(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay, hello everyone. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Meet the Analysts segment Sunday morning. We've got everyone around the world here to discuss a bit of the news around the EU killing the privacy deal, striking it down, among other topics around, you know, data privacy and global commerce. We got great guests here, Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. Bill Mew, founder and CEO of Cyber Crisis Management from the Firm Crisis Team. And JD, CEO of Spearhead Management. JD, I can let you say your name because I really can't pronounce it. How do I (laughs) pronounce it, doctor? >> I wouldn't even try it unless you are Dutch, otherwise it will seriously hurt your throat. (Ray laughing) So, JD works perfect for me. >> Doctor Drooghaag. >> And Sarbjeet Johal, who's obviously an influencer, a cloud awesome native expert. Great, guys. Great to have you on, appreciate it, thanks for comin' on. And Bill, thank you for initiating this, I appreciate all your tweets. >> Happy Sunday. (Bill laughing) >> You guys have been really tweeting up a storm, I want to get everyone together, kind of as an analyst, Meet the Analyst segment. Let's go through with it. The news is the EU and U.S. Privacy Shield for data struck down by the court, that's the BBC headline. Variety of news, different perspectives, you've got an American perspective and you've got an international perspective. Bill, we'll start with you. What does this news mean? I mean, basically half the people in the world probably don't know what the Privacy Shield means, so why is this ruling so important, and why should it be discussed? >> Well, thanks to sharing between Europe and America, it's based on a two-way promise that when data goes from Europe to America, the Americans promise to respect our privacy, and when data goes form America to Europe, the Europeans promise to respect the American privacy. Unfortunately, there are big cultural differences between the two blocks. The Europeans have a massive orientation around privacy as a human right. And in the U.S., there's somewhat more of a prioritization on national security, and therefore for some time there's been a mismatch here, and it could be argued that the Americans haven't been living up to their promise because they've had various different laws, and look how much talk about FISA and the Cloud Act that actually contravene European privacy and are incompatible with the promise Americans have given. That promise, first of all, was in the form of a treaty called Safe Harbor. This went to court and was struck down. It was replaced by Privacy Shield, which was pretty much the same thing really, and that has recently been to the court as well, and that has been struck down. There now is no other means of legally sharing data between Europe and America other than what are being called standard contractual clauses. This isn't a broad treaty between two nations, these are drawn by each individual country. But also in the ruling, they said that standard contractual clauses could not be used by any companies that were subject to mass surveillance. And actually in the U.S., the FISA courts enforce a level of mass surveillance through all of the major IT firms, of all major U.S. telcos, cloud firms, or indeed, social media firms. So, this means that for all of the companies out there and their clients, business should be carrying on as usual apart from if you're one of those major U.S. IT firms, or one of their clients. >> So, why did this come about? Was there like a major incident? Why now, was it in the court, stuck in the courts? Were people bitchin' and moanin' about it? Why did this go down, what's the real issue? >> For those of us who have been following this attentively, things have been getting more and more precarious for a number of years now. We've had a situation where there are different measures being taken in the U.S., that have continued to erode the different protections that there were for Europeans. FISA is an example that I've given, and that is the sort of secret courts and secret warrants that are issued to seize data without anyone's knowledge. There's the Cloud Act, which is a sort of extrajudicial law that means that warrants can be served in America to U.S. organizations, and they have to hand over data wherever that data resides, anywhere in the world. So, data could exist on a European server, if it was under the control of an American company, they'd have to hand that over. So, whilst FISA is in direct conflict with the promises that the Americans made, things like the Cloud Act are not only in controversion with the promise they've made, there's conflicting law here, because if you're a U.S. subsidiary of a big U.S. firm, and you're based in Europe, who do you obey, the European law that says you can't hand it over because of GDPR, or the American laws that says they've got extrajudicial control, and that you've got to hand it over. So, it's made things a complete mess. And to say has this stuff, hasn't really happened? No, there's been a gradual erosion, and this has been going through the courts for a number of years. And many of us have seen it coming, and now it just hit us. >> So, if I get you right in what you're saying, it's basically all this mishmash of different laws, and there's no coherency, and consistency, is that the core issue? >> On the European side you could argue there's quite a lot of consistency, because we uphold people's privacy, in theory. But there have been incidents which we could talk about with that, but in theory, we hold your rights dear, and also the rights of Europeans, so everyone's data should be safe here from the sort of mass surveillance we're seeing. In the U.S., there's more of a direct conflict between everything, including there's been a, in his first week in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that the Privacy Act in the U.S., which had been the main protection for people in the U.S., no longer applied to non-U.S. citizens. Which was, if you wanted try and cause a storm, and if you wanted to try and undermine the treaty, there's no better way of doing it than that. >> A lot of ways, Ray, I mean simplify this for me, because I'm a startup, I'm hustlin', or I'm a big company, I don't even know who runs the servers anymore, and I've got data stored in multiple clouds, I got in regions, and Oracle just announced more regions, you got Amazon, a gazillion regions, I could be on-premise. I mean bottom line, what is this about? I mean, and -- >> Bill's right, I mean when Max Schrems, the Austrian. Bill's right, when Max Schrems the Austrian activist actually filed his case against Facebook for where data was being stored, data residency wasn't as popular. And you know, what it means for companies that are in the cloud is that you have to make sure your data's being stored in the region, and following those specific region rules, you can't skirt those rules anymore. And I think the cloud companies know that this has been coming for some time, and that's why there's been announced in a lot of regions, a lot of areas that are actually happening, so I think that's the important part. But going back to Bill's earlier point, which is important, is America is basically the Canary Islands of privacy, right? Privacy is there, but it isn't there in a very, very explicit sense, and I think we've been skirting the rules for quite some time, because a lot of our economy depends on that data, and the marketing of the data. And so we often confuse privacy with consent, and also with value exchange, and I think that's part of the problem of what's going on here. Companies that have been building their business models on free data, free private data, free personally identifiable data information are the ones that are at risk! And I think that's what's going on here. >> It's the classic Facebook issue, you're the product, and the data is your product. Well, I want to get into what this means, 'cause my personal take away, not knowing the specifics, and just following say, cyber security for instance, one of the tenets there is that data sharing is an invaluable, important ethos in the community. Now, everyone has their own privacy, or security data, they don't want to let everyone know about their exploits but, but it's well known in the security world that sharing data with each other, different companies and countries is actually a good thing. So, the question that comes in my mind, is this really about data sharing or data privacy, or both? >> I think it's about both. And actually what the ruling is saying here is, all we're asking from the European side is please stop spying on us and please give us a level of equal protection that you give to your own citizens. Because data comes from America to Europe, whatever that data belongs to, a U.S. citizen or a European citizen, it's given equal protection. It is only if data goes in the other direction, where you have secret courts, secret warrants, seizure of data on this massive scale, and also a level of lack of equivalence that has been imposed. And we're just asking that once you've sorted out a few of those things, we'd say everything's back on the table, away we go again! >> Why don't we merge the EU with the United States? Wouldn't that solve the problem? (Bill laughing) >> We just left Europe! (laughs heartily) >> Actually I always -- >> A hostile takeover of the UK maybe, the 52nd state. (Bill laughing loudly) >> I always pick on Bill, like Bill, you got all screaming loud and clear about all these concerns, but UKs trying to get out of that economic union. It is a union at the end of the day, and I think the problem is the institutional mismatch between the EU and U.S., U.S. is old democracy, bigger country, population wise, bigger economy. Whereas Europe is several countries trying to put together, band together as one entity, and the institutions are new, like you know, they're 15 years old, right? They're maturing. I think that's where the big mismatch is and -- >> Well, Ray, I want to get your thoughts on this, Ray wrote a book, I forget what year it was, this digital disruption, basically it was digital transformation before it was actually a trend. I mean to me it's like, do you do the process first and then figure out where the value extraction is, and this may be a Silicon Valley or an American thing, but go create value, then figure out how to create process or understand regulations. So, if data and entrepreneurship is going to be a new modern era of value, why wouldn't we want to create a rule based system that's open and enabling, and not restrictive? >> So, that's a great point, right? And the innovation culture means you go do it first, and you figure out the rules later, and that's been a very American way of getting things done, and very Silicon Valley in our perspective, not everyone, but I think in general that's kind of the trend. I think the challenge here is that we are trading privacy for security, privacy for convenience, privacy for personalization, right? And on the security level, it's a very different conversation than what it is on the consumer end, you know, personalization side. On the security side I think most Americans are okay with a little bit of "spying," at least on your own side, you know, to keep the country safe. We're not okay with a China level type of spying, which we're not sure exactly what that means or what's enforceable in the courts. We look like China to the Europeans in the way we treat privacy, and I think that's the perspective we need to understand because Europeans are very explicit about how privacy is being protected. And so this really comes back to a point where we actually have to get to a consent model on privacy, as to knowing what data is being shared, you have the right to say no, and when you have the right to say no. And then if you have a value exchange on that data, then it's really like sometimes it's monetary, sometimes it's non-monetary, sometimes there's other areas around consensus where you can actually put that into place. And I think that's what's missing at this point, saying, you know, "Do we pay for your data? Do we explicitly get your consent first before we use it?" And we haven't had that in place, and I think that's where we're headed towards. And you know sometimes we actually say privacy should be a human right, it is in the UN Charter, but we haven't figured out how to enforce it or talk about it in the digital age. And so I think that's the challenge. >> Okay, people, until they lose it, they don't really understand what it means. I mean, look at Americans. I have to say that we're idiots on this front, (Bill chuckling) but you know, the thing is most people don't even understand how much value's getting sucked out of their digital exhaust. Like, our kids, TikTok and whatnot. So I mean, I get that, I think there's some, there's going to be blow back for America for sure. I just worry it's going to increase the cost of doing business, and take away from the innovation for citizen value, the people, because at the end of the day, it's for the people right? I mean, at the end of the day it's like, what's my privacy mean if I lose value? >> Even before we start talking about the value of the data and the innovation that we can do through data use, you have to understand the European perspective here. For the European there's a level of double standards and an erosion of trust. There's double standards in the fact that in California you have new privacy regulations that are slightly different to GDPR, but they're very much GDPR like. And if the boot was on the other foot, to say if we were spying on Californians and looking at their personal data, and contravening CCPA, the Californians would be up in arms! Likewise if we having promised to have a level of equality, had enacted a local rule in Europe that said that when data from America's over here, actually the privacy of Americans counts for nothing, we're only going to prioritize the privacy of Europeans. Again, the Americans would be up in arms! And therefore you can see that there are real double standards here that are a massive issue, and until those addressed, we're not going to trust the Americans. And likewise, the very fact that on a number of occasions Americans have signed up to treaties and promised to protect our data as they did with Safe Harbor, as they did with Privacy Shield, and then have blatantly, blatantly failed to do so means that actually to get back to even a level playing field, where we were, you have a great deal of trust to overcome! And the thing from the perspective of the big IT firms, they've seen this coming for a long time, as Ray was saying, and they sought to try and have a presence in Europe and other things. But the way this ruling has gone is that, I'm sorry, that isn't going to be sufficient! These big IT firms based in the U.S. that have been happy to hand over data, well some of them maybe more happy than others, but they all need to hand over data to the NSA or the CIA. They've been doing this for some time now without actually respecting this data privacy agreement that has existed between the two trading blocks. And now they've been called out, and the position now is that the U.S. is no longer trusted, and neither are any of these large American technology firms. And until the snooping stops and equality is introduced, they can now no longer, even from their European operations, they can no longer use standard contractual clauses to transfer data, which is going to be a massive restriction on their business. And if they had any sense, they'd be lobbying very, very hard right now to the Senate, to the House, to try and persuade U.S. lawmakers actually to stick to some these treaties! To stop introducing really mad laws that ride roughshod over other people's privacy, and have a certain amount of respect. >> Let's let JD weigh in, 'cause he just got in, sorry on the video, I made him back on a host 'cause he dropped off. Just, Bill, real quick, I mean I think it's like when, you know, I go to Europe there's the line for Americans, there's the line for EU. Or EU and everybody else. I mean we might be there, but ultimately this has to be solved. So, JD, I want to let you weigh in, Germany has been at the beginning forefront of privacy, and they've been hardcore, and how's this all playing out in your perspective? >> Well, the first thing that we have to understand is that in Germany, there is a very strong law for regulation. Germans panic as soon as they know regulation, so they need to understand what am I allowed to do, and what am I not allowed to do. And they expect the same from the others. For the record I'm not German, but I live in Germany for some 20 years, so I got a bit of a feeling for them. And that sense of need for regulation has spread very fast throughout the European Union, because most of the European member states of the European Union consider this, that it makes sense, and then we found that Britain had already a very good framework for privacy, so GDPR itself is very largely based on what the United Kingdom already had in place with their privacy act. Moving forward, we try to find agreement and consensus with other countries, especially the United States because that's where most of the tech providers are, only to find out, and that is where it started to go really, really bad, 2014, when the mass production by Edward Snowden came out, to find out it's not data from citizens, it's surveillance programs which include companies. I joined a purchasing conference a few weeks ago where the purchase of a large European multinational, where the purchasing director explicitly stated that usage of U.S. based tech providers for sensitive data is prohibited as a result of them finding out that they have been under surveillance. So, it's not just the citizens, there's mass -- >> There you have it, guys! We did trust you! We did have agreements there that you could have abided by, but you chose not to, you chose to abuse our trust! And you're now in a position where you are no longer trusted, and unless you can lobby your own elected representatives to actually recreate a level playing field, we're not going to continue trusting you. >> So, I think really I -- >> Well I mean that, you know, innovation has to come from somewhere, and you know, has to come from America if that's the case, you guys have to get on board, right? Is that what it -- >> Innovation without trust? >> Is that the perspective? >> I don't think it's a country thing, I mean like, it's not you or them, I think everybody -- >> I'm just bustin' Bill's chops there. >> No, but I think everybody, everybody is looking for what the privacy rules are, and that's important. And you can have that innovation with consent, and I think that's really where we're going to get to. And this is why I keep pushing that issue. I mean, privacy should be a fundamental right, and how you get paid for that privacy is interesting, or how you get compensated for that privacy if you know what the explicit value exchange is. What you're talking about here is the surveillance that's going on by companies, which shouldn't be happening, right? That shouldn't be happening at the company level. At the government level I can understand that that is happening, and I think those are treaties that the governments have to agree upon as to how much they're going to impinge on our personal privacy for the trade off for security, and I don't think they've had those discussions either. Or they decided and didn't tell any of their citizens, and I think that's probably more likely the case. >> I mean, I think what's happening here, Bill, you guys were pointing out, and Ray, you articulated there on the other side, and my kind of colorful joke aside, is that we're living a first generation modern sociology problem. I mean, this is a policy challenge that extends across multiple industries, cyber security, citizen's rights, geopolitical. I mean when would look, and even when we were doing CUBE events overseas in Europe, in North American companies we'd call it abroad, we'd just recycle the American program, and we found there's so much localization value. So, Ray, this is the digital disruption, it's the virtualization of physical for digital worlds, and it's a lot of network theory, which is computer science, a lot of sociology. This is a modern challenge, and I don't think it so much has a silver bullet, it's just that we need smart people working on this. That's my take away! >> I think we can describe the ideal endpoint being somewhere we have meaningful protection alongside the maximization of economic and social value through innovation. So, that should be what we would all agree would be the ideal endpoint. But we need both, we need meaningful protection, and we need the maximization of economic and social value through innovation! >> Can I add another axis? Another axis, security as well. >> Well, I could -- >> I put meaningful protection as becoming both security and privacy. >> Well, I'll speak for the American perspective here, and I won't speak, 'cause I'm not the President of the United States, but I will say as someone who's been from Silicon Valley and the east coast as a technical person, not a political person, our lawmakers are idiots when it comes to tech, just generally. (Ray laughing) They're not really -- (Bill laughing loudly) >> They really don't understand. They really don't understand the tech at all! >> So, the problem is -- >> I'm not claiming ours are a great deal better. (laughs) >> Well, this is why I think this is a modern problem. Like, the young people I talk to are like, "Why do we have this rules?" They're all lawyers that got into these positions of Congress on the American side, and so with the American JEDI Contract you guys have been following very closely is, it's been like the old school Oracle, IBM, and then Amazon is leading with an innovative solution, and Microsoft has come in and re-pivoted. And so what you have is a fight for the digital future of citizenship! And I think what's happening is that we're in a massive societal transition, where the people in charge don't know what the hell they're talkin' about, technically. And they don't know who to tap to solve the problems, or even shape or frame the problems. Now, there's pockets of people that are workin' on it, but to me as someone who looks at this saying, it's a pretty simple solution, no one's ever seen this before. So, there's a metaphor you can draw, but it's a completely different problem space because it's, this is all digital, data's involved. >> We've got a lobbyists out there, and we've got some tech firms spending an enormous amount of lobbying. If those lobbyists aren't trying to steer their representatives in the right direction to come up with law that aren't going to massively undermine trade and data sharing between Europe and America, then they're making a big mistake, because we got here through some really dumb lawmaking in the U.S., I mean, there are none of the laws in Europe that are a problem here. 'Cause GDPR isn't a great difference, a great deal different from some of the laws that we have already in California and elsewhere. >> Bill, Bill. >> The laws that are at issue here -- >> Bill, Bill! You have to like, back up a little bit from that rhetoric that EU is perfect and U.S. is not, that's not true actually. >> I'm not saying we're perfect! >> No, no, you say that all the time. >> But I'm saying there's a massive lack of innovation. Yeah, yeah. >> I don't, I've never said it! >> Arm wrestle! >> Yes, yes. >> When I'm being critical of some of the dumb laws in the U.S, (Sarbjeet laughing) I'm not saying Europe is perfect. What we're trying to say is that in this particular instance, I said there was an equal balance here between meaningful protection and the maximization of economic and social value. On the meaningful protection side, America's got it very wrong in terms of the meaningful protection it provides to civil European data. On the maximization of economic and social value, I think Europe's got it wrong. I think there are a lot of things we could do in Europe to actually have far more innovation. >> Yeah. >> It's a cultural issue. The Germans want rules, that's what they crave for. America's the other way, we don't want rules, I mean, pretty much is a rebel society. And that's kind of the ethos of most tech companies. But I think you know, to me the media, there's two things that go on with this tech business. The company's themselves have to be checked by say, government, and I believe in not a lot of regulation, but enough to check the power of bad actors. Media so called "checking power", both of these major roles, they don't really know what they're talking about, and this is back to the education piece. The people who are in the media so called "checking power" and the government checking power assume that the companies are bad. Right, so yeah, because eight out of ten companies like Amazon, actually try to do good things. If you don't know what good is, you don't really, (laughs) you know, you're in the wrong game. So, I think media and government have a huge education opportunity to look at this because they don't even know what they're measuring. >> I support the level of innovation -- >> I think we're unreeling from the globalization. Like, we are undoing the globalization, and that these are the side effects, these conflicts are a side effect of that. >> Yeah, so all I'm saying is I support the focus on innovation in America, and that has driven an enormous amount of wealth and value. What I'm questioning here is do you really need to spy on us, your allies, in order to help that innovation? And I'm starting to, I mean, do you need mass surveillance of your allies? I mean, I can see you may want to have some surveillance of people who are a threat to you, but wait, guys, we're meant to be on your side, and you haven't been treating our privacy with a great deal of respect! >> You know, Saudi Arabia was our ally. You know, 9/11 happened because of them, their people, right? There is no ally here, and there is no enemy, in a way. We don't know where the rogue actors are sitting, like they don't know, they can be within the walls -- >> It's well understood I think, I agree, sorry. it's well understood that nation states are enabling terrorist groups to take out cyber attacks. That's well known, the source enables it. So, I think there's the privacy versus -- >> I'm not sure it's true in your case that it's Europeans that's doing this though. >> No, no, well you know, they share -- >> I'm a former officer in the Royal Navy, I've stood shoulder to shoulder with my U.S. counterparts. I put my life on the line on NATO exercises in real war zones, and I'm now a disabled ex-serviceman as a result of that. I mean, if I put my line on the line shoulder to shoulder with Americans, why is my privacy not respected? >> Hold on -- >> I feel it's, I was going to say actually that it's not that, like even the U.S., right? Part of the spying internally is we have internal actors that are behaving poorly. >> Yeah. >> Right, we have Marxist organizations posing as, you know, whatever it is, I'll leave it at that. But my point being is we've got a lot of that, every country has that, every country has actors and citizens and people in the system that are destined to try to overthrow the system. And I think that's what that surveillance is about. The question is, we don't have treaties, or we didn't have your explicit agreements. And that's why I'm pushing really hard here, like, they're separating privacy versus security, which is the national security, and privacy versus us as citizens in terms of our data being basically taken over for free, being used for free. >> John: I agree with that. >> That I think we have some agreement on. I just think that our governments haven't really had that conversation about what surveillance means. Maybe someone agreed and said, "Okay, that's fine. You guys can go do that, we won't tell anybody." And that's what it feels like. And I don't think we deliberately are saying, "Hey, we wanted to spy on your citizens." I think someone said, "Hey, there's a benefit here too." Otherwise I don't think the EU would have let this happen for that long unless Max had made that case and started this ball rolling, so, and Edward Snowden and other folks. >> Yeah, and I totally support the need for security. >> I want to enter the -- >> I mean we need to, where there are domestic terrorists, we need to stop them, and we need to have local action in UK to stop it happening here, and in America to stop it happening there. But if we're doing that, there is absolutely no need for the Americans to be spying on us. And there's absolutely no need for the Americans to say that privacy applies to U.S. citizens only, and not to Europeans, these are daft, it's just daft! >> That's a fair point. I'm sure GCHQ and everyone else has this covered, I mean I'm sure they do. (laughs) >> Oh, Bill, I know, I've been involved, I've been involved, and I know for a fact the U.S. and the UK are discussing I know a company called IronNet, which is run by General Keith Alexander, funded by C5 Capital. There's a lot of collaboration, because again, they're tryin' to get their arms around how to frame it. And they all agree that sharing data for the security side is super important, right? And I think IronNet has this thing called Iron Dome, which is essentially like they're saying, hey, we'll just consistency around the rules of shared data, and we can both, everyone can have their own little data. So, I think there's recognition at the highest levels of some smart people on both countries. (laughs) "Hey, let's work together!" The issue I have is just policy, and I think there's a lot of clustering going on. Clustered here around just getting out of their own way. That's my take on that. >> Are we a PG show? Wait, are we a PG show? I just got to remember that. (laughs) (Bill laughing) >> It's the internet, there's no regulation, there's no rules! >> There's no regulation! >> The European rules or is it the American rules? (Ray laughing) >> I would like to jump back quickly to the purpose of the surveillance, and especially when mass surveillance is done under the cover of national security and terror prevention. I worked with five clients in the past decade who all have been targeted under mass surveillance, which was revealed by Edward Snowden, and when they did their own investigation, and partially was confirmed by Edward Snowden in person, they found out that their purchasing department, their engineering department, big parts of their pricing data was targeted in mass surveillance. There's no way that anyone can explain me that that has anything to do with preventing terror attacks, or finding the bad guys. That is economical espionage, you cannot call it in any other way. And that was authorized by the same legislation that authorizes the surveillance for the right purposes. I'm all for fighting terror, and anything that can help us prevent terror from happening, I would be the first person to welcome it. But I do not welcome when that regulation is abused for a lot of other things under the cover of national interest. I understand -- >> Back to the lawmakers again. And again, America's been victim to the Chinese some of the individual properties, well documented, well known in tech circles. >> Yeah, but just 'cause the Chinese have targeted you doesn't give you free right to target us. >> I'm not saying that, but its abuse of power -- >> If the U.S. can sort out a little bit of reform, in the Senate and the House, I think that would go a long way to solving the issues that Europeans have right now, and a long way to sort of reaching a far better place from which we can all innovate and cooperate. >> Here's the challenge that I see. If you want to be instrumenting everything, you need a closed society, because if you have a free country like America and the UK, a democracy, you're open. If you're open, you can't stop everything, right? So, there has to be a trust, to your point, Bill. As to me that I'm just, I just can't get my arms around that idea of complete lockdown and data surveillance because I don't think it's gettable in the United States, like it's a free world, it's like, open. It should be open. But here we've got the grids, and we've got the critical infrastructure that should be protected. So, that's one hand. I just can't get around that, 'cause once you start getting to locking down stuff and measuring everything, that's just a series of walled gardens. >> So, to JD's point on the procurement data and pricing data, I have been involved in some of those kind of operations, and I think it's financial espionage that they're looking at, financial security, trying to figure out a way to track down capital flows and what was purchased. I hope that was it in your client's case, but I think it's trying to figure out where the money flow is going, more so than trying to understand the pricing data from competitive purposes. If it is the latter, where they're stealing the competitive information on pricing, and data's getting back to a competitor, that is definitely a no-no! But if it's really to figure out where the money trail went, which is what I think most of those financial analysts are doing, especially in the CIA, or in the FBI, that's really what that probably would have been. >> Yeah, I don't think that the CIA is selling the data to your competitors, as a company, to Microsoft or to Google, they're not selling it to each other, right? They're not giving it to each other, right? So, I think the one big problem I studied with FISA is that they get the data, but how long they can keep the data and how long they can mine the data. So, they should use that data as exhaust. Means like, they use it and just throw it away. But they don't, they keep mining that data at a later date, and FISA is only good for five years. Like, I learned that every five years we revisit that, and that's what happened this time, that we renewed it for six years this time, not five, for some reason one extra year. So, I think we revisit all these laws -- >> Could be an election cycle. >> Huh? >> Could be an election cycle maybe. (laughs) >> Yes, exactly! So, we revisit all these laws with Congress and Senate here periodically just to make sure that they are up to date, and that they're not infringing on human rights, or citizen's rights, or stuff like that. >> When you say you update to check they're not conflicting with anything, did you not support that it was conflicting with Privacy Shield and some of the promises you made to Europeans? At what point did that fail to become obvious? >> It does, because there's heightened urgency. Every big incident happens, 9/11 caused a lot of new sort of like regulations and laws coming into the picture. And then the last time, that the Russian interference in our election, that created some sort of heightened urgency. Like, "We need to do something guys here, like if some country can topple our elections, right, that's not acceptable." So, yeah -- >> And what was it that your allies did that caused you to spy on us and to downgrade our privacy? >> I'm not expert on the political systems here. I think our allies are, okay, loose on their, okay, I call it village politics. Like, world is like a village. Like it's so only few countries, it's not millions of countries, right? That's how I see it, a city versus a village, and that's how I see the countries, like village politics. Like there are two camps, like there's Russia and China camp, and then there's U.S. camp on the other side. Like, we used to have Russia and U.S., two forces, big guys, and they managed the whole world balance somehow, right? Like some people with one camp, the other with the other, right? That's how they used to work. Now that Russia has gone, hold on, let me finish, let me finish. >> Yeah. >> Russia's gone, there's this void, right? And China's trying to fill the void. Chinese are not like, acting diplomatic enough to fill that void, and there's, it's all like we're on this imbalance, I believe. And then Russia becomes a rogue actor kind of in a way, that's how I see it, and then they are funding all these bad people. You see that all along, like what happened in the Middle East and all that stuff. >> You said there are different camps. We thought we were in your camp! We didn't expect to be spied on by you, or to have our rights downgraded by you. >> No, I understand but -- >> We thought we were on your side! >> But, but you have to guys to trust us also, like in a village. Let me tell you, I come from a village, that's why I use the villager as a hashtag in my twitter also. Like in village, there are usually one or two families which keep the village intact, that's our roles. >> Right. >> Like, I don't know if you have lived in a village or not -- >> Well, Bill, you're making some great statements. Where's the evidence on the surveillance, where can people find more information on this? Can you share? >> I think there's plenty of evidence, and I can send some stuff on, and I'm a little bit shocked given the awareness of the FISA Act, the Cloud Act, the fact that these things are in existence and they're not exactly unknown. And many people have been complaining about them for years. I mean, we've had Safe Harbor overturned, we've had Privacy Shield overturned, and these weren't just on a whim! >> Yeah, what does JD have in his hand? I want to know. >> The Edward Snowden book! (laughs) >> By Edward Snowden, which gives you plenty. But it wasn't enough, and it's something that we have to keep in mind, because we can always claim that whatever Edward Snowden wrote, that he made it up. Every publication by Edward Snowden is an avalanche of technical confirmation. One of the things that he described about the Cisco switches, which Bill prefers to quote every time, which is a proven case, there were bundles of researchers saying, "I told you guys!" Nobody paid attention to those researchers, and Edward Snowden was smart enough to get the mass media representation in there. But there's one thing, a question I have for Sabjeet, because in the two parties strategy, it is interesting that you always take out the European Union as part. And the European Union is a big player, and it will continue to grow. It has a growing amount of trade agreements with a growing amount of countries, and I still hope, and I think think Bill -- >> Well, I think the number of countries is reducing, you've just lost one! >> Only one. (Bill laughing loudly) Actually though, those are four countries under one kingdom, but that's another point. (Bill chortling heartily) >> Guys, final topic, 5G impact, 'cause you mentioned Cisco, couldn't help think about -- >> Let me finish please my question, John. >> Okay, go ahead. How would you the United States respond if the European Union would now legalize to spy on everybody and every company, and every governmental institution within the United States and say, "No, no, it's our privilege, we need that." How would the United States respond? >> You can try that and see economically what happens to you, that's how the village politics work, you have to listen to the mightier than you, and we are economically mightier, that's the fact. Actually it's hard to swallow fact for, even for anybody else. >> If you guys built a great app, I would use it, and surveil all you want. >> Yeah, but so this is going to be driven by the economics. (John laughing) But the -- >> That's exactly what John said. >> This is going to be driven by the economics here. The big U.S. cloud firms are got to find this ruling enormously difficult for them, and they are inevitably going to lobby for a level of reform. And I think a level of a reform is needed. Nobody on your side is actually arguing very vociferously that the Cloud Act and the discrimination against Europeans is actually a particularly good idea. The problem is that once you've done the reform, are we going to believe you when you say, "Oh, it's all good now, we've stopped it!" Because with Crypto AG scandal in Switzerland you weren't exactly honest about what you were doing. With the FISA courts, so I mean FISA secret courts, the secret warrants, how do we know and what proof can we have that you've stopped doing all these bad things? And I think one of the challenges, A, going to be the reform, and then B, got to be able to show that you actually got your act together and you're now clean. And until you can solve those two, many of your big tech companies are going to be at a competitive disadvantage, and they're going to be screaming for this reform. >> Well, I think that, you know, General Mattis said in his book about Trump and the United states, is that you need alliances, and I think your point about trust and executing together, without alliances, it really doesn't work. So, unless there's some sort of real alliance, (laughs) like understanding that there's going to be some teamwork here, (Bill laughing) I don't think it's going to go anywhere. So, otherwise it'll continue to be siloed and network based, right? So to the village point, if TikTok can become a massively successful app, and they're surveilling, so and then we have to decide that we're going to put up with that, I mean, that's not my decision, but that's what's goin' on here. It's like, what is TikTok, is it good or bad? Amazon sent out an email, and they've retracted it, that's because it went public. I guarantee you that they're talkin' about that at Amazon, like, "Why would we want infiltration by the Chinese?" And I'm speculating, I have no data, I'm just saying, you know. They email those out, then they pull it back, "Oh, we didn't mean to send that." Really, hmm? (laughs) You know, so this kind of -- >> But the TRA Balin's good, you always want to get TRA Balin out there. >> Yeah, exactly. There's some spying going on! So, this is the reality. >> So, John, you were talking about 5G, and I think you know, the role of 5G, you know, the battle between Cisco and Huawei, you just have to look at it this way, would you rather have the U.S. spy on you, or would you rather have China? And that's really your binary choice at this moment. And you know both is happening, and so the question is which one is better. Like, the one that you're in alliance with? The one that you're not in alliance with, the one that wants to bury you, and decimate your country, and steal all your secrets and then commercialize 'em? Or the one kind of does it, but doesn't really do it explicitly? So, you've got to choose. (laughs) >> It's supposed to be -- >> Or you can say no, we're going to create our own standard for 5G and kick both out, that's an option. >> It's probably not as straightforward a question as, or an answer to that question as you say, because if we were to fast-forward 50 years, I would argue that China is going to be the largest trading nation in the world. I believe that China is going to have the upper hand on many of these technologies, and therefore why would we not want to use some of their innovation, some of their technology, why would we not actually be more orientated around trading with them than we might be with the U.S.? I think the U.S. is throwing its weight around at this moment in time, but if we were to fast-forward I think looking in the longterm, if I had to put my money on Huawei or some of its competitors, I think given its level of investments in research and whatever, I think the better longterm bet is Huawei. >> No, no, actually you guys need to pick a camp. It's a village again. You have to pick a camp, you can't be with both guys. >> Global village. >> Oh, right, so we have to go with the guys that have been spying on us? >> How do you know the Chinese haven't been spying on you? (Ray and John laughing loudly) >> I think I'm very happy, you find a backdoor in the Huawei equipment and you show it to us, we'll take them to task on it. But don't start bullying us into making decisions based on what-ifs. >> I don't think I'm, I'm not qualified to represent the U.S., but what we would want to say is that if you look at the dynamics of what's going on, China, we've been studying that as well in terms of the geopolitical aspects of what happens in technology, they have to do what they're doing right now. Because in 20 years our population dynamics go like this, right? You've got the one child policy, and they won't have the ability to go out and fight for those same resources where they are, so what they're doing makes sense from a country perspective and country policy. But I think they're going to look like Japan in 20 years, right? Because the xenophobia, the lack of immigration, the lack of inside stuff coming in, an aging population. I mean, those are all factors that slow down your economy in the long run. And the lack of bringing new people in for ideas, I mean that's part of it, they're a closed system. And so I think the longterm dynamics of every closed system is that they tend to fail versus open systems. So, I'm not sure, they may have better technology along the way. But I think a lot of us are probably in the camp now thinking that we're not going to aid and abet them, in that sense to get there. >> You're competing a country with a company, I didn't say that China had necessarily everything rosy in its future, it'll be a bigger economy, and it'll be a bigger trading partner, but it's got its problems, the one child policy and the repercussions of that. But that is not one of the things, Huawei, I think Huawei's a massively unlimited company that has got a massive lead, certainly in 5G technology, and may continue to maintain a lead into 6G and beyond. >> Oh yeah, yeah, Huawei's done a great job on the 5G side, and I don't disagree with that. And they're ahead in many aspects compared to the U.S., and they're already working on the 6G technologies as well, and the roll outs have been further ahead. So, that's definitely -- >> And they've got a great backer too, the financer, the country China. Okay guys, (Ray laughing) let's wrap up the segment. Thanks for everyone's time. Final thoughts, just each of you on this core issue of the news that we discussed and the impact that was the conversation. What's the core issue? What should people think about? What's your solution? What's your opinion of how this plays out? Just final statements. We'll start with Bill, Ray, Sarbjeet and JD. >> All I'm going to ask you is stop spying on us, treat us equally, treat us like the allies that we are, and then I think we've got to a bright future together! >> John: Ray? >> I would say that Bill's right in that aspect in terms of how security agreements work, I think that we've needed to be more explicit about those. I can't represent the U.S. government, but I think the larger issue is really how do we view privacy, and how we do trade offs between security and convenience, and you know, what's required for personalization, and companies that are built on data. So, the sooner we get to those kind of rules, an understanding of what's possible, what's a consensus between different countries and companies, I think the better off we will all be a society. >> Yeah, I believe the most important kind of independence is the economic independence. Like, economically sound parties dictate the terms, that's what U.S. is doing. And the smaller countries have to live with it or pick the other bigger player, number two in this case is China. John said earlier, I think, also what JD said is the fine balance between national security and the privacy. You can't have, you have to strike that balance, because the rogue actors are sitting in your country, and across the boundaries of the countries, right? So, it's not that FISA is being fought by Europeans only. Our internal people are fighting that too, like how when you are mining our data, like what are you using it for? Like, I get concerned too, when you can use that data against me, that you have some data against me, right? So, I think it's the fine balance between security and privacy, we have to strike that. Awesome. JD? I'll include a little fake check, fact check, at the moment China is the largest economy, the European Union is the second largest economy, followed directly by the USA, it's a very small difference, and I recommend that these two big parties behind the largest economy start to collaborate and start to do that eye to eye, because if you want to balance the economical and manufacturing power of China, you cannot do that as being number two and number three. You have to join up forces, and that starts with sticking with the treaties that you signed, and that has not happened in the past, almost four years. So, let's go back to the table, let's work on rules where from both sides the rights and the privileges are properly reflected, and then do the most important thing, stick to them! >> Yep, I think that's awesome. I think I would say that these young kids in high school and college, they need to come up and solve the problems, this is going to be a new generational shift where the geopolitical landscape will change radically, you mentioned the top three there. And new alliances, new kinds of re-imagination has to be there, and from America's standpoint I'll just say that I'd like to see lawmakers have, instead of a LinkedIn handle, a GitHub handle. You know, when they all go out on campaign talk about what code they've written. So, I think having a technical background or some sort of knowledge of computer science and how the internet works with sociology and societal impact will be critical for our citizenships to advance. So, you know rather a lawyer, right so? (laughs) Maybe get some law involved in that, I mean the critical lawyers, but today most people are lawyers in American politics, but show me a GitHub handle of that congressman, that senator, I'd be impressed. So, that's what we need. >> Thanks, good night! >> Ray, you want to say something? >> I wanted to say something, because I thought the U.S. economy was 21 trillion, the EU is sittin' at about 16, and China was sitting about 14, but okay, I don't know. >> You need to do math man. >> Hey, we went over our 30 minutes time, we can do an hour with you guys, so you're still good. (laughs) >> Can't take anymore. >> No go on, get in there, go at it when you've got something to say. >> I don't think it's immaterial the exact size of the economy, I think that we're better off collaborating on even and fair terms, we are -- >> We're all better off collaborating. >> Yeah. >> Gentlemen -- >> But the collaboration has to be on equal and fair terms, you know. (laughs) >> How do you define fair, good point. Fair and balanced, you know, we've got the new -- >> We did define fair, we struck a treaty! We absolutely defined it, absolutely! >> Yeah. >> And then one side didn't stick to it. >> We will leave it right there, and we'll follow up (Bill laughing) in a later conversation. Gentlemen, you guys are good. Thank you. (relaxing electronic music)

(slow music) >> From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. The event happening digitally this year. We are bringing in Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around the globe. And happy to welcome back to the program. One of our cube alumni. Robin Bergeron is the senior principal community architect with Ansible part of Red Hat. Robin, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. So we've got the community coming together even while we're apart. >> Indeed. That's what we're good at. So, I'm glad to be back here again with you all. So, hello. >> All right. So, Robin, we caught up with you last at AnsibleFest of course Red Hat Summit. So much community activity that goes on. The Ansible, community is a big piece of summit even though they also have, the separate AnsibleFest. So just give us a little bit update what's happening in your world and in the community. >> Well. I hate to say it's a, "it's a big wide world" because it sounds very cliche, but the Ansible world is fairly big. I don't know if, let's see, we talked, lasted, AnsibleFest and that was in September in Atlanta, is that correct? >> Sounds right. Yep. >> I believe so. So right around that time was when GitHub released their annual list of, they have a report called the Octoverse they publish every year, in conjunction with their annual event. And one of their metrics they have on that list is, most active projects. So, we clocked in at the number ninth most active project on Github this past year. And that's out of, I've lost count of github, like number of projects. It's not quite the, United States national debt status, but it's a, like a hundred million repositories or something like that. So we're the number nine most active repository this year. And I believe we are one of two projects who's been on that list every year since 2016 I want to say. So, yeah, we're at 5900 contributors right now. So it's, all over the globe. A lot of people keeping us very busy. I guess that and fact it's so busy and we talked about collections a bit when we were at AnsibleFest this past year and it's been a thing that we've been talking about continuously in Ansible community and also, as part of Red Hats product line for a while and we've actually now gotten to the point of sort of splitting out the Ansible repository. Ansible is going to continue to be the, you a car and you look under the engine and there's like the things that make the car run. >> Ansible base, separate from the windshield wipers and all the ad-ons and all the cool stuff that you actually, want to get when you get a car. And that stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible collections that we'll have or repository that's actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done, more rapidly. Cause in the past it's always been a really a tug of war between, work and github have always been very respectful about, how the balances between community and product because obviously without a community you don't have a product. And this is a obviously a method that Red Hat has sort of nailed down. I guess IBM really liked the idea. So here we are. But we're really looking forward to, right now we've got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo. But, they're also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way. Once we opened for business, since we've got several thousand contributors, we don't say, open for business and then have everybody comes running into a glass wall like it and then all on the floor, right? We want the doors to be open. We want the, registers so to speak to be processing things. We want, all the box to be working, all of the, all of the magic to be happening just as it is, as it has in past. But, this time with a little bit more empowerment to the community, that's on a work progress for it was like forever, but, nine months, and here in the next few weeks that will be open for business and we're hoping that, by the time the AnsibleFest rolls around, that will be part of the two, part and parcel to the 2.10 release. And, we're hoping that, even though under the hood for contributors, that's changed. We believe we'll be very transparent brand eaters, which has been one of the most important things for us because, we don't like to break people. That's, >> yeah, >> {Robin] Glad yeah >> Absolutely Robin. So it was one of the key things a announced at a AnsibleFest last year. Anybody that knows the software world is the traditional release train. Get on that train. Got to make sure you get your feature in there. But for a solution like Ansible, which as you said, has a lot of partners and it's a very big ecosystem. If you have to worry about how much stuff do I get shoved into one release, it's a little bit limiting. So you break those pieces up more like the, containers, that go on the train and you can make sure that you're adding and, doing the various pieces as they go. So maybe >> Yeah >> not the perfect analogy. >> Yeah. >> But very important so, Robin, as you've been going through this, I'm wondering, what feedback are you getting from the contributors there? and how about as you said, very active community. We know if anybody you know, says something, you got, the crowd and the wisdom coming in and giving you ideas. But, how do you balance that? You're not going to have everybody be happy about every decision, but making sure that the ultimate release train, does the job and delivers the overall solution. >> Yes. What color are we going to paint? Paint our bike shed. Right? Like the yak for circling. So it's, I don't want to to say it's been mixed, it's, you know, we, I can, I compare and contrast this, one of my, previous roles was being the newer project leader, right. And, which is, as we know the upstream, for Red Hat enterprise Linux, and its some of the, Linux and, a lot of the Linux distributions have been around for forever. Back when there were like, I don't know. 10, 15 opensource projects that anybody at all, could contribute to. Now as we can see looking on, github and many other places get lab, open dev. There's a, you name it, there's a gazillion opensource projects out there. People aren't always as attached to, I don't want to say attached, coz that sounds, terrible, but open source has become such a norm people are just very used to, there's something wrong. I'm going to submit it, I'm going to hope it gets accepted, but I'm going to move on with my life because I also have all these other places that I can also contribute, right. That said, we do have, a significant number of compute of contributors who have been with us back since Ansible started. Some of those folks go back with us to Fidor days, on Linux days on and on and on. Some of them, some folks I have concerns, they do like that this is the opportunity to give them more empowerment to figure out better ways to run the, contributor process. I think the number one thing that everybody's been concerned about is what diseases your experience going to be. And I think that's a testament to, just the power of our community is that, people aren't just concerned about how am I going to get my stuff in and your stuff in and like the tug of war of like, is one person can get something else in before someone else. Everybody's very concerned about is this going to still work for the end users? Is this going to disrupt them? Because it's a change under hood. Are they going to have to change all their playbooks and all of their, rules and everything that they have. And right now the goal is, it should be transparent. Anything that you have written right now, you should continue work, you shouldn't notice. Once we get your 3.O our goal is to ramp people up into harnessing the power of collections. But first we need to get the collections, infrastructure in place, before we get in. Start giving them to artists the power of collections. You can't just flip the switch and be like, hi . So it used to be this way, now we have collections and now you've got to redo everything, right. Because that's-- you still have the opportunity because it's open source. We'll have this window where we can still find all the bugs and get that re rapid feedback, which means, once we roll out, Red Hat Ansible automation platform, the next version. I'm not going to say an AnsibleFest. That would be shocking, right? We never do announcements at events. But, whenever that product comes out, we want to make sure, that power of open source and, having that rapid feedback loop, ensures that, what we end up, we'll bring to customers, winds up being solid, but I believe it will be very, very solid for contributors because or, and, a community. There's, because, a significant number of our contributors are community users and they have that in their own interest in mind. And we've seen that not just from, I'm a community user at a university, but all of our partners are actually participating in the community as well. And there, just painting and chatting and we had a, we had planned to have a European as well contributor summit, which is a thing we normally run in combination or the day before AnsibleFest. and we had planned that for Sweden. I was so excited. I was going to go to Gothenburg. I hear it's a charming little town, except, when we are all stuck in, the a world that we are in currently. so we ran that virtually and a lot of our longterm contributors are actually from Europe. So that was really exciting except for me, cause I had to get up 8 Am but it was still nice to see them all. So we had, 50 some odd folks pop in over the course of, that day. And we talked through elections and debated and, got some demos from folks. Had some folks talk through some specific collections, folks talking about AWS and some of the networking things. So, yeah it was nice to see everyone. I was sad that it wasn't in Gothenburg. But it is what it is. I'm going to roll. >> So Robin, I think back to 2019 an automation, was right at the top of a hot topics. When I talk to practitioners out there, many conferences I went to, not just of course Ansible test, which focus on it, but many other shows and events. Well when you talk to people about key initiatives, its in a really leveraging automation, something that I've heard talked about my entire career, but really it feels like the last painful of years and people are much more serious about it. You know, you referenced the times that we live in right now, we're unprecedented global pandemics. So I'm not saying that, somebody, everybody all of a sudden woke up and say, Oh my gosh, I have to work from home and I need to be smarter. Let me finally use this automation that I've been hearing about all these years. But why don't you bring us into, what is happening today, what you are hearing customers, because automation obviously is a critical piece of what everybody is doing and probably just, shines a light on it even more. Now that we need to make sure that people are being efficient and still being able to deal with their lives while everything else is going on. >> Yeah. It's interesting because some of is, as well as used. Yeah, there's actually a, there's the dependency graph that you can look at on github and it will tell you how many other things in github are actually depending on the Ansible. It's, I can't even remember the number. It's a very large number, like tens of thousands of things as I recall. Disclaimer, my memory is terrible sometimes. I believe it was in the tens of thousands of things. Lots of people use Ansible and it's almost like probably not quite as popular as, the uses Docker container to get started, but, venture to guess it might be a number to that. Type this Ansible thing and this thing will magically come up. Right. For folks that are, in a traditional IT department, just trying to get along, day to day right now who are, they're like me. They're at home, they're with their spouse, they're sharing an office. They're also homeschooling their kids if they got out of bed. Hopefully we all have enough bandwidth. For those folks it's, I'm just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing, they're using Ansible tower, they're glad that they can still manage to figure out how to collaborate their coworkers in that type of environment. For all the folks out there who are doing, research or trying to set up any type of infrastructure anywhere to related to this, I don't care if it's a, grocery store or you're a research laboratory, whatever it is. Last thing you want to do is spend five hours, be like, oh God okay, let me get out my manual. Where did I, it's hey, there's an Ansible. Excellent, I can type this Ansible thing in. And if for some reason it gets hung up. We have folks on IRC, we have, there's folks on stack overflow . There folks literally everywhere. You can ask a question on Twitter and It's a Pretty large, friendly, global community of people who have plenty of answers. And that's, I can't say we're like, hey, we solved everything, but we got all the >> stuff out of the way so that people can actually solve all of their, they can get down to what's actually important for them. And so that, that's always been one of the most redeeming things about Ansible that it's, for me, it's, the thing that I work on is, it's easy and it helps people solve their problems and gets all there, stuff out of the way so that they can concentrate on what's actually important to them. So I like to think, it's most important to them. And I know it is, but it's interesting seeing how things change, as people are like, are you going to teach a bunch of people Ansible now? And it's like, well, if they're in need of a job, there are a lot of online resources for that. But if they're just trying to get through their job, like everybody's sort of in a don't rock the boat position. Like if I can get a little bit ahead, that's cool. If I've already got a bunch of stuff automated Yes. That's one less thing that I have to worry about right now and that's all we can really hope for at this moment. >> Yeah, great stuff Robin. One of the high point always is seeing, the value and support of the community and as you said, it's something that we definitely see highlighted up out there. All right, Robyn Bergeron, greatest as always to catch up with you. Thank you so much. I'm sure you know so many community activities that people will be able to participate in. This week at Red Hat Summit, even though we're, all doing it remotely, >> and the >> yeah >> challenges there. >> Glad I, great uni central area city. You can come on, come on by and see all of the, various Red Hat open source communities doing their thing. >> All right, watch lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit coming at you. I'm Stu Miniman and always, thank you for watching, the cube (slow music)

if Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minuteman and welcome to a special cube conversation we've been talking to leaders around the industry about how they are helping their organizations and their customers in these challenging time with Kovac 19 really happy to bring back to the program one of our cube alumni he also has a new title Paul Cormier is now the president and CEO of Red Hat Paul it is great to see you we live geographically not too far apart normally we would be getting together person for summit of course that event happening digitally but thanks so much for joining us all right so Paul you have you know storied history at Red Hat you know I've sat through many keynotes where you walk through the product in portfolio looked at the acquisitions looked at the strategic direction moves taking the new job as CEO is a big move in regular times of course we're not in regular times we're in rather unique times here so let's start there what does it mean about coming into this new role in the times that we are facing you know you know as I see it considering the times here I think it's probably one of the biggest decisions I have made in my career to take on this new job only because don't as you know Stu talked a lot I've been here from certainly the beginning of our move to the enterprise in 19 years I was played 120 or so and and I think I actually think that we brought such a big value our customers I think that customers actually going to see even more value as we come out of this because than they have in the past for one thing with the combination of IBM were able to reach a wider set of customers out there if we can bring into the Linux world where all the innovations happening so I think I think our customers we've treated this our product line is an enterprise-grade product line since the beginning since day one we're literally helping our customers eat their businesses running at this point on our product lines because of you know everything we've done the victim enterprise-class you know so Paul some previous you know challenges in my my career you talk about whether financial you know whether it is natural disasters or 9/11 you know the technical industry needs to kind of rally together but you know one of the things that is different about this is the impact that has on every employee I wasn't surprised to see that the letter that you sent out to all of the associates was you know posted on the Red Hat site it didn't need to be leaked or anything like that so you know the transparency always is appreciated but bring us inside a little bit the organization you know how are you you know helping your employees and making sure that they can deal with all the personal things that they need to deal with while still being there for your customers your I mean well first of all first of all one of the things is you know we're sort of used to working remotely when the need arises even full-time for that case a big percentage of our associates are work remotely 1% of the time we've always had the philosophy in that we especially in engineering where we go after the best possible talent and the unique part of being 100 percent open-source focus is that our engineers know the other engineers that are working in our communities whether they know them better met them face to face they certainly know them very well on a professional level so a lot of our people were used to working remotely the other thing the other thing is most of Red Hat is type A personality type people so that's that's a good thing on some days and may be a tough thing on other days but but what that means is everybody works from home at some period whether it's you know they go to the office all day and wake up at midnight and do some more or that's Saturday or Sunday we're all pretty much you know set up to do that so our IT department has been you know they've been fabulous through this you know we've had you know a gazillion more hours of both VPN and video hours and it's just all work but they've had a great test bed for all these years so from from that standpoint from that technical standpoint worked very well from from the employee standpoint we've really we've really picked up the video All Hands videoconferencing from once a quarter every two weeks and so you know I had an All Hands meeting two days ago three days ago when I was announced on my new role and I committed to them we're gonna we're gonna have it all hands every two weeks come in talk we'll give you the updates etc so I think that's one thing you can't over communicate that I like this and I think the third thing that my I guess that's to say my former products for now but you know I still I still love those guys buying my form proved the products group they actually had a very great idea they're holding virtual office hours for their for their colleagues in the field once a week and we're actually holding once in the morning once later at night for the people in asia-pacific actual hours with a product managers in the engineers except for getting on videoconference to integrate and in talk with the folks out in the field about what we're doing in the products and in what's going on and what's upcoming and hear their issues as well I think this serves as two things the first thing that serves a certainly it keeps people engaged but secondly you know our people love the technology and so to some extent with everything going on around kovin and how serious it is in every country it almost gives our our people almost an escape from that to really spend an hour or two a day on this and just really have conversations with each other about the business and the products and the technology so that's become a really big hit inside as well yeah you know definitely there are some things that just get amplified you talked about you know we're used to being able to be on or join meetings you know regardless of the time of day amateur your team plenty of blue jeans and zoom meetings before this but it has taken a slightly different tone now with you know you've now got everybody at home you know and managing you know other personal relationships and things that are happening on the outside you you are still holding red hat summit at the end of April you think there's there's a real strong you know push from your team to you know balance and make sure that you're there for your customers but it's it's not going to be as much of the hoopla there's not that you know the slag and the announcements that are going on why is it important to still bring the community together and you know meet with your partners and customers you know rather than push it off to later this year you know it's a great question you know I said anyone know that when I stand up on stage for my keynote at the summit every year even though I'm so many year I don't know me son it's 1314 something like that even when even it's such a rush because we really do stand there you know Jim talked about this on our internal handoff where he said you know remember Paul and I on a ballroom with one of the first summits at some hotel we look behind the curtain and I said to him there's 300 people out there and you know last year in Boston I looked out and said wow there's 10,000 people here it's amazing so it really started as a as a way to really talk to an interact with both our customers and our community as well but it turned into a celebration and not just a celebration of internal RedHat people a celebration of the whole ecosystem and partners and customers and upstream people of how far open-source and linux has come and we didn't think that celebration part this year was really appropriate considering where we were but but we all still have a job to do we're all doing him remotely and as I said we're running made our customers business so we felt it was really important to put this out there to have our customers understand where we're going in the coming year the new some of the new products that we have coming and how we can help them and so that's really more of the tone this year and we feel that still important we all have a big job right now in coming out of this we're even going to have bigger jobs and how we re-entry into this and balance that so that's really the focus this year how we can continue to help with the technology we brought to the enterprise for the last 19 years yeah Paul the last question I have for you you know I think back to summit last year Satya Nadella was on stage Jenny Jenny Rometty was up on stage of course Red Hat you know tightly tied into you know abroad community and ecosystem network out there so as the leader of Red Hat you know how are you you know in contact and working with you know the communities and the partner ecosystem to both manage through and be ready for the other side of today I mean in one regard especially with many it's almost more at this point I mean that the partners in the ecosystems are really important many of the partners especially the smaller partners they look to us for leadership so so we still have communication with them and partly the summit is is for them as well well some of the larger partners like that you mentioned Microsoft a certainly IBM and an Amazon and Google and others we actually communicate almost more now that we're all working from home because as I said earlier the same goes outside as it does in inside you just can't and over communicate this environment and you know as you know sue the tech industry looks like this giant industry but it really is kind of a small industry and a lot of us know each other from for many years and so that communication is going on we're comparing notes actually in many cases we're comparing notes maybe even more than we might have in the past well no what are you guys doing at your company the plan for this is and I've actually seen some of the partners who focus on proprietary technologies even become a more bit more open on those discussions now so I think maybe that could be if there's any good outcome of this that could be one of the outcomes that's slightly positive all right well Paul thank you so much for the update congratulations on your new role we absolutely are looking forward to the summit at the end of the month thanks again always great to see you soon thanks very much all right be sure to check out the cube dotnet where you can see the the preview of Red Hat summit as well as the guests that we will have there we will have Paul Stephanie Matt Hicks lots of the Red Hat executives their customers and partners I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watching the cube [Music]

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Male Voice: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. Well, welcome back everyone. Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier my cohost Jeff Frick,. For these next two days our next guest is Cynthia Stoddard CIO Adobe, former CIO of NetApp. When you were on the cube last time we were on >> That's right. AT&T now called Oracle Field ironically. >> Wow. >> I mean that is a transformation in itself. Welcome to the cube. >> Yeah, I'm glad to be back. >> Thanks for coming on with you, appreciate it. So your keynote, you had an amazing conversation around with the CIO from Intuit. >> Yes. >> You guys talked about changing the culture of the company. Talk about that conversation. >> Yeah, so I, we have similar, I would say, our companies has similar paths and that we both used to be box software and now we're, you know, we're operating out of cloud SaaS providers. And you know, it's really interesting and actually Atticus and I were just on another panel talking about this. When you sell a box, you don't really know who your customer is, right? But when you sell through a SaaS or an e-commerce site, you know a lot about your customer. 'Cause you know first of all, who they are. Then as you go through the customer journey, you can understand the different touch points. You can understand, you know, what the pain points are, what they're using, what they're not using and really gear your product and your information to really make that experience a lot better for the customer. >> Yeah, and even even more than that 'cause when you ship the box, you ship the box. And bye bye box he has no idea how it's being used, when it's being, he's not only the who, but the how and the whats. Now that you're connected to all your users and the way they use their products, the amount data that you have to make continuous adjustments, to pick your feature prioritization. It's completely different ballgame. >> It's exactly right. So you really take an outside view and outside in view of the customer versus an inside out. And you know, the customer and their experience becomes front and center and you focus in on that. And then additionally, you know, that impacts all of your processes inside of the company because they were all geared for that. You know, we don't know who the customer was before. Now you have to gear to knowing who the customer is, providing that right level of information through a number of different, you know, different functions, consistent information so that everybody can operate to the, you know, the same level of knowledge and same level of understanding. And when you look at your IT infrastructure as well, it's gotta be geared for that experience. So what you used to do on a cycle, now becomes real time. So if you think about, you know, downtime or invoicing or you know, customer lookups whatever, you need to have that always on, experience for the customer. So your operational excellence, your resiliency again, changes dramatically with that customer view, the outside in. >> One of the things you mentioned in the keynote I thought was really an important point was about the cloud journey and the role that data plays in the integration of data. And you had a couple of key tenants. >> That's right. >> That you talked about. Can you just quickly explain that, 'cause I think that's a point that everyone's talking about right now and it's really hard to do. And you guys have an interesting angle on this. Can you share your a prospective on that? >> Absolutely. So the tenants are commonality of data, consistent measurement, actionable insights and I focus in on the actionable, you know, the action part and then data governance. And when you think about it, you know, you have all this data around the organization, you know, it can be in different data lakes, it could be under, you know, somebody's under somebody's PC, you know, under their desk or whatever. And when you start getting into looking at that customer journey, what initially happens is everybody brings their own data to the table. So my data is different than your data but of course my data is the one that is best and correct, right? So what you need to be able to do is really get that consistency and definition. So, you know, if we're going to have, you know, even just define what customer is, what is, you know, what does that term? But when you get that, then how do you measure it? And you know, you may have a term but, you know, you have to put the boundaries around how do you measure it? How are we going to look at it? You know, what's good, what's bad and that sort of thing. So that's the consistency of measurement. The actionable insights is, you know, you can do a lot with dashboards and I think a lot of IT organizations have a gazillion dashboards that they have. But I would ask how much of that is actually actionable. So what we focused on is let's get the insights, let's get the information into our data, you know, our data repository into these dashboards so that people could act on it proactively as opposed to just say, oh this is great. And then the fourth area is data governance. What we did is we made sure and working with our business people that the metrics that are selected to measure that are consistent have business owners and they are responsible for owning that definition. They're responsible for owning the quality and they're responsible for owning how they're used throughout the entire organization. >> We had for the first time, we have been doing the CUBE for 10 years. We had a guest on this event came on for the first time with a new title we've never seen before. >> Oh Wow. >> Marketing CIO. >> Marketing CIO. >> One of the customers, Metlife, talked about how marketing and IT are coming together and how the CIO has to be aligned with the marketing CMO if they wanted to serve the business unit. This was a criteria that he said is what organizations should look like, if they're ready to to be transformed. >> Yeah, yeah. Can you comment on that because you're looking at it from you're at Adobe, so you kind of have the inside view. There's a confluence of the worlds coming together. Business and tech. >> That's right. That is, and it is and it used to be, I would say an organization's that there was walls between departments, right? IT was behind this huge wall. And that can't be any more. Technology is pervasive and the organization and when I look at marketing, I would say that the marketing discipline probably has some of the most mature data and analytic skills of anybody in the company. That's what their roles are, right? Is to analyze the customer marketing campaigns, how can they bring this value into the organization? So they've got that skill. What IT has is the big data skills. We know how to process, we know how to govern, we know how to make sure that the data is there. So, you know, bringing the two worlds together is actually really a perfect marriage because you're bringing the big data discipline together with the people who know how to look and analyze that data and come together. You know, to really deliver those really great actionable, I'll use actionable, again, actionable insights. So when I look at how my team works with our marketing organization is blended. You go into a room, you would not know who is IT, you would not know who the marketing. You won't be able to tell. It's interdisciplinary. From the time, I mean from staff meetings, from the time of working on, you know, a new idea, all the way through to sprints of getting it done. They are hooked at the hip together and marketing and IT are working jointly. I mean we have joint sprint teams and things like that >> So I gotta ask you the kind of historical question. You look back, CIO roles evolving over time. You've seen a couple of key points. Obviously, security, cloud, data, big data these kinda changed a little bit of the direction trajectory of IT organizations. And now you've got Adobe with a platform and integrating data across of it is gonna yield some new capabilities. It's always hard to operationalize new. >> Yeah. >> Your customers, for Adobe's customers who have not just Adobe products, they might have other, other stuff. >> Right. >> So they have multivendors out there. A lot of different data, a lot of diversity data. So the kinda pull it all together. Is a really hard task. So how does a CIO have to deal with that now? Because you're gonna use first party data now we got privacy, you got GDPR kinds of things. You mentioned governance, so it sounds really hard. How does it get easier? >> It's not easy. It's not easy, that's for sure. But I would say, I mean a few different ways. I would say first and foremost the CIO has to be out there with their business partners, you know, with the CMO, with the CFO, with, you know, with everybody in the business. And you know, really understand, you know, what their business goals and objectives are so that they can bring their knowledge to the table. Relationships are really key. I mean or you can do so much for the relationships. So, you know, being that collaborative agent I think is really key. In order to solve the hard technology issues, I would say that architecture is absolutely the first and foremost thing CIOs could think about. Is you should have your architecture in place, know what that data with that common data model is going to look like. Figure that out. Know how you're going to operate it. And then, you know, as I said this morning, you can't do it alone. So figure out who your key partners are and then bring them into the fold. With the right architecture and the right partners and the right relationships internally, you're going to overcome those issues. >> An the operating model dashboards that Shannon was mentioning earlier can be a key point but also people could, you know, see too many dashboards and not see the real issues. >> That's right. >> So the dashboard is not the silver bullet per se but it's an instrumentation panel. >> That's right. The dashboard is not a solution. The solution is really the insights that you're providing. And then getting people on board with the insights and then getting alignment across different disciplines that need to action the insights. Now, they may action them in different ways. So finance may action different than marketing, than different than sales. But it's important to have that common definition and really look at how I'm gonna use this in my day-to-day operations. >> John and I thought you were going down a different path. I'll ask a question. You're gonna bring up the new fun toy, which is AI and machine learning. >> Yes. So how are you, you know, it's gonna solve all, you know, peace in the Middle East and hunger in Africa. As you look at, you know, why some of these new technologies? You know, how are you trying to get kind past the hype and really find great places to get great value return on applying AI machine learning. >> Yeah, there is hype for sure but there is a lot of value to when you apply a correctly. And you know, when I look at what I do within my organization, we use the techniques for actually using it in some of our data-driven operating model to look at abnormalities and how data moves through the cycle and point those out because it'd be, you know, in some respects like finding a needle in a haystack. So we're using, you know, some AI techniques there but we're also using it in core IT and how we run IT. So I'm in our operations we've used a lot of automation but automation supplemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning. So if a problem occurs and it can be fixed by human, then it goes into a knowledge base and the next time around that problem occurs it could be fixed programmatically. So, and that has saved us a tremendous amount of time and you know, our return to service statistics have improved considerably. >> One of the exciting things in covering the tech industry for so long and seeing the cloud has done, >> Yeah, >> You have the whole Dev ops movement infrastructures code >> Infrastructure, really key. >> Very good point. It makes the infrastructure programmable versus the old model. I remember back when I was working at HP back in the late 80s, early 90s you were limited by what you could provision and deploy as tech networking, compute and storage and you kinda had to operate that, okay. Now, it's other way around. So what I see when I see the slides up on this keynote today and the architecture slides, I look at it, I'm like, it looks like Amazon to me. But it's marketing provisioning. So it's content developers, it's creative developers, it's the user not programmers. So when you start to get down that road, you (mumbles) about large scale. So the question I have for you is as workloads and use cases become the determinant of the architecture, having that dynamic of versatility and that ability to provision either other services becomes an interesting part of the architecture. That's where I think we're data I see fitting in. Can you just kinda react how you see that world? Because if this continues to happen, the terms being dictated down will be coming from the use cases and the workloads. >> They will be coming from the use cases and the workloads. And it's interesting that you mentioned your days at HP because I just actually gave a little talk about operational excellence. And the analogy that I used is people used to come to me and say, I want a server, right? Or I need additional space. And I would say, no, you're not efficient. Go back and clean up the stuff. And you know, then maybe I'll give you additional capacity. Well now that infrastructure is absolutely in the code, it sitting in the hands of the developer, it's in the hands of the engineer. And they need to understand how the decisions that they make, you know, impact, you know, performance, impact costs, impact a lot of different things. Impact data, right? So, it's a whole different world. And I think that part of it is really education and awareness, working with the engineering teams so that they understand that, you know, having your ops embedded in your code is a lot of responsibility, a lot of responsibility. And we need to understand how we're making decisions and how they affect, not only what I'm doing here in my piece of code, but actually the whole into end, right? The whole into end flow. It certainly changes your role because now you're not saying no, you're saying yes but you're not even saying yes. You just saying do it. >> That's right. So we, I think our roles changed to, yeah, we're not saying yes or no, we're saying you can go do it. >> With policy. >> Yeah. With policy and then also with, you know, the right level of information so that they can, you know, the right standards, the right architecture so that you can use the standards and architecture to make the right decisions in the code. >> My final question before we break for the day, you interviewed on stage Atticus decent from intuit and you were asking some questions. I could see you wanting to answer them yourself. I'm gonna ask you the questions you asked him since you know the questions coming. >> Oh Wow. >> Acceleration, transformation doesn't happen in the silo. I think it was your comment. >> Yeah. >> The specific questions are how do you build a team to accelerate? How do you increase the velocity of change and how does it impact culture? >> Yeah. So that's yeah, that was one of my favorite questions actually to talk to Atticus about 'cause he's done a tremendous amount of work within Intuit to kinda revamp. And actually, you know, within Adobe and other places, you know, I've gone through a culture change with my team and it's really getting them to take the customer view. One of the things we've done within Adobe is we've said we wanted to have cloud-like characteristics in our DNA. And people kinda looked at me and said, you know, what does that really mean? Cloud-like characteristics, is it a set of cloud. It was easy to use. It's extensible. And the way that I describe it to them is we really want to take IT out of the equation. So when you build, think about self service, think about APIs, think about the right architecture and then also, you know, organize around not a project because projects has start and finishes and then, you know, things never get taken care of but organize around the concept of products and life cycles. And that's what we're doing. So, and that's a lot of fun. >> And now with the Adobe platform, you can stand up solutions, >> That's right. >> very quickly. Sounds like cloud. It's easy to use. >> It is cloud and it is easy to use. >> Easy to buy, you can buy it all at once. You can buy a Juco. >> You can. >> This is the new business model. >> That's right. That's right. >> Thank you for coming on the cube and sharing. >> Thank you so much. Always my pleasure. >> Great insights, great data on the queue. Thanks for sharing the data. >> Thank you. Bringing all the dated insights here at Adobe Summit 2019 I'm John and Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. Day Two is tomorrow. (gentle music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo. Live Europe, Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Everybody watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Valentin here with my co host Student events. Do Myself and John for Be here all week. Eric Hurt, Saugus Here Long time Cuba Long friend. Great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM IBM Storage division. He's joined by James Amy's, who's the head of networks at advance. The service provider Guys, Welcome to the Cube. Good to see again. >> Great. Thanks for having us loved being on the cute. >> So we love having you So, James, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about advanced to want to dig into some of the networking trends. We're hearing a lot about it here. It's just go live. >> Yeah, I think so. Advanced are a manage service provider software software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing interim solutions for lots of different Marchal market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we've got involved with as well as charity sector legal sector. A lot of education work we do is real diverse portfolio of products we offer on with the manage services piece. We also offer complete outsourcing. So this is desktop support. Telephony support, printer support all the >> way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms, the majority of >> which is our in. >> So so Eric advanced are both a customer and a partner, right? Right, right. And so you love you. Love versus Stack. These guys are presumed versus stack customers. Well >> stacked customer in the Versace tack, as you know, Integrate. Cisco, UCS, Cisco Networking Infrastructure, IBM Storage of all types entry products up into the fastest all flash raise with our software spectrum virtualized spectrum, Accelerate Family and James's company is using versus tax is part of their infrastructure, which they then offer, as you know, to a service toe and uses. James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers and you're responding to your customer. So we're seeing two hearing today. Lot about multi cloud. We've been hearing that for a while the network is flattening your network expert love to get your your thoughts on that. Security, obviously, is a huge topic. End end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So so James, what 1 of the big mega trends that you're seeing that a driving your business decisions and your customer's activity? One >> of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large scare enterprise scale deployments off a particular type of technology on customers are now choosing because they're informed the best fit for a particular application or particular service on that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves to offer our services products to them. Uh, or they're looking for us to run in infrastructure service for them or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key on DH. I think people were looking around a few years ago thinking, How do we compete to this well, with partnerships that we have in our Francisco? It gives us a very compelling competitive offering. But we can turn around and say, Well, we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service because we could give you guaranteed availability. We give you guaranteed price point on, and this is all backed with key vendor certified designs. So we're not talking about going out on developing a solution that takes maybe eighteen months to take to market. This is understanding a requirement for a quick, you know, Q and A with a customer a line that, too a reference architecture that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building rocks that we use across the business. So Nexus nine K seven k's or our standard bread and butter inside the data center environment. As Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our our key Intel computer platform that we used on DH. The store wise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a a mixed then the house where we would align storage requirement paste with what we could find in the market. That was, that was a good fit. But the store was products is basically just allowed us to standardize on the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time tio service ready, which is when we start charging for revenue on if we want a ninety day build. Well, we've got a lot of special service time, A lot of engineering time getting that ready Teo, Teo and take to the customer and then we turn it on. We can start seeing revenue from that platform with versus Stack. This enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop, too. They're literally days through standardisation elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide arrange off different types of customers with different needs, but it allows us to take those standing building blocks, align them to their needs and deliver that service. >> James James, we found the peas are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi clouds. You talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? If if you tie into the public Cloud services or yes, maybe you can help explain a little bit on how that worked Five years ago, it was the public loud there are going to kill them and service providers. And what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn two partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think three years ago we'd be talking to our customers and they were I am going to this public cloud or I am going to build this infrastructure. Where is now? They're They're making Mohr informed select decisions based on the drive to the hosted office and voice platforms offered by Microsoft. There's a big driving. Many of our customers are going in that direction, but it's how we integrate that with legacy applications. Some of the solutions that some of our customers use have have have had millions of pounds of investment into them, and that's not something I can just turn off the water away from overnight. So it is how we're integrating that. We're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're appearing with different service providers, bringing that in integrating that, I'm offering it to them as a solution. What we try tio, we try to try position ourselves is really it's the same experience, regardless of where we're placing it. Consumption. Workload doesn't know whether it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking one of the public cloud platforms or even on premise. So we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premises because that's right for their business, depending on on what they're doing, especially some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture, and you talk a lot about software to find you guys made a big move to software to find, you know, a couple years ago, actually, maybe discuss how that fits in to how you're servicing advanced another client? >> Sure. So you know, IBM Storage has embraced multi Cloud for several years. So our solutions. While, of course, they work with IBM, Cloud and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with azure Google Cloud and in fact, some are products. For example, the versus stack not only is advanced using it, but we've got pry forty or fifty public, small, medium sized cloud providers that our public references for the vs Tag and Spectrum Protect you Know which is our backup product Number one in the Enterprise. Back up space Expect from detectives Got at least three hundred cloud providers. Medium, small and big. Who offered the engine underneath for their backup is a service is spectrum protect, So we make sure that weather PR transparent cloud tearing our cyber resiliency technology. What we doing? Backup archive object storage works with essentially all cloud providers. That way, someone like James A. CSP MSP can leverage our products. And we, like I said, we have tons of public records around versus Stack for that, but so can an enterprise. And in fact, I saw survey recently that it was done in Europe and in North America that when you look at a roughly two billion US size revenue and up the average company of that sizing up, we use five different public cloud riders at one time. Where that it be due to legal reasons whether that be procurement. You know, the Web is really the Internet. And, yeah, Cloud is really just It's been around for twenty some years. So in bigger accounts, guess what is now involved Procurement Well, we love that you did that deal with IBM club, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft, right? So that's driven it legal's driven it. Certain countries, right? The data needs to stay in that country, even if your cloud if eyeing it, it's so to speak. So if the clap water doesn't have a data center there, guess what? Another geographer used different. And then you, of course, still have some large entities that still allow regional buying pattern so they'll have three or four different cloud providers that air quote certified by corporate. And then you could use whichever one you want, so we make sure that we could take advantage of that. Wade and IBM. We ride the wave, We don't fight the way. >> So you've got in that situation. You these multi cloud you got different AP eyes, You get different frameworks potty, you abstract all that complexity you got, Francisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, I b m. Now with Red Hat is good. Be a big player in that that world. VM where What do you guys do? James, in terms of of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity >> for people. I think some of it is actually the mystifying on its engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is on, how we can develop that on a line, that to mind your own business, but more importantly, to the needs of our customers. We've got some really, really talented technicians worked within within advance, and we've got a number of different forums that allow them to feed back their ideas. But we've got the alignments between those partners and and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion on drive. Some of that thinking forward about ultimately see engaging with customers. So the customers feedback is key on how we shape and deliver no need service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces, some somewhere even competitive. So we have to tread that line very safe, very carefully and safely. But it is. It's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, technical technicians. We have inside business having that to complete three sixty communication is key, but that's that's that's really the bottom takes. Its creation >> came like youto dig into security for us a little bit. You know, I think we surpassed a couple of years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud to it because it's not secure to Oh, I understand it's time for me to least reevaluate meant security and, most likely, you know, manage service fighters. Public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center, but if I've got multiple environment, there's a lot of complexity there. So how do you traverse that? Make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not just all these point solutions for security all over the place. >> Ah, so that's that comes onto visibility. So its visibility understanding where all the control points are within a given infrastructure on how the landscape looks. So we were working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly tohave a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers. You used to once upon a time you had one game, right? So we need it is from good security on your Internet. Facing viable For now, you might have a ten. Twenty, thirty of those. We need tohave consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially, if there's any attempt attack vector on one of them. How that how someone is trying to looking to compromise that so centralized intelligence on That's where we start to look at my eye operations to gather all that information. The long gone are the days where you have twenty people sharing a room just reading streams. Those twenty people now need thio. See reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be called up to them. They could make a decision quickly on Active planet on DH. That's really where we we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with key part, Mr >> Never talk about your announcement cadence. Good idea as a big show. Think coming up in a couple weeks cubes gonna be there. Of course. What can we expect from from you guys? >> So we're actually gonna announce on the fifth before things way, want to drive end users and our business partners to storage campus, which is one of the largest campuses at IBM, think we'll have over fifteen pedestals of demo and actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio, from the all flash arrays to our versus stack offering to a whole set of modern data protection management control for storage, which manages in control storage, that's not ours, right? Our competitors storage as well, and, of course, our software to find storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These air solutions blueprints reference architectures is Jane, you mentioned that use our software and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate wrestling recipe for that German chocolate cake. But it's the perfect recipe. It's tried. It's true, it's tested. It's been on the Food Channel twenty seven times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our our solutions. Blueprints. We'll have some announcements around modern data protection, and obviously a big focus of IBM. Storage is been in the space. So both storage as an Aye aye platform for aye aye, applications are workloads but also the incorporation of technology into our own storage systems and software. So be having announcements around that on February fifth going into think, which will then be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great. So I'm here and trusted data protection plays into that. Aye, aye. Intelligence machine intelligence. And I'm also hearing header of Geneti multiple platforms. Whether it's your storage, you said our competitors now does that also include sort of the clouds? Fear we're not announcing anything. But you guys have you know, you've seen your pictures. That's azure itt's a w a s. I mean, that continues >> so absolutely so. Whether it be what we do from backup in archive, right, let's take the easy one. So we support not only the protocol of IBM clad object storage which we acquired and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud in stance e ation. But we also support the s three protocol. So, for example, our spectrum scale software giant scale out. In fact, the two fastest supercomputers world you spectrum scale over four hundred fifty petabytes running on spectrum scale, and they continue their to an object store that supports us three. Or it can tear toe IBM clad object stories through that IBM clad object storage customer. That's great for using the S three protocol. You, Khun, Tear to that as well. That's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency. So from a cyber resents me perspective, we could do things with any cloud vendor oven air cat air gap, right? And so you could do that, eh? With tape. But you could also do that with the clouds. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom writer. When you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of ways. Our protect family, our new products, a safeguard copy for the main friend that we announced October. So all that allows us to be multi cloud resiliency as well as how do we connect a multi cloud backup archive automated tearing all kinds of clouds, whether the IBM cloud and, of course, I'm a shareholder. So I love that, but at the same time were realistic. Lots of people use Amazon Google Azar. And like I said, there's thousands of mid two small cloud providers all over the world, and we support them, too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS? You know, that's one of the questions we've been trying to squint through and understand is because when you talk about five cloud providers is obviously infrastructures of service. And then there's their service providers like like Advanced. And then there's like a gazillion SAS Companies >> write a lot of data >> in there and a lot of data in there. How should we think about, you know, protecting that data? Securing that data is that sort of up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch. Or should that be part of the scope of AH, storage company? Well, so what we do >> is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different sass coming is, in fact, one of them was on the Cube two years ago with us. They were startup in the cyber security space and all of its delivered over SAS. So what they do is in that case, the use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver south. They want no bottlenecks because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS Andi. Also, what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought in because we have on our flash arrays capability and most of our product line especially the flash systems to have no performance hit on encrypt their decrypt because its hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers. That gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time, we've given the right performance. They need tohave soft reserve, so we engage with all we pry have three hundred, four hundred different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model. This software's interest, by the way, we do that as well as I mentioned, over three hundred cloud providers today have a backup is a service and the engine ease their spectrum. Protect or spectrum protect. Plus, but they may call it something else. In fact, we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK, and all they do is cyber resiliency. Backup in archive. That's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum Protect and Spectrum Check plus is the engine underneath their Prada. So that's an example. In this case, the backup is a service, which, I would argue is not infrastructure, but more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cyber security vendors, we have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges. United States. They have about eight thousand of them, including the junior colleges, and they run all their bookstores. So when you place an order, all their air NPR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor that's based in there in the Northeast. And they've got, like I said, about a thousand colleges and universities in the U. S. And Canada, and they offer this if you will bookstore as a sass service and the students use it. University uses it. And, of course, the bookstores are designed to, you know, make a little money for the university, and they all use that so that's another example. And they use are flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protectors. They obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these book stores all over the United States at the collegiate >> level right now. James Way gotta wrap, but just sort of give you the final word. UK specialist, right? So Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement? >> Uh, we'll do? Yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. No one really knows. I think that's all the debates are about. AJ's trying to understand that on DH for us. We're just watching and observing. >> Staying focused on your customers, obviously. So no predictions as to what's going to happen. I was not from a weeks ago. I got hurt both sides. You know, it's definitely gonna happen, All right, Not happen, but okay, again give you the last word. You know? What's your focus? Over the next twelve eighteen months? >> Eso all our focus is really about visibility, So they they they've touched on that. We're talking about security for customers. Understanding whether data is whether exposure point saw. That's our keep. Keep focusing on DH versus stack on dh thie IBM store wise product underpin all of those offerings that we have on. That will continue to be to be so forward. >> Guys. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and our pleasure hosting you. Thanks. Appreciate, Really welcome. Alright, Keep right, everybody. We'll be back. Day Volante was stew Minutemen from Cisco live in Barcelona. >> No.

[Narrator] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live teach coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu, myself, and John Fur will be here all week. Eric Herzog is here, long time Cube alumn friend, great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM storage division. he's joined by James Amies who's the head of networks at Advanced, the service provider guys. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Great thanks for having us. Love being on theCUBE. >> So we love having you. So James let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about Advanced, do you want to dig into some of the networking trends? We're hearing a lot about it here at Cisco Live. >> Yeah thanks, Advanced are a manage service provider, software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing entrance solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with, as well charity sector, legal sector, a lot of education work that we do. And it's just real diverse portfolio products that we offer. And with the manage services piece, we also offer complete IT outsourcing. So this is desktop support, telephony support, printer support, all the way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms. The majority of which is our own. >> So Eric, Advanced are both a customer and a partner. >> Right >> Right and so you love Versastack, These guys are I presume are Versastack customers as well? >> Yes Versastack customer in the Versastack as you know integrates Cisco UCS Cisco networking infrastructure, IBM storage of all types, entry products up into the fastest off flash rays with our software spectrum virtualizer, spectrum accelerate family, and James' company is using Versastacks as part of their infrastructure. Which they then offer as a service to end users as James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers, and you're responding to your customers. So we're seeing here today, a lot about multi-cloud. We've been hearing that for a while. The network is flattening, you're a network expert, love to get your thoughts on that. Security obviously is a huge topic. End to end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So James what are the big mega trends that you're seeing that are driving your business decisions and your customers' activities. >> So I think one of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large enterprise scale deployments of a particular type of technology and customers are now choosing because they're informed, the best fit for a particular application or a particular service, and that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves, or for our service product to them, or they're looking for us to run an infrastructure service for them, or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. And I think people were looking around a few years ago, thinking how do we compete to this. Well with the partnerships that we have with IBM and Cisco, it gives us a very compelling, competitive offering where we can turn around and say, well we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service, because we can give you guaranteed availability. We can give you guaranteed price points, and we this is all backed with key vendor certified designs, so we're not talking about going out and developing a solution that takes as maybe 18 months, to take to market, this is understanding a requirement for a quick Q and A with a customer, align that to a reference architecture, that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building blocks that we use across the business. So Nexus, nine K seven K's, or our standard` bread and butter inside the data center environment, as Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our key intel compute platform that we use. And the storewise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a mixed vendor house, where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market that was a good fit. But the storewise products just basically just allowed us to standardize, and the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time to serve as ready. Which is when we start charging for revenue. And if we want a 90 day build, well we've got a lot of professional service time, a lot of engineering time getting that ready to go and take to the customer, and then we turn it on, and then we can start seeing revenue from that platform. With Versastack, it's enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop to literally days through standardization, elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide range of different types of customers with different needs. But it allows us to take those standard building blocks, algin them to their needs, and deliver that service. >> James we found the MSP's are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi-cloud, so you talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? Do you tie into the public cloud services? >> Yes. >> Maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that works. Five years ago it was, the public clouds were all going to kill the manage service providers, and what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn to partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah that's a fantastic question. Because I think three years ago, we'd be talking to our customers, and they were "I am going to this public cloud" or " I am going to build this infrastructure." Whereas now they're making more informed select decisions based on (mumbles) The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms, often by microsoft, is a big drive in many of our ITO customers are going in that direction. But it's how we integrate that with their legacy applications. Some of the ERP solutions that some of our customers use have had millions of pounds of investment into them. And that's not something that I can just turn off and walk away from overnight. So it's how we're integrating that, and we're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're pairing with different service providers, bringing that and integrating that, and offering it to them as a solution. And what we try to position ourselves is really, the same experience regardless of where we're placing IT consumption workload. It doesn't matter if it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking on one of the public cloud platforms, or even on premise, we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premise. Because that's right for their business, depending on what they're doing. Especially with some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture. I know you talk a lot about software define, you guys made a big move to software define a couple years ago actually. Maybe discuss how that fits into how you're servicing Advanced and other clients. >> Sure so IBM storage has embraced multi-cloud for several years now. So our solutions, well of course they work with IBM cloud, and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with Azure, Google Cloud. And in fact, some of our products for example, the Versastack not only is Advanced using it, but we've got probably 40 or 50 public small medium sized cloud providers, that are public references for the Versastack, and spectrum protect, which is our back-up product, number one in the enterprise back-up space, spectrum protect has got at least 300 cloud providers, medium, small, and big who offer the engine underneath, for their backup as a service, is spectrum protect. So we make sure that whether it be our transparent cloud tiering, our cyber resiliency technology, what we do in back up archive. Object storage works with essentially, all cloud providers, that way someone like James, a CSP, MSP, can leverage our products, and we like I said, we got tons of public references around Versastack for that. But so can an enterprise, and in fact I saw a survey recently, and it was done in Europe, and in North American, that when you look at a roughly, the two billion US size revenue and up, the average company of that sizing up, will use five different public cloud providers at one time, whether that be due to legal reasons, whether that procurement, the web is really the internet. And the cloud is really just, it's been around for 20 some years. So in bigger accounts, guess who is now involved? Procurement, well we love that you did that deal with IBM cloud, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft right. So that's driven it, legal's driven it, certain countries right the data needs to stay in that country, even if you're cloudafying it, so to speak. So If the cloud provider doesn't have a data center there, guess what, another GI use different, and then you of course still have some large entities that still allow regional buying patterns, so they'll have three or four different cloud providers, that are quote, certified by corporate, and then you can use whichever one you want. So we make sure that we can take advantage of that wave. At IBM we ride the wave. We don't fight the wave. >> So you've got in that situation, you've got these multi clouds, you've got different API's. You've got different frameworks. How do you abstract all that complexity, you got Cisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, IBM now with red hat is good. They'd be a big player in that, that world VM ware. What do you guys do James, in terms of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity for people? >> I think with some of it, is actually demystifying and it's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is, and how we can develop that and align that to, not only in your own business, but more importantly to the needs of our customers. We've got some really really talented technicians work within Advanced. We've got a number of different forums that allow them to feedback their ideas. And we've got the alignments between those partners, and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion, and drive some of that thinking forward. But ultimately it's engaging with the customers. So the customers' feedback is key on how we shape and deliver, not only the service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces. Some are even competitive, so we have to tread that line very carefully and safely. But it's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, the technicians we have inside the business, having that complete 360 communication is key. And that's really the bottom too, is communication. >> James I'd like you to dig into security a little bit. I think we surpassed a couple years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud because it's not secured to, oh I understand, it's time for me to at least re-evaluate my security, and most likely manage service providers, public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center. But if I've got multiple environments, there's a lot of complexity there, so how do you traverse that, make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not sure all these point solutions, all over the place? >> Yeah so that comes down to visibility. So it's visibility, understanding where all the control points are, within a given infrastructure. And how the landscape looks, so we're working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly. To have a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers, you used to once upon a time. You had one gate. So all we needed is good security on your internet fighting firewall. But now you may have a 10, 20, 30 of those, we need to have consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially if there's any attack vector on one of them, how somebody's trying to look into compromise that. So it's centralized intelligence, and that's where we're starting to look at AI operations to gather all our information. Long gone are the days where you have 20 people sitting in a room just reading screens. Those 20 people now need to see reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be caught up to them, so they can make their decision quickly, and access upon it. And that's really where we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with few partners to be able to do that. >> Eric talk about your announcement cadence. IBM has big show, Think, coming up in a couple weeks, Cube's going to be there of course. What can we expect from you guys? >> So we're actually going to announce on the fifth before Think. We want to drive end users and our business partners to the storage campus, which probably one of the largest campuses at IBM Think. We'll have over 15 pedestals of demo. And actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio from the all flash arrays to our Versastack offering, to a whole set of modern day protection, management and control for storage. Which manage is going to control storage that's not ours right, our competitor's storage as well. And of course our software Defined storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These are solutions, blueprints, references, architectures, Jame you mentioned that use our software, and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate recipe for the german chocolate cake, but it's the perfect recipe. It's tried it's true it's tested, it's been on the food channel 27 times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our solutions blueprints. We'll all have some announcements around modern data protection and obviously a big focus of IBM storage is been in the AI space. So both storage as an AI platform for AI applications workloads, but also the incorporation of AI technology into our own storage systems and software. So we'll be having announcements around that on February fifth, going into Think, which will be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great so I'm hearing trusted, data protection plays into that. Ai intelligence, machine intelligence and I'm also hearing heterogeneity, multiple platforms whether it's your storage you said, or competitor's storage. Now does that also include the cloud sphere? Without announcing anything, but you guys have -- >> Yeah. >> I've seen your pictures ads Azure. It's AWS, I mean that continues yes? >> Absolutely so whether it be what we do from back up in archive right. Let's take the easy one, so we support not only the protocol of IBM cloud object storage, which we acquired, and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud instantiation. But we also support the S3 protocol, so for example our spectrum scale software, giant scale out in fact, the two fastest super computers in the world, use spectrum scale. Over 450 petabytes running on spectrum scale. And they can tier to an object store that supports S3. Or it can tier to IBM cloud and object storage. So we have IBM storage customer that's great. If you're using the S3 protocol, you can tier to that at well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency, so for a cyber resiliency perspective, we can do things with any cloud vendor of an air gap right. And so you can do that, A with tape, but you can also do that with the cloud. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom right. Or when you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of different ways, our protect family, our new product safe guard copy for the main frame that we announced it on October. So all that allows us to be multi-cloud resiliency, as well as how do we connect to multi-cloud, back up archive automated tiering to all kinds of clouds, whether it be IBM cloud, and of course I'm a share holder, so I love that. But at the same time we're realistic. Lots of people us Amazon, Google, Azure, and like I said there's thousands of mid to small cloud providers all over the world. And we support them too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS, one of the questions we've been trying to squint through, and understand is, because when you talk about five cloud providers, there's obviously infrastructures of service, and then there's service providers like Advanced, and then there's like a Gazillion SAS companies. >> Right. >> Lot of data in there. >> And a lot of Data in there. How should we think about protecting that data, securing that data? Is that up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch or should that be part of the scope of a storage company? >> Well so what we do is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different SAS companies in fact, one was on theCUBE two years ago with us. They were a start up in the cybersecurity space, and all of it's delivered over SAS. What they do is in that case, they use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver SAS. They want no bottle necks. Because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS. And then also what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought it because we have on our flash arrays, the capability in most of our product line, especially the flash systems, to have no performance suit on encrypt or decrypt because it's hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers that gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time we give them the right performance they need to have softwares and service. So we probably have 300,400 different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model is softwares and service, by the way we do that as well. As I mentioned over 300 cloud providers today have a backup as a service and the engine needs a spectrum protect or spectrum protect plus, but they may call it something else. In fact we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK. And all they do is Cyber resiliency backup and archive, that's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum protect, and spectrum protect plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example, in this case, of back up as a service, which I would argue is not infrastructure. But more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cybersecurity vendors. We have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges in the United States. They have about 8,000 of them, including the junior colleges. And they run all of their bookstores, so when you place an order all their AR and PR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor. They're in the northeast and they've got like I said, about 8,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. And they offer this, if you will, bookstore as a SAS service. And the students use it, the university uses it. And of course the bookstores are designed to at least make a little money for the University. And they all use that. So that's another example, and they use our flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protect because they obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these bookstores all over the United States at the colligate level. >> Right. >> Now James we got to wrap, but just to give you the final word, UK specialist right, so Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement or? >> It will do yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. And no one really knows. I think that's what all the debates are about, is trying to understand that. And for us, I think we're just watching and observing. >> And staying focused on your customers obviously >> Yeah. >> So no predictions as to what's going to happen. When I was in the UK-- >> Not from me. a few weeks ago I heard both sides. You know oh it's definitely going to happen, oh it might not happen. But okay, again give you the last word. What's your focus over the next 12, 18 months? >> Our focus is really about visibility so Dave touched on that when we were talking about the security. For customers understanding where their data is, where their exposure points are. That's our key focus. And Versastack and the IBM storewise products underpin all of those offerings that we have. And that will continue to be so moving forward. >> Guys great to see you. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. And our pleasure hosting you. >> Great thank you really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome, alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back. Dave Velante with Stu Minamin from Cisco live in Barcelona. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is the technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE, I should say, Jeffrey, you're a CUBE alum. >> Yes, I enjoyed the last time. So can't wait to do it again this time. >> Well we're excited to have you. So before the camera's were rolling, we were talking about PowerShell. You invented PowerShell. >> Yeah, I did. >> It was invented in the early 2000's, it took a few years to ship, as you said. But can you give our viewers an update of where we are? >> Yeah, you know, it's 2018, and it's never been a better time for PowerShell. You know, basically the initial mission is sort of complete. And the mission was provide sort of general purpose scripting for Windows. But now we have a new mission. And that new mission is to manage anything, anywhere. So we've taken PowerShell, we've open sourced it. It's now running, we've ported it to macOS and Linux. There's a very large list of Linux distributions that we support it on, and it runs everywhere. And so, now, you can manage from anywhere. Your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser, you can manage, and then anything. You can manage Windows, you can manage Linux, you can manage macOS. So manage anything, anywhere. Any cloud, Azure, or AWS, or Google. Any hypervisor, Hyper-V or VMware, or any physical server. It's amazing. In fact, our launch partners, when we launched this, our launch partners, VMware, Google, AWS. Not Microsoft's traditional partners. >> That's great to hear. It was actually, one of the critiques we had, at the key note this morning, was partnerships are critically important. But felt that Satya gave a little bit of a jab towards, the kind of, the Amazon's out there. When we talk to customers, we know it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world. You know, you work all over the place, with your solutions that you had. There's not, like, Azure, Azure Stack, out to The Edge. The Edge, it is early, it's going to be very heterogeneous. So connect the dots for us a little. You know, we love having the technical fellows on, as to, you go from PowerShell, to now this diverse set of solutions that you work on today. >> Yeah, exactly. So basically, from PowerShell, they asked me to be the chief architect for Windows Server. Right, because if you think about it, an operating system is largely management, right? And, so, that's what I did, resource management. And, so, I was the chief architect for that, for many years, and we decided that, as part of that, we were developing cloud-inspired infrastructure. So, basically, you know, Windows Server had grown up. You know, sort of focused in on a machine. Azure had gone and needed to build a new set of infrastructure for the cloud. And we looked at what they were doing. And they say, hey, that's some great ideas. Let's take the ideas there, and put them into the general purpose operating system. And that's what we call our software-defined data center. And the reason why we couldn't use Azure's directly is, Azure's, really, design center is very, very, very large systems. So, for instance, the storage stamp, that starts at about 10 racks. No customer wants to start with 10 racks. So we took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it. And now our systems can start with two servers. Our Azure Stack systems, well, so, then, what we decided was, hey, this is great technology. Let's take the great cloud-inspired infrastructure of Windows Server, and match it with the Azure services themselves. So we take Azure, put it on top of Windows Server, package it as an appliance experience, and we call that Azure Stack. And that's where I have been mostly focused for the last couple of years. >> Right, can you help us unpack a little bit. There's a lot of news today. >> Yes. >> You know, Windows 2019 was announced. I was real interested in the Data Box Edge solution, which I'm sure. >> Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah, really interesting. You're like, let's do some AI applications out at the Edge, and with the same kind of box that we can transport data. Because, I always say, you got to follow customers applications and data, and it's tough to move these things. You know, we've got physics that we still have to, you know, work on until some of these smart guys figure out how to break that. But, yeah, maybe give us a little context, as to news of the show, things your teams have been working on. >> Yeah, so the Data Box Edge, big, exciting stuff. Now, there's a couple scenarios for Data Box Edge. First is, first it's all kind of largely centered on storage and the Edge. So Storage, you've got a bunch of data in your enterprise, and you'd like it to be in Azure. One flavor of Data Box Edge is a disk. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, you send it back to us, it shows up in Azure. Next. >> A pretty big disk, though? >> Well, it can be a small disk. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, no, it can be a single SSD, okay. But then you can say, well, no, I need a bunch more. And so we send you a box, the box is over there. It's like 47 pounds, we send you this thing, it's about 100 terabytes of data. You fill that thing up, send it to us, and we upload it. Or a Data Box Heavy. Now this thing has a handle and wheels. I mean, literally, wheels, it's specially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up, right? It's like, I don't know, like 400 pounds, it's crazy. And that's got about a petabyte worth of storage. Again, we ship it to you, you fill it up, ship it back to us. So that's one flavor, Data Box transport. Then there's Data Box Edge. Data Box Edge, you go to the website, say, I'd like a Data Box Edge, we send you a 1u server. You plug that in, you keep it plugged in, then you use it. How do you use it? You connect it to your Azure storage, and then all your Azure storage is available through here. And it's exposed through SMB. Later, we'll expose it through NFS and a Blob API. But, then, anything you write here is available immediately, it gets back to Azure, and, effectively, it looks like near-infinite storage. Just use it and it gets backed up, so it's amazing. Now, on that box, we're also adding the ability to say, hey, we got a bunch of compute there. You can run IoT Edge platforms. So you run the IoT Edge platform, you can run gateways, you can run Kubernetes clusters on this thing, you can run all sorts of IoT software. Including, we're integrating in brainwave technology. So, brainwave technology is, and, by the way, we'll want to talk about this a little bit, in a second. It is evidence of the largest transformation we'll see in our industry. And that is the re-integration of the industry. So, basically, what does that mean? In the past, the industry used to be, back when the big key players were digital. Remember digital, from DEC? We're all Massachusetts people. (Rebecca laughs) So, DEC was the number one employer in Massachusetts, gone. IBM dominant, much diminished, a whole bunch of people. They were dominant when the industry was vertically integrated. Vertically integrated meant all those companies designed their own silicone, they built their own boards, they built their own systems, they built their OS, they built the applications, the serviced them. Then there was the disintegration of the computer industry. Where, basically, we went vertically integrated. You got your chips from Intel or Motorola. The operating system, you got from Sun or Microsoft. The applications you got from a number of different vendors. Okay, so we got vertically integrated. What you're seeing, and what's so exciting, is a shift back to vertical integration. So Microsoft is designing its own hardware, right? We're designing our own chips. So we've designed a chip specially for AI, we call it a brainwave chip, and that's available in the Data Box Edge. So, now, when you do this AI stuff, guess what? The processing is very different. And it can be very, very fast. So that's just one example of Microsoft's innovation in hardware. >> Wow, so, I mean. >> What do you do with that? >> One of the things that we keep hearing so much, at this conference, is that Microsoft products and services are helping individual employees tap into their own creativity, their ingenuity, and then, also, collaborate with colleagues. I'm curious about where you get your ideas, and how you actually put that into practice, as a technical fellow. >> Yeah. >> How do you think about the future, and envision these next generation technologies? >> Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things, honestly, where your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength. So my weakness is, I can't deal with complexity, right. And, so, what I'm always doing is I'm taking a look at a very complex situation, and I'm saying, what's the heart of it, like, give me the heart of it. So my background's physics, right? And so, in physics, you're not doing, you're looking for the F equals M A. And if you have that, when you find that, then you can apply it over, and over, and over again. So I'm always looking at what are the essential things here. And so that's this, well, you see a whole bunch of confusing things, like, what's up with this? What's with this? That idea of there is this narrative about the reintegration of the computer industry. How very large vendors, be it Microsoft, or AWS, are, because we operate at such large scales, we are going to be vertically integrated. We're developing our own hardware, we do our own systems, et cetera. So, I'm always looking for the simple story, and then applying it. And, it turns out, I do it pretty accurately. And it turns out, it's pretty valuable. >> Alright, so that's a good set up to talk about Azure Stacks. So, the value proposition we heard, of course, is, you know, start everything in the cloud first, you know, Microsoft does Azure, and then lets, you know, have some of those services in the same operating model in your data center, or in your hosting service provider environment. So, first of all, did I get that right? And, you know, give us the update on Azure Stack. I've been trying to talk to customers that are using it, talking to your partners. There is a lot of excitement around it. But, you know, proof points, early use cases, you know, where is this going to be pointing towards, where the future of the data center is? >> So, it's a great example. So what I figured out, when I thought about this, and kind of drilled in, like what's really, what really matters here? What I realized was that what the gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we've done in the past. And it really is an appliance, okay? So, in the past, I just had a session the other day, and people were asking, well, when are you going to, when is Azure Stack going to have the latest version of the operating system? I said, no, no, no, no, no. Internals are internal, it's an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people who want to build it. So you shouldn't be concerned about all the internals. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and then you use it, just start using it. You don't care about the details of how it's all configured, you don't do the provisioning, we do all that for you. And so that's what we've done. And it turns out that that message resonates really well. Because, as you probably know, most private clouds fail. Most private clouds fail miserably. Why? And there's really two reasons. There's two flavors of failure. But one is they just never work. Now that's because, guess what, it's incredibly hard. There are so many moving pieces and, guess what, we learned that ourselves. The numbers of times we stepped on the rakes, and, like, how do you make all this work? There's a gazillion moving parts. So if any of your, you have a team, that's failed at private cloud, they're not idiots. It's super, super, super hard. So that's one level of failure. But even those teams that got it working, they ultimately failed, as well, because of lack of usage. And the reason for that is, having done all that, they then built a snowflake cloud. And then when someone said, well, how do I use this? How do I add another NIC to a VM? The team that put it together were the only ones that could answer that. Nope, there was no ecosystem around it. So, with Azure Stack, the gestalt is, like, this is for people who want to use it, not for people who want to build it. So you just plug it in, you pick a vendor, and you pick a capacity. This vendor, four notes, this vendor 12 or 16 notes. And that's it. You come in, we ask you what IP range is, how do I integrate with your identity? Within a day, it's up and running, and your users are using it, really using it. Like, that's craziness. And then, well what does it mean to use it? Like, oh, hey, how do I ad a NIC to a VM? It's Azure, so how does Azure do it? I have an entire Azure ecosystem. There's documentation, there's training, there's videos, there's conferences. You can go and put on a resume, I'd like to hire someone with Azure skills, and get someone, and then they're productive that day. Or, and here's the best part, you can put on your resume, I have Azure skills, and you knock on 10 doors, and nine of them are going to say, come talk to me. So, that was the heart of it. And, again, it goes back to your question of, like, the value, or what does a technical fellow do. It's to figure out what really matters. And then say, we're all in on that. There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of customers like, I must have my security agent on there. It's like, well, no, then you're not a good candidate. What do you mean? I say, well, look, we're not going to do this. And they say, well you'll never be able to sell to anyone in my industry. I said, no, you're wrong. They say, what do you mean, I'm wrong? I say, well, let me prove it to ya, do you own a SAN? They say, well, of course we own a SAN. I said, I know you own a SAN. Let me ask you this, a SAN is a general purpose server with a general purpose operating system. So do you put your security and managing agents on there? And they said, no, we're not allowed to. I said, right, and that's the way Azure Stack is. It's a sealed appliance. We take care of that responsibility for you. And it's worked out very, very well. >> Alright, you got me thinking. One of the things we want to do is, we want to simplify the environment. That's been the problem we've had in IT, for a long time, is it's this heterogeneous mess. Every group did their own thing. I worry a multi-cloud world has gotten us into more silos. Because, I've got lots of SAS providers, I've got multiple cloud providers, and, boy, maybe when I get to the Edge, every customer is going to have multiple Edge applications, and they're going to be different, so, you know. How do you simplify this, over time, for customers? Or do we? >> Here's the hard story, back to getting at the heart of it. Look, one of the benefits of having done this a while, is I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. You're looking at one of the biggest, earliest adopters of the Boolean cross-platform, Gooey Framework. And, every time, there is this, oh, there's multiple platforms? People say, oh, that's a problem, I want a technology that allows me to bridge all of those things. And it sound so attractive, and generates a lot of early things, and then it turned out, I was rocking with this Boolean cross-breed platform. I wrote it, and it worked on Mac's and Windows. Except, I couldn't cut and paste. I couldn't print, I couldn't do anything. And so what happens is it's so attractive, blah, blah, blah. And then you find out, and when the platforms aren't very sophisticated, the gap between what these cross-platform things do, and the platform is not so much, so it's like, eh, it's better to do this. But, over time, the platform just grows and grows and grows. So the hard message is, people should pick. People should pick. Now, one of the benefits of Azure, as a great choice, is that, with the other guys, you are locked to vendor. Right, there is exactly one provider of those API's. With Azure, you can get an implementation of Azure from Microsoft, the Azure Public Cloud. Or you can get an implementation from one of our hardware vendors, running Azure Stack. They provide that to you. Or you can get it from a service provider. So, you don't have to get, you buy into these API's. You optimize around that, but then you can still use vendor. You know, hey, what's your price for this? What's your price for that, what can you give me? With the other guys, they're going to give you whatcha give ya, and that's your deal. (Rebecca laughs) >> That's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for coming on theCUBE again. It was great talking to you. >> Oh, that was fast. (Rebecca laughs) Enjoyed it, this was great. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, stay tuned to theCUBE. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in the Palo Alto Cube studios for our special digital live event sponsored by CA Technologies. I'm here with Peter Burris, Head of Research Wikibon.com, General Manager of Research for SiliconANGLE Media. Peter, you gave the Keynote this morning along with Sudip Datta talking about analytics. Interesting connection. Dave has been around for a while but now it's more instrumental. CA's had analytics, and monitoring for a while, now it's more instrumental. That seems to be the theme we're seeing here with the research that you're representing and your insight around digital business. Some of the leading research on the topic. Your thoughts on how they connect, what should users know about the connection between data and business, CA analytics and data? >> I think two things, John, first off as I kind of mentioned number one is that more devices are going to be more instrumental to the flow of, to the information flow to the data flows are going to create business value, and that's going to increase the need for greater visibility into how each of these things work together individually, but increasingly it's not just about having individual devices or individual things up and running or having visibility into them. You have to understand how they end up interacting with each other and so the whole modern anthropology becomes more important. We need to start finding ways of improving the capability of monitoring while at the same time simplifying it is the only way that we're going to achieve the goal of these increasingly complex infrastructures that nonetheless consistently deliver the business value that the business requires and customers expect. >> It's been interesting, monitoring has been around for awhile, you can monitor this, you can monitor that, you can kind of bring it all together in a database, but as we move to the cloud and you're seeing internet or things as you pointed out, there's a real connection here and the point that I wanted to talk about is, you mentioned the internet as a computer. Okay, which involves, system software kind of thinking, Let's tease that out. I want to unpack that concept because if the internet now is the platform that everyone will be basing and reimagining their business around, how do companies need to figure this out because this is on everyone's mind because it might miss the fact that it costs a hell of a lot of cash just to move stuff from the edge to the cloud or even just architectural strategies. What's that importance of the internet as a computer? >> Well, the notion of internet scale computing has been around for quite sometime. And the folks who take that kind of systems approach to things, may of them are sitting within 50 miles of where we sit right here. In fact, most of them. So, Google looks at the internet as a computer, that it can process. Facebook sees things the same way. So, if you look at some of these big companies that are actually thinking about internet scale computing, any service, any data, anytime, anywhere, then that thinking has started to permeate, certainly Silicon Valley. And in my conversations with CIO's, they increasingly want to think the same way. What is it, what, how do I have to think about my business relative to all of the available resources that are out there so I can have my company think about gaining access to a service wherever it might be. Gaining access to data that would be relevant to my company, wherever it might be. Appropriately moving the data, minimizing the amount of data that I have to move. Moving the events to the data when necessary. So, the, this is, in many respects the architectural question in IT today. How do we think about the way we weave together all these possible resources, possible combinations into something that sustains, sustainably delivers business value in a coherent manageable, predictable way? >> It's interesting, you and I have both seen many waves of innovation going back to the mini computer mainframe days and there used to be departments called data processing and this would be departments that handle analytics and monitoring. But now we're in a new era, a modern era where everything can be instrumented which elevates the notion of a department into a holistic perspective. You brought this up in your talk during the Keynote where it said data has to permeate throughout the organization whether it's IOT edge or wherever, so how do companies move from that department mindset, oh, the department handles the data warehouse or analytics, to a much more strategic, intelligent system? >> Well, that's an interesting question, John. I think it's one of the biggest things a business, you're going to have to think about. On the one hand, our expectations, we will continue to see a department. And the reason why that is, but not in a way that's historically been thought about, one of the reasons why that is, is because the entire business is going to share claims against the capabilities of technology. Marketing's going to lay a claim to it. Sales is going to lay claim to it. Manufacturing and finance are going to lay claims to it. And those claims have to be arbitrated. They have to be negotiated. So there will be a department, a group that's responsible for ensuring that the fundamental plant, the fundamental capabilities of the business are high quality and up and running and sustained. Having said that, the way that that is manifest is going to be much faster, much more local, much more in response to customer needs which often will break down functional type barriers. And so it's going to be this interesting combination of, on the one hand for efficiency and effectiveness standpoint, we're going to sustain that notion of a group that delivers while at the same time, everybody in the business is going to be participating more clearly in establishing the outcomes and how technology achieves those outcomes. It's very dynamic world and we haven't figured out how it's all going to come together. >> Well, we're seeing some trends, now you're seeing the marketing departments and these other departments taking some of that core competence that used to be kind of outsourced to the IT departments so analytics are moving in and data science and so you're seeing the early signs of that. I think modern analytics that CA was talking about was interesting, but I want to get your thoughts on the data value piece cause this is another billion dollar question or gazillion dollar question. Where is the value in the data? And from your research in the impact of digital business, where's the value come from? And how should companies think about extracting that value? >> Well, the value, first off, when we talk about the value of data we perhaps take a little license with the concept. And by that I mean, software to a computer scientist is data. It happens to be the absolutely most structured data you can possibly have. It is data that is so tightly structured that it can actually execute. So we bring software in under that rubric of the value of data. That's one way. The data is the basis for software and how we think about the business actually having consequential actions that are differentiated, increasing the digital world. One of the most important things, ultimately, about data is that unlike virtually every other asset that I can think about, money, labor, materials, all of those different types of assets are dominated by the economics of scarcity. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. I'm not running around and walking my dog right now. I can only do one thing with my time. I may have in my mind, thinking, but I can't create value at the same moment that I'm talking to you. I mean, we can create value here, I guess. Same thing if you have a machine and the machine is applied to pull a wire of a certain diameter, it's not pulling a wire of a different diameter. So these are all assets or sources that are dominated by scarcity. Data's different because the characteristics of data, the things that make data so unique and so interesting is that the same data can be applied to a lot of things at the same time. So we're talking about an asses that can actually amplify business value if it's appropriately utilized. And I think this is one of the, on the one hand, one of the reasons why data is often regarded, it's disposable, is because, oh I can just copy it or I can just do this with it or I can do that with it. It just goes away, it's ephemeral. But on the other hand, why leading businesses and a lot of these digital native companies, but increasing the other companies are now recognizing that with data as an asset, that kind of a thinking, you can apply the same data to a lot of different pursuits at the same time and quite frankly, that's what our customers want to see. Our customers want to see their requests, their needs be matched to capabilities, but also be used to build better products in the future, be used to ensure that the quality of the services that they're getting is high. That their needs are being met, their needs are being responded to. So they want to see data being applied to all these different uses. It's an absolutely essential feature in the future of digital business. >> And you've got to monitor in order to understand it. And for the folks watching, Peter had a great description in his Keynote, go check that video out around the elements of the digital business, how it's all working together. I'll let you go look at that. My final question for you is, you mention in your Keynote, the Wikibon private, true private cloud report. One of the things that's interesting in that graph, again on the Keynote he did present the slide, it's also on Wikibon.com if you're a member of the research subscription. It shows that actually the on premise assets are super valuable and that there's going to be a decline in labor, non differentiated labor or operational labor over the next six, seven years, around 1.6 billion dollars, but it shifts. And I think this was your point. Can you just explain in a little deeper way, the importance of that statistic because what it shows is, yes, automations coming. Whether it's analytics or machine learning and what not, but the value's shifting. Can you talk about that? >> Yeah, the very nature of the work that's performed within what we today call IT operations is shifting. It always has been. So when I was running around inside an IT organization, I remember some of the most frenetic activity that I saw was tape jockeys. We don't have too many tape jockeys in the world anymore, we still have tape, but we don't have a lot of tape jockeys anymore. So the first thing it suggests is that the very nature of the IT work that's going to be performed is going to change over the next few years. It's going to change largely in response to the fact that as folks recognize the value of the data and acknowledge that the placement of data to the event is going to be crucial to achieving that event within the envelope of time that that event requires. That ultimately the slow motion of dev op, which is still a maturing, changing, not broadly adopted set of concepts will start to change the nature of the work that we perform within that shared IT organization we were talking about a second ago. But the second thing it says is that we are going to be called upon to do a lot more work within an IT organization. A digital business is utilizing technology to perform a multitude of activities and that's just going to explode over the course of the next dozen years. So we have this combination of the works going to change, the amount of work that has, that's going to be performed by this group is going to expand dramatically, which means ultimately the only way out of this is the tooling is going to improve. So we expect to see significant advances in the productivity of an individual within an IT organization to support, sustain a digital business. And that's why we start to see some of the down tick in the cost of labor within IT. It's more important, more works going to be performed, but it's pretty clear that the industries now focus on improving that tooling and simplifying the way that that tooling works together. >> And having intelligence. >> Having intelligence, but also simplifying how it works together so it becomes more coherent. That's where we're going to need to improve these new levels of productivity. >> Real quick to end this segment, quickly talk about how CA connects to this because you know, they have modern analytics, they have modern monitoring strategies, the four pillars that you talked about. How do they connect into your research that you're talking about? >> Well I think one of the biggest things that a CIO is going to have to understand over the course of the next few years and we talked about a couple of them is, that this new architecture is not fully baked yet. We don't know what the new computing model is going to look like exactly. You know, not every business is Google. So Google's got a vision of it. Amazon's got a vision of it. But not every business is of those guys. So a lot of work on what is that new computing model? A second thing is this notion of ultimately where is or how is an IT organization going to deliver value? And it's clear that you're not going to deliver value by optimizing a single resource. You're going to deliver value by looking at all of these resources holistically and understand the inner connections and the interplay of these resources and how they achieve the business outcomes. So when I think about CA, I think of two things. First off, it is a company that has been at the vanguard of understanding how IT operations has worked, is working, and will likely continue to work as it evolves. And that's an important thing for a technology company that's serving IT operations to have. The second thing is, CA's core message, CA's tech core message now is evolving from just best of breed to how these things are going to come together. So the notion of modern moddering is to improve the visibility into everything as a holistic whole going back to that notion of, it's not just one device, it's how all devices holistically come together and the moddering fabric that we put in place has to focus on that and not just the productivity of any one piece. >> It's like an early day's test lick, it only gets better as they have that headroom to grow. Peter Burris head of research at Wikibon.com here, for one-on-one conversations, part of the cloud and modern analytics for digital business. Be back with more one-on-one conversations after this short break.

(fun, relaxing music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center, in New York City, it's The Cube. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Stephan Scholl, he is the president of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> For returning to The Cube My pleasure, yeah, three years in a row, I think, or four now, yeah. >> Indeed. >> Well, we skipped a year in-between. >> That's right! Three years. Anyway, it's good to be here. >> This has been a hugely successful conference. We're hearing so much about the growth and momentum of Infor. Can you unpack this a little bit for our viewers? >> Yeah, I mean... People always forget, we only started this aggressive Cloud journey literally three years ago. When we announced at Inforum in New Orleans that we were pivoting the company to Infor industry-based CloudSuites, everybody looked at us and said, "Well, that's an interesting pivot." "Why are you doing that?" Well, as I said yesterday, we really saw a market dynamic that you see retail just getting crushed by what Amazon was doing, and it was obvious, today, but then it wasn't so obvious, but that was going to happen everywhere, and so we really got aggressive on believing we could put together a very different approach to tackling enterprise software. Everybody is so fatigued from buying from our competitors traditional, perpetual software, and then you end up modifying the hell out of it, and then you end up spending a gazillion dollars, and it takes forever, and then if it does work, you're stuck on old technology already, and you never get to the next round of evolution. So we said why don't we build CloudSuites, take the last model industry functionality that we have, put it in a Cloud, make it easy for our customers to implement it, and then we'll run it for them. And then, by the way, when the newest innovation comes up, we'll upgrade them automatically. That's what Cloud's about. So, that's where we saw that transformation happening. So in three years, we went from two percent, as I said, to 55 plus percent of our revenue. And, by the way, we're not a small company. Nobody at our size and scale has ever done that in enterprise software. So what an accomplishment. >> So a lot of large companies, some that you used to work for, are really slow. And, you know what, lot of times that's okay, 'cause IT tends to be really slow, as you move to the Cloud, and move to the situation where, "Okay, guys, new release coming!" What are your customers saying about that, how are you managing that sort of pace of change, that flywheel of Amazon, and you're now innovating on and pushing to your climate? >> Well, they're excited. And, I'll tell you, I remember standing up in Frankfurt, Germany, 18 months ago for a keynote, and said the Cloud is coming, I almost got kicked out of Germany. (laughing) They said it's not going to happen in Germany, "No, we're an engineering pedigree," "We're going to be on premise." >> "You don't understand the German market!" >> "You don't understand our marketplace!" And, we're really close friends with Andy Jassy at AWS, the CEO. The AWS guys are unbelievable, and innovative, and we said, "You know, you guys got to build" "your next data center in Frankfurt." So they put hundreds of millions of dollars investment in, built a data center. What's the fastest growing data center in Europe, right now, for them? Frankfurt! The German market, for us, our pipeline is tenfold increase from what it was a year ago. So, it's working in Germany, and it's happening on a global basis, we have, I think yesterday 75 customers from Saudi, from Dubai, from all the Middle East. Cloud is a great equalizer. And don't underestimate... I'll take luck to our advantage anytime. The luck part is, there's fatigue out there, they're exhausted, they've spent so much money over the last 20, 30 years, and never reached the promise of what they were sold then, and so now, with all the digital disruption, I think of the business competitive challenges that they have to deal with. I mean, I don't care, you could be in Wichita, Kansas building up an e-commerce website, and compete with a company in Saudi tomorrow. The barest entry in manufacturing, retail, look at government agencies, we're doing nine-figure transformations in the Cloud with public sector agencies. Again, two years ago, they would've said never going to happen. >> Rebecca: Yet the government does spend that kind of... >> Mike Rogers, the CIO, was saying to us, "Look at all the technical debt" "that we've accumulated over the years," "and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse." "If we don't bite the bullet and move now," "it's just going to take that much longer." >> That's right. And they're leap-frogging. I mean, I'm so excited, government agencies! I mean, there's even some edicts in some places where Cloud-only. I mean, this whole Gold Coast opportunity, 40 plus different applications in Australia, all going into the Cloud to handle all the complexities they have around the commonwealth games that they're trying to deal with. I mean, just huge transformations on a global basis. >> At this conference, we're hearing about so many different companies, and, as you said, government agencies, municipalalities, transforming their business models, transforming their approaches. What are some of your favorite transformation stories? >> My favorite one that we're doing is Travis Perkins. John Carter, I think you guys maybe even interviewed him last year when he was here. CEO. Old, staid distribution business, and taking a whole new fresh approach. Undoing 40 to 50 different applications, taking his entire business, putting it online. He deals with contracts... So, they're the Home Depot of the UK market, and right now, if you drive up into that car port and you want to order something, it's manual! Sticky notes, phones, dumb terminals, I need five windows, I need five roofs, I need five pieces of wood. Everything is just a scurry. He wants to put it on, when you drive up next year, you're on an iPad, what would you like? Oh, by the way, you want to make a custom order on that window frame? You want to make green, yellow, red, you want to order different tiles of roof styling? Custom orders is the future! You, as a contractor, walking into that organization, want to make a custom order. That, today, is very complicated for a company like that to handle. So, the future is about undoing all that, embracing the custom order process, giving you a really unique, touchless buying process, where it's all on an iPad, it's all automated. You know what? Telling you here's your five new windows, here's a new frame want on it, and, by the way, you're going to get it in five days, and three hours, and 21 minutes. Deliver it to your door. And, by the way, these guys are huge. They're one of the biggest distribution companies in all of the United Kingdom, and so that's one of my favorite stories. >> Can we go over some of the metrics that you've been sharing. I know it's somewhat repetitive, but I'd like to get it on-record. There's 55%, 84, 88, over 1100, 3x, 60%, maybe start with the 60%. I think it's bookings grown, right? >> That's right, yeah. License sales growth last year alone. And, you know what, I looked at... You know, I see it, Paul always keeps me honest, but I think I can say it anyways, which is, I looked at everybody else. You look at the... I don't want you to mention any competitors' names, but you look at the top five competitors that we have, we grew faster than they did last year on sales of CloudSuite. >> Dave: Okay, so that's 60% bookings growth on Cloud. >> Correct. That's right. Yeah, I mean, when you think of our competitors, I saw 40s, I saw some 30s, I saw maybe 52 at the next one down. So, people don't think of us that way, so we were, at the enterprise scale, the fastest-growing Cloud company in the world. >> Okay, and then, 3x, that's 3x the number of customers who bought multiple products, is that correct? >> Correct. That's exactly right. So think about that transformation. They used to buy from us one product, feature-function rich, great, but now they're buying five products, eight products from us. So 3x increase, year over year, already happening. >> Okay, and then there was 1100 plus, is Go-Lives. >> People always ask us, "You're selling stuff." "Are they using it, is it working?" So you got to follow up with delivery, so we're spending a ton of money on certification, training, and ablement, look at the SI community, look at the... Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, and Grand Thornton. Four of the major SIs in the world, that weren't here last year, are all here this year. Platinum sponsors. So, delivery on Go Lives, the SI community is embracing us, helping us, I mean, I can't do hundred million dollar transformations on my own with these customers. I need Accenture, I need Deloitte. Look at Koch! Koch's going to be a massive transformation for financials, human-capital management, and so I've got Accenture and Deloitte helping us, taking a hundred plus billion dollar company on those two systems. >> And then 84, 88, is number of... >> Live customers, I'm sorry, total customers that we have in the Cloud. >> Cloud customers, okay, not total customers. >> No, no, we have 90 thousand plus customers, and then 84, 85 hundred of them are Cloud-based customers. >> You got a ways to go, then, to convert some of those customers. >> Well, that's our opportunity, that's exactly right. >> And then 55% of revenue came from the Cloud, obviously driven by the Cloud bookings growth. >> That's right. Exactly. So, I mean, just the acceleration, I mean, as I said, when we started this thing in New Orleans, two or three percent. Now, tipping point, revenue, I mean, it's one thing to sell software, but to actually turn it into revenue? Nobody at an enterprise scale has done 2% to 55% at our size. Lots of companies in the hundred million dollar range, small companies, you know, if we were a stand-alone Cloud company, we'd be one of the largest Cloud companies in the world. >> So the narrative from Oracle, I wonder if you can comment on this, is that the core of enterprise apps has not moved to the Cloud, and we, Oracle, are the guys to move it there, 'cause we are the only ones with that end-to-end Cloud on prem to Cloud strategy. And most companies can't put core apps, enterprise apps in the Cloud, especially on Amazon. So, what do you say to that? >> Well, it's 'cause they don't have the applications to do that. Oracle doesn't have the application horsepower. They don't have industry-based application suites. If you think of what fusion is, it's a mishmash of all the applications that they bought. There's no industry capability. >> Dave: It's horizontal, is what you're saying. >> It's horizontal. Oracle is fighting a battle against Amazon, they declared war against AWS. I'm glad they're doing that, go ahead! I mean, I don't know how you're going to do that, but they want to fight the infrastructure game. For us, infrastructure is commoditized. We're fighting the business applications layer game, and so, when you look at SAP or Oracle or anybody else, they have never done what we've done in our heritage, which is take key critical mission functionality for aerospace and defense, or automotive, we have the last mile functionality. I mean, I have companies like Ferrari, on of the most complicated companies, we've talked about those guys for years, no modifications! BAE, over in the UK, building the F-35 fighter jets and the Typhoon war planes. It doesn't get any more complicated than building an F-35 fighter jet. No modifications in their software, that they have with us. You can only build Cloud-based solutions if you don't modify the software. Oracle doesn't have that. Never had it. They're not a manufacturing pedigreed organization. SAP's probably more analogous to that, but even for SAP, they only have one complete big product sect covering retail, distribution, finance, it's the same piece of software they send to a bank, that they send to a retailer, that they send to a manufacturer. We don't do that. That's been our core forever. >> So your dogma is no custom mods, because you're basically saying you can't succeed in the Cloud with custom mods. >> Yeah. I mean, we have an extensive ability platform to do some neat things if you need to do that, but generally speaking, otherwise it's just lipstick on the pig if you're running modified applications. That's called hosting, and that's what these guys are largely doing. >> You know, a lot of people count hosting as Cloud. >> That's the game they're playing, right? >> They throw everything in the Cloud kitchen sink. >> That's right. >> Okay. >> And as we've talked with you before, we've spent billions... We all are R&D's at the application layer. We do some work in the integration layer, and so on, but most of our money is spent in the last mile, which, Oracle and SAP, they're all focused on HANA and infrastructure, and system speed, and performance, and all the stuff that we view as absolutely being commoditized. >> But that's really attractive to the SIs, the fact that they don't go that last mile, so why is it that the SIs are suddenly sort of coming to Infor? >> Well, you know what, because they finally see there is a lot of revenue still on the line in terms of change management, business-process re-engineering. You take a company like Travis Perkins, change their entire model of doing business. There isn't just modification revenue, or integration revenue, there is huge dollars to be had on change management, taking the company to CEO John Carter by the hand, and saying, "Here's how you're going to transform" "your entire business process." That more than makes up in many cases high-value dollars than focused on changing a widget from green to yellow. >> And it's right in the wheelhouse of these big consultancies. >> And they're making good money on digital transformation, so what are the digital use cases? Look at Accenture, they're did a great job. I think 20 plus percent of their business now is all coming from digital. That didn't exist three, four years ago. >> Well, you have a lot of historical experience from your Oracle days of working with those large SIs, they were critical, but they were doing different type of work then, and is it your premise that a lot of that's going away and that's shifting toward. >> The voice of the customer is everything, and it may take time, you can snow a customer once, which we've already done in this industry of software. We told them buy generic-based software, Oracle or SAP, modify it with an SI, take five years, implement it for a hundred million dollars, get stuck on this platform, and if you're lucky, maybe upgrade in ten years. Whoever does that today, as a playbook, as a customer, and if an SI can sell that, I'm not buying that. You think any customers I know today are buying that vision? I don't think so. >> Dave: Right there with the outsourcing business. >> Another thing that's come out of this conference is attention to the Brooklyn Nets deal. Can you talk a little big about it, it's very cool. >> I love those guys. >> Dave: We're from Boston, we love the Brooklyn Nets, too. >> Rebecca: They can play us anytime. Every day. >> Dave: For those draft picks. >> Bread on those guys. You know what it is. And Shaun, the GM, the energy... I use that a lot with my own guys. Brooklyn grit. And they're willing to look and upturn every aspect of the game to be more competitive. And so, we're in there with our technology, looking at every facet, what are they eating? What's the EQ stuff? Emotional occlusion. How's that team collaboration coming together? And then mapping it to... They have the best 3-D cameras on the court, so put positioning, and how are they aligning to each other? Who's doing the front guard in terms of holding the next person back so they can have enough room to do a three-point shot. Where should the three-point shot come from? So, taking all the EQ stuff, the IQ stuff, the performance, the teamwork, putting it all into a recipe for success. These guys are, I'm going to predict it here, these guys are going to rock it next couple years as a team. >> But it's not just what goes on in the court, too, it's also about fan engagement, too. >> All that. Well, fair enough, I get all excited about just making them a much better team, but the whole fan experience, walking into a place knowing that if I get up now, the washroom line isn't 15 miles long, and at the cash line for a beer isn't going to take me 20 minutes, that I'm on my app, you actually have all the information and sensors in place to know that, hey, right now's a great time, aisle number four, queue number three, is a one-minute wait for a beer, go. Or have runners, everything's on your phone, they don't do enough service. So there's a huge revenue opportunity along with it, from a business point of view, but I would also say is a customer service element. How many times have we sat in a game and go, "I'm not getting up there." (laughing) Unless you're sitting in the VIP area, well, there's revenue to be had all over the place. >> Yeah, they're missing out on our beer money, yeah. >> It's ways for a stadium services, which are essentially a liquor distribution system. >> Exactly right. But to do that, you got to connect point of sales systems, you got to connect a lot of components, centers in the bathroom, I mean you got to do a lot of work, so we're going to create the fan experience of the future with them. And preferences, the fact that they that when you walk in past the door with your app and if you have Brooklyn Nets app, that we know who your favorite player is, and you get a little text that says, Hey, you know what, 10% discount on the next shirt from your favorite player. Things like that. Making a personal connection with you about what you like is going to change the game. And that's happening everywhere. In retail... Everybody wants to have a one-to-one relationship. You want to order your Nike shoes online with a green lace and a red lace on the right, Nike allows you to do that. You want to order a shirt that they'll make for you with the different emblems on it and different technology to it, those are things they're doing, too. So, a very one-to-one relationship. >> Well, it's data, it's more than data, it's insights, and you guys are, everybody's a data company, but you're really becoming a data and insight-oriented company. Did you kind of stumble into that, or is this part of the grand plan six years ago, or, how'd you get here? >> Listen, this whole... I mean, to do Cloud-based solutions by industry is not just to solve for applications going from infrastructure on-premise to off-premise. What does it allow you to do? Well, if you're in AWS, I can run ten thousand core products... I can run a report in ten minutes with AWS that would take you a week, around sales information, customer information. Look at all the Netflix content. You log in on Netflix, "Suggestions for You". It's actually pretty accurate, isn't it? >> Scarily accurate, sometimes, yes. >> It's pretty smart what goes into the algorithm that looks at your past. Unfortunately, I log into my kid's section, and it has my name on it and I get all these wonderful recommendations for kids. But that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Customers need that. It's about real-time, it's not looking backwards anymore, it's about real-time decisioning, and analytics, and artificial intelligence, AI is the future, for sure. >> So more, more on the future, this is really fun, listening to you talk, because you are the president, and you have a great view of what's going on. What will we be talking about next year, at this time. Well, it won't be quite this time, it will be September, but what do you think? >> I think what you're going to see is massive global organizations up on stage, like the ones I mentioned, Travis Perkins, a Safeway, a Gold Coast, a Hertz. Hertz is under attack as a company. The entry point into the rental car business was very very hard. Who's going to go buy 800 thousand cars and get in the rental business, open ten thousand centers? You don't need to do that anymore today! >> Dave: Software! >> It's called software, the application business, so their business model is under attack. We're feverishly working with their CEO and their executive team and their board on redefining the future of Hertz. So, you're going to see here, next year, the conversation with a company like Hertz rebounding and growing and being successful, and... The best defense is a good offense, so they're on the offensive! They're going to use their size, their scale. You look at the retailers, I mean, I love the TAL story, and they may make one out of every six shirts. Amazon puts the same shirt online that they sell for $39.99, TAL's trying to sell for $89.99. They're saying enough of that. They built these beautiful analyzers, sensors, where you walk into this little room, and they do a sensor of a hundred different parts of your body, So they're going to get the perfect shirt for you. So, it's an experience center. So you walk into this little center, name's escaping me now, but they're going to take all the measurements, like a professional Italian tailor would do, you walk in, it's all automatic, you come out of there, they know all the components of your body, which is a good thing and a bad thing, sometimes, right, (laughing) they'll know it all, and then you go to this beautiful rack and you're going to pick what color do you want. Do you want a different color? So everything is moving to custom, and you'll pay more for that. Wouldn't you pay for a customized shirt that fits your body perfectly, rather than an off-the-rack kind of shirt at $89.99? That's how you compete with the generic-based e-commerce plays that are out there. That use case of TAL is going to happen in every facet. DSW, the DSW ones, these experience centers, the shoeless aisles, that whole experience. You walking in as... The most loyal women shoppers are DSW with their applications, right. >> Rebecca: (laughs) Yes, yes. >> And how many times have you tried a shoe on that doesn't fit properly, or it's not the one you want, or they don't have your size, or you want to make some configurations to it. You got one, too! >> Ashley came by and gave me this, 'cause I love DSW. >> I mean, they're what, one of the biggest shoe companies in the world not standing still, and Ashley is transforming, they went live on financials in like 90 days in the Cloud? Which for them, that kind of innovation happening that fast is unbelievable. So next year, the whole customer experience side is going to be revolutionary for these kinds of exciting organizations. So, rather than cowering from this digital transformation, they're embracing it. We're going to be the engine of digital transformation for them. I get so excited to have major corporations completely disrupting themselves to change their market for themselves moving forward. >> What is the Koch investment meant to you guys, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, obviously, we hear two billion dollars, and blah, blah, blah, but can you go a little deeper for us? >> I mean, forget all the money stuff, for a minute, just the fact that we're part of a company that is, went from 40 million when Charles Koch started, taking over from his family, and went to 100 plus billion. Think about that innovation. Think about the horsepower, the culture, the aggressiveness, the tenacity, the will to win. We already had that. To combine that with their sheer size and scale is something that is exciting for me, one. Two is they view technology as the next big chapter for them. I mean, again, not resting on your laurels, I'm already 100 billion, they want to grow to 150, 200 billion, and they see technology as the root to getting there. Automating their plants, connecting all their components of their employees, gain the right employees to the right place, so workforce management, all the HR stuff that we're doing on transformation, the financials, getting a global consolidated view across 100 billion dollar business on our systems. That's transformation! That's big, big business for us, and what a great reference to have! A guy like Steve Fellmeier up yesterday, he'll be up here next year talking about how he's using us to transform their business. There's not many 100 billion dollar companies around, right, so what a great reference point for us to have them as a customer, and as a proved point of success. >> Well, we'll look forward to that in September, and seeing you back here next year, too. >> Look forward to it. >> Stephan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, appreciate it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that is it for us and The Cube at Inforum 2017. See you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE covering DotNext Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the district everybody, I'm Dave Allante with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we Extract the Signal from the Noise. We're here, this is day two of the Nutanix.NEXTConf, #NEXTConf, Chris Hsu is here, sorry Calvin Hsu is here, VP of Product Marketing at Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, nice to be here. >> So, you're up on stage earlier today right? A lot of good action here at the show. Talk about Citrix, and what you guys are doing here. >> Yeah, so I think Citrix, Nutanix, we've had a partnership going back for quite awhile. I think what really brought us together were customers that were actually trying to solve this issue, of how do I implement VDI, and how do I do this better right, there has to be a better way. And it's funny, we were just talking about chatting a little bit before about how many different infrastructure pieces and how many different components there are to learn in order to do VDI, and that was one of the things that always kind of stood as a barrier to adoption in some of the early days, going back, I don't know several years now, and they would say, well, you got to have, be an expert in networking, you got to be an expert in storage, you got to know all the server side infrastructure, the virtualization that goes with it, and then you got to also know the desktops, and the app parts of it, and how to manage all that. And in my experience it was all that technical knowledge, but it was also, it was also the people right? So, you also had to bring those people to the table, have one VDI project, go in and talk to a customer, and we're going to do a pilot for 200 people to start, and there'd be 20 people in the room. Because everybody had different areas of responsibility. And so as Nutanix is involved, and the whole idea of hyper-conversion, and HDI that's come around, that's really been some of the basis of where VDI is kind of getting that second booster of, in it's life cycle here, where they're realizing that it could just be a few people that are responsible for that HDI infrastructure, can deploy the VDI, and now they have a more simple reliable way of implementing that solution so (mumbles). >> I mean, that's kind of where, even when I go back to the converged infrastructure world that's, VDI was the one like foothold use case with Vblock's in the early days, and the HPE stuff, or HP then, and you know I have to say, I have to ask both of you guys, because you know this business really well, and you're obviously a VDI expert but, when you talk to customers, they get really excited about VDI, they're like, "Hey, this is a great use case, "we're going to, we're doing VDI, VDI, VDI, "it was a big project effort." When you talk to the analysts they're like, "Uhhh, VDI is so boring." What is it about VDI that there's this bifurcated opinion base right? Analysts uhhhh, okay, but customers eat it up. What's going on, what...? Unpack that for us. >> Well, I mean analysts don't necessarily feel the day-to-day pain of managing a desktop right? That's what it is right, so for them it's a-- >> Well said. >> It's the truth. Well, actually I know, I know some analysts that actually did that job, and so they're the ones that are still excited about it right? But in general, like once you get past the idea of that consulting a client on the complexities, and how do you choose a vendor and, and then it comes down to a few basic things, it's which one's going to deliver the best employee experience with the solution, which one's going to be the best operationally to manage and then sort of their job is done. But then, from a IT Admin perspective it's like they're still, every day they're managing new application update, the new desktop image, and it doesn't end right? And that's dozens and dozens of hours out of every week, every month, that you spend. >> Alright let's hear from the analyst. >> Dave, it was called VDI fatigue. Every year was the year of VDI you know. I think we've gotten beyond that, because I tell you, from my viewpoint, it was wait. It was this mess of a stack, and we're going to fix that. Oh wait, now storage is the mess, now flash is going to solve that, oh wait, mobile adoption is you know, the barrier, yet the opportunity, how do we modernize our applications, the changing workforce, mobile workforce. There were always the next, the next, the next, the next, the next thing and, it reminds me of our conversations with (mumbles) you know, it was like we're never finished, and a lot of it was, it was this big category of you know, you talk about the user experience, is I think, what Citrix is focused on, and how do we make that simpler and you know, so many analysts... The other thing from an analyst is, most analysts focus on a piece of it, and this is very different. I know some analysts focus on like, user experience, and let's look at the application, that's probably closer to where VDI is then, right, if you ask the storage guys they're like ah, VDI. If you ask the desktop people they're like wait, my place is fine so, it's that, it was a really complicated problem, but it's very different today, than it was, and I have to think with Nutanix it is, must've changed in the last five years. >> Absolutely, and well, I think the other thing is that's funny is if you take it back to like 2008 right? Analysts called the VDI game really early, so it's like you're saying every year was the VDI. Before anybody was deploying it in any sort of size, they were already saying it's a, X gazillion billion dollar market and that, and it, I think it's taken awhile for the customers... The customers are still just trying to dealing with some very basic desktop management issues today, and they're probably lagging behind the industry and analysts by three to five years I'd say, right? But what I hear now is, Windows 10 is coming around the horizon, how am I going to manage Windows 10 updates? I've got an Office 365 deployment project on my hands, how am I going to get this all out, how am I going to get the functionality that every one of my end users needs? And it comes around and it's like VDI is a great answer for that, it's a great way to solve that issue. >> Calvin, one of the things that we hear from new (mumbles) customers I mean, they love that kind of one-click simplicity, one-click update, and I hear about you know, Windows 10 is like the roll-out of the next thing, and where things break. How are Citrix and Nutanix working together to solve some of these challenges? >> Yeah, I think that approach of one-click, the automation you know, both the blue-printing types of technology is what we're pulling together. All that sort of automation is really important for, for this type of environment. You know I think the, we're both willing to pull together solutions that really then, drive that simplicity for, for both the infrastructure and the management, ongoing of that solution. It's like for example, we're working together on, work on the district's workspace appliance right? And that's, for us it's not a product name that's really a program, it's a way of defining HCI infrastructure like Nutanix and they're jumping on board with this. To be able to point that thing at the Citrix Cloud, and then download all the resources that it needs in order to run a Citrix workload on it. So it's a very automated way of getting stood up, so that not only is it deployment of the infrastructure, automated and simple, but placing that workload on it, and getting it set to manage, and then even running it and operating it is more like running and operating a Cloud service than it is even operating a local infrastructure for it. >> One of the things that David Floyer from Wikibon, has done a lot of analysis saying, if we can get to basically a single-managed entity is where he calls it, so I can have the entire thing comes out, not just the infrastructure, but all the way through the stack. Not only does that really help your deployment, but the overall kind of time-to-value, customer experience is just tremendously improved, tell us how you're helping to kind of reach that vision. >> Yeah, well I think it's time-to-value, but it's also making VDI accessible to more customers right, and more segments of the market. The types of things that VDI solves, security, manageability, those aren't just enterprise problems right? Even midsize companies, they have security concerns, and for them it's actually probably even more dramatic, like they have a breach there, and it's catastrophic for the company, not just, you know we're delayed by a few hours. And so you know, having that simplicity, and then making that whole thing easier to deploy, and faster, it's not just easier to deploy, but on day two, it's easier to manage ongoing. Those things are getting into tension again. >> So for years I remember in the Citrix, Synergy, a bunch of VMware, VM world's, talked to customers, and it was always a two-horse race between those two companies, and Citrix was like Secretariat, and VMware was like Devil His Due. You've probably never heard of Devil His Due. Pretty good horse but not Secretariat, and you guys, Citrix was the dominant player in that marketplace. What's the competitive situation today? It seems like VMware has made some acquisitions, has maybe caught up, maybe has some advantages, what, how do you see them as a competitor? >> I, so I think where Citrix is, I think that what really happens in the competitors space now is that it becomes less about VDI, versus VDI, and like what features are in each one. Although I could talk for hours, I think there's still a bunch of differentiation in there. You know earlier talking about user experience, I think the way we're looking at this market, and what's happening to it right now, is less about sort of user experience in the sense of a classic protocol versus protocol sense, in a technical sense, and more about, and I'll use the term more and more often about employee experience, alright, so it's not just what is the performance of my virtual desktop when I'm on x-y-z device, over a certain network. It is what happens that first time I give an employee a resource, or a virtual desktop, or a mobile application, or access to a SAS application, or an internally-hosted Web application through a virtual browser, and they go in and they, they want to get work done right? So the experience of that employee is now, not just one of these technologies, it is what we refer to as workspace technology. It's everything I need from the applications, to the files that I want to use, to the workflows that I want to kick off, and I think that will be their new area of differentiation, and again, that's where we want to move very far for. >> Calvin, what should we be expecting to see from Citrix and Nutanix going for a long partnership, and how does it improve even more for customers? >> I think you know, the stuff that Nutanix has announced here, with the whole Hybrid Cloud strategy, I think that very much is in alignment with our philosophy on Hybrid Cloud approaches for customers. So I would expect to see a lot more in that collaboration area. There's lots more that we can do on the NetScaler side of the business for networking, and enabling the reliability of a lot of these network connections as people become, you know I love that concept of the core, the distributing the Edge Cloud right, and all of that's going to need interconnectivity, and security and reliability. And you know, more of the same on making VDI simpler for, for all customers of all sizes. I think we're just at the cusp of you know we've got this automation plan going in, we're creating the workspace appliance in its simplicity there. I think there's a lot more we can do, again, from day two perspective operationally, as I keep going and I'm growing this thing, and I'm managing my images, and I'm managing applications, and growing the infrastructure, increasing performance, taking on different types of workloads, there's lots more we can do in that area. >> What is the all Citrix Stack Workplace Appliance? >> Right, so that is really the Nutanix has announced support for XenServer, and for us, you know XenServer, we've really done a transformation of that technology over the last couple years, where we've taken what was a general platform virtualization solution, and we've really specifically targeted at our workloads. At XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, and making it the best virtualization platform for our, for our solutions. Why do we do that? We do that because there's going to be certain things that we need out of that layer from an innovation standpoint whether it's supporting graphics, which we were the first to do, across all the major ship vendors, virtual GPUs, coming up with new security paradigms like being able to do deep Hypervisor Introspection, and identify day one malware attacks before they, even infect any of the machines. You know, those sorts of innovations become really important that we can drive, and having control over XenServer we're able to do that. So through the partnership with Nutanix, and getting their support on that as well, then all the joint Nutanix and Citrix customers could take advantage of that innovation. So now they also have the obviously at their disposal, everything that Nutanix is putting into HV, everything we're putting into XenServer, and being able to manage it that way. So, in the workspace appliance, sort of reference guide for building this, one of the things we focus on is the XenServer component of it, and being able to have that innovation coming from Citrix as part of that solution. >> Great. Calvin, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate your time, and your insights. >> Thank you, yeah it's good to be here. >> Good to see you. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from DotNext, #NEXTConf, this is theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension, an augmentation, a community-focused event of their DevNet community, which is a Cisco developer community, now out in the wild. Our next guest is Steven Pousty, lead developer and evangelist at Red Hat, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host Peter Burris. Steven, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you very much. It's exciting to be here. >> Great to have you on. We were just talking before on camera, getting all animated like, "Hey, turn the cameras on. "We got to get this conversation." We're talking about open source and really looking at some of the trends, but more importantly, the impact. >> Steven: Right. >> Also, we've had you guys on many times on theCUBE. We covered Red Hat Summit, Jim Whitehurst. So, abstractions layers in software, open source ecosystems, you have a background in nature. >> Steven: Yeah. I- >> And ecosystems, literally. >> Steven: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually I have my PhD in ecology. I'm actually a conservation biologist by training, but IT and computer programming pays the bills a lot better than-- >> Hey, anthropologists and ecologists do very well in the tech world, believe it or not. >> Steven: Yeah, I love big data. >> Peter: And philosophers. >> Yeah, and philosophers. Yeah, with all that logic and the ontologies and all that. >> Ontologies and symbiotics. >> Steven: Yep, yep. >> John: Okay, so I got to ask you, obviously Red Hat has been really the poster child for open source companies going public. We've heard since over the past generation, "The Red Hat of blank, The Red Hat of," and that got played. Certainly we downplayed that. People were trying to call Cloudera the Red Hat of Hadoop (mumbles) realizing that that's never going to happen. You were a once in a generational company, but Red Hat was a tier two company back in those days. Now, open source is certainly tier one software across the board, and I think this event at Cisco kind of amplifies that. Look at it, open source has gone a whole nother generation. A lot of young kids coming in. It's tier one software. The business model is open source. Four new companies just went public recently. So, done deal. >> Right, I mean, I think if you look in the technology ecosystem as a whole, if you don't start with open source you either have some incredibly magic sauce that no one else has or you're done. You couldn't even look at the movies... The arch enemy when I was growing up in software was Microsoft of open source, right? If you look at them now with Satya, they've made great strides to be part of the open source ecosystem at a real level, not like just lip service like they used to do sometimes. Like when I interact with some of our Microsoft partners, you can tell that there's a different change and they really believe in that open source-- >> Microsoft used to be known as lip service and vaporware and they used to kind of freeze the market with their monopoly power as some would say, but more recently they've... Back in the old days, Linux was a cancer. Steve Ballmer said, "Linux is the cancer to the industry." >> Steven: And so-- >> John: Now they're doing Linux with .NET. >> And so at the Red Hat Summit just recently I did the Microsoft keynote, I was the Red Hat person on the Microsoft keynote, and we demonstrated .NET Core running in OpenShift on Linux machines, we demonstrated SQL Server running in containers on OpenShift, and then for the end we showed some of the community work, because both of us are involved in Kubernetes. We actually showed a Windows container spinning up IIS being orchestrated from a Linux OpenShift. So, it was actually the Linux server, the Linux OpenShift server, was talking to Windows containers and spinning up Windows containers on the fly. So, I never thought that would've happened. So, it's definitely a sea change. >> And boy was that partly the sea change, we can encapsulate it, is that we used to think in terms of winners and losers in the tech industry, and now it's big winners and less big winners, but the question is how is, I think the realization Microsoft had, is that open source does not demarcate winners from losers. It demarcates, or rather suggests, a new way of thinking about how software gets developed, how software gets integrated and packaged, and ultimately how software gets diffused. So, talk a little bit about this notion of the new world of winners and winners and how this thing moves together, almost in an ecosystem type of way, so that the capabilities overall improve over time, because that's really where we're going is digital business being able to do more for customers. >> Right, and I think that's one of the things that you're seeing coming out from the open source world now is it's becoming less and less about I have this technology versus this is the technology, this open source technology, that we use to help solve your business problems. I gave a talk about this a couple times. There's a concept in ecology called, now I'm blocking on the word, but you probably came across it in school, probably even elementary school. It's the idea that you have bare earth, and then a few plants show up and they start breaking it up, and those plants create a condition where new trees come in, and then it just keeps going and going and going, and then you finally have a rainforest at the end, right? >> Peter: Diversity? >> No, it's-- >> Anyway, we don't want to put you out. >> Yeah, I'm stuck on the word and I can't remember-- >> Here's an ecology question. I saw a Facebook thing where in Yellowstone National Park they introduced four wolves to the ecosystem, and all of a sudden the rivers are no longer wide, they're tighter, there's pools. So four wolves create dynamics. So there's a coexistence, but there's still wolves. >> Right, and so the-- >> John: Who's the wolves in the industry? >> See, that's the thing, it's not that. Just because there are wolves in the industry doesn't mean that they control the entire ecosystem. So I think what I say at the end of this talk is there is no right or wrong about where you are in the ecosystem or in your evolution as an ecosystem, right? There is what is right for your business problem. So, we have this in our, especially in the United States, we have this idea of you're either the winner in this space, you're the cloud solution and you're the winner, or you're not, you're nothing. It's like the Talladega Nights, "If you're not first, you're last!" >> He runs around in his underwear. That's your outcome if you have that strategy. >> Great strategy. >> It was such a good movie. But so the point that I was trying to make in this talk is there's lots of different... So like with bird species, when they need to share a tree, there can be six different species all in the same tree, and what they do is what's called niche differentiation. That means, "Oh, I'm going to specialize "in the tops of the trees "and I'm going to only eat this type of caterpillar." And the one on the bottom says, "I specialize on beetles and I do this." And I think what you're seeing with the open source stuff is all these things can coexist. Like GNOME versus KDE. Everybody was claiming GNOME or KDE was the winner for forever. They're still around for forever. So, what I think with this cloud software as well where everybody is like, "Oh, this is the one winning," or this is the, there's a whole host of places for them all to live, and with open source I think things just live forever. >> John: What's your ecosystem analogy that coexistence is actually a better philosophy looking at the big picture than some dominant wolf or whatever. >> That's right, it's the diversity, it's the mutualism, it's the coevolution, it's the right diversity. Like a desert is actually a beautiful place if you go to it. Like we like to pick on the desert, but if you actually spend time in the desert it's gorgeous. There's nothing wrong with the desert. So, if you're some company who doesn't need Kubernetes and all the other pieces in this huge cloud environment, don't feel like that's something you have to take on. >> Peter: But they are the desert. >> That's right, but they are the desert. But, all my PhD research was in the desert, and I used to hate it, because I started this little rolly polly in the desert, and by the time I left I was like, "Oh, I miss the desert when I don't have it." >> John: The sunrises are beautiful. >> Sunrises are beautiful. You can see forever. If you actually pay attention to the small things... All I'm trying to point out is people live in Kansas, people live in New York, people live all over, and they usually find where they live, unless it's some disgusting dump, they say this is a beautiful-- >> Peter: They find beauty in it. >> Yeah, and I think it shouldn't necessarily be everybody has to get to the same place and use all the same technology. There's technology reasons for everything. >> So, I want to pick up on that concept. So the industry used to be pretty much structured around asset specificity. This asset does this for you. As we move more to a software orientation that notion of asset specificity starts to blend away. I think that's one of the seminal features of digital business and digital business transformation is the reduction of asset specificity, but it does mean that increasingly we need to focus on what I'll call value specificity, that we're moving away from the asset being the dominant determinant of structure and how you do things to the value that's being generated and the value that's being presented in any number of different fashions, and that becomes what dictates or describes who you are, what you do, both as an individual, also as a company, as well as a piece of software data. So talk a bit about kind of this notion of niche specialization being more tied to the value that you create as opposed to the asset that you bring. >> That's right, and we're seeing this a lot with our customers, who... You know, OpenShift is based off of Kubernetes and Docker and all that stuff, and containers, and so what we're seeing is a lot of companies come to us and say, "Well, I want to use OpenShift for this. "I want to use OpenShift for that." It's no more that we go to customers and say, "Here's OpenShift and you will use it "for purposes X, Y, and Z." What it is is well, that IT group might say well I've got three different business groups that I have to produce stuff for them that they can use. And they'll say, "Can I use Kubernetes for this? "Can I use, oh, I can't? "Well, then I'll get something else for this, or can we adapt-- >> Or complement it. >> Yeah, it's about creating value for the business unit, and it's becoming more and more that now. I think it's an evolution that we've seen, again, this evolution of stuff with the shadow IT and all that stuff. It became less about you're some sort of specialized high priest with this special asset that only you know how to control, I know how to do GIS software, I know how to do big data, no, what value do you produce for me? I don't care that you can buy these kinds of servers and provision them. If I can't use them, what does that do for me, right? So I think we see that at Red Hat a lot where we were the enterprise Linux company, and I think our leaders have done a really good job of saying, "Yeah, that's a good place "where the puck is right now, "but that's not where the puck is staying. "It's moving towards value, "it's moving towards integrated solutions." Go ahead. >> Let me extend this a little bit. So one of the things that we've observed within (mumbles) SiliconAngle, and we've talked to some other people today specifically about this, was the idea that open source has done a really good job of looking at a thing, a convention, that's well defined and well established and then building an open source variant of it. Open source has not been as successful, for example, in the big data world, where the use case or the definition of where we're going is amorphous. Instead, a lot of open source development ends up looking at each other saying, "Well, I'll fix your problem and you'll fix my problem, kind of. Nothing wrong with that, but the vision of where the industry is going to go. How are different companies, what will be open source leadership at redefining where this industry goes so that the open source developers can both be free to do what they need to do, create value as they need to, but at the same time, share a common understanding of where this ends up? >> So I think this goes back to what you were talking about with value, right? So I think what ends up... I'll use the example of big data. So I did a lot of statistical analysis for my PhD, and back then you used SAS or S-PLUS, both proprietary solutions. I think what has caused some of the explosion in big data is that you had these data scientists, the statisticians, intermingling, fertilizing with the computer science people who were handling these other really big problems. So what comes out of that, this is that margin thing again, right? You have statistics and-- >> Peter: Diversity and interesting things happen in the margin. >> At the margin. So what you have is these two groups come together, and suddenly you have the computer science people saying, "Oh, well I know a lot about algorithms "and I'm going to help you figure out "how to get value of what... "You're trying to solve this statistical algorithm, "I'm going to help you build distributed software that does that and that's where we get that happening. >> So the collaboration at the edge, the fringe, the lunatic fringe, or whatever you want to call it, the margin, is where the innovation is. >> I think that's where the innovation is because that helps avoid the navel gazing, right? Like, "Oh, I'm looking at what you exactly built, "and I'm going to build a slight variation on it." Well no, I actually need some, when you bring other disciplines in they say, "Well, this is the problem I'm going to solve," and the computer science person or the other side will say, "Well, that sounds "kind of like this thing, but let's try," and then suddenly new ideas come up and new ways to handle things. So I think, again, switching to value rather than what technology am I going to build is what's going to actually drive like, we need something to handle our big data. That's what's going to drive the vision. So you see in the big data world you see Spark, you see Zeppelin, you see all these different things competing, but what they're all doing is trying to drive how do I analyze big data efficiently? So you get some competing solutions. Then over time I think that's the vision that they're driving. >> I got to ask you, so like naval gazers is one dimension, but also there's the rearranging the deck chairs, like someone says, "Let's move things around "and magic will happen." Well you're pushing a whole nother concept, which I think is legit, which is as you put people together it might be uncomfortable, but then innovation can come out of it. Okay, so here's the ways. Computer and science and cloud computing, all that great stuff is happening, compute, storage, algorithm, etc., data, now society. So now society has issues, because what's the societal impact? These are first generation problems that we're facing, which side of the street does the cards drive on? Who gets hit first? They have to make these decisions. You see all these new issues, from even younger kids, cyber bullying, online behavior, across the board, societal impact. We are those margins. >> So I think for me tools... I thought about this a lot, right, because in the college I was kind of a tools person, and I think tools are value neutral. Any tool can be used for good or for bad. So, what we're doing right now in the open source world is develop, and in IT in general, is developing new tools, and what usually ends up happening is society develops norms after the tools have been created. In some ways, I think... I some ways, I kind of... It's a hard one. This is a much longer discussion and probably would involve some sort of alcoholic liquid or something to draw it out. >> It's a double edged sword, or tool, depending on how you look at it. We got to see it first before you can problem solve it. >> But the problem is-- >> You can't problem solve vapor. >> That's right, but on the other hand, sometimes you can see if you stopped and aren't so enamored with the latest and greatest tool without thinking about like, "Oh, well what are actually the implications of it?" I was going to say, I think the Europeans do a little bit of a better job of putting a little bit of foresight into tools when they come out saying, "Hold on, let's take a look at this." >> John: At the impact? >> Yeah, at the impact. >> So let me add one more thing to the conversation, because I think you're spot on, that the tools may be value neutral, but the impact, the transaction cost, of doing certain types of work in a different ways, and some work, and work is not necessarily value neutral. We may look at some tools and say, "That work is not good. "This tool reduces the transaction cost "of performing that work faster "or more completely than that work, "so that tool is going to have a less positive impact--" >> Impact on society as a whole >> "Than some other tool." And I think we can start introducing that kind of an analysis into it. >> I think so. I think that was... I live in this area, like I'm in Santa Cruz, so when I want to I say I'm not in the Valley, but when I want to I say I am in the Valley, I think the Valley is particularly enamored with the toys, or the tools, that it produces, and how technology will solve all our problems, and technology is great, and it is inherently good, and I like to say, "No, it's a tool, "and so a tool could be used for good or for bad." Like one example is ride sharing. Everybody was like, "Oh, this is the best! "This is awesome!" One of the things I thought of, my father is an immigrant, so I'm first generation on my father's side, and he wasn't a taxi driver, but I know how hard it is for first generation immigrants if you don't speak the language really well. So what used to happen with those ride shares is you had to have the capital to acquire a car before you could actually do ride sharing. So what you were basically doing was disenfranchising people who didn't have the capital from actually having this as a source of income when they came to the country. So, I was very conflicted about it to start with. Now, I'm less conflicted. I actually don't think ride share, given the economics I've seen actually play out I actually think ride sharing is not as big of a market and as game changing as everybody was making it. It was just some funny economics. >> Well Steven, certainly the conversation is very awesome. We should have you at the studio in Palo Alto next time you're in the Valley. >> Sounds great. >> You have plenty of tools and shiny new toys. >> Go by the Baylands and then go birding together at the Baylands, or maybe some fishing. >> Let's bring theCube over to Santa Cruz for a couple days. >> We should go down. >> That's great. >> Chill in Santa Cruz. Surf those waves, cloud, data, society. >> There you go. >> theCube on the boardwalk. >> Final question for you. Cisco is trying to push the margin with this event. It's a new event. It's an extension. It's outside their comfort zone. They had some projects that were kind of dismissed, interclouding, other things, this is a statement. Your thoughts on this show, because they have DevNet, why DevNet Create? Your thoughts. >> I think DevNet Create is a great opportunity for Cisco. I've been to the Cisco, is it Cisco Live, the huge gazillion people event? And there's a lot of energy around that, but that's mostly like network engineers and people who were bread and butter Cisco people. I really like that Cisco, that blurring between software and hardware means that Cisco really should be pushing people more in the, "We're going to help you create really interesting solutions." The more they make that easy for the developers... I think some developers are hardware hackers and love it. I am not one of those, and there's a lot of us who are not, and the more you make it easy for me to use software to create really interesting hardware things, the better it is for us. >> It's a classic case, the data scientists meets the algorithm guy. >> Steven: Exactly. >> So they're trying to bring these margins together where it might be awkward at first, but magic can happen. >> If I got to sit with some hardware people and like, "You need to make it so that I can write in Python "and do a whole bunch of neat networking and stuff "so at my house I can keep track "of how many birds are coming to my bird feeder "because I want to do this really cool experiment, "make that easy for me." >> By the way, you got camera, so you got bird recognition software. >> Steven: Exactly, exactly. >> A new feature on AWS. >> Yeah, I've seen demos of that. It's incredible what they can actually pull out now. >> Steven Pousty, Lead Developer at Red Hat, thanks for coming on theCube. Great conversation. >> Thank you very much. >> We'll have to continue it in Palo Alto. More live coverage here at Cisco Systems' DevNet Create. It's their inaugural event for developers. It's where IoT and app developers meet infrastructure, application infrastructure (mumbles). I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris with theCube. We'll be right back. Stay with us. (techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco DevNet.