(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to our Cube special programming on "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." We got Cole Humphreys who's with HPE, global server security product manager, and Mike Ferron-Jones with Intel. He's the product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on this special presentation. >> All right, thanks for having us. >> So, securing compute, I mean, compute, everyone wants more compute. You can't have enough compute as far as we're concerned. You know, more bits are flying around the internet. Hardware's mattering more than ever. Performance markets hot right now for next-gen solutions. When you're talking about security, it's at the center of every single conversation. And Gen11 for the HPE has been big-time focus here. So let's get into the story. What's the market for Gen11, Cole, on the security piece? What's going on? How do you see this impacting the marketplace? >> Hey, you know, thanks. I think this is, again, just a moment in time where we're all working towards solving a problem that doesn't stop. You know, because we are looking at data protection. You know, in compute, you're looking out there, there's international impacts, there's federal impacts, there's state-level impacts, and even regulation to protect the data. So, you know, how do we do this stuff in an environment that keeps changing? >> And on the Intel side, you guys are a Tier 1 combination partner, Better Together. HPE has a deep bench on security, Intel, We know what your history is. You guys have a real root of trust with your code, down to the silicon level, continuing to be, and you're on the 4th Gen Xeon here. Mike, take us through the Intel's relationship with HPE. Super important. You guys have been working together for many, many years. Data security, chips, HPE, Gen11. Take us through the relationship. What's the update? >> Yeah, thanks and I mean, HPE and Intel have been partners in delivering technology and delivering security for decades. And when a customer invests in an HPE server, like at one of the new Gen11s, they're getting the benefit of the combined investment that these two great companies are putting into product security. On the Intel side, for example, we invest heavily in the way that we develop our products for security from the ground up, and also continue to support them once they're in the market. You know, launching a product isn't the end of our security investment. You know, our Intel Red Teams continue to hammer on Intel products looking for any kind of security vulnerability for a platform that's in the field. As well as we invest heavily in the external research community through our bug bounty programs to harness the entire creativity of the security community to find those vulnerabilities, because that allows us to patch them and make sure our customers are staying safe throughout that platform's deployed lifecycle. You know, in 2021, between Intel's internal red teams and our investments in external research, we found 93% of our own vulnerabilities. Only a small percentage were found by unaffiliated external entities. >> Cole, HPE has a great track record and long history serving customers around security, actually, with the solutions you guys had. With Gen11, it's more important than ever. Can you share your thoughts on the talent gap out there? People want to move faster, breaches are happening at a higher velocity. They need more protection now than ever before. Can you share your thoughts on why these breaches are happening, and what you guys are doing, and how you guys see this happening from a customer standpoint? What you guys fill in with Gen11 with solution? >> You bet, you know, because when you hear about the relentless pursuit of innovation from our partners, and we in our engineering organizations in India, and Taiwan, and the Americas all collaborating together years in advance, are about delivering solutions that help protect our customer's environments. But what you hear Mike talking about is it's also about keeping 'em safe. Because you look to the market, right? What you see in, at least from our data from 2021, we have that breaches are still happening, and lot of it has to do with the fact that there is just a lack of adequate security staff with the necessary skills to protect the customer's application and ultimately the workloads. And then that's how these breaches are happening. Because ultimately you need to see some sort of control and visibility of what's going on out there. And what we were talking about earlier is you see time. Time to seeing some incident happen, the blast radius can be tremendous in today's technical, advanced world. And so you have to identify it and then correct it quickly, and that's why this continued innovation and partnership is so important, to help work together to keep up. >> You guys have had a great track record with Intel-based platforms with HPE. Gen11's a really big part of the story. Where do you see that impacting customers? Can you explain the benefits of what's going on with Gen11? What's the key story? What's the most important thing we should be paying attention to here? >> I think there's probably three areas as we look into this generation. And again, this is a point in time, we will continue to evolve. But at this particular point it's about, you know, a fundamental approach to our security enablement, right? Partnering as a Tier 1 OEM with one of the best in the industry, right? We can deliver systems that help protect some of the most critical infrastructure on earth, right? I know of some things that are required to have a non-disclosure because it is some of the most important jobs that you would see out there. And working together with Intel to protect those specific compute workloads, that's a serious deal that protects not only state, and local, and federal interests, but, really, a global one. >> This is a really- >> And then there's another one- Oh sorry. >> No, go ahead. Finish your thought. >> And then there's another one that I would call our uncompromising focus. We work in the industry, we lead and partner with those in the, I would say, in the good side. And we want to focus on enablement through a specific capability set, let's call it our global operations, and that ability to protect our supply chain and deliver infrastructure that can be trusted and into an operating environment. You put all those together and you see very significant and meaningful solutions together. >> The operating benefits are significant. I just want to go back to something you just said before about the joint NDAs and kind of the relationship you kind of unpacked, that to me, you know, I heard you guys say from sand to server, I love that phrase, because, you know, silicone into the server. But this is a combination you guys have with HPE and Intel supply-chain security. I mean, it's not just like you're getting chips and sticking them into a machine. This is, like, there's an in-depth relationship on the supply chain that has a very intricate piece to it. Can you guys just double down on that and share that, how that works and why it's important? >> Sure, so why don't I go ahead and start on that one. So, you know, as you mentioned the, you know, the supply chain that ultimately results in an end user pulling, you know, a new Gen11 HPE server out of the box, you know, started, you know, way, way back in it. And we've been, you know, Intel, from our part are, you know, invest heavily in making sure that all of our entire supply chain to deliver all of the Intel components that are inside that HPE platform have been protected and monitored ever since, you know, their inception at one of any of our 14,000, you know, Intel vendors that we monitor as part of our supply-chain assurance program. I mean we, you know, Intel, you know, invests heavily in compliance with guidelines from places like NIST and ISO, as well as, you know, doing best practices under things like the Transported Asset Protection Alliance, TAPA. You know, we have been intensely invested in making sure that when a customer gets an Intel processor, or any other Intel silicone product, that it has not been tampered with or altered during its trip through the supply chain. HPE then is able to pick up that, those components that we deliver, and add onto that their own supply-chain assurance when it comes down to delivering, you know, the final product to the customer. >> Cole, do you want to- >> That's exactly right. Yeah, I feel like that integration point is a really good segue into why we're talking today, right? Because that then comes into a global operations network that is pulling together these servers and able to deploy 'em all over the world. And as part of the Gen11 launch, we have security services that allow 'em to be hardened from our factories to that next stage into that trusted partner ecosystem for system integration, or directly to customers, right? So that ability to have that chain of trust. And it's not only about attestation and knowing what, you know, came from whom, because, obviously, you want to trust and make sure you're get getting the parts from Intel to build your technical solutions. But it's also about some of the provisioning we're doing in our global operations where we're putting cryptographic identities and manifests of the server and its components and moving it through that supply chain. So you talked about this common challenge we have of assuring no tampering of that device through the supply chain, and that's why this partnering is so important. We deliver secure solutions, we move them, you're able to see and control that information to verify they've not been tampered with, and you move on to your next stage of this very complicated and necessary chain of trust to build, you know, what some people are calling zero-trust type ecosystems. >> Yeah, it's interesting. You know, a lot goes on under the covers. That's good though, right? You want to have greater security and platform integrity, if you can abstract the way the complexity, that's key. Now one of the things I like about this conversation is that you mentioned this idea of a hardware-root-of-trust set of technologies. Can you guys just quickly touch on that, because that's one of the major benefits we see from this combination of the partnership, is that it's not just one, each party doing something, it's the combination. But this notion of hardware-root-of-trust technologies, what is that? >> Yeah, well let me, why don't I go ahead and start on that, and then, you know, Cole can take it from there. Because we provide some of the foundational technologies that underlie a root of trust. Now the idea behind a root of trust, of course, is that you want your platform to, you know, from the moment that first electron hits it from the power supply, that it has a chain of trust that all of the software, firmware, BIOS is loading, to bring that platform up into an operational state is trusted. If you have a breach in one of those lower-level code bases, like in the BIOS or in the system firmware, that can be a huge problem. It can undermine every other software-based security protection that you may have implemented up the stack. So, you know, Intel and HPE work together to coordinate our trusted boot and root-of-trust technologies to make sure that when a customer, you know, boots that platform up, it boots up into a known good state so that it is ready for the customer's workload. So on the Intel side, we've got technologies like our trusted execution technology, or Intel Boot Guard, that then feed into the HPE iLO system to help, you know, create that chain of trust that's rooted in silicon to be able to deliver that known good state to the customer so it's ready for workloads. >> All right, Cole, I got to ask you, with Gen11 HPE platforms that has 4th Gen Intel Xeon, what are the customers really getting? >> So, you know, what a great setup. I'm smiling because it's, like, it has a good answer, because one, this, you know, to be clear, this isn't the first time we've worked on this root-of-trust problem. You know, we have a construct that we call the HPE Silicon Root of Trust. You know, there are, it's an industry standard construct, it's not a proprietary solution to HPE, but it does follow some differentiated steps that we like to say make a little difference in how it's best implemented. And where you see that is that tight, you know, Intel Trusted Execution exchange. The Intel Trusted Execution exchange is a very important step to assuring that route of trust in that HPE Silicon Root of Trust construct, right? So they're not different things, right? We just have an umbrella that we pull under our ProLiant, because there's ILO, our BIOS team, CPLDs, firmware, but I'll tell you this, Gen11, you know, while all that, keeping that moving forward would be good enough, we are not holding to that. We are moving forward. Our uncompromising focus, we want to drive more visibility into that Gen11 server, specifically into the PCIE lanes. And now you're going to be able to see, and measure, and make policies to have control and visibility of the PCI devices, like storage controllers, NICs, direct connect, NVME drives, et cetera. You know, if you follow the trends of where the industry would like to go, all the components in a server would be able to be seen and attested for full infrastructure integrity, right? So, but this is a meaningful step forward between not only the greatness we do together, but, I would say, a little uncompromising focus on this problem and doing a little bit more to make Gen11 Intel's server just a little better for the challenges of the future. >> Yeah, the Tier 1 partnership is really kind of highlighted there. Great, great point. I got to ask you, Mike, on the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable capabilities, what does it do for the customer with Gen11 now that they have these breaches? Does it eliminate stuff? What's in it for the customer? What are some of the new things coming out with the Xeon? You're at Gen4, Gen11 for HP, but you guys have new stuff. What does it do for the customer? Does it help eliminate breaches? Are there things that are inherent in the product that HP is jointly working with you on or you were contributing in to the relationship that we should know about? What's new? >> Yeah, well there's so much great new stuff in our new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processor. This is the one that was codenamed Sapphire Rapids. I mean, you know, more cores, more performance, AI acceleration, crypto acceleration, it's all in there. But one of my favorite security features, and it is one that's called Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, or Intel CET. And why I like CET is because I find the attack that it is designed to mitigate is just evil genius. This type of attack, which is called a return, a jump, or a call-oriented programming attack, is designed to not bring a whole bunch of new identifiable malware into the system, you know, which could be picked up by security software. What it is designed to do is to look for little bits of existing, little bits of existing code already on the server. So if you're running, say, a web server, it's looking for little bits of that web-server code that it can then execute in a particular order to achieve a malicious outcome, something like open a command prompt, or escalate its privileges. Now in order to get those little code bits to execute in an order, it has a control mechanism. And there are different, each of the different types of attacks uses a different control mechanism. But what CET does is it gets in there and it disrupts those control mechanisms, uses hardware to prevent those particular techniques from being able to dig in and take effect. So CET can, you know, disrupt it and make sure that software behaves safely and as the programmer intended, rather than picking off these little arbitrary bits in one of these return, or jump, or call-oriented programming attacks. Now it is a technology that is included in every single one of the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors. And so it's going to be an inherent characteristic the customers can benefit from when they buy a new Gen11 HPE server. >> Cole, more goodness from Intel there impacting Gen11 on the HPE side. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I feel like this is exactly why you do business with the big Tier 1 partners, because you can put, you know, trust in from where it comes from, through the global operations, literally, having it hardened from the factory it's finished in, moving into your operating environment, and then now protecting against attacks in your web hosting services, right? I mean, this is great. I mean, you'll always have an attack on data, you know, as you're seeing in the data. But the more contained, the more information, and the more control and trust we can give to our customers, it's going to make their job a little easier in protecting whatever job they're trying to do. >> Yeah, and enterprise customers, as you know, they're always trying to keep up to date on the skills and battle the threats. Having that built in under the covers is a real good way to kind of help them free up their time, and also protect them is really killer. This is a big, big part of the Gen11 story here. Securing the data, securing compute, that's the topic here for this special cube conversation, engineering for a hybrid world. Cole, I'll give you the final word. What should people pay attention to, Gen11 from HPE, bottom line, what's the story? >> You know, it's, you know, it's not the first time, it's not the last time, but it's our fundamental security approach to just helping customers through their digital transformation defend in an uncompromising focus to help protect our infrastructure in these technical solutions. >> Cole Humphreys is the global server security product manager at HPE. He's got his finger on the pulse and keeping everyone secure in the platform integrity there. Mike Ferron-Jones is the Intel product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for this great conversation, getting into the weeds a little bit with Gen11, which is great. Love the hardware route-of-trust technologies, Better Together. Congratulations on Gen11 and your 4th Gen Xeon Scalable. Thanks for coming on. >> All right, thanks, John. >> Thank you very much, guys, appreciate it. Okay, you're watching "theCube's" special presentation, "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome everyone to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world," sponsored by HP and Intel. Today we're going to going to discuss how to transform your compute management experience with the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," and my guests today are Chinmay Ashok, director cloud engineering at Intel, and Koichiro Nakajima, principal product manager, compute at cloud services with HPE. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this segment, "Transform your compute management experience." >> Thanks for having us. >> Great topic. A lot of people want to see that system management one pane of glass and want to manage everything. This is a really important topic and they started getting into distributed computing and cloud and hybrid. This is a major discussion point. What are some of the major trends you guys see in the system management space? >> Yeah, so system management is trying to help user manage their IT infrastructure effectively and efficiently. So, the system management is evolving along with the IT infrastructures which is trying to accommodate market trends. We have been observing the continuous trends like digital transformation, edge computing, and exponential data growth never stops. AI, machine learning, deep learning, cloud native applications, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategies. There's a lot of things going on. Also, COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live and work. These are all the things that, given a profound implication to the system design architectures that system management has to consider. Also, security has always been the very important topic, but it has become more important than ever before. Some of the research is saying that the cyber criminals becoming like a $10.5 trillion per year. We all do our efforts on the solution provider size and on the user side, but still cyber criminals are growing 15% year by year. So, with all this kind of thing in the mind, system management really have to evolve in a way to help user efficiently and effectively manage their more and more distributed IT infrastructure. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the major trends in system management space? >> Thanks, John, Yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think especially with the view of the system or the service provider, as he was saying, is changing, is evolving over the last few years, especially with the advent of the cloud and the different types of cloud usage models like platform as a service, on-premises, of course, infrastructure is a service, but the traditional software as a service implies that the service provider needs a different view of the system and the context in which we need the CPU vendor, or the platform vendor needs to provide that, is changing. That includes both in-band telemetry being able to monitor what is going on on the system through traditional in-band methods, but also the advent of the out-of-band methods to do this without end user disruption is a key element to the enhancements that our customers are expecting from us as we deploy CPUs and platforms. >> That's great. You know what I love about this discussion is we had multiple generation enhancements, 4th Gen Xeon, 11th Gen ProLiant, iLOs going to come up with got another generation increase on that one. We'll get into that on the next segment, but while we're here, what is iLO? Can you guys define what that is and why it's important? >> Yeah, great question. Real quick, so HPE Integrated Lights-Out is the formal name of the product and we tend to call it as a iLO for short. iLO is HPE'S BMC. If you're familiar with this topic it's a Baseboard Management Controller. If not, this is a small computer on the server mother board and it runs independently from host CPU and the operating system. So, that's why it's named as Lights-Out. Now what can you do with the iLO? iLO really helps a user manage and use and monitor the server remotely, securely, throughout its life from the deployment to the retirement. So, you can really do things like, you know, turning a server power on, off, install operating system, access to IT, firmware update, and when you decide to retire server, you can completely wipe the data off that server so then it's ready to trash. iLO is really a best solution to manage a single server, but when you try to manage hundreds or thousand of servers in a larger scale environment, then managing server one by one by one through the iLO is not practical. So, HPE has two options. One of them is a HPE OneView. OneView is a best solution to manage a very complex, on-prem IT infrastructure that involves a thousand of servers as well as the other IT elements like fiber channel storage through the storage agent network and so on. Another option that we have is HPE for GreenLake Compute Ops Management. This is our latest, greatest product that we recently launched and this is a best solution to manage a distributed IT environment with multiple edge points or multiple clouds. And I recently involved in the customer conversation about the computer office management and with the hotel chain, global hotel chain with 9,000 locations worldwide and each of the location only have like a couple of servers to manage, but combined it's, you know, 27,000 servers and over the 9,000 locations, we didn't really have a great answer for that kind of environment before, but now HPE has GreenLake for computer office management for also deal with, you know, such kind of environment. >> Awesome. We're going to do a big dive on iLO in the next segment, but Chinmay, before we end this segment, what is PMT? >> Sure, so yeah, with the introduction of the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we of course introduce many new technologies like PCI Gen 5, DDR5, et cetera. And these are very key to general system provision, if you will. But with all of these new technologies come new sources of telemetry that the service provider now has to manage, right? So, the PMT is a technology called Platform Monitoring Technology. That is a capability that we introduced with the Intel 4th Gen Xeon scalable processor that allows the service provider to monitor all of these sources of telemetry within the system, within the system on chip, the CPU SOC, in all of these contexts that we talked about, like the hybrid cloud and cloud infrastructure as a service or platform as a service, but both in their in-band traditional telemetry collection models, but also out-of-band collection models such as the ones that Koichiro was talking about through the BMC et cetera. So, this is a key enhancement that we believe that takes the Intel product line closer to what the service providers require for managing their end user experience. >> Awesome, well thanks so much for spending the time in this segment. We're going to take a quick break, we're going to come back and we're going to discuss more what's new with Gen 11 and iLO 6. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (light music) Welcome back. We're continuing the coverage of "theCUBE's" coverage of compute engineered for your hybrid world. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by Chinmay Ashok who's from Intel and Koichiro Nakajima with HPE. We're going to dive deeper into transforming your compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and HP ProLiant Gen11. Okay, let's get into it. We want to talk about Gen11. What's new with Gen11? What's new with iLO 6? So, NexGen increases in performance capabilities. What's new, what's new at Gen11 and iLO 6 let's go. >> Yeah, iLO 6 accommodates a lot of new features and the latest, greatest technology advancements like a new generation CPUs, DDR5 memories, PCI Gen 5, GPGPUs, SmartNICs. There's a lot of great feature functions. So, it's an iLO, make sure that supports all the use cases that associate with those latest, greatest advancements. For instance, like you know, some of the higher thermal design point CPU SKUs that requires a liquid cooling. We all support those kind of things. And also iLO6 accommodates latest, greatest industry standard system management, standard specifications, for instance, like an DMTF, TLDN, DMTF, RDE, SPDM. And what are these means for the iLO6 and Gen11? iLO6 really offers the greatest manageability and monitoring user experiences as well as the greatest automation through the refresh APIs. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the Gen11 and iLO6? You're at Intel, you're enabling all this innovation. >> Yeah. >> What's the new features? >> Yeah, thanks John. Yeah, so yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think with the introduction of Gen11, 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we have all of these rich new feature sets, right? With the DDR5, PCI Gen5, liquid cooling, et cetera. And then all of these new accelerators for various specific workloads that customers can use using this processor. So, as we were discussing previously, what this brings is all of these different sources of telemetry, right? So, our sources of data that the system provider or the service provider then needs to utilize to manage the compute experience for their end user. And so, what's new from that perspective is Intel realized that these new different sources of telemetry and the new mechanisms by which the service provider has to extract this telemetry required us to fundamentally think about how we provide the telemetry experience to the service provider. And that meant extending our existing best-in-class, in-band telemetry capabilities that we have today already built into in market Intel processors. But now, extending that with the introduction of the PMT, the Platform Monitoring Technology, that allows us to expand on that in-band telemetry, but also include all of these new sources of telemetry data through all of these new accelerators through the new features like PCI Gen5, DDR5, et cetera, but also bring in that out-of-band telemetry management experience. And so, I think that's a key innovation here, helping prepare for the world that the cloud is enabling. >> It's interesting, you know, Koichiro you had mentioned on the previous segment, COVID-19, we all know the impact of how that changed, how IT at the managed, you know, all of a sudden remote work, right? So, as you have cloud go to hybrid, now we got the edge coming, we're talking about a distributed computing environment, we got telemetry, you got management. This is a huge shift and it's happening super fast. What's the Gen11 iLO6 mean for architects as they start to look at going beyond hybrid and going to the edge, you're going to need all this telemetry. What's the impact? Can you guys just riff and share your thoughts on what this means for that kind of NexGen cloud that we see coming on on which is essentially distributed computing. >> Yeah, that's a great topic to discuss. So, there's a couple of the things. Really, to make sure those remote environment and also the management distributed IT environments, the system management has to reach across the remote location, across the internet connections, and the connectivities. So, the system management protocol, for instance, like traditionally IPMI or SNMP, or those things, got to be modernized into more restful API and those modern integration friendly to the modern tool chains. So, we're investing on those like refresh APIs and also again, the security becomes paramount importance because those are exposed to the bad people to snoop and trying to do some bad thing like men in a middle attacks, things like that. So we really, you know, focus on the security side on the two aspects on the iLO6 and Gen11. One other thing is we continue our industry unique silicon root of trust technology. So, that one is fortunate platform making sure the platform firmware, only the authentic and legitimate image of the firmware can run on HP server. And when you check in, validating the firmware images, the root of the trust reside in the silicon. So, no one can change it. Even the bad people trying to change the root of trust, it's bond in the chips so you cannot really change. And that's why, even bad people trying to compromise, you know, install compromise the firmware image on the HPE servers, you cannot do that. Another thing is we're making a lot of enhancements to make sure security on board our HP server into your network or onto a services like a GreenLake. Give you a couple of example, for instance, like a IDevID, Initial Device ID. That one is conforming to IEEE 802.1AR and it's immutable so no one can change it. And by using the IDevID, you can really identify you are not onboarding a rogue server or unknown server, but the server that you you want to onboard, right? It's absolutely important. Another thing is like platform certificate. Platform certificate really is the measurement of the configuration. So again, this is a great feature that makes sure you receive a server from the factory and no one during the transportation touch the server and alter the configuration. >> Chinmay, what's your reaction to this new distributed NextGen cloud? You got data, security, edge, move the compute to the data, don't move the data around. These are big conversations. >> Yeah, great question, John. I think this is an important thing to consider for the end user, the service provider in all of these contexts, right? I think Koichiro mentioned some of these key elements that go into as we develop and design these new products. But for example, from a security perspective, we introduce the trust domain extensions, TDX feature, for confidential computing in Intel 4th Generation Xeon scalable processors. And that enables the isolation of user workloads in these cloud environments, et cetera. But again, going back to the point Koichiro was making where if you go to the edge, you go to the cloud and then have the edge connect to the cloud you have independent networks for system management, independent networks for user data, et cetera. So, you need the ability to create that isolation. All of this telemetry data that needs to be isolated from the user, but used by the service provider to provide the best experience. All of these are built on the foundations of technologies such as TDX, PMT, iLO6, et cetera. >> Great stuff, gentlemen. Well, we have a lot more to discuss on our next segment. We're going to take a break here before wrapping up. We'll be right back with more. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (light music) Okay, welcome back here, on "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world." I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're wrapping up our discussion here on transforming compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and obviously HPE ProLiant Gen11. Gentlemen, welcome back. Let's get into the takeaways for this discussion. Obviously, systems management has been around for a while, but transforming that experience on the management side is super important as the environment just radically changing for the better. What are some of the key takeaways for the audience watching here that they should put into their kind of tickler file and/or put on their to-do list to keep an eye on? >> Yeah, so Gen11 and iLO6 offers the latest, greatest technologies with new generation CPUs, DDR5, PCI Gen5, and so on and on. There's a lot of things in there and also iLO6 is the most mature version of iLO and it offers the best manageability and security. On top of iLO, HP offers the best of read management options like HP OneView and Compute Ops Management. It's really a lot of the things that help user achieve a lot of the things regardless of the use case like edge computing, or distributed IT, or hybrid strategy and so on and on. And you could also have a great system management that you can unleash all the full potential of latest, greatest technology. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the key takeaways? Obviously as the world's changing, more gen chips are coming out, specialized workloads, performance. I mean, I've never met anyone that says they want to run on slower infrastructure. I mean, come on, performance matters. >> Yes, no, it definitely, I think one of the key things I would say is yes, with Gen11 Intel for gen scalable we're introducing all of these technologies, but I think one of the key things that has grown over the last few years is the view of the system provider, the abstraction that's needed, right? Like the end user today is migrating a lot of what they're traditionally used to from a physical compute perspective to the cloud. Everything goes to the cloud and when that happens there's a lot of just the experience that the end user sees, but everything underneath is abstracted away and then managed by the system provider, right? So we at Intel, and of course, our partners at HP, we have spent a lot of time figuring out what are the best sets of features that provide that best system management experience that allow for that abstraction to work seamlessly without the end user noticing? And I think from that perspective, the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors is so far the best Intel product that we have introduced that is prepared for that type of abstraction. >> So, I'm going to put my customer hat on for a second. I'll ask you both. What's in it for me? I'm the customer. What's in it for me? What's the benefit to me? What does this all mean to me? What's my win? >> Yeah, I can start there. I think the key thing here is that when we create capabilities that allow you to build the best cloud, at the end of the day that efficiency, that performance, all of that translates to a better experience for the consumer, right? So, as the service provider is able to have all of these myriad capabilities to use and choose from and then manage the system experience, what that implies is that the end user sees a seamless experience as they go from one application to another as they go about their daily lives. >> Koichiro, what's your thoughts on what's in it for me? You guys got a lot of engineering going on in Gen11, every gen increase always is a step function and increase of value. What's in it for me? What do I care? What's in it for me? I'm the customer. >> Alright. Yeah, so I fully agree with Chinmay's point. You know, he lays out the all the good points, right? Again, you know what the Gen11 and iLO6 offer all the latest, greatest features and all the technology and advancements are packed in the Gen11 platform and iLO6 unleash all full potentials for those benefits. And things are really dynamic in today's world and IT system also going to be agile and the system management get really far, to the point like we never imagine what the system management can do in the past. For instance, the managing on-prem devices across multiple locations from a single point, like a single pane of glass on the cloud management system, management on the cloud, that's what really the compute office management that HP offers. It's all new and it's really help customers unleash full potential of the gear and their investment and provide the best TCO and ROIs, right? I'm very excited that all the things that all the teams have worked for the multiple years have finally come to their life and to the public. And I can't really wait to see our customers start putting their hands on and enjoy the benefit of the latest, greatest offerings. >> Yeah, 4th Gen Xeon, Gen11 ProLiant, I mean, all the things coming together, accelerators, more cores. You got data, you got compute, and you got now this idea of security, I mean, you got hitting all the points, data and security big features here, right? Data being computed in a way with Gen4 and Gen11. This is like the big theme, data security, kind of the the big part of the core here in this announcement, in this relationship. >> Absolutely. I believe, I think the key things as these new generations of processors enable is new types of compute which imply is more types of data, more types of and hence, with more types of data, more types of compute. You have more types of system management more differentiation that the service provider has to then deal with, the disaggregation that they have to deal with. So yes, absolutely this is, I think exciting times for end users, but also for new frontiers for service providers to go tackle. And we believe that the features that we're introducing with this CPU and this platform will enable them to do so. >> Well Chinmay thank you so much for sharing your Intel perspective, Koichiro with HPE. Congratulations on all that hard work and engineering coming together. Bearing fruit, as you said, Koichiro, this is an exciting time. And again, keep moving the needle. This is an important inflection point in the industry and now more than ever this compute is needed and this kind of specialization's all awesome. So, congratulations and participating in the "Transforming your compute management experience" segment. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." You're watching the "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World Series" sponsored by HP and Intel. Thanks for watching. (light music)

>> Welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with the new fourth gen Intel Z on scalable process being announced, HPE is releasing four new HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers and here to talk about the feature of those servers as well as the partnership between HPE and Intel, we have Darren Anthony, director compute server product manager with HPE, and Suzi Jewett, general manager of the Zion products with Intel. Thanks for joining us folks. Appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks for having us. (Suzi's speech drowned out) >> This segment is about NextGen enhanced scale of process. Obviously the Zion fourth gen. This is really cool stuff. What's the most exciting element of the new Intel fourth gen Zion processor? >> Yeah, John, thanks for asking. Of course, I'm very excited about the fourth gen Intel Zion processor. I think the best thing that we'll be delivering is our new ong package accelerators, which you know allows us to service the majority of the server market, which still is buying in that mid core count range and provide workload acceleration that matters for every one of the products that we sell. And that workload acceleration allows us to drive better efficiency and allows us to really dive into improved sustainability and workload optimizations for the data center. >> It's about al the rage about the cores. Now we got the acceleration continued to innovate with Zion. Congratulations. Darren what does the new Intel fourth Gen Zion processes mean for HPE from the ProLiant perspective? You're on Gen 11 servers. What's in it? What's it mean for you guys and for your customers? >> Well, John, first we got to talk about the great partnership. HPE and Intel have been partners delivering innovation for our server products for over 30 years, and we're continuing that partnership with HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers to deliver compelling business outcomes for our customers. Customers are on a digital transformation journey, and they need the right compute to power applications, accelerate analytics, and turn data into value. HP ProLiant Compute is engineered for your hybrid world and delivers optimized performance for your workloads. With HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers and Intel fourth gen Zion processors, you can have the performance to accelerate workloads from the data center to the edge. With Gen 11, we have more. More performance to meet new workload demands. With PCI Gen five which delivers increased bandwidth with room for more data and graphics accelerators for workloads like VDI, our new demands at the edge. DDR5 memory springs greater bandwidth and performance increases for low latency and memory solutions for database and analytics workloads and higher clock speed CPU chipset combinations for processor intensive AI and machine learning applications. >> Got to love the low latency. Got to love the more performance. Got to love the engineered for the hybrid world. You mentioned that. Can you elaborate more on engineered for the hybrid world? What does that mean? Can you elaborate? >> Well, HP ProLiant Compute is based on three pillars. First, an intuitive cloud operating experience with HPE GreenLake compute ops management. Second, trusted security by design with a zero trust approach from silicone to cloud. And third, optimize for performance for your workloads, whether you deploy as a traditional infrastructure or a pay-as-you-go model with HPE GreenLake on-premise at the edge in a colo and in the public cloud. >> Well, thanks Suzi and Darren, we'll be right back. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and do a deep dive and get into the ProLiant Gen 11 servers. We're going to dig into it. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back continuing coverage of "theCUBE's" "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" with HP and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE'" joined back by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzie Jewitt from Intel. as we continue our conversation on the fourth gen Zion scalable processor and HP Gen 11 servers. Suzi, we'll start with you first. Can you give us some use cases around the new fourth gen, Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Yeah, I'd love to. What we're really seeing with an ever-changing market, and you know, adapting to that is we're leading with that workload focus approach. Some examples, you know, that we see are with vRAN. For in vRAN, we estimate the 2021 market size was about 150 million, and we expect a CAG of almost 30% all the way through 2030. So we're really focused on that, on, you know deployed edge use cases, growing about 10% to over 50% in 2026. And HPC use cases, of course, continue to grow at a study CAGR around, you know, about 7%. Then last but not least is cloud. So we're, you know, targeting a growth rate of almost 20% over a five year CAGR. And the fourth G Zion is targeted to all of those workloads, both through our architectural improvements that, you know deliver node level performance as well as our operational improvements that deliver data center performance. And wrapping that all around with the accelerators that I talked about earlier that provide that workload specific improvements that get us to where our customers need to operationalize in their data center. >> I love the focus solutions around seeing compute used that way and the processors. Great stuff. Darren, how do you see the new ProLiant Gen 11 servers being used on your side? I mean obviously, you've got the customers deploying the servers. What are you seeing on those workloads? Those targeted workloads? (John chuckling) >> Well, you know, very much in line with what Suzi was talking about. The generational improvements that we're seeing in performance for Gen 11. They're outstanding for many different use cases. You know, obviously VDI. what we're seeing a lot is around the analytics. You know, with moving to the edge, there's a lot more data. Customers need to convert that data into something tangible. Something that's actionable. And so we're really seeing the strong use cases around analytics in order to mine that data and to make better, faster decisions for the customers. >> You know what I love about this market is people really want to hear about performance. They love speed, they love the power, and low power, by the way on the other side. So, you know, this has really been a big part of the focus now this year. We're seeing a lot more discussion. Suzi, can you tell us more about the key performance improvements on the processors? And Darren, if you don't mind, if you can follow up on the benefits of the new servers relative to the performance. Suzi? >> Sure, so, you know, at a standard expectant rate we're looking at, you know, 60% gen over gen, from our previous third gen Zion, but more importantly as we've been mentioning is the performance improvement we get with the accelerators. As an example, an average accelerator proof point that we have is 2.9 times improvement in performance per wat for accelerated workloads versus non-accelerated workloads. Additionally, we're seeing really great and performance improvement in low jitter so almost 20 to 50 times improvement versus previous gen in jitter on particular workloads which is really important, you know to our cloud service providers. >> Darren, what's your follow up on this? This is obviously translates into the the gen 11 servers. >> Well, you know, this generation. Huge improvements across the board. And what we're seeing is that not only customers are prepared for what they need now you know, workloads are evolving and transitioning. Customers need more. They're doing more. They're doing more analytics. And so not only do you have the performance you need now, but it's actually built for the future. We know that customers are looking to take in that data and do something and work with the data wherever it resides within their infrastructure. We also see customers that are beginning to move servers out of a centralized data center more to the edge, closer to the way that where the data resides. And so this new generation really tremendous for that. Seeing a lot of benefits for the customers from that perspective. >> Okay, Suzi, Darren, I want to get your thoughts on one of the hottest trends happening right now. Obviously machine learning and AI has always been hot, but recently more and more focus has been on AI. As you start to see this kind of next gen kind of AI coming on, and the younger generation of developers, you know, they're all into this. This is really the one of the hottest trends of AI. We've seen the momentum and accelerations kind of going next level. Can you guys comment on how Zion here and Gen 11 are tying into that? What's that mean for AI? >> So, exactly. With the fourth gen Intel Zion, we have one of our key you know, on package accelerators in every core is our AMX. It delivers up to 10 times improvement on inference and training versus previous gens, and, you know throws the competition out of the water. So we are really excited for our AI performance leading with Zion >> And- >> And John, what we're seeing is that this next generation, you know you're absolutely right, you know. Workloads a lot more focused. A lot more taking more advantage of AI machine learning capabilities. And with this generation together with the Intel Zion fourth gen, you know what we're seeing is the opportunity with that increase in IO bandwidth that now we have an opportunity for those applications and those use cases and those workloads to take advantage of this capability. We haven't had that before, but now more than ever, we've actually, you know opened the throttle with the performance and with the capabilities to support those workloads. >> That's great stuff. And you know, the AI stuff also does all lot on differentiated heavy lifting, and it needs processing power. It needs the servers. This is just, (John chuckling) it creates more and more value. This is right in line. Congratulations. Super excited by that call out. Really appreciate it. Thanks Suzi and Darren. Really appreciate. A lot more discuss with you guys as we go a little bit deeper. We're going to talk about security and wrap things up after this short break. I'm John Furrier, "theCUBE," the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" joined by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzi Jewett from Intel as we turn our discussion to security. A lot of great features with the new Zion scalable processor's gen four and the ProLiant gen 11. Let's get into it. Suzi, what are some of the cool features of the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Sure, John, I'd love to talk about it. With fourth gen, Intel offers the most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio to really enhance data security and ingest regulatory compliance and sovereignty concerns. A couple examples of those features and technologies that we've included are a larger baseline enclave with the SGX technology, which is our application isolation technology and our Intel CET substantially reduces the risk of whole class software-based attacks. That wrapped around at a platform level really allows us, you know, to secure workload acceleration software and ensure platform integrity. >> Darren, this is a great enablement for HPE. Can you tell us about the security with the the new HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers? >> Absolutely, John. So HP ProLiant engineered with a fundamental security approach to defend against increasingly complex threats and uncompromising focus on state-of-the-art security innovations that are built right into our DNA, from silicon to software, from the factory to the cloud. It's our goal to protect the customer's infrastructure, workloads, and the data from threats to hardware and risk from third party software and devices. So Gen 11 is just a continuation of the the great technological innovations that we've had around providing zero trust architecture. We're extending our Silicon Root of Trust, and it's just a motion forward for innovating on that Silicon Root of Trust that we've had. So with Silicon Root of Trust, we protect millions of lines of firmware code from malware and ransomware with the digital footprint that's unique to the server. With this Silicon Root of Trust, we're securing over 4 million HPE servers around the world and beyond that Silicon, the authentication of and extending this to our partner ecosystem, the authentication of platform components, such as network interface cards and storage controllers just gives us that protection against additional entry points of security threats that can compromise the entire server infrastructure. With this latest version, we're also doing authentication integrity with those components using the security protocol and data model protocol or SPDM. But we know that trusted and protected infrastructure begins with a secure supply chain, a layer of protection that starts at the manufacturing floor. HP provides you optimized protection for ProLiant servers from trusted suppliers to the factories and into transit to the customer. >> Any final messages Darren you'd like to share with your audience on the hybrid world engineering for the hybrid world security overall the new Gen 11 servers with the Zion fourth generation process scalable processors? >> Well, it's really about choice. Having the right choice for your compute, and we know HPE ProLiant servers, together, ProLiant Gen 11 servers together with the new Zion processors is the right choice. Delivering the capabilities to performance and the efficiency that customers need to run their most complex workloads and their most performance hungry work workloads. We're really excited about this next generation of platforms. >> ProLiant Gen 11. Suzi, great customer for Intel. You got the fourth generation Zion scalable processes. We've been tracking multiple generations for both of you guys for many, many years now, the past decade. A lot of growth, a lot of innovation. I'll give you the last word on the series here on this segment. Can you share the the collaboration between Intel and HP? What does it mean and what's that mean for customers? Can you give your thoughts and share your views on the relationship with with HPE? >> Yeah, we value, obviously HPE as one of our key customers. We partner with them from the beginning of when we are defining the product all the way through the development and validation. HP has been a great partner in making sure that we deliver collaboratively to the needs of their customers and our customers all together to make sure that we get the best product in the market that meets our customer needs allowing for the flexibility, the operational efficiency, the security that our markets demand. >> Darren, Suzi, thank you so much. You know, "Compute for an Engineered Hybrid World" is really important. Compute is... (John stuttering) We need more compute. (John chuckling) Give us more power and less power on the sustainability side. So a lot of great advances. Thank you so much for spending the time and give us an overview on the innovation around the Zion and, and the ProLiant Gen 11. Appreciate your time. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having us. >> You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World," sponsored by HPE and Intel. Today we're going to discuss the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable process impact on containers and AI. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, and I'm joined by three experts to guide us along. We have Jordan Plum, Senior Director of AI and products for Intel, Bradley Sweeney, Big Data and AI Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE, and Gary Wang, Containers Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE. Welcome to the program gentlemen. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> Thank you for having us. >> This segment is going to be talking about containers to deploy high performance AI applications. This is a really important area right now. We're seeing a lot more AI deployed, kind of next gen AI coming. How is HPE supporting and testing and delivering containers for AI? >> Yeah, so what we're doing from HPE's perspective is we're taking these container platforms, combining with the next generation Intel servers to fully validate the deployment of the containers. So what we're doing is we're publishing the reference architectures. We're creating these automation scripts, and also creating a monitoring and security strategy for these container platforms. So for customers to easily deploy these Kubernete clusters and to easily secure their community environments. >> Gary, give us a quick overview of the new Proliant DL 360 and 380 Gen 11 servers. >> Yeah, the load, for example, for container platforms what we're seeing mostly is the DL 360 and DL 380 for matching really well for container use cases, especially for AI. The DL 360, with the expended now the DDR five memory and the new PCI five slots really, really helps the speeds to deploy these container environments and also to grow the data that's required to store it within these container environments. So for example, like the DL 380 if you want to deploy a data fabric whether it's the Ezmeral data fabric or different vendors data fabric software you can do so with the DL 360 and DL 380 with the new Intel Xeon processors. >> How does HP help customers with Kubernetes deployments? >> Yeah, like I mentioned earlier so we do a full validation to ensure the container deployment is easy and it's fast. So we create these automation scripts and then we publish them on GitHub for customers to use and to reference. So they can take that and then they can adjust as they need to. But following the deployment guide that we provide will make the, deploy the community deployment much easier, much faster. So we also have demo videos that's also published and then for reference architecture document that's published to guide the customer step by step through the process. >> Great stuff. Thanks everyone. We'll be going to take a quick break here and come back. We're going to do a deep dive on the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable process and the impact on AI and containers. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World" series. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, joined by Jordan Plum with Intel, Bradley Sweeney with HPE, and Gary Wang from HPE. We're going to do a drill down and do a deeper dive into the AI containers with the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors we appreciate your time coming in. Jordan, great to see you. I got to ask you right out of the gate, what is the view right now in terms of Intel's approach to containers for AI? It's hot right now. AI is booming. You're seeing kind of next gen use cases. What's your approach to containers relative to AI? >> Thanks John and thanks for the question. With the fourth generation Xeon scalable processor launch we have tested and validated this platform with over 400 deep learning and machine learning models and workloads. These models and workloads are publicly available in the framework repositories and they can be downloaded by anybody. Yet customers are not only looking for model validation they're looking for model performance and performance is usually a combination of a given throughput at a target latency. And to do that in the data center all the way to the factory floor, this is not always delivered from these generic proxy models that are publicly available in the industry. >> You know, performance is critical. We're seeing more and more developers saying, "Hey, I want to go faster on a better platform, faster all the time." No one wants to run slower stuff, that's for sure. Can you talk more about the different container approaches Intel is pursuing? >> Sure. First our approach is to meet the customers where they are and help them build and deploy AI everywhere. Some customers just want to focus on deployment they have more mature use cases, and they just want to download a model that works that's high performing and run. Others are really focused more on development and innovation. They want to build and train models from scratch or at least highly customize them. Therefore we have several container approaches to accelerate the customer's time to solution and help them meet their business SLA along their AI journey. >> So what developers can just download these containers and just go? >> Yeah, so let me talk about the different kinds of containers we have. We start off with pre-trained containers. We'll have about 55 or more of these containers where the model is actually pre-trained, highly performant, some are optimized for low latency, others are optimized for throughput and the customers can just download these from Intel's website or from HPE and they can just go into production right away. >> That's great. A lot of choice. People can just get jump right in. That's awesome. Good, good choice for developers. They want more faster velocity. We know that. What else does Intel provide? Can you share some thoughts there? What you guys else provide developers? >> Yeah, so we talked about how hey some are just focused on deployment and they maybe they have more mature use cases. Other customers really want to do some more customization or optimization. So we have another class of containers called development containers and this includes not just the kind of a model itself but it's integrated with the framework and some other capabilities and techniques like model serving. So now that customers can download just not only the model but an entire AI stack and they can be sort of do some optimizations but they can also be sure that Intel has optimized that specific stack on top of the HPE servers. >> So it sounds simple to just get started using the DL model and containers. Is that it? Where, what else are customers looking for? What can you take a little bit deeper? >> Yeah, not quite. Well, while the customer customer's ability to reproduce performance on their site that HPE and Intel have measured in our own labs is fantastic. That's not actually what the customer is only trying to do. They're actually building very complex end-to-end AI pipelines, okay? And a lot of data scientists are really good at building models, really good at building algorithms but they're less experienced in building end-to-end pipelines especially 'cause the number of use cases end-to-end are kind of infinite. So we are building end-to-end pipeline containers for use cases like media analytics and sentiment analysis, anomaly detection. Therefore a customer can download these end-to-end containers, right? They can either use them as a reference, just like, see how we built them and maybe they have some changes in their own data center where they like to use different tools, but they can just see, "Okay this is what's possible with an end-to-end container on top of an HPE server." And other cases they could actually, if the overlap in the use case is pretty close, they can just take our containers and go directly into production. So this provides developers, all three types of containers that I discussed provide developers an easy starting point to get them up and running quickly and make them productive. And that's a really important point. You talked a lot about performance, John. But really when we talk to data scientists what they really want to be is productive, right? They're under pressure to change the business to transform the business and containers is a great way to get started fast >> People take product productivity, you know, seriously now with developer productivity is the hottest trend obviously they want performance. Totally nailed it. Where can customers get these containers? >> Right. Great, thank you John. Our pre-trained model containers, our developmental containers, and our end-to-end containers are available at intel.com at the developer catalog. But we'd also post these on many third party marketplaces that other people like to pull containers from. And they're frequently updated. >> Love the developer productivity angle. Great stuff. We've still got more to discuss with Jordan, Bradley, and Gary. We're going to take a short break here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier with theCUBE and we'll be discussing and wrapping up our discussion on containers to deploy high performance AI. This is a great segment on really a lot of demand for AI and the applications involved. And we got the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with HP Gen 11 servers. Bradley, what is the top AI use case that Gen 11 HP Proliant servers are optimized for? >> Yeah, thanks John. I would have to say intelligent video analytics. It's a use case that's supplied across industries and verticals. For example, a smart hospital solution that we conducted with Nvidia and Artisight in our previous customer success we've seen 5% more hospital procedures, a 16 times return on investment using operating room coordination. With that IVA, so with the Gen 11 DL 380 that we provide using the the Intel four gen Xeon processors it can really support workloads at scale. Whether that is a smart hospital solution whether that's manufacturing at the edge security camera integration, we can do it all with Intel. >> You know what's really great about AI right now you're starting to see people starting to figure out kind of where the value is does a lot of the heavy lifting on setting things up to make humans more productive. This has been clearly now kind of going neck level. You're seeing it all in the media now and all these new tools coming out. How does HPE make it easier for customers to manage their AI workloads? I imagine there's going to be a surge in demand. How are you guys making it easier to manage their AI workloads? >> Well, I would say the biggest way we do this is through GreenLake, which is our IT as a service model. So customers deploying AI workloads can get fully-managed services to optimize not only their operations but also their spending and the cost that they're putting towards it. In addition to that we have our Gen 11 reliance servers equipped with iLO 6 technology. What this does is allows customers to securely manage their server complete environment from anywhere in the world remotely. >> Any last thoughts or message on the overall fourth gen intel Xeon based Proliant Gen 11 servers? How they will improve workload performance? >> You know, with this generation, obviously the performance is only getting ramped up as the needs and requirements for customers grow. We partner with Intel to support that. >> Jordan, gimme the last word on the container's effect on AI applications. Your thoughts as we close out. >> Yeah, great. I think it's important to remember that containers themselves don't deliver performance, right? The AI stack is a very complex set of software that's compiled together and what we're doing together is to make it easier for customers to get access to that software, to make sure it all works well together and that it can be easily installed and run on sort of a cloud native infrastructure that's hosted by HPE Proliant servers. Hence the title of this talk. How to use Containers to Deploy High Performance AI Applications. Thank you. >> Gentlemen. Thank you for your time on the Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HPE and Intel. Again, I love this segment for AI applications Containers to Deploy Higher Performance. This is a great topic. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay, I'm John. We'll be back with more coverage. See you soon. (soft music)

>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HPE and Intel. Today we're going to dive into advanced performance of VDI with the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processors. Hello I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. My guests today are Alan Chu, Director of Data Center Performance and Competition for Intel as well as Denis Kondakov who's the VDI product manager at HPE, and also joining us is Cynthia Sustiva, CAD/CAM product manager at HPE. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate you guys taking the time. >> Thank you. >> So accelerating VDI to the Edge. That's the topic of this topic here today. Let's get into it, Dennis, tell us about the new HPE ProLiant DL321 Gen 11 server. >> Okay, absolutely. Hello everybody. So HP ProLiant DL320 Gen 11 server is the new age center CCO and density optimized compact server, compact form factor server. It enables to modernize and power at the next generation of workloads in the diverse rec environment at the Edge in an industry standard designed with flexible scale for advanced graphics and compute. So it is one unit, one processor rec optimized server that can be deployed in the enterprise data center as well as at the remote office at end age. >> Cynthia HPE has announced another server, the ProLiant ML350. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, so the HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen 11 server is a powerful tower solution for a wide range of workloads. It is ideal for remote office compute with NextGen performance and expandability with two processors in tower form factor. This enables the server to be used not only in the data center environment, but also in the open office space as a powerful workstation use case. >> Dennis mentioned both servers are empowered by the fourth gen Intel Zion scale of process. Can you talk about the relationship between Intel HPE to get this done? How do you guys come together, what's behind the scenes? Share as much as you can. >> Yeah, thanks a lot John. So without a doubt it takes a lot to put all this together and I think the partnership that HPE and Intel bring together is a little bit of a critical point for us to be able to deliver to our customers. And I'm really thrilled to say that these leading Edge solutions that Dennis and Cynthia just talked about, they're built on the foundation of our fourth Gen Z on scalable platform that's trying to meet a wide variety of deployments for today and into the future. So I think the key point of it is we're together trying to drive leading performance with built-in acceleration and in order to deliver a lot of the business values to our customers, both HP and Intels, look to scale, drive down costs and deliver new services. >> You got the fourth Gen Z on, you got the Gen 11 and multiple ProLiants, a lot of action going on. Again, I love when these next gens come out. Can each of you guys comment and share what are the use cases for each of the systems? Because I think what we're looking at here is the next level innovation. What are some of the use cases on the systems? >> Yeah, so for the ML350, in the modern world where more and more data are generated at the Edge, we need to deploy computer infrastructure where the data is generated. So smaller form factor service will satisfy the requirements of S&B customers or remote and branch offices to deliver required performance redundancy where we're needed. This type of locations can be lacking dedicated facilities with strict humidity, temperature and noise isolation control. The server, the ML350 Gen 11 can be used as a powerful workstation sitting under a desk in the office or open space as well as the server for visualized workloads. It is a productivity workhorse with the ability to scale and adapt to any environment. One of the use cases can be for hosting digital workplace for manufacturing CAD/CAM engineering or oil and gas customers industry. So this server can be used as a high end bare metal workstation for local end users or it can be virtualized desktop solution environments for local and remote users. And talk about the DL320 Gen 11, I will pass it on to Dennis. >> Okay. >> Sure. So when we are talking about age of location we are talking about very specific requirements. So we need to provide solution building blocks that will empower and performance efficient, secure available for scaling up and down in a smaller increments than compared to the enterprise data center and of course redundant. So DL 320 Gen 11 server is the perfect server to satisfy all of those requirements. So for example, S&B customers can build a video solution, for example starting with just two HP ProLiant TL320 Gen 11 servers that will provide sufficient performance for high density video solution and at the same time be redundant and enable it for scaling up as required. So for VGI use cases it can be used for high density general VDI without GP acceleration or for a high performance VDI with virtual VGPU. So thanks to the modern modular architecture that is used on the server, it can be tailored for GPU or high density storage deployment with software defined compute and storage environment and to provide greater details on your Intel view I'm going to pass to Alan. >> Thanks a lot Dennis and I loved how you're both seeing the importance of how we scale and the applicability of the use cases of both the ML350 and DL320 solutions. So scalability is certainly a key tenant towards how we're delivering Intel's Zion scalable platform. It is called Zion scalable after all. And we know that deployments are happening in all different sorts of environments. And I think Cynthia you talked a little bit about kind of a environmental factors that go into how we're designing and I think a lot of people think of a traditional data center with all the bells and whistles and cooling technology where it sometimes might just be a dusty closet in the Edge. So we're defining fortunes you see on scalable to kind of tackle all those different environments and keep that in mind. Our SKUs range from low to high power, general purpose to segment optimize. We're supporting long life use cases so that all goes into account in delivering value to our customers. A lot of the latency sensitive nature of these Edge deployments also benefit greatly from monolithic architectures. And with our latest CPUs we do maintain quite a bit of that with many of our SKUs and delivering higher frequencies along with those SKUs optimized for those specific workloads in networking. So in the end we're looking to drive scalability. We're looking to drive value in a lot of our end users most important KPIs, whether it's latency throughput or efficiency and 4th Gen Z on scalable is looking to deliver that with 60 cores up to 60 cores, the most builtin accelerators of any CPUs in the market. And really the true technology transitions of the platform with DDR5, PCIE, Gen five and CXL. >> Love the scalability story, love the performance. We're going to take a break. Thanks Cynthia, Dennis. Now we're going to come back on our next segment after a quick break to discuss the performance and the benefits of the fourth Gen Intel Zion Scalable. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage, be right back. Welcome back around. We're continuing theCUBE's coverage of compute engineer for your hybrid world. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by Alan Chu from Intel and Denis Konikoff and Cynthia Sistia from HPE. Welcome back. Cynthia, let's start with you. Can you tell us the benefits of the fourth Gen Intel Zion scale process for the HP Gen 11 server? >> Yeah, so HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers support DDR five memory which delivers increased bandwidth and lower power consumption. There are 32 DDR five dim slots with up to eight terabyte total on ML350 and 16 DDR five dim slots with up to two terabytes total on DL320. So we deliver more memory at a greater bandwidth. Also PCIE 5.0 delivers an increased bandwidth and greater number of lanes. So when we say increased number of lanes we need to remember that each lane delivers more bandwidth than lanes of the previous generation plus. Also a flexible storage configuration on HPDO 320 Gen 11 makes it an ideal server for establishing software defined compute and storage solution at the Edge. When we consider a server for VDI workloads, we need to keep the right balance between the number of cords and CPU frequency in order to deliver the desire environment density and noncompromised user experience. So the new server generation supports a greater number of single wide and global wide GPU use to deliver more graphic accelerated virtual desktops per server unit than ever before. HPE ProLiant ML 350 Gen 11 server supports up to four double wide GPUs or up to eight single wide GPUs. When the signing GPU accelerated solutions the number of GPUs available in the system and consistently the number of BGPUs that can be provisioned for VMs in the binding factor rather than CPU course or memory. So HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers with Intel fourth generation science scalable processors enable us to deliver more virtual desktops per server than ever before. And with that I will pass it on to Alan to provide more details on the new Gen CPU performance. >> Thanks Cynthia. So you brought up I think a really great point earlier about the importance of achieving the right balance. So between the both of us, Intel and HPE, I'm sure we've heard countless feedback about how we should be optimizing efficiency for our customers and with four Gen Z and scalable in HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers I think we achieved just that with our built-in accelerator. So built-in acceleration delivers not only the revolutionary performance, but enables significant offload from valuable core execution. That offload unlocks a lot of previously unrealized execution efficiency. So for example, with quick assist technology built in, running engine X, TLS encryption to drive 65,000 connections per second we can offload up to 47% of the course that do other work. Accelerating AI inferences with AMX, that's 10X higher performance and we're now unlocking realtime inferencing. It's becoming an element in every workload from the data center to the Edge. And lastly, so with faster and more efficient database performance with RocksDB, we're executing with Intel in-memory analytics accelerator we're able to deliver 2X the performance per watt than prior gen. So I'll say it's that kind of offload that is really going to enable more and more virtualized desktops or users for any given deployment. >> Thanks everyone. We still got a lot more to discuss with Cynthia, Dennis and Allen, but we're going to take a break. Quick break before wrapping things up. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBEs coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World. I'm John Furrier. We'll be wrapping up our discussion on advanced performance of VDI with the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processers. Welcome back everyone. Dennis, we'll start with you. Let's continue our conversation and turn our attention to security. Obviously security is baked in from day zero as they say. What are some of the new security features or the key security features for the HP ProLiant Gen 11 server? >> Sure, I would like to start with the balance, right? We were talking about performance, we were talking about density, but Alan mentioned about the balance. So what about the security? The security is really important aspect especially if we're talking about solutions deployed at the H. When the security is not active but other aspects of the environment become non-important. And HP is uniquely positioned to deliver the best in class security solution on the market starting with the trusted supply chain and factories and silicon route of trust implemented from the factory. So the new ISO6 supports added protection leveraging SPDM for component authorization and not only enabled for the embedded server management, but also it is integrated with HP GreenLake compute ops manager that enables environment for secure and optimized configuration deployment and even lifecycle management starting from the single server deployed on the Edge and all the way up to the full scale distributed data center. So it brings uncompromised and trusted solution to customers fully protected at all tiers, hardware, firmware, hypervisor, operational system application and data. And the new intel CPUs play an important role in the securing of the platform. So Alan- >> Yeah, thanks. So Intel, I think our zero trust strategy toward security is a really great and a really strong parallel to all the focus that HPE is also bringing to that segment and market. We have even invested in a lot of hardware enabled security technologies like SGX designed to enhance data protection at rest in motion and in use. SGX'S application isolation is the most deployed, researched and battle tested confidential computing technology for the data center market and with the smallest trust boundary of any solution in market. So as we've talked about a little bit about virtualized use cases a lot of virtualized applications rely also on encryption whether bulk or specific ciphers. And this is again an area where we've seen the opportunity for offload to Intel's quick assist technology to encrypt within a single data flow. I think Intel and HP together, we are really providing security at all facets of execution today. >> I love that Software Guard Extension, SGX, also silicon root of trust. We've heard a lot about great stuff. Congratulations, security's very critical as we see more and more. Got to be embedded, got to be completely zero trust. Final question for you guys. Can you share any messages you'd like to share with the audience each of you, what should they walk away from this? What's in it for them? What does all this mean? >> Yeah, so I'll start. Yes, so to wrap it up, HPR Proliant Gen 11 servers are built on four generation science scalable processors to enable high density and extreme performance with high performance CDR five memory and PCI 5.0 plus HP engine engineered and validated workload solutions provide better ROI in any consumption model and prefer by a customer from Edge to Cloud. >> Dennis? >> And yeah, so you are talking about all of the great features that the new generation servers are bringing to our customers, but at the same time, customer IT organization should be ready to enable, configure, support, and fine tune all of these great features for the new server generation. And this is not an obvious task. It requires investments, skills, knowledge and experience. And HP is ready to step up and help customers at any desired skill with the HP Greenlake H2 cloud platform that enables customers for cloud like experience and convenience and the flexibility with the security of the infrastructure deployed in the private data center or in the Edge. So while consuming all of the HP solutions, customer have flexibility to choose the right level of the service delivered from HP GreenLake, starting from hardwares as a service and scale up or down is required to consume the full stack of the hardwares and software as a service with an option to paper use. >> Awesome. Alan, final word. >> Yeah. What should we walk away with? >> Yeah, thanks. So I'd say that we've talked a lot about the systems here in question with HP ProLiant Gen 11 and they're delivering on a lot of the business outcomes that our customers require in order to optimize for operational efficiency or to optimize for just to, well maybe just to enable what they want to do in, with their customers enabling new features, enabling new capabilities. Underpinning all of that is our fourth Gen Zion scalable platform. Whether it's the technology transitions that we're driving with DDR5 PCIA Gen 5 or the raw performance efficiency and scalability of the platform in CPU, I think we're here for our customers in delivering to it. >> That's great stuff. Alan, Dennis, Cynthia, thank you so much for taking the time to do a deep dive in the advanced performance of VDI with the fourth Gen Intel Zion scalable process. And congratulations on Gen 11 ProLiant. You get some great servers there and again next Gen's here. Thanks for taking the time. >> Thank you so much for having us here. >> Okay, this is theCUBEs keeps coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HP and Intel. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Accelerate VDI at the Edge. Thanks for watching.

>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>Okay, we're back with the hybrid Cloud power panel. I'm Dave Ante, and with me our Eric Lockard, who's the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Specialized Thomas Corn's, the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the Senior Vice President of engineering, NCI and nnc two at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>It's to be >>Here. Have us, >>Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I not just ev put everything in the public cloud. >>Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity, the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a, a trend towards public cloud, but you know, not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise, you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise, but also take advantage of, of the cloud for bursting or regionality or expansion, especially coming outta the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and, and video conferencing and so on, driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >>Yeah, it makes sense. I wanna, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit, I don't wanna inundate people with the acronyms, but, but the Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there please. >>Yeah, there, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure, which we actually call NC two to make it simple and SONC two on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you about hybrid cloud, highly desirable customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them, given that they wanna have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you did with just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise and dealing with different portals, networkings get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know, hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done, we then c to Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as is to any Azure region where Ncq is available. Once it's running there, you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that's actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion, do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more cost effective fashion, know for all your applications. And that's really what's really special about NC two Azure today. >>So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly, it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >>This is, this is the key for us, right? Is when you think you're sending on premises, you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model two workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster deploying C to an Azure, it's gonna look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center using the same tools you, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads, make them highly available, do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Americanist teams on, is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services in from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know, and we bridge them together and you get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >>Yeah. And as you alluded to, this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for, for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this, this is not just a press releases or a PowerPoint, you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >>So let me start with what's unique about this, and I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that the best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds of the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC two allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud, at which point you start the refactor journey. >>And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC two on Azure is that NC two is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric, especially the software defined network and SDN piece. What that means is that, you know, you don't have to worry about connecting your NC two cluster to Azure to some sort of an net worth pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC two cluster. And that makes your refactoring journey so much easier. Your management plan looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes, they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the facts that you're doing something in the public cloud, all the nutanix's goodness that you're used to continue to receive that, there is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. >>But if we had to pick one that really stands out, it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity of a public cloud, in this case Azure, and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC construc, the virtual private cloud construc that allows them to really think of that on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's gone on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I drew up that, you know, if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third do a flow development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team, and you're very grateful for their >>Support. I, I need NC two for my house. I live in a house that was built in, it's 1687 and we connect all to new and it's, it is a bolt on, but, but, but, and so, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there, but is it a PAs layer? You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud, You've done more than that. I'm inferring, >>You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of fid. You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road, if you have a containerized application, you'll actually be able to TA it from OnPrem and run it on C two. But the NC two offer itself, the NCAA offer itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know, define tenants to begin with, the hypervisor that you're used to, the network constructs that you're used to light MI segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC two in Azure, the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier, that makes your management challenge easier, that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they'll be able to otherwise. >>Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are, that are gonna emerge for the solution? >>Yeah, I mean we've, you know, we've had a solution for a while, you know, this is now new on Azure's gonna extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us, the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same concept that are around the application and make them, we make them available Now in the Azure region, you can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change. The same IP will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. >>The app stays exactly the same, manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers point politically or maybe I wanna go do something different or I wanna go and shut down location on premises, I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion, in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which are doing on premises, is disaster recovery. And something that we refer to as elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site, just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment, feed over workloads, run them with performance, potentially fill them back to on premises and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again, optimize cost and take advantage of elasticity that you get from public cloud models. >>And then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workload and now basically get combined desktop running on premises desktops running on NC two on Azure, same desktop images, same management, same services, and do that as a burst use case during, say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look, I wanna go to desktop as a service, but right now, now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just won't be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >>Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customers', digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and, but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations. And Eric, you, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >>Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold. I think the one is to, you know, first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their, their administrators and or, or to obviate their investment that they already have in platforms like, like Nutanix. And so the, the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage, leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and and capabilities of of Azure, you know. Second, it is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from, from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-prem up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in in on-premise hci. >>Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with with with with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >>Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, you takes cloud clusters on Azure is ngi, you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers, both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going, going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this, this is now live GA open for business and you know, we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >>Great Indu >>In our Dave. In a prior life about seven or eight, eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular patch preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had had NC two then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >>Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >>Yeah, I'll just point out like this is not something that's just both on or something. We, we, we started yesterday. This is something the teams, both companies have been working on together for, for years really. And it's, it's a way of, of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud and with the ultimate goal of, of again, providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know, take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for, for customers who have significant investments in, in Nutanix clusters on premise, >>Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank >>You. Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, keep it right there. You're watching. Accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on the cube. You're leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage >>Organizations are increasingly moving towards a hybrid cloud model that contains a mix of on premises public and private clouds. A recent study confirms 83% of businesses agree that hybrid multi-cloud is the ideal operating model. Despite its many benefits, deploying a hybrid cloud can be challenging, complex, slow and expensive require different skills and tool sets and separate siloed management interfaces. In fact, 87% of surveyed enterprises believe that multi-cloud success will require simplified management of mixed infrastructures >>With Nutanix and Microsoft. Your hybrid cloud gets the best of both worlds. The predictable costs, performance control and data sovereignty of a private cloud and the scalability, cloud services, ease of use and fractional economics of the public cloud. Whatever your use case, Nutanix cloud clusters simplifies IT. Operations is faster and lowers risk for migration projects, lowers cloud TCO and provides investment optimization and offers effortless, limitless scale and flexibility. Choose NC two to accelerate your business in the cloud and achieve true hybrid cloud success. Take a free self-guided 30 minute test drive of the solutions provisioning steps and use cases at nutanix.com/azure td. >>Okay, so we're just wrapping up accelerate hybrid cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft made possible by Nutanix where we just heard how Nutanix is partnering with cloud and software leader Microsoft to enable customers to execute on a true hybrid cloud vision with actionable solutions. We pushed and got the answer that with NC two on Azure, you get the same stack, the same performance, the same networking, the same automation, the same workflows across on-prem and Azure Estates. Realizing the goal of simplifying and extending on-prem workloads to any Azure region to move apps without complicated refactoring and to be able to tap the full complement of native services that are available on Azure. Remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news related to this announcement and all things enterprise tech. Please go to nutanix.com as of course information about this announcement and the partnership, but there's also a ton of resources to better understand the Nutanix product portfolio. There are white papers, videos, and other valuable content, so check that out. This is Dave Ante for Lisa Martin with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching the program and we'll see you next time.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISV Commercial Solutions at Microsoft. And Michael Luka, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so a, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Well, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. So the, the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at the own pace, and more important to ensure that every one of them as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help, how can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and or Microsoft ISV power ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite >>Then exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Sure. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this quite a while. But really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as I mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill and leverage the most that, So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things cost on premises and are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing in their apps. >>And of course as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technic for reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on pre the cloud or even the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer our joint customers. >>Let's into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation, you guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds of even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it, it's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>And can you comment a little bit further, maybe both of you, of our, starting with you and then Michael, what are some of those business outcomes that customers are coming to Microsoft and Nutanix saying, help us, we've gotta be more competitive, we've gotta get, we've gotta be able to get solutions to market faster, et cetera. What are those key outcomes that these two powerhouse companies are helping customers to unlock? >>Yeah, I will say, look, the range of imperative of customers varies greatly depending on the industry, depending on the positioning. I think that the fundamental question is given your imperative, do we have the ability to empower you to achieve the outcome that you want? And these days, of course, the tons of companies, given the the business context that are being very conscious on cost and efficiency, how do you do more with less? How do I keep innovating? Because innovation will be at the heart of the solutions, but I do that on my own pace with my own priorities. That higher level answer is the one that we're enabling through partnership, like the one we're we're sharing today to the market with Nutanix. >>Yeah, I think >>From you, >>Go ahead. I was just gonna comment ON'S pump as well is that absolutely really depends on the customer and what they're trying to achieve, right? As they think about the next set of innovation that they're trying to develop. But for example, we take a, a web, a use case that we've seen with some of the customers is like migration to the cloud, right? And you know, a lot of companies, they embark on that migration. We see there's a lot of data that says basically, you know, it's much harder than it looks, right? And a lot of these projects become years behind schedule and millions and millions of dollars over budget, right? So reducing that risk and saying, Hey, how do I, can I land in Azure? And then bit by bit start thinking, how do I continue to innovate to get, since now I have easy and secure access while I'm in Azure with, and seek with Nutanix Nutanix clusters on Azure to continue my innovation by taking advantage of Azure native services, right? But again, like Aaro said, it's, it really depends on what the customer goals are. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our rebuttal lines. It does means, but yeah, so like, like, like you mentioned, Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of CU not only s but also partners battle solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have offered to everyone else, but one of our customers Camp Day was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Nstitute and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Ava, the power of the ISB ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an isv, you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our power ecosystem. Because at the same time, making our powers more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us >>Of, Can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on joy opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna talk, go into too much detail, but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what all Borrow said, you know, it's not just about the product integration area, it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customer. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focus on the biggest problems the customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar drug organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah. >>Let me, Go ahead. >>No, I will say, well say Michael, I think that the, the one element that we complement, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and far as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I i, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>Yeah. And, and you know, with every hard problem there's challenges along the way, right? And so I'm actually really proud of both of the teams that stepped up and, you know, figure it out. How do we go solve some of these technical problems? How do we go solve, making sure we continue to provide world class support for sports organizations? And, you know, these weren't easy things to solve and, and you know, everyone really stepped up the challenge >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers and every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the GA that's J in Americas kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months. Look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned is working from kind of the customers backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for the ga, we're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across as they're running their workloads cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've do both, done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Of our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know, you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in this complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspired. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game so that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never a small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement, Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you Avara for joining me. >>Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic and looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. >>Exactly. >>And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave Valante and product execs from both and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with the hybrid cloud power panel. I'm Dave Vellante, and with me Eric Lockard who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Specialized. Thomas Cornely is the Senior Vice President of Products at Nutanix and Indu Keri, who's the Senior Vice President of Engineering, NCI and NC2 at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> It's good to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I want to just put everything in the public cloud. >> Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a trend towards public cloud, but you know not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise but also take advantage of the cloud for bursting, originality or expansion especially coming out of the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and and video conferencing and so on driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >> Yeah, makes sense. I want to, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit I don't want to inundate people with the acronyms, but the Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there, please. >> Yeah, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure which we actually call NC2 to make it simple. And so NC2 on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you think about hybrid cloud highly desirable, customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them given that they want to have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you deal with is just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise. And dealing with different portals, networking get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done we then NC2 Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as-is to any Azure region where NC2 is available. Once it's running there you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion. Do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more (indistinct) fashion know for all your applications. And that's what's really special about NC2 today. >> So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >> This is the key for us, right? When you think you're sitting on premises you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model to workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster, deploy in NC2 Azure, it's going to look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center, using the same tools, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads make them highly available do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Eric and his teams on is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services (indistinct) from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know and we bridge them together and you to get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >> Yeah. And as you alluded to this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this is not just a press release, this is, or a PowerPoint you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >> So let me start with what's unique about this. And I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that. The best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds up the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC2 allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as-is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud at which point you start the refactor journey. And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC2 on Azure is that NC2 is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric especially the software-defined networking, SDN piece. What that means is that, you know you don't have to worry about connecting your NC2 cluster to Azure to some sort of a network pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC2 cluster. And that makes your refactor journey so much easier. Your management claim looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the fact that you're doing something in the public cloud all the Nutanix goodness that you're used to continue to receive that. There is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. But if we had to pick one that really stands out it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity offer public cloud, in this case Azure and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC, the virtual private cloud (indistinct) that allows them to really think of their on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's done on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I grew up that, you know if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third, do a cloud development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team and we're very grateful for their support. >> I need NC2 for my house. I live in a house that was built and it's 1687 and we connect all the new and it is a bolt on, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there but is it a (indistinct) layer. You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud. You've done more than that, I'm inferring. >> You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of (indistinct). You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road if you have a containerized application you'll actually be able to take it from on prem and run it on NC2. But the NC2 offer itself, the NC2 offering itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know define Nutanix to begin with the hypervisor that you're used to the network constructs that you're used to light micro segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC2 in Azure the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier that makes your management challenge easier that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they would be able to otherwise. >> Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are that are going to emerge for this solution? >> Yeah, I mean we've, you know we've had a solution for a while and you know this is now new on Azure is going to extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same culture that were around the application and we make them available now in the Azure region. You can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change the same IP constraint will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. The app stays exactly the same manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers for (indistinct) maybe I want to go do something different or I want to go and shut down the location on premises I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which we're doing on premises IT disaster recovery and something that we refer to as Elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment feed over workloads, run them with performance potentially fill them back to on premises, and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again optimize cost and take advantage of the elasticity that you get from public cloud models. Then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workloads and now basically get combined desktops running on premises desktops running on NC2 on Azure same desktop images, same management, same services and do that as a burst use case during say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look I want to go to desktop as a service, but right now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just want to be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >> Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customer's, digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations generic. You, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >> Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold, I think. The one is to, you know first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their administrators and or to obviate their investment that they already have and platforms like Nutanix. And so the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and capabilities of Azure. You know, second is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-premise up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in on-premise HCI. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >> Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, cloud customers on Azure is now GA you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this this is now live GA open for business and you know we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >> Great, Indu. >> In our day, in a prior life about seven or eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular text preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had NC2 then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >> Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'll just point out that, this is not something that's just bought on or something we started yesterday. This is something the teams both companies have been working on together for years really. And it's a way of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud. And with the ultimate goal of again providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for customers who have significant investments in Nutanix clusters on premise. >> Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there. You're watching accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on The Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle music)

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

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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

>>Hello, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in getting great guests in events are coming back. Next few weeks, we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the cube everywhere, but this conversation's about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got a team say he principal, product manager, edge networking solutions, a Dell technologies and Rob McBride channel and partner sales engineer at versa networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this cube conversation, >>John. Thank you, John. >>So first of all, obviously with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic, even with Omnichron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clearly hybrid environment cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that. The fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different what's your guys' take on this. >>Yeah, to then when we start looking at it, let's kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, you know, when this all kind of started off, obviously, as you stated, right, everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional land transformation and one of the changed their branches to do something from an SD perspective. And then the pandemic hit. And their question to me was Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about now, all of a sudden to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect. >>And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing? Because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches, if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And we'll be seeing kind of progression through all this as a, as, as opposed to just solving, getting a user, to connect into the, into an environment that it can provide, you know, continuity for. They started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I I've now got a ransomware problem, right? >>So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my, my, my branch has state has basically become much more diversified and solutions and things that they're looking for, regardless, obviously around security connectivity, there they've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network if you will. Right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know, acronyms around from like a Z TNA or, you know, cloud security and all this fun stuff starts coming into play. But what it, what it points to is that the biggest challenge ideas, how does, how do they converge networking and security together and provide equitable and uniform policy architecture to identify their users, to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like >>It's a good thing in a way. It actually opens up the kimono and say, Hey, this is the real world we've got to prepare for this next generation a TIF. I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we've got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the V land or remotely, you know, it's not 30%. It was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack and yet they want more resiliency at the edge. Right. So, so one, I didn't budget for it. They didn't predict it and it's gotta be better, faster, cheaper, more skier. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so John, the difference is, is that, you know, Dell, for instance, as already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So, so when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those, those problems. Right. Because we'd already done studies before this, right. We had done studies and we'd come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And, and the results were pretty unanimous in that customers were, all users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, and, you know, connectivity issues and, and things like that. So we, we, we kinda knew about this. And so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, there's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure, wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organization is accessing corporate resources from away from campus. Right? So we, we, we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize that network and address these problems. >>Well, that's a great segue to the next topic. Talk track is, you know, what is a network? What is network monetization? Right. So let's, let's define that if you don't mind, well, I got you guys here. You're both pros get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? >>I think there's a lot of definitions, or it kind of depends on your point, your point of view of where you're, where you're responsible for, from a network or within the stack, you know, are from a take obviously is, you know, working, working from a vendor. And with solutions that we provide modernization is really around solutions that begin to look at more software defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software, and other kinds of points of visibility and automation to the point where, where things are let's, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized. And in the sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things a much more, more cloud aware cloud specific cloud native in built automation, as well as inbuilt kind of analytics where things are much more in a, in a broader SDN, kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a, from a, from a, from a monetization perspective. >>Now, do the other element of your, kind of a question in regards to, it's kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is you want, when you're looking at, whether it's like you're using a word like sassy to kind of define, you know, how are enterprises looking for ZTE and they based solutions or cloud security to augment their, their overall needs. The benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management, because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access, as it relates to their offices to better visibility. Because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, the now able to actually really see the level of context, right? >>I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and access and what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy to that matters to me as the business, from an IP perspective, to protect me as the business, but also to ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an it regular reg regulations perspective. So benefits and the summary are kind of like Mo in bill automation, better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way, as a result of automation, greater visibility. Now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall it infrastructure and better overall control. That's been ultimately simplified as result of consolidation and unification. >>That's awesome. Insight. I T what's your take on the benefits of ma network modernization? >>So I'd like to sort of double down on, on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight, more insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance, more insights means control that it departments are, are meeting. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement, to be able to push updates and, and patches quickly. So, so it's really about, you know, that, that manageability, that that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally one of the key benefits is cost savings of, you know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from, from our perspective, it's, it's really about building an open platform. >>You know, we've built a platform or an x86 based platform. We've we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, as they build their build towards their modernizing modernization goals. And so we're like tech leveraging technologies, like UCPs so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform, but what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall, and when optimization you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You, you get operational savings as well, right? So you've it, common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model means a streamlined operations means fewer truck rolls, right? So, so there's a tremendous amount of, of, of benefit from the cost standpoint as well, because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. >>That's awesome. You guys mentioned sassy earlier. I'm like, first of all, software as a service is very sassy, big modern application movements. Always get my hair sassy. I think, you know, a kind of a term around SAS software as a service, but for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, per security and networking, it's a huge discussion SD win fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before now. It's everyone's world is the same. Now it's connected. So sassy is huge. How does that fit into SD when it's in the trend of the SAS at the same? What's the difference? Cause wan has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in what's the difference? >>You know, I like to also agree with you, this thing has been booming the last couple of years, right. You know, kind of, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing, but, you know, to your question in regards to kind of its linkage relative to sassy, right. You know, as you articulated, right. It's the sassy secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym. So it's authority is first kind of good to kind of define a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit into the point of sassy is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud, as well as addressing, you know, their, their kind of traditional land requirements. >>Now digging in sassy is broken to two little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and the six security layer and by its definition, right, by, by a particular analyst, the network component, a big portion of that is SD wan. And so SD wan providing that value associated to what does, you know, dynamic lanes, steering automation, application attachments, so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associates, associate sassy. And then the other element of zesty is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked, whether, you know, for example, like versus just the kind of mentioned this here, the, the, the sassy cloud that we built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet CASBY, DLP type of services is built upon SQM. In addition to our customers that are using Guesty Lampard or traditional land are using SD wan to connect to that cloud. >>So it's very, very much linked and they kind of go hand in hand, depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that. What, what it also highlights is that whether it's around sassy or not, when we, when in pertinent to everything we'd been other kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with sun intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security it's around, whether it's security at the branch, or whether it's around some form of, you know, identity management or a point of improving posture for the, for the enterprise to, you know, obviously the spec traffic at the branch where remotely, but what we're seeing at a trend wise, which, you know, part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD Wang coming together, whether for your traditional land transformation, or as a result of sassy services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce, going into the cloud for, for their connectivity needs and optimizations. In addition to obviously the, the enterprises branch transformations, >>I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD way in St. Cloud because it's, we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick. If you don't mind, I want to just double click them what you mentioned there, because I think the cloud effication plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true? Or did they get that right? What's what's this all mean with cloud vacation? Yeah, >>And I, I would, I, I, I agree with, I guess kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us you're right now. Exactly. In talking with you right now, right. John is, as you stated at the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right, we are accessing, or from an engagement we're accessing a cloud service. Now what's critical for us, as you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right. Not only our own asset that we're using, right. Our laptops or other machinery that you use to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect them. So how can we do that? Right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? >>Sure. We can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of, of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring it to the cloud where you'd have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically, scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and, and enforcement. And so that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, right, is for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security, as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right. To, to, to do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together. And the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we, we, we need to ensure, right. We're all much, we're much more vulnerable. Right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office. Right? >>So most people, because you have worked for virtual networks, >>I can make that argument. Yes. Right. But you know, the average, most of us, remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so, as we, as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet. Right. You know, the, the, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into that. >>All my network engineer, friends are secure, as you read about. And I always joked to the malware, you missed, missed the wrong network engineer. If I go after them, their house, spear fishing. And you're trying to get into your network. I'd say, if I want to bring this back, because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on premises because you're working at home. That's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise edge and cloud. And a cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day is where you are. Right. So having the performance and the security and the partnership that same with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now, because what does that even mean? Home's edge is the camp of data centers and edge the, the cars and edge, the telco monopoles and edge. This is a big deal. This is the unit about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your, what's your take on this from the Dell perspective. >>Yeah. And I think, I mean, it that's, I mean, you, you kind of summarize it, right. I mean, what does edge mean to you? Right. It's and then, so every time I have a conversation with, with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, you know, from, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, you know, we believe that we want to provide enterprise grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need for, you know, from it departments for tools, for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources. Right. And so that's what we're committed to is making sure that, that, that management layer by either developing the solutions, in-house bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend, or this, this, this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. >>So thanks for coming on, Rob, we'll give you the final word. What's changed the most, in your opinion, with customers, environments, around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't where to double down on what was screwed up. I mean, come on. This is, we're kind of seeing it all play out. What's your, what's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this, what's the big learning. Okay. >>Well that you need partners. Right. Okay. So it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of other customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy for even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right. It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise, it is recognized. They need a lot of these building blocks, right. To, to accomplish a lot of different things, whether it's around automation, to, in other tools as, as auto was leading into. And so we're finding that, you know, a lot of our, our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology, but help them actually understand all the various different, you know, multi-colored legal blocks, they've got to put together, but also help help them actually put that into a realization. >>Right. And, you know, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car. Right. And so the learning that we're seeing here is this is a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech, new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done. And they're, they're, they're looking for help. Right. And so they're looking for kind of, let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together. So they can then ultimately accomplish our overall kind of, you know, other kinds of objectives from an it perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say, and then I'll, then I'll stop. Here is SD wan isn't dead, right? Yes. The man is actually still driving. And it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing, whether it's around, you know, sassy, oriented services, remote access, private access, and other things of that nature. >>I totally agree. I think the networking, stuff's still going to be so much innovation going on with the edge exploding as well. That the really great, amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet, making them secure. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >> Throughout the pre-vaccine COVID era, IT buyers indicated that budget constraints would constrict 2020 spending by roughly 5 percent relative to 2019 levels. But the forced march to digital, combined with increased cyber threats, created a modernization mandate that powered Q4 spending last year and this momentum has carried through to 2021. However, COVID variants have delayed return to work and business travel plans and as such our current forecast for global IT spending remains strong at 6 to 7 percent but slightly down from previous estimates. Notably, CIOs and IT buyers expect a 7 to 8 percent increase in 2022 spending, reflecting investments in hybrid strategies in a continued belief that technology remains the underpinning of competitive advantage in the coming decade. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll share the latest results of ETR's macro spending survey and update you in industry and sector spending patterns. First, let's summarize the key take-aways from ETR's latest demand-side survey. Based on ETR's latest survey. Currently with 869 responses as shown here at the bottom, we expect a slight pull-back in spending expectations from CIOs and IT buyers to roughly 6 to 7 percent, down from 7 to 8 percent earlier this year. This reflects caution over return to office strategies but buyers continue to expect robust spending as we said into next year as they support hybrid models, modernize their HQ infrastructure and continue to move forward on digital transformation initiatives. Cyber security and cloud remain the top 2 priorities with data initiatives overtaking collaboration and productivity on the priority list. Although all of these remain strong. Organizations now expect around 44 percent of employees to be working in a hybrid model over the long-term with 37 percent currently working in a hybrid fashion. Now here's the data behind the revised projections it compares the spending growth expectations from the March, June, and September 21 surveys. This by no means is a radical change as you can see from the downward trajectory of the yellow bar. It reflects the reality of the continued injection of uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Organizations are dealing with the reality and remaining flexible with regard to strategies and spending outlook, but the 2022 bar on the far-right at 7 and a half percent stands out in its telling as buyers expect spending levels in 22 to outpace historical norms by quite a large margin. Now as shown here, the spending compression is an across the board trend. Only Latin America, industrial materials manufacturing, and retail consumer show an uptick from previous surveys. With non-profits, education, energy, and APAC showing the steepest declines. But the longer term spending outlook remains robust across the boards. This chart shows that generally the outlook for 2022 spending is strong with retail consumer and government leading the charge. Only the historically cautious education sector stands out as softer, but even so its spending outlook is comparable to historical norms. Now be careful putting too much emphasis, by the way, on Latin America as the ends are small as ETR noted here. Now let's take a look at the sector analysis. This picture has been amazingly consistent. ETR asks respondents to rate their spending priorities and the chart shows the ratings from highest to lowest priority for the top technology sectors. Now this data only shows the top 7 sectors, so even though for instance RPA appears down the list, it remains one of the highest in the survey. In fact, although we are not showing this data, we went in and looked at this. Machine learning, containers, cloud, and RPA remain the top 4 areas from a net score or spending momentum standpoint. Well above the 40 percent mark we talk about all the time. Back to the priorities we asked the CIOs. Cyber security is noticeably above the rest with cloud migration remaining very strong. The data sector i.e. analytics and data warehousing have overtaken collaboration and productivity as priorities. However, collaboration remains strong as do networking, AI, and RPA. Now when we dig into some of these sectors to see which vendors are showing spending momentum, let's take a look. In addition to the large cloud players, especially AWS and Microsoft, we saw that snowflake continued to hover at around 80 percent net score level. Some others that we haven't cited as much recently are popping up either with spending momentum, or showing a larger presence in the market or both within these sectors. Toughtsbot has popped up now this AI specialist has shown up every now and then in the survey but they seem to be getting traction in the data set and they have an elevated net score. Datadog also stood out as did Cockroach Labs and Databricks is starting to show some strength even though they have shown strength in past surveys, they're starting to show larger presence in the survey. Now Networking Arista who has always had strong momentum shows continued strong momentum. And Maraki which has a large presence in the data set, is also notable. Not as high, but as a much larger share. Monday.com is also hitting the radar in collaboration and Twilio is popping up as well. Let's take a look at the return to office trends and the actions organizations have taken as a result of COVID and see how that's changed over time. This data shows the time series going back to the June 2020 survey. Let's start with the percent of organizations with employees working from home and you'll note that has ticked up since June and is now back up to 75 percent. And you can see the noticeable drop in the percentage of companies that have employees fully returning to the office. Also, more organizations are canceling business trips. So these are some of the factors that contribute to the slightly more cautious spending outlook that we're reporting here. Now continuing on the chart even though layoffs are trending downward, it's no surprise given the skill shortage you see a slight uptick in hiring freezes and a downtick in new hiring. New IT deployment freezes they remain low but there is a slight down tick in accelerating new IT deployments. So look, these are not radical changes, but they do reflect the on-going day-by-day, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter adjustments that we've seen companies make throughout the COVID era. And it underscores the need for organizations to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and responsive to change. What does that mean? It means modernizing infrastructure and apps, better leveraging data, applying AI, and taking care of governance, compliance, and security. And CIOs expect these spending priorities to continue for the foreseeable future, at least for the next 15 months. Now as we've declared in previous episodes, every CEO, CXO, corner office, boards of directors, they're trying to get hybrid right. Interestingly, we see some companies mandating a return to work. We've seen this with some of the Wall Street firms, for example, but tech is a leading example of advocating for remote or hybrid work. To it, Michael Dell's public posture that he's wide-open for remote and, or hybrid work and Frank Slootman has moved Snowflakes' executive offices to Bozeman, Montana reflecting his sentiment that the days of big corporate towers are over. And why not? Productivity is through the roof, and the cost savings from working remotely can be enormous. This chart shows data back to the December 2020 survey. And we've seen a steady decline in remote work, but it's still the dominant model of 53 percent of the work force. In other words, people are starting to come back to office but still very, very high remote. Now jump to the third set of bars. And organizations expect a 39 percent of employees to be working remotely in 6 months. Now jump back to the second set of bars, 37 percent of employees are currently working in a hybrid model and that's up from 33 percent in June. Now jump to the fourth set of bars and the expectation is around 44 percent will be working in a hybrid model within the next 6 months. Organizations expect remote workers to settle in and level around 30 percent. Now that's down from previous highs of 35 percent last December but it's up significantly from the historical average of 15 to 16 percent. And the expectation as you can see in the last set of bars is that more than 40 percent of employees will be working in a hybrid model, on a permanent basis. So look, the world is going hybrid. It's the future and that requires technology investments to support new ways to work. And that's one main reason why we see the spending momentum continuing into 2022. So let's drill a little bit into what this means. In order words, how are organizations thinking about their hybrid models. This chart shows the responses from the June and September surveys when ETR began asking organizations to describe their hybrid approaches in more detail. The dominant model, around 50 percent of organizations say time will be split between remote and required on-site days. This is where leaders will ask employees to come to the office at designated times for whiteboard sessions, or planning meetings, et cetera. So hybrid is the dominant model. Then we see a big drop to primarily on-site with exceptions as needed and a low single digit number of organizations with no hybrid option. So the message is clear: Hybrid is the way forward and IT infrastructure will evolve to support these models and this bodes well for tech spending in our view. It speaks to continued cyber investments, leverage the cloud for flexible capacity shoring up on-prem infrastructure as we now see more vendors offering flexible capacity on-prem. Modernizing applications, building layers with micro-services and kubernetes that can actually connect to the cloud or assist in moving workloads, evolving the network architecture, flattening that out we hear a lot of talk about the edge, driving automation, and new ways to work and putting data at the core of digital business strategies. These are the technology approaches that organizations are tapping to deal with the changing dynamics of the pandemic, and adapting to new business models. Across the board, technology has become one of the most important enablers for competitiveness ain the coming decade and we expect that momentum to continue until some exogenous factors derail the spending trend. At the moment, that risk doesn't appear to be a slow-down in an economic recovery, although we continue to watch uncertainties around interest rates, inflation, tax policy, and global economic tensions, especially with China. And as always, we'll be here to update you as the data changes. Okay we're going to leave it there for now, remember these episodes are all available as podcasts you just got to search "breaking analysis podcasts" and we publish each week on wikibon.com and silliconeggle.com. You can connect with me on twitter @Devalante or email me at david.valante@silliconeggle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Valante for the Cube insights powered by ETR, be well, and we'll see you next time. (music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Now, regardless of the chosen approach, which is going to vary, technology executives, they understand they have to accelerate their digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. Now, this is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments. And at the macro level, we expect total spending to increase at as much as 8% or even more in 2021, compared to last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud collaboration that are enabling hybrid work as well as data, including analytics, AI, and automation are at the top of the spending priorities for CXOs. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're pleased to welcome back Erik Bradley, who is the chief engagement strategist at our partner, ETR. Now in this segment, we're going to share some of the latest findings from ETR's surveys and provide our commentary on what it means for the markets, for sellers, and for buyers. Erik, great to see you, my friend. Welcome back to Breaking Analysis. >> Thank you for having me, always enjoy it. We've got some fresh data to talk about on this beautiful summer Friday, so I'm ready to go. >> All right. I'm excited too. Okay, last year we saw a contraction in IT spending by at least 5%. And now we're seeing a snapback to, as I said, at least 8% growth relative to last year. You got to go back to 2007 just before the financial crisis to see this type of top line growth. The shift to hybrid work, it's exposed us to new insidious security threats. And we're going to discuss that in a lot more detail. Cloud migration of course picked up dramatically last year, and based on the recent earnings results of the big cloud players, for now we got two quarters of data, that trend continues as organizations are accelerating their digital platform build-outs, and this is bringing a lot of complexity and a greater need for so-called observability solutions, which Erik is going to talk about extensively later on in this segment. Data, we think is entering a new era of de-centralization. We see organizations not only focused on analytics and insights, but actually creating data products. Leading technology organizations like JP Morgan, they're heavily leaning into this trend toward packaging and monetizing data products. And finally, as part of the digital transformation trend, we see no slow down in spending momentum for AI and automation, generally in RPA specifically. Erik, anything you want to add to that top level narrative? >> Yeah, there's a lot to take on the macro takeaways. The first thing I want to state is that that 8, 8.5% number that started off at just 3 to 4% beginning of the year. So as the year has continued, we are just seeing this trend in budgets continue to accelerate, and we don't have any reason to believe that's going to stop. So I think we're going to just keep moving on heading into 2021. And we're going to see a banner year of spend this year and probably next as well. >> All right, now we're going to bring up a chart that shows kind of that progression here of spending momentum. So Erik, I'm going to let you comment on this chart that tracks those projections over time. >> Erik: Yeah. Great. So thank you very much for pulling this up. As you can see in the beginning part of the year, when we asked people, "What do you plan to spend throughout 2021?" They were saying it would be about a 4% increase. Which we were happy with because as you said last year, it was all negative. That continues to accelerate and is only hyper accelerating now as we head into the back half of the year. In addition, after we do this data, I always host a panel of IT end users to kind of get their feedback on what we collected, to a man, every one of them expects continued increase throughout next year. There are some concerns and uncertainty about what we're seeing right now with COVID, but even with that, they're planning their budgets now for 2022 and they're planning for even further increases going forward. >> Dave: Great, thank you. So we circled that 8%. That's really kind of where we thought it was going to land. And so we're happy with that number, but let's take a look at where the action is by technology sector. This chart that we're showing you here, it tracks spending priorities back to last September. When I believe that was the point, Erik, that cyber became the top priority in the survey, ahead of cloud collaboration, analytics, and data, and the other sectors that you see there. Now, Erik, we should explain. These areas, they're the top seven, and they outrank all the other sectors. ETR tracks many, many other sectors, but please weigh in here and share your thoughts on this data. >> Erik: Yeah. Security, security, security. It hasn't changed. It had really hasn't. The hybrid work. The fact that you're behind the firewall one day and then you're outside working from home the next, switching in and out of networks. This is just a field day for bad actors. And we have no choice right now, but to continue to spend, because as you're going to talk about in a minute, hybrid's here to stay. So we have to figure out a way to secure behind the firewall on-prem. We also have to secure our employees and our assets that are not in the office. So it is a main priority. One of the things that point out on this chart, I had a couple of ITN users talk to me about customer experience and automation really need to move from the right part of that chart to the left. So they're seeing more in what you were talking about in RPA and automation, starting to creep up heading into next year. As cloud migration matures, as you know, cybersecurity spending has been ramping up. People are going to see a little bit more on the analytics and a little bit more on the automation side going forward. >> Dave: Great. Now, this next data view- well, first of all, one of the great things about the ETR dataset is that you can ask key questions and get a time series. And I will tell you again, I go back to last March, ETR hit it. They were the first on the work from home trend. And so if you were on that trend, you were able to anticipate it. And a lot of investors I think took advantage of that. Now, but we've shown this before, but there's new data points that we want to introduce. So the data tracks how CIOs and IT buyers have responded to the pandemic since last March. Still 70% of the organizations have employees working remotely, but 39% now have employees fully returning to the office and Erik, the rest of the metrics all point toward positives for IT spending, although accelerating IT deployments there at the right peaked last year, as people realized they had to invest in the future. Your thoughts? >> Erik: Yeah, this is the slide for optimism, without a doubt. Of the entire macro survey we did, this is the most optimistic slide. It's great for overall business. It's great for business travel. This is well beyond just IT. Hiring is up. I've had some people tell me that they possibly can't hire enough people right now. They had to furlough employees, they had to stop projects, and they want to re accelerate those now. But talent is very hard to find. Another point to you about your automation and RPA, another underlying trend for there. The one thing I did want to talk about here is the hybrid workplace, but I believe there's another slide on it. So just to recap on this extremely optimistic, we're seeing a lot of hiring. We're seeing increased spending, and I do believe that that's going to continue. >> Yeah I'm glad you brought that up because a session that you and I did a while ago, we pointed out, it was earlier this year, that the skill shortage is one potential risk to our positive scenario. We'll keep an eye on that, but so I want to show another set of data that we've showed previously, but ETR again, has added some new questions in here. So note here that 60% of employees still work remotely with 33% in a hybrid model currently, and the CIO's expect that to land on about 42% hybrid workforce with around 30% working remotely, which is around, it's been consistent by the way on your surveys, but that's about double the historic norm, Eric. >> Erik: Yeah, and even further to your point Dave, recently I did a panel asking people to give me some feedback on this. And three of those four experts basically said to me, if we had greed run this survey right now, that even more people would be saying remote. That they believe that that number, that's saying they're expecting that number of people to be back in office, is actually too optimistic. They're actually saying that maybe if we had- cause as a survey launched about six, seven weeks ago before this little blip on the radar, before the little COVID hiccup we're seeing now, and they're telling me that they believe if we reran this now that it would be even more remote work, even more hybrid and less returned to the office. So that's just an update I wanted to offer on this slide. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, we're still in this kind of day to day, week to week, month to month mode, but I want to do a little double click on this. We're not going to share this data, but there was so much ETR data. We got to be selective. But if you double click on the hybrid models, you'll see that 50% of organizations plan to have time roughly equally split between onsite and remote with again around 30 or 31% mostly remote, with onsite space available if they need it. And Erik, very few don't plan to have some type of hybrid model, at least. >> Yeah, I think it was less than 10% that said it was going to be exclusively onsite. And again, that was a more optimistic scenario six, seven weeks ago than we're seeing right now throughout the country. So I agree with you, hybrid is here to stay. There really is no doubt about it. from everyone I speak to when, you know, I basically make a living talking to IT end users. Hybrid is here to stay. They're planning for it. And that's really the drive behind the spending because you have to support both. You have to give people the option. You have to, from an IT perspective, you also have to support both, right? So if somebody is in office, I need the support staff to be in office. Plus I need them to be able to remote in and fix something from home. So they're spending on both fronts right now. >> Okay. Let's get into some of the vendor performance data. And I want to start with the cloud hyperscalers. It's something that we followed pretty closely. I got some Wiki bond data, that we just had earnings released. So here's data that shows the Q2 revenue shares on the left-hand side in the pie and the growth rates for the big four cloud players on the right hand side. It goes back to Q1 2019. Now the first thing I want to say is these players generated just under $39 billion in the quarter with AWS capturing 50% of that number. I said 39, it was 29 billion, sorry, with AWS capturing 50% of that in the quarter. As you're still tracking around a third in Alibaba and GCP in the, you know, eight or 9% range. But what's most interesting to me, Erik, is that AWS, which generated almost 15 billion in the quarter, was the only player to grow its revenue, both sequentially and year over year. And Erik, I think the street is missing the real story here on Amazon. Amazon announced earnings on Thursday night. The company had a 2% miss on the top line revenues and a meaningful 22% beat on earnings per share. So the retail side of the business missed its revenue targets, so that's why everybody's freaked out. But AWS, the cloud side, saw a 4% revenue beat. So the stock was off more than 70% after hours and into Friday. Now to me, a mix shift toward AWS, that's great news for investors. Now, tepid guidance is a negative, but the shift to a more profitable cloud business is a huge positive. >> Yeah, there's a lot that goes into stock price, right? I remember I was a director of research back in the day. One of my analysts said to me, "Am I crazy for putting a $1,000 target on Amazon?" And I laughed and I said, "No, you're crazy if you don't make it $2,000." (both chuckling) So, you know, at that time it was basically the mix shift towards AWS. You're a thousand percent right. I think the tough year over year comps had something to do with that reaction. That, you know, it's just getting really hard. What's that? The law of large numbers, right? It's really hard to grow at that percentage rate when you're getting this big. But from our data perspective, we're seeing no slowdown in AWS, in cloud, none whatsoever. The only slowdown we're seeing in cloud is GCP. But to, you know, to focus on AWS, extremely strong across the board and not only just in cloud, but in all their data products as well, data and analytics. >> Yeah and I think that the AWS, don't forget folks, that funds Amazon's TAM expansion into so many different places. Okay. As we said at the top, the world of digital and hybrid work, and multi-cloud, it's more complicated than it used to be. And that means if you need to resolve issues, which everybody does, like poor application performance, et cetera, what's happening at the user level, you have to have a better way to sort of see what's going on. And that's what the emergence of the observability space is all about. So Erik, let me set this up and you have a lot of comments here because you've recently had some, and you always have had a lot of round table discussions with CXOs on this topic. So this chart plots net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And we inserted a table that shows the data points in detail. Now that red dotted line is just sort of Dave Vellante's subjective mark in the sand for elevated spending levels. And there are three other points here. One is Splunk as well off is two-year peak, as highlighted in the red, but Signal FX, which Splunk acquired, has made a big move northward this last quarter. As has Datadog. So Erik, what can you share with us on this hot, but increasingly crowded space? >> Yeah. I could talk about the space for a long time. As you know, I've gotten some flack over the last year and a half about, you know, kind of pointing out this trend, this negative trend in Splunk. So I do want to be the first one to say that this data set is rebounding. Splunk has been horrific in our data for going back almost two years now, straight downward trend. This is the first time we're seeing any increase, any positivity there. So I do want to be fair and state that because I've been accused of being a little too negative on Splunk in the past. But I would basically say for observability right now, it's a rising tide lifts all boats, if I can use a New England phrase. The data across the board in analytics for these observability players is up, is accelerating. None more so than Datadog. And it's exactly your point, David. The complexity, the increased cloud migration is a perfect setup for Datadog, which is a cloud native. It focuses on microservices. It focuses on cloud observability. Old Splunk was just application monitoring. Don't get me wrong, they're changing, but they were on-prem application monitoring, first and foremost. Datadog came out as cloud native. They, you know, do microservices. This is just a perfect setup for them. And not only is Datadog leading the observability, it's leading the entire analytics sector, all of it. Not just the observability niche. So without a doubt, that is the strongest that we're seeing. It's leading Dynatrace new Relic. The only one that really isn't rebounding is Cisco App Dynamics. That's getting the dreaded legacy word really attached to it. But this space is really on fire, elastic as well, really doing well in this space. New Relic has shown a little bit of improvement as well. And what I heard when I asked my panelists about this, is that because of the maturity of cloud migration, that this observability has to grow. Spending on this has to happen. So they all say the chart looks right. And it's really just about the digital transformation maturity. So that's largely what they think is happening here. And they don't really see it getting, you know, changing anytime soon. >> Yeah, and I would add, and you see that it's getting crowded. You saw a service now acquired LightStep, and they want to get into the game. You mentioned, you know, last deck of the elk stack is, you know, the open source alternative, but then we see a company who's raised a fair amount of money, startup, chaos search, coming in, going after kind of the complexity of the elk stack. You've got honeycomb, which has got a really innovative approach, Jeremy Burton's company observes. So you have venture capital coming in. So we'll see if those guys could be disruptive enough or are they, you know, candidates to get acquired? We'll see how that all- you know that well. The M and A space. You think this space is ripe for M and A? >> I think it's ripe for consolidation, M and A. Something has to shake out. There's no doubt. I do believe that all of these can be standalone. So we shall see what's happened to, you mentioned the Splunk acquisition of Signal FX, just a house cleaning point. That was really nice acceleration by Signal FX, but it was only 20 citations. We'd looked into this a little bit deeper. Our data scientists did. It appears as if the majority of people are just signaling spunk and not FX separately. So moving forward for our data set, we're going to combine those two, so we don't have those anomalies going forward. But that type of acquisition does show what we should expect to see more of in this group going forward. >> Well that's I want to mention. That's one of the challenges that any data company has, and you guys do a great job of it. You're constantly having to reevaluate. There's so much M and A going on in the industry. You've got to pick the right spots in terms of when to consolidate. There's some big, you know, Dell and EMC, for example. You know, you've beautifully worked through that transition. You're seeing, you know, open shift and red hat with IBM. You just got to be flexible. And that's where it's valuable to be able to have a pipeline to guys like Erik, to sort of squint through that. So thank you for that clarification. >> Thank you too, because having a resource like you with industry knowledge really helps us navigate some of those as well for everyone out there. So that's a lot to do with you do Dave, >> Thank you. It's going to be interesting to watch Splunk. Doug Merritt's made some, you know, management changes, not the least of which is bringing in Teresa Carlson to run go to market. So if you know, I'd be interested if they are hitting, bouncing off the bottom and rising up again. They have a great customer base. Okay. Let's look at some of the same dimensions. Go ahead. You got a comment? >> A few of ETR's clients looked at our data and then put a billion dollar investment into it too. So obviously I agree. (Dave laughing) Splunk is looking like it's set for a rebound, and it's definitely something to watch, I agree. >> Not to rat hole in this, but I got to say. When I look back, cause theCUBE gives us kind of early visibility. So companies with momentum and you talk to the customers that all these shows that we go to. I will tell you that three companies stood out last decade. It was Splunk. It was Service Now and Tableau. And you could tell just from just discussions with their customers, the enthusiasm in that customer base. And so that's a real asset, and that helps them build them a moat. So we'll see. All right, let's take a look at the same dimensions now for cyber. This is cybersecurity net score in the vertical, and market share in the horizontal. And I filtered by in greater than a hundred shared in because just gets so crowded. Erik, the only things I would point out here is CrowdStrike and Zscaler continue to shine, CyberArk also showing momentum over that 40% line. Very impressively, Palo Alto networks, which has a big presence in the market. They've bounced back. We predicted that a while back. Your round table suggested people like working with Palo Alto. They're a gold standard. You know, we had reported earlier on that divergence with four to net in terms of valuation and some of the challenges they had in cloud, clearly, you know, back with the momentum. And of course, Microsoft in the upper, right. It's just, they're literally off the charts and obviously a major player here, but your thoughts on cyber? >> Erik: Yeah. Going back to the backdrop. Security, security, security. It has been the number one priority going back to last September. No one sees it changing. It has to happen. The threat vectors are actually expanding and we have no choice but to spend here. So it is not surprising to see. You did name our three favorite names. So as you know, we look at the dataset, we see which ones have the most positive inflections, and we put outlooks on those. And you did mention Zscaler, Okta and CrowdStrike, by far the three standouts that we're seeing. I just recently did a huge panel on Okta talking about their acquisition of Auth Zero. They're pushed into Sale Point space, trying to move just from single sign on and MFA to going to really privileged account management. There is some hurdles there. Really Okta's ability to do this on-prem is something that a little bit of the IT end users are concerned about. But what we're seeing right now, both Okta and Auth Zero are two of the main adopted names in security. They look incredibly well set up. Zscaler as well. With the ZTNA push more towards zero trust, Zscaler came out so hot in their IPO. And everyone was wondering if it was going to trail off just like Snowflake. It's not trailing off. This thing just keeps going up into the right, up into the right. The data supports a lot of tremendous growth for the three names that you just mentioned. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Auth Zero. We had reported on that earlier. I just feel like that was a great acquisition. You had Okta doing the belly to belly enterprise, you know, selling. And the one thing that they really lacked was that developer momentum. And that's what Auth Zero brings. Just a smart move by Todd McKinnon and company. And I mean, so this, you know, I want to, I want to pull up another chart show a quick snapshot of some of the players in the survey who show momentum and have you comment on this. We haven't mentioned Snowflake so far, but they remain again with like this gold standard of net score, they've consistently had those high marks with regard to spending velocity. But here's some other data. Erik, how should we interpret this? >> Erik: Yeah, just to harp on Snowflake for a second. Right, I mean the rich get richer. They came out- IPO was so hyped, so it was hard for us as a research company to say, "Oh, you know, well, you know, we agree." But we did. The data is incredible. You can't beat the management team. You can't beat what they're doing. They've got so much cash. I can't wait to see what they do with it. And meanwhile, you would expect something that debuted with that high of a net score, that high of spending velocity to trail off. It would be natural. It's not Dave, it's still accelerating. It's gone even higher. It's at all time highs. And we just don't see it stopping anytime soon. It's a really interesting space right now. Maybe another name to look at on here that I think is pretty interesting, kind of a play on return to business is Kupa. It's a great project expense management tool that got hit really hard. Listen, traveling stopped, business expense stopped, and I did a panel on it. And a lot of our guys basically said, "Yeah, it was the first thing I cut." But we're seeing a huge rebound in spending there in that space. So that's a name that I think might be worth being called out on a positive side. Negative, If you look down to the bottom right of that chart, unfortunately we're seeing some issues in RingCentral and Zoom. Anything that's sort of playing in this next, you know, video conferencing, IP telephony space, they seem to be having really decelerating spending. Also now with Zoom's acquisition of five nine. I'm not really sure how RingCentral's going to compete on that. But yeah, that's one where we debuted for the first time with a negative outlook on that name. And looking and asking to some of the people in our community, a lot of them say externally, you still need IP telepany, but internally you don't. Because the You Cast communication systems are getting so sophisticated, that if I have Teams, if I have Slack, I don't need phones anymore. (chuckling) That you and I can just do a Slack call. We can do a Teams call. And many of them are saying I'm truly ripping out my IP Telepany internally as soon as possible because we just don't need it. So this whole collaboration, productivity space is here to stay. And it's got wide ranging implications to some of these more legacy type of tools. >> You know, one of the other things I'd call out on this chart is Accenture. You and I had a session earlier this year, and we had predicted that that skill shortage was going to lead to an uptick in traditional services. We've certainly seen that. I mean, IBM beat its quarter on the strength of services largely. And seeing Accenture on that is I think confirmation. >> Yeah that was our New Year prediction show, right Dave? When we made top 10 predictions? >> That's right. That was part of our predictions show. Exactly, good memory. >> The data is really showing that continue. People want the projects, they need to do the projects, but hiring is very difficult. So obviously the number one beneficiary there are going to be the Accentures of the world. >> All right. So let's do a quick wrap. I'm going to make a few comments and then have you bring us home, Erik. So we laid out our scenario for the tech spending rebound. We definitely believe last year tracked downward, along with GDP contraction. It was interesting. Gardner doesn't believe, at least factions of Gardner don't believe there's a correlation between GDP and tech spending. But, you know, I personally think there generally is some kind of relatively proportional pattern there. And I think we saw contraction last year. People are concerned about inflation. Of course, that adds some uncertainty. And as well, as you mentioned around the Delta variant. But I feel as though that the boards of directors and CEOs, they've mandated that tech execs have to build out digital platforms for the future. They're data centric. They're highly automated, to your earlier points. They're intelligent with AI infused, and that's going to take investment. I feel like the tech community has said, "Look, we know what to do here. We're dealing with hybrid work. We can't just stop doing what we're doing. Let's move forward." You know, and as you say, we're flying again and so forth. You know, getting hybrid right is a major priority that directly impacts strategies. Technology strategies, particularly around security, cloud, the productivity of remote workers with collaboration. And as we've said many times, we are entering a new era of data that's going to focus on decentralized data, building data products, and Erik let's keep an eye on this observability space. Lot of interest there, and buyers have a number of choices. You know, do they go with a specialist, as we saw recently, we've seen in the past, or did they go with the generalist like Service Now with the acquisition of LightStep? You know, it's going to be interesting. A lot of people are going to get into this space, start bundling into larger platforms. And so as you said, there's probably not enough room for all the players. We're going to see some consolidation there. But anyway, let me give you the final word here. >> Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of it. And I think your earlier points are spot on, that analytics and automation are certainly going to be moving more and more to that left of that chart we had of priorities. I think as we continue that survey heading into 2022, we'll have some fresh data for you again in a few months, that's going to start looking at 2022 priorities and overall spend. And the one other area that I keep hearing about over and over and over again is customer experience. There's a transition from good old CRM to CXM. Right now, everything is digital. It is not going away. So you need an omni-channel support to not only track your customer experience, but improve it. Make sure there's a two way communication. And it's a really interesting space. Salesforce is going to migrate into it. We've got Qualtrics out there. You've got Medallia. You've got FreshWorks, you've got Sprinkler. You got some names out there. And everyone I keep talking to on the IT end user side keeps bringing up customer experience. So let's keep an eye on that as well. >> That's a great point. And again, it brings me back to Service Now. We wrote a piece last week that's sort of, Service Now and Salesforce are on a collision course. We've said that for many, many years. And you've got this platform of platforms. They're just kind of sucking in different functions saying, "Hey, we're friends with everybody." But as you know Erik, software companies, they want to own it all. (both chuckling) All right. Hey Erik, thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming back on. It's always a pleasure to have you on Breaking Analysis. Great to see you. >> Love the partnership. Love the collaboration. Let's go enjoy this summer Friday. >> All right. Let's do. Okay, remember everybody, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, click subscribe to the series. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. They've just launched a new website. They've got a whole new pricing model. It's great to see that innovation going on. Now remember we also publish a full report every week on WikiBond.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can always email me, appreciate the back channel comments, the metadata insights. David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. DM me on Twitter @DVellante or comment on the LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, a good rest of summer, be well. And we'll see you next time. (inspiring music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting enterprise. Digital resilience on hybrid and multi cloud Brought to You by Iota Ho. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our continuing Siri's covering data automation brought to you by Io Tahoe. Today we're gonna look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multi cloud. Let's welcome in age. Eva Hora, who is the CEO of Iota A J. Always good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to be back. David Pleasure. >>And he's joined by Fozzy Coons, who is a global principal architect for financial services. The vertical of financial services. That red hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome, Fozzie. Good to see you. >>Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >>Fancy. Let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and and how it works. >>Sure, yes. So the hybrid cloud is a 90 architecture that incorporates some degree off workload, possibility, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private cloud or public cloud or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand. Allocation of resources across clouds and separate clouds can become hydrate when they're similarly >>interconnected. And >>it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads workers to be moved and how management can be unified in off the street. You can work and how well you have. These interconnections has a direct impact on how well your hybrid cloud will work. >>Okay, so we'll fancy staying with you for a minute. So in the early days of Cloud that turned private Cloud was thrown a lot around a lot, but often just meant virtualization of an on PREM system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view, does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >>Sure. So for modern public clouds, we see that, um, teams organizations need to focus on the portability off applications across clouds. That's very important, right? And when organizations build applications, they need to build and deploy these applications as small collections off independently, loosely coupled services, and then have those things run on the same operating system which means, in other words, running it on Lenox everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage and orchestrate thes applications with platforms like KUBERNETES or read it open shit, for example. >>Okay, so that Z, that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and and doesn't move. So what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud? Aziz, you've just described it. Is it skill sets? Is that the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your view there? >>So, I mean, from what we've seen around around the industry, especially around financial services, where I spent most of my time, we see that the first thing that we see is management right now because you have all these clouds and all these applications, you have a massive array off connections off interconnections. You also have massive array off integrations, possibility and resource allocations as well, and then orchestrating all those different moving pieces. Things like storage networks and things like those are really difficult to manage, right? That's one. What s O Management is the first challenge. The second one is workload, placement, placement. Where do you place this? How do you place this cloud? Native applications. Do you or do you keep on site on Prem? And what do you put in the cloud? That is the the the other challenge. The major one. The third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we could talk about how hundreds? Yeah, >>we're definitely gonna dig into that. Let's bring a J into the conversation. A J. You know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every companies face is data fragmentation. Um, talk a little bit about how I owe Tahoe unifies data across both traditional systems legacy systems. And it connects to these modern I t environments. >>Yeah, sure, Dave. I mean, fancy just nailed it. There used to be about data of the volume of data on the different types of data. But as applications become or connected and interconnected at the location of that data really matters how we serve that data up to those those app. So working with red hat in our partnership with Red Hat being able Thio, inject our data Discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. Would it be in AWS on IBM Cloud or A D. C p R. On Prem being able thio Automate that discovery? I'm pulling that. That single view of where is all my data then allows the CEO to manage cast that can do things like one. I keep the data where it is on premise or in my Oracle Cloud or in my IBM cloud on Connect. The application that needs to feed off that data on the way in which you do that is machine learning. That learns over time is it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to declassify that data. Andi and brings it all together with automation. >>Right? And that's one of the big themes and we've talked about this on earlier episodes. Is really simplification really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away so we can focus on things A. J A. Z. You just mentioned e nifaz e. One of the big challenges that, of course, we all talk about his governance across thes disparity data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts. How does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations, which, of course, are are particularly acute within financial services. >>Oh, yeah, Yes. So for banks and the payment providers, like you've just mentioned their insurers and many other financial services firms, Um, you know, they have to adhere Thio standards such as a PC. I. D. S s in Europe. You've got the G g d p g d p r, which requires strange and tracking, reporting documentation. And you know, for them to to remain in compliance and the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy. Right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance off the organization and reduce the risk after the business. Right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start without consulting services residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And that's also we help organizations build security into their applications without open sources. Mueller, where, um, middle offerings and even using a platform like open shift because it allows you to run legacy applications and also continue rights applications in a unified platform right And also that provides you with, you know, with the automation and the truly that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance >>purposes. Hey, >>Jay, anything. Any color you could add to this conversation? >>Yeah, I'm pleased. Badly brought up Open shift. I mean, we're using open shift to be able. Thio, take that security application of controls to to the data level. It's all about context. So, understanding what data is there being able to assess it to say who should have access to it. Which application permission should be applied to it. Um, that za great combination of Red Hat tonight. Tahoe. >>But what about multi Cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even even further? Maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi >>cloud a swell. Yeah, sure. >>Yeah. So the right automation solution, you know, can be the difference between, you know, cultivating an automated enterprise or automation caress. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So that means have an automation solution that provides that provides, um, you know, promotes I t availability and reliability with your platform so that you can provide, you know, enterprise great support, including security and testing, integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability interoperability in that you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds. Simples lee, right? And with that comes the challenge off maintain ability. So you you you're going to need to look into a automation Ah, solution that that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability in the in the hybrid cloud space scale is >>is >>a big, big deal here, and you need a to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a constituent, consistent manner, right? And then also, that allows you finally to, uh, integrate the multiple data centers that you have, >>So A J I mean, this is a complicated situation, for if a customer has toe, make sure things work on AWS or azure or Google. Uh, they're gonna spend all their time doing that, huh? What can you add really? To simplify that that multi cloud and hybrid cloud equation? >>Yeah. I could give a few customer examples here Warming a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification Onda riel bonuses for them is has been a reduction cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost bend down by $10 million in 2021 so they could hit that reduced budget. Andre, What we brought to that was the ability thio deploy using open shift templates into their different environments. Where there is on premise on bond or in as you mentioned, a W s. They had G cps well, for their marketing team on a cross, those different platforms being out Thio use a template, use pre built scripts to get up and running in catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having Thio to jump on workshop cause and I know we're all on a lot of teens. The zoom cause, um, in these current times, they just sent me is in in of hours in the day Thio manually perform all of this. So yeah, working with red hat applying machine learning into those templates those little recipes that we can put that automation toe work, regardless of which location the data is in allows us thio pull that unified view together. Right? >>Thank you, Fozzie. I wanna come back to you. So the early days of cloud, you're in the big apple, you know, financial services. Really well. Cloud was like an evil word within financial services, and obviously that's changed. It's evolved. We talked about the pandemic, has even accelerated that, Um And when you really, you know, dug into it when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud it was it was not that it wasn't good. It was great, whatever. But it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools suck up teams, they're really overburdened. But in the cloud requires new thinking. You've got the shared responsibility model you've got obviously have specific corporate requirements and compliance. So this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So what are the differences that you can share from your experience is running on a sort of either on Prem or on a mono cloud, um, or, you know, and versus across clouds. What? What? What do you suggest there? >>Yeah, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here, Miss Configurations and the inadequate change control the top security threats. So human error is what we want to avoid because is, you know, as your clouds grow with complexity and you put humans in the mix, then the rate off eras is going to increase, and that is going to exposure to security threat. So this is where automation comes in because automation will streamline and increase the consistency off your infrastructure management. Also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection, compliance and change control. So you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre approved um, you know, pre approved policies and you want to proactively maintain a to them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then you also want to rapid the identified system that require patches and and reconfiguration and automate that process off patching and reconfiguring so that you don't have humans doing this type of thing, right? And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistant settings. According Thio, Pre defined, based on like explained before, you know, with the pre approved policies and also you want is off auditing and troubleshooting, right? And from a rate of perspective, we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example, a tool called danceable that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications and also obvious shit yourself, you know, automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers on, causing, uh, potentially introducing errors right now in looking into the new world off multiple clouds and so forth. The difference is that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas which is control security and compliance. Right control here it means if your on premise or you have one cloud, um, you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on Prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference there. The ownership, it is still yours. But your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds. You know, e w s and so forth infrastructure. So people that are going to do this need to really especially banks and governments need to be aware off the regulatory constraints off running, uh, those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers regionalize some of these choices and also on security. You will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud, you have more control, especially if you're on Prem. You can control this sensitive information that you have, however, in the cloud. That's a different situation, especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful off that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then the last one is compliant. Aziz. Well, you see that if you're running on Prem or a single cloud, um, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running a problem, you have control over that. You can document everything you have access to everything that you need. But if you're gonna go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation, and we have standards that can help you, uh, you know, address some of these challenges for security and compliance. >>So that's really strong insights, Potsie. I mean, first of all, answerable has a lot of market momentum. Red hats in a really good job with that acquisition, your point about repeatability is critical because you can't scale otherwise. And then that idea you're you're putting forth about control, security compliance It's so true is I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe a W s is gonna physically secure the, you know, s three, but in the bucket. But we saw so many Miss configurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So this all sounds great. A j. You're sharp, you know, financial background. What about the economics? >>You >>know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. E especially when you think about the work from home pivot and and all the areas that they had toe the holes that they had to fill their, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, etcetera. So how do organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs so I could, you know, pay it forward or there's a There's a risk reduction angle. What can you share >>their? Yeah. I mean, the perspective I'd like to give here is, um, not being multi cloud is multi copies of an application or data. When I think about 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at with managing copies of data that we're feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now what we're saying I talk a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data so that if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer, I'm just gonna keep that in one location. But across my different clouds, I'm gonna have best of breed applications developed in house third parties in collaboration with my supply chain connecting securely to that. That single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So ah, lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on kubernetes. Um, that decoupled from the data source that allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from the security capability and resilience because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data on with that. Couldn't come. Cost, cost of storage on duh cost of compute. So what we're seeing is using multi cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer That goes all the way to Snowflake and Hiroko on Cloud manage databases, too. >>Well, and the people cost to a swell when you think about yes, the copy creep. But then you know when something goes wrong, a human has to come in and figured out um, you brought up snowflake, get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know, data data. I think this we're gonna be rethinking a j, uh, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs. It's distributed, and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications applications as we talked about with Fozzie. Much more portable. So it Z really the last 10 years will be different than the next 10 years. A. >>J Definitely. I think the people cast election is used. Gone are the days where you needed thio have a dozen people governing managing black policies to data. Ah, lot of that repetitive work. Those tests can be in power automated. We've seen examples in insurance were reduced teams of 15 people working in the the back office China apply security controls compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDP are in CCP a last year, very much the economic effect of reduce headcounts on on enterprises of running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive cos they're looking at initiatives such as net zero emissions how they use data toe under understand how cape how they can become more have a better social impact. Um, and using data to drive that, and that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So those regulatory compliance issues that may have been external we see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that benefiting the environment, social impact and and, of course, course, >>great perspectives. Yeah, Jeff Hammer, Bucker once famously said, The best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and a J. Those examples that you just gave of, you know, social good and moving. Uh, things forward are really critical. And I think that's where Data is gonna have the biggest societal impact. Okay, guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. Keep it right there from, or insight and conversation around, creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching the >>Cube digital resilience, automated compliance, privacy and security for your multi cloud. Congratulations. You're on the journey. You have successfully transformed your organization by moving to a cloud based platform to ensure business continuity in these challenging times. But as you scale your digital activities, there is an inevitable influx of users that outpaces traditional methods of cybersecurity, exposing your data toe underlying threats on making your company susceptible toe ever greater risk to become digitally resilient. Have you applied controls your data continuously throughout the data Lifecycle? What are you doing to keep your customer on supply data private and secure? I owe Tahoe's automated, sensitive data. Discovery is pre programmed with over 300 existing policies that meet government mandated risk and compliance standards. Thes automate the process of applying policies and controls to your data. Our algorithm driven recommendation engine alerts you to risk exposure at the data level and suggests the appropriate next steps to remain compliant on ensure sensitive data is secure. Unsure about where your organization stands In terms of digital resilience, Sign up for a minimal cost commitment. Free data Health check. Let us run our sensitive data discovery on key unmapped data silos and sources to give you a clear understanding of what's in your environment. Book time within Iot. Tahoe Engineer Now >>Okay, let's now get into the next segment where we'll explore data automation. But from the angle of digital resilience within and as a service consumption model, we're now joined by Yusuf Khan, who heads data services for Iot, Tahoe and Shirish County up in. Who's the vice president and head of U. S. Sales at happiest Minds? Gents, welcome to the program. Great to have you in the Cube. >>Thank you, David. >>Trust you guys talk about happiest minds. This notion of born digital, foreign agile. I like that. But talk about your mission at the company. >>Sure. >>A former in 2011 Happiest Mind is a born digital born a child company. The reason is that we are focused on customers. Our customer centric approach on delivering digitals and seamless solutions have helped us be in the race. Along with the Tier one providers, Our mission, happiest people, happiest customers is focused to enable customer happiness through people happiness. We have Bean ranked among the top 25 i t services company in the great places to work serving hour glass to ratings off 41 against the rating off. Five is among the job in the Indian nineties services company that >>shows the >>mission on the culture. What we have built on the values right sharing, mindful, integrity, learning and social on social responsibilities are the core values off our company on. That's where the entire culture of the company has been built. >>That's great. That sounds like a happy place to be. Now you said you had up data services for Iot Tahoe. We've talked in the past. Of course you're out of London. What >>do you what? Your >>day to day focus with customers and partners. What you focused >>on? Well, David, my team work daily with customers and partners to help them better understand their data, improve their data quality, their data governance on help them make that data more accessible in a self service kind of way. To the stakeholders within those businesses on dis is all a key part of digital resilience that will will come on to talk about but later. You're >>right, e mean, that self service theme is something that we're gonna we're gonna really accelerate this decade, Yussef and so. But I wonder before we get into that, maybe you could talk about the nature of the partnership with happiest minds, you know? Why do you guys choose toe work closely together? >>Very good question. Um, we see Hyo Tahoe on happiest minds as a great mutual fit. A Suresh has said, uh, happiest minds are very agile organization um, I think that's one of the key things that attracts their customers on Io. Tahoe is all about automation. Uh, we're using machine learning algorithms to make data discovery data cataloging, understanding, data done. See, uh, much easier on. We're enabling customers and partners to do it much more quickly. So when you combine our emphasis on automation with the emphasis on agility that happiest minds have that that's a really nice combination work works very well together, very powerful. I think the other things that a key are both businesses, a serious have said, are really innovative digital native type type companies. Um, very focused on newer technologies, the cloud etcetera on. Then finally, I think they're both Challenger brands on happiest minds have a really positive, fresh ethical approach to people and customers that really resonates with us at Ideo Tahoe to >>great thank you for that. So Russia, let's get into the whole notion of digital resilience. I wanna I wanna sort of set it up with what I see, and maybe you can comment be prior to the pandemic. A lot of customers that kind of equated disaster recovery with their business continuance or business resilient strategy, and that's changed almost overnight. How have you seen your clients respond to that? What? I sometimes called the forced march to become a digital business. And maybe you could talk about some of the challenges that they faced along the way. >>Absolutely. So, uh, especially during this pandemic, times when you say Dave, customers have been having tough times managing their business. So happiest minds. Being a digital Brazilian company, we were able to react much faster in the industry, apart from the other services company. So one of the key things is the organisation's trying to adopt onto the digital technologies. Right there has bean lot off data which has been to manage by these customers on There have been lot off threats and risk, which has been to manage by the CEO Seo's so happiest minds digital resilient technology, right where we bring in the data. Complaints as a service were ableto manage the resilience much ahead off other competitors in the market. We were ableto bring in our business continuity processes from day one, where we were ableto deliver our services without any interruption to the services. What we were delivered to our customers So that is where the digital resilience with business community process enabled was very helpful for us. Toe enable our customers continue their business without any interruptions during pandemics. >>So I mean, some of the challenges that customers tell me they obviously they had to figure out how to get laptops to remote workers and that that whole remote work from home pivot figure out how to secure the end points. And, you know, those were kind of looking back there kind of table stakes, But it sounds like you've got a digital business. Means a data business putting data at the core, I like to say, but so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about maybe the philosophy you have toward digital resilience in the specific approach you take with clients? >>Absolutely. They seen any organization data becomes. The key on that, for the first step is to identify the critical data. Right. So we this is a six step process. What we following happiest minds. First of all, we take stock off the current state, though the customers think that they have a clear visibility off their data. How are we do more often assessment from an external point off view on see how critical their data is, then we help the customers to strategies that right. The most important thing is to identify the most important critical herself. Data being the most critical assert for any organization. Identification off the data's key for the customers. Then we help in building a viable operating model to ensure these identified critical assets are secure on monitor dearly so that they are consumed well as well as protected from external threats. Then, as 1/4 step, we try to bring in awareness, toe the people we train them >>at >>all levels in the organization. That is a P for people to understand the importance off the digital ourselves and then as 1/5 step, we work as a back up plan in terms of bringing in a very comprehensive and a holistic testing approach on people process as well as in technology. We'll see how the organization can withstand during a crisis time, and finally we do a continuous governance off this data, which is a key right. It is not just a one step process. We set up the environment, we do the initial analysis and set up the strategy on continuously govern this data to ensure that they are not only know managed will secure as well as they also have to meet the compliance requirements off the organization's right. That is where we help organizations toe secure on Meet the regulations off the organizations. As for the privacy laws, so this is a constant process. It's not on one time effort. We do a constant process because every organization goes towards their digital journey on. They have to face all these as part off the evolving environment on digital journey. And that's where they should be kept ready in terms off. No recovering, rebounding on moving forward if things goes wrong. >>So let's stick on that for a minute, and then I wanna bring yourself into the conversation. So you mentioned compliance and governance when when your digital business, you're, as you say, you're a data business, so that brings up issues. Data sovereignty. Uh, there's governance, this compliance. There's things like right to be forgotten. There's data privacy, so many things. These were often kind of afterthoughts for businesses that bolted on, if you will. I know a lot of executives are very much concerned that these air built in on, and it's not a one shot deal. So do you have solutions around compliance and governance? Can you deliver that as a service? Maybe you could talk about some of the specifics there, >>so some of way have offered multiple services. Tow our customers on digital against. On one of the key service is the data complaints. As a service here we help organizations toe map the key data against the data compliance requirements. Some of the features includes in terms off the continuous discovery off data right, because organizations keep adding on data when they move more digital on helping the helping and understanding the actual data in terms off the residents of data, it could be a heterogeneous data soldiers. It could be on data basis, or it could be even on the data legs. Or it could be a no even on compromise all the cloud environment. So identifying the data across the various no heterogeneous environment is very key. Feature off our solution. Once we identify classify this sensitive data, the data privacy regulations on the traveling laws have to be map based on the business rules So we define those rules on help map those data so that organizations know how critical their digital assets are. Then we work on a continuous marching off data for anomalies because that's one of the key teachers off the solution, which needs to be implemented on the day to day operational basis. So we're helping monitoring those anomalies off data for data quality management on an ongoing basis. On finally, we also bringing the automated data governance where we can manage the sensory data policies on their later relationships in terms off mapping on manage their business roots on we drive reputations toe Also suggest appropriate actions to the customers. Take on those specific data sets. >>Great. Thank you, Yousef. Thanks for being patient. I want to bring in Iota ho thio discussion and understand where your customers and happiest minds can leverage your data automation capability that you and I have talked about in the past. I'm gonna be great if you had an example is well, but maybe you could pick it up from there, >>John. I mean, at a high level, assertions are clearly articulated. Really? Um, Hyoty, who delivers business agility. So that's by, um accelerating the time to operationalize data, automating, putting in place controls and actually putting helping put in place digital resilience. I mean way if we step back a little bit in time, um, traditional resilience in relation to data often met manually, making multiple copies of the same data. So you have a d b A. They would copy the data to various different places, and then business users would access it in those functional style owes. And of course, what happened was you ended up with lots of different copies off the same data around the enterprise. Very inefficient. ONDA course ultimately, uh, increases your risk profile. Your risk of a data breach. Um, it's very hard to know where everything is. And I realized that expression. They used David the idea of the forced march to digital. So with enterprises that are going on this forced march, what they're finding is they don't have a single version of the truth, and almost nobody has an accurate view of where their critical data is. Then you have containers bond with containers that enables a big leap forward so you could break applications down into micro services. Updates are available via a p I s on. So you don't have the same need thio to build and to manage multiple copies of the data. So you have an opportunity to just have a single version of the truth. Then your challenge is, how do you deal with these large legacy data states that the service has been referring Thio, where you you have toe consolidate and that's really where I attack comes in. Um, we massively accelerate that process of putting in a single version of the truth into place. So by automatically discovering the data, discovering what's dubica? What's redundant? Uh, that means you can consolidate it down to a single trusted version much more quickly. We've seen many customers have tried to do this manually, and it's literally taken years using manual methods to cover even a small percentage of their I T estates. With our tire, you could do it really very quickly on you can have tangible results within weeks and months on Ben, you can apply controls to the data based on context. So who's the user? What's the content? What's the use case? Things like data quality validations or access permissions on. Then, once you've done there. Your applications and your enterprise are much more secure, much more resilient. As a result, you've got to do these things whilst retaining agility, though. So coming full circle. This is where the partnership with happiest minds really comes in as well. You've got to be agile. You've gotta have controls. Um, on you've got a drug toward the business outcomes. Uh, and it's doing those three things together that really deliver for the customer. >>Thank you. Use f. I mean you and I. In previous episodes, we've looked in detail at the business case. You were just talking about the manual labor involved. We know that you can't scale, but also there's that compression of time. Thio get to the next step in terms of ultimately getting to the outcome. And we talked to a number of customers in the Cube, and the conclusion is, it's really consistent that if you could accelerate the time to value, that's the key driver reducing complexity, automating and getting to insights faster. That's where you see telephone numbers in terms of business impact. So my question is, where should customers start? I mean, how can they take advantage of some of these opportunities that we've discussed today. >>Well, we've tried to make that easy for customers. So with our Tahoe and happiest minds, you can very quickly do what we call a data health check. Um, this is a is a 2 to 3 week process, uh, to really quickly start to understand on deliver value from your data. Um, so, iota, who deploys into the customer environment? Data doesn't go anywhere. Um, we would look at a few data sources on a sample of data. Onda. We can very rapidly demonstrate how they discovery those catalog e on understanding Jupiter data and redundant data can be done. Um, using machine learning, um, on how those problems can be solved. Um, And so what we tend to find is that we can very quickly, as I say in the matter of a few weeks, show a customer how they could get toe, um, or Brazilian outcome on then how they can scale that up, take it into production on, then really understand their data state? Better on build. Um, Brasiliense into the enterprise. >>Excellent. There you have it. We'll leave it right there. Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Best of luck to you and the partnership Be well, >>Thank you, David Suresh. Thank you. Thank >>you for watching everybody, This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban are ongoing Siris on data automation without >>Tahoe, digital resilience, automated compliance, privacy and security for your multi cloud. Congratulations. You're on the journey. You have successfully transformed your organization by moving to a cloud based platform to ensure business continuity in these challenging times. But as you scale your digital activities, there is an inevitable influx of users that outpaces traditional methods of cybersecurity, exposing your data toe underlying threats on making your company susceptible toe ever greater risk to become digitally resilient. Have you applied controls your data continuously throughout the data lifecycle? What are you doing to keep your customer on supply data private and secure? I owe Tahoe's automated sensitive data. Discovery is pre programmed with over 300 existing policies that meet government mandated risk and compliance standards. Thes automate the process of applying policies and controls to your data. Our algorithm driven recommendation engine alerts you to risk exposure at the data level and suggests the appropriate next steps to remain compliant on ensure sensitive data is secure. Unsure about where your organization stands in terms of digital resilience. Sign up for our minimal cost commitment. Free data health check. Let us run our sensitive data discovery on key unmapped data silos and sources to give you a clear understanding of what's in your environment. Book time within Iot. Tahoe Engineer. Now. >>Okay, now we're >>gonna go into the demo. We want to get a better understanding of how you can leverage open shift. And I owe Tahoe to facilitate faster application deployment. Let me pass the mic to Sabetta. Take it away. >>Uh, thanks, Dave. Happy to be here again, Guys, uh, they've mentioned names to be the Davis. I'm the enterprise account executive here. Toyota ho eso Today we just wanted to give you guys a general overview of how we're using open shift. Yeah. Hey, I'm Noah Iota host data operations engineer, working with open ship. And I've been learning the Internets of open shift for, like, the past few months, and I'm here to share. What a plan. Okay, so So before we begin, I'm sure everybody wants to know. Noel, what are the benefits of using open shift. Well, there's five that I can think of a faster time, the operation simplicity, automation control and digital resilience. Okay, so that that's really interesting, because there's an exact same benefits that we had a Tahoe delivered to our customers. But let's start with faster time the operation by running iota. Who on open shift? Is it faster than, let's say, using kubernetes and other platforms >>are >>objective iota. Who is to be accessible across multiple cloud platforms, right? And so by hosting our application and containers were able to achieve this. So to answer your question, it's faster to create and use your application images using container tools like kubernetes with open shift as compared to, like kubernetes with docker cry over container D. Okay, so we got a bit technical there. Can you explain that in a bit more detail? Yeah, there's a bit of vocabulary involved, uh, so basically, containers are used in developing things like databases, Web servers or applications such as I have top. What's great about containers is that they split the workload so developers can select the libraries without breaking anything. And since Hammond's can update the host without interrupting the programmers. Uh, now, open shift works hand in hand with kubernetes to provide a way to build those containers for applications. Okay, got It s basically containers make life easier for developers and system happens. How does open shift differ from other platforms? Well, this kind of leads into the second benefit I want to talk about, which is simplicity. Basically, there's a lot of steps involved with when using kubernetes with docker. But open shift simplifies this with their source to image process that takes the source code and turns it into a container image. But that's not all. Open shift has a lot of automation and features that simplify working with containers, an important one being its Web console. Here. I've set up a light version of open ship called Code Ready Containers, and I was able to set up her application right from the Web console. And I was able to set up this entire thing in Windows, Mac and Lennox. So its environment agnostic in that sense. Okay, so I think I've seen the top left that this is a developers view. What would a systems admin view look like? It's a good question. So here's the administrator view and this kind of ties into the benefit of control. Um, this view gives insights into each one of the applications and containers that are running, and you could make changes without affecting deployment. Andi can also, within this view, set up each layer of security, and there's multiple that you can prop up. But I haven't fully messed around with it because with my luck, I'd probably locked myself out. So that seems pretty secure. Is there a single point security such as you use a log in? Or are there multiple layers of security? Yeah, there are multiple layers of security. There's your user login security groups and general role based access controls. Um, but there's also a ton of layers of security surrounding like the containers themselves. But for the sake of time, I won't get too far into it. Okay, eso you mentioned simplicity In time. The operation is being two of the benefits. You also briefly mention automation. And as you know, automation is the backbone of our platform here, Toyota Ho. So that's certainly grabbed my attention. Can you go a bit more in depth in terms of automation? Open shift provides extensive automation that speeds up that time the operation. Right. So the latest versions of open should come with a built in cryo container engine, which basically means that you get to skip that container engine insulation step and you don't have to, like, log into each individual container host and configure networking, configure registry servers, storage, etcetera. So I'd say, uh, it automates the more boring kind of tedious process is Okay, so I see the iota ho template there. What does it allow me to do? Um, in terms of automation in application development. So we've created an open shift template which contains our application. This allows developers thio instantly, like set up our product within that template. So, Noah Last question. Speaking of vocabulary, you mentioned earlier digital resilience of the term we're hearing, especially in the banking and finance world. Um, it seems from what you described, industries like banking and finance would be more resilient using open shift, Correct. Yeah, In terms of digital resilience, open shift will give you better control over the consumption of resource is each container is using. In addition, the benefit of containers is that, like I mentioned earlier since Hammond's can troubleshoot servers about bringing down the application and if the application does go down is easy to bring it back up using templates and, like the other automation features that open ship provides. Okay, so thanks so much. Know us? So any final thoughts you want to share? Yeah. I just want to give a quick recap with, like, the five benefits that you gained by using open shift. Uh, the five are timeto operation automation, control, security and simplicity. You could deploy applications faster. You could simplify the workload you could automate. A lot of the otherwise tedious processes can maintain full control over your workflow. And you could assert digital resilience within your environment. Guys, >>Thanks for that. Appreciate the demo. Um, I wonder you guys have been talking about the combination of a Iot Tahoe and red hat. Can you tie that in subito Digital resilience >>Specifically? Yeah, sure, Dave eso when we speak to the benefits of security controls in terms of digital resilience at Io Tahoe, we automated detection and apply controls at the data level, so this would provide for more enhanced security. >>Okay, But so if you were trying to do all these things manually. I mean, what what does that do? How much time can I compress? What's the time to value? >>So with our latest versions, Biota we're taking advantage of faster deployment time associated with container ization and kubernetes. So this kind of speeds up the time it takes for customers. Start using our software as they be ableto quickly spin up io towel on their own on premise environment are otherwise in their own cloud environment, like including aws. Assure or call GP on IBM Cloud a quick start templates allow flexibility deploy into multi cloud environments all just using, like, a few clicks. Okay, so so now just quickly add So what we've done iota, Who here is We've really moved our customers away from the whole idea of needing a team of engineers to apply controls to data as compared to other manually driven work flows. Eso with templates, automation, previous policies and data controls. One person can be fully operational within a few hours and achieve results straight out of the box on any cloud. >>Yeah, we've been talking about this theme of abstracting the complexity. That's really what we're seeing is a major trend in in this coming decade. Okay, great. Thanks, Sabina. Noah, How could people get more information or if they have any follow up questions? Where should they go? >>Yeah, sure. They've. I mean, if you guys are interested in learning more, you know, reach out to us at info at iata ho dot com to speak with one of our sales engineers. I mean, we love to hear from you, so book a meeting as soon as you can. All >>right. Thanks, guys. Keep it right there from or cube content with.