little bit of an entrenched customer base and that's working as well. And then you made a great list here, of all the new entrants, but it goes beyond this. There's so many more. In our emerging technology survey, we're seeing Century, Catchpoint, Securonix, Lucid Works. There are so many options in this space. And let's not forget, the biggest data that we're seeing is with Grafana. And Grafana labs as yet to turn on their enterprise. Elastic did it, why can't Grafana labs do it? They have an enterprise stack. So when you look at how crowded this space is, there has to be consolidation. I recently hosted a panel and every single guy on that panel said, "Please give me a consolidation." Because they're the end users trying to actually deploy these and it's getting a little bit confusing. >> Great. Thank you for that. Okay. Last prediction. Erik, might be a little out of your wheelhouse, but you know, you might have some thoughts on it. And that's a hybrid events become the new digital model and a new category in 2022. You got these pure play digital or virtual events. They're going to take a back seat to in-person hybrids. The virtual experience will eventually give way to metaverse experiences and that's going to take some time, but the physical hybrid is going to drive it. And metaverse is ultimately going to define the virtual experience because the virtual experience today is not great. Nobody likes virtual. And hybrid is going to become the business model. Today's pure virtual experience has to evolve, you know, theCUBE first delivered hybrid mid last decade, but nobody really wanted it. We did Mobile World Congress last summer in Barcelona in an amazing hybrid model, which we're showing in some of the pictures here. Alex, if you don't mind bringing that back up. And every physical event that we're we're doing now has a hybrid and virtual component, including the pre-records. You can see in our studios, you see that the green screen. I don't know. Erik, what do you think about, you know, the Zoom fatigue and all this. I know you host regular events with your round tables, but what are your thoughts? >> Well, first of all, I think you and your company here have just done an amazing job on this. So that's really your expertise. I spent 20 years of my career hosting intimate wall street idea dinners. So I'm better at navigating a wine list than I am navigating a conference floor. But I will say that, you know, the trend just goes along with what we saw. If 35% are going to be fully remote. If 70% are going to be hybrid, then our events are going to be as well. I used to host round table dinners on, you know, one or two nights a week. Now those have gone virtual. They're now panels. They're now one-on-one interviews. You know, we do chats. We do submitted questions. We do what we can, but there's no reason that this is going to change anytime soon. I think you're spot on here. >> Yeah. Great. All right. So there you have it, Erik and I, Listen, we always love the feedback. Love to know what you think. Thank you, Erik, for your partnership, your collaboration, and love doing these predictions with you. >> Yeah. I always enjoy them too. And I'm actually happy. Last year you made us do a baker's dozen, so thanks for keeping it to 10 this year. >> (laughs) We've got a lot to say. I know, you know, we cut out. We didn't do much on crypto. We didn't really talk about SaaS. I mean, I got some thoughts there. We didn't really do much on containers and AI. >> You want to keep going? I've got another 10 for you. >> RPA...All right, we'll have you back and then let's do that. All right. All right. Don't forget, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, all you can do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus, they've got a new website out. It's the best data in the industry, and we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can always reach out on email, David.Vellante@siliconangle.com I'm @DVellante on Twitter. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You are watching theCube's coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'll tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000. And there's a little overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable. And we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the vice president of development and ops at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, vice-president of ecosystem partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Jay, maybe you could take us through for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do? What do you all about? >> Yes, so PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong Telecom. So if it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable. We've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity. Came into business in 2005 if my brain is serving me correctly right now. So we have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a tier one service provider from that perspective as well. So we do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on that our network and our assets. >> Okay, so 2005, obviously you predated cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers, it's getting in the ocean, I mean, global networks, I mean, there was a big trend to do that and you had to think, you had to go bigger or go home and that business. >> Jay: Yes you had to do. >> So and Console Connect is your platform, is that right? So explain. >> Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Console Connect is our software defined interconnection platform. So we built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issue to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. And that may be extending to their data centers or extending or their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. And all of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> So, when you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the cloud model, AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting, if you will, the visioning and management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? And AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting, and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. >> So it's a classic case of, okay, AWS has direct connect, people they go, "Ah, that's directly competitive, but it's not, you're adding value on top of that." Right. So describe where you fit Garrett inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem, what's that like? >> Okay, so where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. So we have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> Okay, so and you're doing that inside of AWS? I that right? Or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> Okay, so your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> And then, so your relationship with AWS is to sort of superpower direct connect, is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW Global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in clouds. >> Wherever there's a cloud you plug into it? Okay. >> That's correct. >> And then another advantage there is the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographic region. If for some reason you need to be connected to US West, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? Why, what's the use case there? >> Global diversity is certainly one of them, just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these cloud-based companies are beginning to kind of be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these pockets of use and they'll go, well, okay, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. And so then we want to our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset, that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What are the big, sort of macro trends in your business? I mean, broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughing) Because that's what our granularity is. So we allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. So if something happens, suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic. If a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you, or we've provisioned a new circuit for you. We've got your backup going whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume, so I can have one date or a three-year term. Presume if I commit to three years, I get a better deal, is that right or? >> You do, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. So yeah, if you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> Yeah, so it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. Is just you want to reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you would sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a floor and then everything above that is I can flex up? Is that how it works? Okay. And then the more I commit to the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat, right. >> So, okay. So I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, I'll sign up for that and anything over it. You're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, and the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, or I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense I don't want. And we say, fine, take your one gig port, run one gig of services on it, if that's 20 different services, we're fine. So we allow you to multiplex your port and provision- >> It's awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend take a look at that pricing model. So, Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that way? Maybe you could draw paint a picture sort of the, the ideal partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but. >> Sure, so our ideal partners are internet exchanges, cloud partners, and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the cloud. And the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the cloud much easier and flexible in a flexible format for their customers. >> Yeah, so what can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the the scope, the scale. >> Well, of our business, kind of one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. So now, instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to kind of understand that now you're going, well, okay, so it's in the cloud now I need to manage my connectivity there. And, oh, well, wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just, bought into myself to try to run this? So the platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So you're a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. So that's really one of our guiding principles is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> Well, I don't understand, 'cause in the early days of cloud, a lot of enterprises, CIO they were concerned about security. And I think they realized that AWS has pretty good security, well, CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's bad security, it's just different. We move slow, Dave. So how do you accommodate, now I don't know, does that diversity, I mean, AWS has obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the cloud? Is that kind of how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> It is such now in the eco, it was all the diversity in the ecosystem. Is it such that there's enough common patterns that you you guys can kind of accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the, one of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. Now we do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem, we can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of... I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. So we're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> Well, I would think 5G actually, I mean, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business, 'cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services I think, I could see somebody arguing the counter, but what's your point of view on that? >> No. I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor. And it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. And we're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge, rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse in Hare pending it. So, again, the ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, and ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. And that's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah, yeah and then you look at some of the car companies are coming on, you know, Tesla, you're driving around with like eight CPU's in that thing, communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah right. >> You start scaling that, and you start getting into some real bottleneck. >> Amazing business you guys having, obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you've got a big moat, and then it's a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Yeah. No, thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Connections 21. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program today. I want to start with a bit of an assessment on the keynotes that we heard this morning, but before I get into that, I want to set the framework for thinking about Commvault as a company. This company has been around for a long time, since the late 1980s, but really came into prominence in the client server era and it has ridden numerous waves, including network backup and recovery, data management, and now cloud data services. It's a company with more than $700 million in revenue and a market value of nearly $3 billion. Since coming on as CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani has embarked on moving the company towards a subscription model, focusing on optionality for on premises, hybrid and cloud workloads. It's launch of metallic and data management as a service are two components that underpin the strategy. At his keynote earlier today, Mirchandani drew on his experience as both a former CIO and current CEO roles to connect with his audience. His major themes hit on data, the value of data, and the imperative to get control of your data. Of course, data protection has become a fundamental component of digital transformations. For years, data protection was an afterthought or a bolt on, but today, organizations are forced to think about their digital stacks in their entirety, which means they have to build resilience into their platforms from the start. Mirchandani said that if we embrace, manage, and properly protect data, it will become the defining disruptive difference for an organization. But he talked about the gap between what the business wants to do and what the technology teams are actually equipped to do and when it comes to data, I couldn't agree more. He called this the business integrity gap and I'll come back to that. He also put out some fun facts and I'll share those here. According to IDC, 64 zettabytes of data was created and replicated in 2020. That's the equivalent of 2 trillion 4K movies. That's a lot of data. Gardner says by 2025, 85% of business will be delivered through SAS applications. Sophos, the security firm, estimates that the average cost of a ransomware attack is approaching nearly $2 million. The security company Proofpoint did a survey and 64% of surveyed CSOs felt that they were at risk of a material cyber attack in the next 12 months. I'm surprised that number was so, so low. I think the other 36% are busy responding to a cyber attack. Coming back to Sanjay's business integrity gap. Here's how I see it. Data by its very nature is distributed, decentralized, and it's becoming more so with hybrid connections, multicloud installations, and edge use cases. This is only going to accelerate in the future. As such, organizations need to rethink their approaches to getting value from data. Instead of building monolithic data architectures and hyper-specialized technical data teams, organizations are beginning to empower lines of business and domain owners to take end-to-end responsibility for data ownership. The underlying technology platform is becoming an operational detail that serves the data owners, where data protection and governance is computationally automated in a federated model. So the policy is centralized, but the implementation of that policy is done by software. This means that data governance, security, privacy, access, and policy are all adjudicated wherever possible by software and our automated, irrespective of physical location. Data silos are not just a technology problem. They're a symptom of flawed organizational constructs, steeped in the notion that highly technical data specialists and centralized teams should be the stewards of the data and serve multiple lines of business simultaneously, without proper business context. Now, this is changing. Data is being used to create a new class of products and services that can be directly or indirectly monetized, or drive other value, for instance, like saving lives. It's about the organizational mission. Now in this sense, data is undergoing a renaissance, where the responsibility for end-to-end data ownership is being distributed and decentralized, where highly specialized technical teams are becoming enablers for generalists that reside within the lines of business, i.e., those who are building data products and services. This is not shadow IT. It's decentralized management with federated governance. Now, by rethinking the data management paradigm, the responsibility for good data protection policy transcends technical teams and becomes a priority for the entire organization. To that end, Commvault laid out its strategy to deliver a comprehensive set of intelligent data services, spanning data protection, security, compliance, governance, data transformation, and data insights. In my view, a huge part of Commvault's strategy lies in automation. That's a key ingredient of cloud and any cloud strategy. In other words, supporting cloud native and cloud-like data management capabilities that can be programmatically deployed, secured, managed, and governed, and applied across an organization's sprawling data empire. The world of enterprise technology is complex and the winning technology companies are going to be those that can abstract the underlying complexity and assist organizations to implement sound data management practices, irrespective of data location, in the most efficient way. So as you hear the stories and examples here at Commvault Connections, you can decide for yourself if the company is on the right track and if what you hear aligns with your digital business skill goals. So let's now get a practitioner's perspective and hear how the CSO is thinking about data protection. Up next is Dave Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at ADP. You're watching theCUBE. (gentle upbeat music)