(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the "AWS Startup Showcase." This is season three, episode one. The focus of this episode is AI/ML: Top Startups Building Foundational Models, Infrastructure, and AI. It's great topics, super-relevant, and it's part of our ongoing coverage of startups in the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, John Furrier, with theCUBE. Today, we're excited to be joined by Jay Marshall, VP of Business Development at Neural Magic. Jay, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey, John, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> We had a great CUBE conversation with you guys. This is very much about the company focuses. It's a feature presentation for the "Startup Showcase," and the machine learning at scale is the topic, but in general, it's more, (laughs) and we should call it "Machine Learning and AI: How to Get Started," because everybody is retooling their business. Companies that aren't retooling their business right now with AI first will be out of business, in my opinion. You're seeing massive shift. This is really truly the beginning of the next-gen machine learning AI trend. It's really seeing ChatGPT. Everyone sees that. That went mainstream. But this is just the beginning. This is scratching the surface of this next-generation AI with machine learning powering it, and with all the goodness of cloud, cloud scale, and how horizontally scalable it is. The resources are there. You got the Edge. Everything's perfect for AI 'cause data infrastructure's exploding in value. AI is just the applications. This is a super topic, so what do you guys see in this general area of opportunities right now in the headlines? And I'm sure you guys' phone must be ringing off the hook, metaphorically speaking, or emails and meetings and Zooms. What's going on over there at Neural Magic? >> No, absolutely, and you pretty much nailed most of it. I think that, you know, my background, we've seen for the last 20-plus years. Even just getting enterprise applications kind of built and delivered at scale, obviously, amazing things with AWS and the cloud to help accelerate that. And we just kind of figured out in the last five or so years how to do that productively and efficiently, kind of from an operations perspective. Got development and operations teams. We even came up with DevOps, right? But now, we kind of have this new kind of persona and new workload that developers have to talk to, and then it has to be deployed on those ITOps solutions. And so you pretty much nailed it. Folks are saying, "Well, how do I do this?" These big, generational models or foundational models, as we're calling them, they're great, but enterprises want to do that with their data, on their infrastructure, at scale, at the edge. So for us, yeah, we're helping enterprises accelerate that through optimizing models and then delivering them at scale in a more cost-effective fashion. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things, the benefits of OpenAI we saw, was not only is it open source, then you got also other models that are more proprietary, is that it shows the world that this is really happening, right? It's a whole nother level, and there's also new landscape kind of maps coming out. You got the generative AI, and you got the foundational models, large LLMs. Where do you guys fit into the landscape? Because you guys are in the middle of this. How do you talk to customers when they say, "I'm going down this road. I need help. I'm going to stand this up." This new AI infrastructure and applications, where do you guys fit in the landscape? >> Right, and really, the answer is both. I think today, when it comes to a lot of what for some folks would still be considered kind of cutting edge around computer vision and natural language processing, a lot of our optimization tools and our runtime are based around most of the common computer vision and natural language processing models. So your YOLOs, your BERTs, you know, your DistilBERTs and what have you, so we work to help optimize those, again, who've gotten great performance and great value for customers trying to get those into production. But when you get into the LLMs, and you mentioned some of the open source components there, our research teams have kind of been right in the trenches with those. So kind of the GPT open source equivalent being OPT, being able to actually take, you know, a multi-$100 billion parameter model and sparsify that or optimize that down, shaving away a ton of parameters, and being able to run it on smaller infrastructure. So I think the evolution here, you know, all this stuff came out in the last six months in terms of being turned loose into the wild, but we're staying in the trenches with folks so that we can help optimize those as well and not require, again, the heavy compute, the heavy cost, the heavy power consumption as those models evolve as well. So we're staying right in with everybody while they're being built, but trying to get folks into production today with things that help with business value today. >> Jay, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and before we came on camera, you said you just were on a customer call. I know you got a lot of activity. What specific things are you helping enterprises solve? What kind of problems? Take us through the spectrum from the beginning, people jumping in the deep end of the pool, some people kind of coming in, starting out slow. What are the scale? Can you scope the kind of use cases and problems that are emerging that people are calling you for? >> Absolutely, so I think if I break it down to kind of, like, your startup, or I maybe call 'em AI native to kind of steal from cloud native years ago, that group, it's pretty much, you know, part and parcel for how that group already runs. So if you have a data science team and an ML engineering team, you're building models, you're training models, you're deploying models. You're seeing firsthand the expense of starting to try to do that at scale. So it's really just a pure operational efficiency play. They kind of speak natively to our tools, which we're doing in the open source. So it's really helping, again, with the optimization of the models they've built, and then, again, giving them an alternative to expensive proprietary hardware accelerators to have to run them. Now, on the enterprise side, it varies, right? You have some kind of AI native folks there that already have these teams, but you also have kind of, like, AI curious, right? Like, they want to do it, but they don't really know where to start, and so for there, we actually have an open source toolkit that can help you get into this optimization, and then again, that runtime, that inferencing runtime, purpose-built for CPUs. It allows you to not have to worry, again, about do I have a hardware accelerator available? How do I integrate that into my application stack? If I don't already know how to build this into my infrastructure, does my ITOps teams, do they know how to do this, and what does that runway look like? How do I cost for this? How do I plan for this? When it's just x86 compute, we've been doing that for a while, right? So it obviously still requires more, but at least it's a little bit more predictable. >> It's funny you mentioned AI native. You know, born in the cloud was a phrase that was out there. Now, you have startups that are born in AI companies. So I think you have this kind of cloud kind of vibe going on. You have lift and shift was a big discussion. Then you had cloud native, kind of in the cloud, kind of making it all work. Is there a existing set of things? People will throw on this hat, and then what's the difference between AI native and kind of providing it to existing stuff? 'Cause we're a lot of people take some of these tools and apply it to either existing stuff almost, and it's not really a lift and shift, but it's kind of like bolting on AI to something else, and then starting with AI first or native AI. >> Absolutely. It's a- >> How would you- >> It's a great question. I think that probably, where I'd probably pull back to kind of allow kind of retail-type scenarios where, you know, for five, seven, nine years or more even, a lot of these folks already have data science teams, you know? I mean, they've been doing this for quite some time. The difference is the introduction of these neural networks and deep learning, right? Those kinds of models are just a little bit of a paradigm shift. So, you know, I obviously was trying to be fun with the term AI native, but I think it's more folks that kind of came up in that neural network world, so it's a little bit more second nature, whereas I think for maybe some traditional data scientists starting to get into neural networks, you have the complexity there and the training overhead, and a lot of the aspects of getting a model finely tuned and hyperparameterization and all of these aspects of it. It just adds a layer of complexity that they're just not as used to dealing with. And so our goal is to help make that easy, and then of course, make it easier to run anywhere that you have just kind of standard infrastructure. >> Well, the other point I'd bring out, and I'd love to get your reaction to, is not only is that a neural network team, people who have been focused on that, but also, if you look at some of the DataOps lately, AIOps markets, a lot of data engineering, a lot of scale, folks who have been kind of, like, in that data tsunami cloud world are seeing, they kind of been in this, right? They're, like, been experiencing that. >> No doubt. I think it's funny the data lake concept, right? And you got data oceans now. Like, the metaphors just keep growing on us, but where it is valuable in terms of trying to shift the mindset, I've always kind of been a fan of some of the naming shift. I know with AWS, they always talk about purpose-built databases. And I always liked that because, you know, you don't have one database that can do everything. Even ones that say they can, like, you still have to do implementation detail differences. So sitting back and saying, "What is my use case, and then which database will I use it for?" I think it's kind of similar here. And when you're building those data teams, if you don't have folks that are doing data engineering, kind of that data harvesting, free processing, you got to do all that before a model's even going to care about it. So yeah, it's definitely a central piece of this as well, and again, whether or not you're going to be AI negative as you're making your way to kind of, you know, on that journey, you know, data's definitely a huge component of it. >> Yeah, you would have loved our Supercloud event we had. Talk about naming and, you know, around data meshes was talked about a lot. You're starting to see the control plane layers of data. I think that was the beginning of what I saw as that data infrastructure shift, to be horizontally scalable. So I have to ask you, with Neural Magic, when your customers and the people that are prospects for you guys, they're probably asking a lot of questions because I think the general thing that we see is, "How do I get started? Which GPU do I use?" I mean, there's a lot of things that are kind of, I won't say technical or targeted towards people who are living in that world, but, like, as the mainstream enterprises come in, they're going to need a playbook. What do you guys see, what do you guys offer your clients when they come in, and what do you recommend? >> Absolutely, and I think where we hook in specifically tends to be on the training side. So again, I've built a model. Now, I want to really optimize that model. And then on the runtime side when you want to deploy it, you know, we run that optimized model. And so that's where we're able to provide. We even have a labs offering in terms of being able to pair up our engineering teams with a customer's engineering teams, and we can actually help with most of that pipeline. So even if it is something where you have a dataset and you want some help in picking a model, you want some help training it, you want some help deploying that, we can actually help there as well. You know, there's also a great partner ecosystem out there, like a lot of folks even in the "Startup Showcase" here, that extend beyond into kind of your earlier comment around data engineering or downstream ITOps or the all-up MLOps umbrella. So we can absolutely engage with our labs, and then, of course, you know, again, partners, which are always kind of key to this. So you are spot on. I think what's happened with the kind of this, they talk about a hockey stick. This is almost like a flat wall now with the rate of innovation right now in this space. And so we do have a lot of folks wanting to go straight from curious to native. And so that's definitely where the partner ecosystem comes in so hard 'cause there just isn't anybody or any teams out there that, I literally do from, "Here's my blank database, and I want an API that does all the stuff," right? Like, that's a big chunk, but we can definitely help with the model to delivery piece. >> Well, you guys are obviously a featured company in this space. Talk about the expertise. A lot of companies are like, I won't say faking it till they make it. You can't really fake security. You can't really fake AI, right? So there's going to be a learning curve. They'll be a few startups who'll come out of the gate early. You guys are one of 'em. Talk about what you guys have as expertise as a company, why you're successful, and what problems do you solve for customers? >> No, appreciate that. Yeah, we actually, we love to tell the story of our founder, Nir Shavit. So he's a 20-year professor at MIT. Actually, he was doing a lot of work on kind of multicore processing before there were even physical multicores, and actually even did a stint in computational neurobiology in the 2010s, and the impetus for this whole technology, has a great talk on YouTube about it, where he talks about the fact that his work there, he kind of realized that the way neural networks encode and how they're executed by kind of ramming data layer by layer through these kind of HPC-style platforms, actually was not analogous to how the human brain actually works. So we're on one side, we're building neural networks, and we're trying to emulate neurons. We're not really executing them that way. So our team, which one of the co-founders, also an ex-MIT, that was kind of the birth of why can't we leverage this super-performance CPU platform, which has those really fat, fast caches attached to each core, and actually start to find a way to break that model down in a way that I can execute things in parallel, not having to do them sequentially? So it is a lot of amazing, like, talks and stuff that show kind of the magic, if you will, a part of the pun of Neural Magic, but that's kind of the foundational layer of all the engineering that we do here. And in terms of how we're able to bring it to reality for customers, I'll give one customer quote where it's a large retailer, and it's a people-counting application. So a very common application. And that customer's actually been able to show literally double the amount of cameras being run with the same amount of compute. So for a one-to-one perspective, two-to-one, business leaders usually like that math, right? So we're able to show pure cost savings, but even performance-wise, you know, we have some of the common models like your ResNets and your YOLOs, where we can actually even perform better than hardware-accelerated solutions. So we're trying to do, I need to just dumb it down to better, faster, cheaper, but from a commodity perspective, that's where we're accelerating. >> That's not a bad business model. Make things easier to use, faster, and reduce the steps it takes to do stuff. So, you know, that's always going to be a good market. Now, you guys have DeepSparse, which we've talked about on our CUBE conversation prior to this interview, delivers ML models through the software so the hardware allows for a decoupling, right? >> Yep. >> Which is going to drive probably a cost advantage. Also, it's also probably from a deployment standpoint it must be easier. Can you share the benefits? Is it a cost side? Is it more of a deployment? What are the benefits of the DeepSparse when you guys decouple the software from the hardware on the ML models? >> No you actually, you hit 'em both 'cause that really is primarily the value. Because ultimately, again, we're so early. And I came from this world in a prior life where I'm doing Java development, WebSphere, WebLogic, Tomcat open source, right? When we were trying to do innovation, we had innovation buckets, 'cause everybody wanted to be on the web and have their app and a browser, right? We got all the money we needed to build something and show, hey, look at the thing on the web, right? But when you had to get in production, that was the challenge. So to what you're speaking to here, in this situation, we're able to show we're just a Python package. So whether you just install it on the operating system itself, or we also have a containerized version you can drop on any container orchestration platform, so ECS or EKS on AWS. And so you get all the auto-scaling features. So when you think about that kind of a world where you have everything from real-time inferencing to kind of after hours batch processing inferencing, the fact that you can auto scale that hardware up and down and it's CPU based, so you're paying by the minute instead of maybe paying by the hour at a lower cost shelf, it does everything from pure cost to, again, I can have my standard IT team say, "Hey, here's the Kubernetes in the container," and it just runs on the infrastructure we're already managing. So yeah, operational, cost and again, and many times even performance. (audio warbles) CPUs if I want to. >> Yeah, so that's easier on the deployment too. And you don't have this kind of, you know, blank check kind of situation where you don't know what's on the backend on the cost side. >> Exactly. >> And you control the actual hardware and you can manage that supply chain. >> And keep in mind, exactly. Because the other thing that sometimes gets lost in the conversation, depending on where a customer is, some of these workloads, like, you know, you and I remember a world where even like the roundtrip to the cloud and back was a problem for folks, right? We're used to extremely low latency. And some of these workloads absolutely also adhere to that. But there's some workloads where the latency isn't as important. And we actually even provide the tuning. Now, if we're giving you five milliseconds of latency and you don't need that, you can tune that back. So less CPU, lower cost. Now, throughput and other things come into play. But that's the kind of configurability and flexibility we give for operations. >> All right, so why should I call you if I'm a customer or prospect Neural Magic, what problem do I have or when do I know I need you guys? When do I call you in and what does my environment look like? When do I know? What are some of the signals that would tell me that I need Neural Magic? >> No, absolutely. So I think in general, any neural network, you know, the process I mentioned before called sparcification, it's, you know, an optimization process that we specialize in. Any neural network, you know, can be sparcified. So I think if it's a deep-learning neural network type model. If you're trying to get AI into production, you have cost concerns even performance-wise. I certainly hate to be too generic and say, "Hey, we'll talk to everybody." But really in this world right now, if it's a neural network, it's something where you're trying to get into production, you know, we are definitely offering, you know, kind of an at-scale performant deployable solution for deep learning models. >> So neural network you would define as what? Just devices that are connected that need to know about each other? What's the state-of-the-art current definition of neural network for customers that may think they have a neural network or might not know they have a neural network architecture? What is that definition for neural network? >> That's a great question. So basically, machine learning models that fall under this kind of category, you hear about transformers a lot, or I mentioned about YOLO, the YOLO family of computer vision models, or natural language processing models like BERT. If you have a data science team or even developers, some even regular, I used to call myself a nine to five developer 'cause I worked in the enterprise, right? So like, hey, we found a new open source framework, you know, I used to use Spring back in the day and I had to go figure it out. There's developers that are pulling these models down and they're figuring out how to get 'em into production, okay? So I think all of those kinds of situations, you know, if it's a machine learning model of the deep learning variety that's, you know, really specifically where we shine. >> Okay, so let me pretend I'm a customer for a minute. I have all these videos, like all these transcripts, I have all these people that we've interviewed, CUBE alumnis, and I say to my team, "Let's AI-ify, sparcify theCUBE." >> Yep. >> What do I do? I mean, do I just like, my developers got to get involved and they're going to be like, "Well, how do I upload it to the cloud? Do I use a GPU?" So there's a thought process. And I think a lot of companies are going through that example of let's get on this AI, how can it help our business? >> Absolutely. >> What does that progression look like? Take me through that example. I mean, I made up theCUBE example up, but we do have a lot of data. We have large data models and we have people and connect to the internet and so we kind of seem like there's a neural network. I think every company might have a neural network in place. >> Well, and I was going to say, I think in general, you all probably do represent even the standard enterprise more than most. 'Cause even the enterprise is going to have a ton of video content, a ton of text content. So I think it's a great example. So I think that that kind of sea or I'll even go ahead and use that term data lake again, of data that you have, you're probably going to want to be setting up kind of machine learning pipelines that are going to be doing all of the pre-processing from kind of the raw data to kind of prepare it into the format that say a YOLO would actually use or let's say BERT for natural language processing. So you have all these transcripts, right? So we would do a pre-processing path where we would create that into the file format that BERT, the machine learning model would know how to train off of. So that's kind of all the pre-processing steps. And then for training itself, we actually enable what's called sparse transfer learning. So that's transfer learning is a very popular method of doing training with existing models. So we would be able to retrain that BERT model with your transcript data that we have now done the pre-processing with to get it into the proper format. And now we have a BERT natural language processing model that's been trained on your data. And now we can deploy that onto DeepSparse runtime so that now you can ask that model whatever questions, or I should say pass, you're not going to ask it those kinds of questions ChatGPT, although we can do that too. But you're going to pass text through the BERT model and it's going to give you answers back. It could be things like sentiment analysis or text classification. You just call the model, and now when you pass text through it, you get the answers better, faster or cheaper. I'll use that reference again. >> Okay, we can create a CUBE bot to give us questions on the fly from the the AI bot, you know, from our previous guests. >> Well, and I will tell you using that as an example. So I had mentioned OPT before, kind of the open source version of ChatGPT. So, you know, typically that requires multiple GPUs to run. So our research team, I may have mentioned earlier, we've been able to sparcify that over 50% already and run it on only a single GPU. And so in that situation, you could train OPT with that corpus of data and do exactly what you say. Actually we could use Alexa, we could use Alexa to actually respond back with voice. How about that? We'll do an API call and we'll actually have an interactive Alexa-enabled bot. >> Okay, we're going to be a customer, let's put it on the list. But this is a great example of what you guys call software delivered AI, a topic we chatted about on theCUBE conversation. This really means this is a developer opportunity. This really is the convergence of the data growth, the restructuring, how data is going to be horizontally scalable, meets developers. So this is an AI developer model going on right now, which is kind of unique. >> It is, John, I will tell you what's interesting. And again, folks don't always think of it this way, you know, the AI magical goodness is now getting pushed in the middle where the developers and IT are operating. And so it again, that paradigm, although for some folks seem obvious, again, if you've been around for 20 years, that whole all that plumbing is a thing, right? And so what we basically help with is when you deploy the DeepSparse runtime, we have a very rich API footprint. And so the developers can call the API, ITOps can run it, or to your point, it's developer friendly enough that you could actually deploy our off-the-shelf models. We have something called the SparseZoo where we actually publish pre-optimized or pre-sparcified models. And so developers could literally grab those right off the shelf with the training they've already had and just put 'em right into their applications and deploy them as containers. So yeah, we enable that for sure as well. >> It's interesting, DevOps was infrastructure as code and we had a last season, a series on data as code, which we kind of coined. This is data as code. This is a whole nother level of opportunity where developers just want to have programmable data and apps with AI. This is a whole new- >> Absolutely. >> Well, absolutely great, great stuff. Our news team at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE said you guys had a little bit of a launch announcement you wanted to make here on the "AWS Startup Showcase." So Jay, you have something that you want to launch here? >> Yes, and thank you John for teeing me up. So I'm going to try to put this in like, you know, the vein of like an AWS, like main stage keynote launch, okay? So we're going to try this out. So, you know, a lot of our product has obviously been built on top of x86. I've been sharing that the past 15 minutes or so. And with that, you know, we're seeing a lot of acceleration for folks wanting to run on commodity infrastructure. But we've had customers and prospects and partners tell us that, you know, ARM and all of its kind of variance are very compelling, both cost performance-wise and also obviously with Edge. And wanted to know if there was anything we could do from a runtime perspective with ARM. And so we got the work and, you know, it's a hard problem to solve 'cause the instructions set for ARM is very different than the instruction set for x86, and our deep tensor column technology has to be able to work with that lower level instruction spec. But working really hard, the engineering team's been at it and we are happy to announce here at the "AWS Startup Showcase," that DeepSparse inference now has, or inference runtime now has support for AWS Graviton instances. So it's no longer just x86, it is also ARM and that obviously also opens up the door to Edge and further out the stack so that optimize once run anywhere, we're not going to open up. So it is an early access. So if you go to neuralmagic.com/graviton, you can sign up for early access, but we're excited to now get into the ARM side of the fence as well on top of Graviton. >> That's awesome. Our news team is going to jump on that news. We'll get it right up. We get a little scoop here on the "Startup Showcase." Jay Marshall, great job. That really highlights the flexibility that you guys have when you decouple the software from the hardware. And again, we're seeing open source driving a lot more in AI ops now with with machine learning and AI. So to me, that makes a lot of sense. And congratulations on that announcement. Final minute or so we have left, give a summary of what you guys are all about. Put a plug in for the company, what you guys are looking to do. I'm sure you're probably hiring like crazy. Take the last few minutes to give a plug for the company and give a summary. >> No, I appreciate that so much. So yeah, joining us out neuralmagic.com, you know, part of what we didn't spend a lot of time here, our optimization tools, we are doing all of that in the open source. It's called SparseML and I mentioned SparseZoo briefly. So we really want the data scientists community and ML engineering community to join us out there. And again, the DeepSparse runtime, it's actually free to use for trial purposes and for personal use. So you can actually run all this on your own laptop or on an AWS instance of your choice. We are now live in the AWS marketplace. So push button, deploy, come try us out and reach out to us on neuralmagic.com. And again, sign up for the Graviton early access. >> All right, Jay Marshall, Vice President of Business Development Neural Magic here, talking about performant, cost effective machine learning at scale. This is season three, episode one, focusing on foundational models as far as building data infrastructure and AI, AI native. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and infrastructure services both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business particularly the operating model. So my first question Jim is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation and resilience. >> So, thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate everybody's sort of concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know understands the innovation and agility piece at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business might not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> You know, priority is often an overused term in digital transformation, you know people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC'S philosophy not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized for instance, in many cases you can run applications, you know in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments in a hybrid environment or multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint, and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the bring the things to the business that the clients are you know, that their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, you know there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology, technology oftentimes CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part, We'll figure that out whether it's true or not but I agree, people and process are sometimes the tough ones. So Jay, why don't you start, what do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> Well, I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from, you know, the standards that are being built by, you know best in class models, and there's many people that have gone on, you know cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments, there's a, you know, there's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for, you know, where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, you know and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know their own challenges if you would. So they need advocacy to help, you know bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through you know, technology advances, which, you know Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah. Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is, thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want, and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments, are really important to get maximizing your business return on a journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then we had in January 17th we had our Supercloud two event and Supercloud is basically, it's really what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds, and you guys were talking about, you know there's different governance, there's different security there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event, in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment, and they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know both private and public, you know to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know what's the best optimal running environment, you know for us to be able to bring, you know the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah. You know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right Jay, I think initially people felt like, oh wow, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out Jim (all laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table, and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners, to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach but a cloud right approach, where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, but chime in here. >> And now if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership they put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship, we do regular QBR meetings, we have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client with the partners, you know, in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them, you know there's other OEM partners of course in the market there's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, kind of over the years, taking your arrows, you know, over decades, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on the cube right back. (upbeat music)

>> If you really want to make an impact to your business, it takes more than just moving your workloads into the cloud. So-called lift and shift is fine to reduce data center footprints and associated costs, but to really drive change, you don't want to simply "pave the cow path," as the saying goes. Rather, you need to think about the operating model, and that requires more comprehensive systems thinking. In other words, how will changes in technology affect business productivity? Or, you know what? Even flip that. What changes in my business process could lower cost, cut elapse times, and accelerate time to market, increase user productivity, and lower operational risks? And what role can technology play in supporting these mandates through modernization, automation, machine intelligence, and business resilience? And that's what we're here to discuss today. Welcome to Driving Business Results with Cloud Transformation, made Possible by Dell and DXC. My name is Dave Vellante, and today we're going to zoom out and explore many aspects of cloud transformation that leading organizations are acting on today. Yeah, sure, we're going to look at optimizing infrastructure, but we'll also dig deeper into cloud considerations, governance, compliance, and security angles, as well as the impact of emerging opportunities around edge and Industry 4.0. Our focus will be on how to remove barriers and help you achieve business outcomes. And to do this, our program features the long-term partnership between Dell and DXC. And we bring to this program six experts in three separate sessions, who are working directly with top organizations in virtually every industry to achieve high impact results. We're going to start with a conversation about cloud, the cloud operating model, and transforming key aspects of your infrastructure. And then we'll look into governance, security, and business resilience. And in our third session, we'll discuss exciting transformations that are occurring in smart manufacturing and facilities innovations. So let's get right into it with our first session. Enjoy the program. (bright music) Hello, and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, and Jay Dowling, Americas Sales Lead for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, "Look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift." You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio. You got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is, What role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the, the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization, and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment, which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience, to be able, to be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, so thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate, everybody's, you know, concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and, and, and agility piece, at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, "Wow, my business might not be that resilient." So Jay, my question to you is, What are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> Yeah, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything goes to, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases, you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on-prem, or in other environments, in a hybrid environment, or multi-cloud environment, and, and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the, bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know, that their clients are looking for, like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera. Trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know, business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And, and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model, you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So if, let's talk about some of the, the barriers to realizing value in, in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and, and, and resilience. But there's a business angle, and there's a technical angle here. 'Cause we always talk about people, process, and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, "Well, that's the easy part. We'll figured that out," whether it's true or not. But I agree, people and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are, that are out there in the market from, you know, the, the standards that are being built by, you know, best in class models. And, and there's many people that have gone on, you know, cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments. There's a, you know, there's a skillset set environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the, and the models that that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know, there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a, "This price is better," or, "This can operate better than one environment over the other." I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know, as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients. You know, and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know, across such a broad spectra of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know, their own challenges, if you would. So they need, they need advocacy to help, you know, bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through, you know, technology advances, which, you know, Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah, Jim, is, is it, is it a, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of, of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And, and we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to, to determine which providers you want. And it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation, "I want to move everything, and I want to move it all at once." That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments are really important to get at maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings, and, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then. We had, in January 17th, we had our Supercloud 2 event. And Supercloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-cloud should have been, I, I like to say. So it's this creating a common experience across clouds. And you guys were talking about, you know, there's different governance, there's different security, there's different pricing. So, and, and one of the takeaways from this event in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is, you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table, and what is, what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and, and the history of the company. I could use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, they're on the edge. They're, you know, they're, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought, you know, a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there, there's somebody, you could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscale activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, "Listen, not all things are destined for cloud, or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment." And they like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know, both private and public, you know, to clients. And let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know, what's the best optimal running environment, you know, for us to be able to bring, you know, the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know. And, you know, the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of, you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're, they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market. And, and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know, their support of our strategy, and, and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know, work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah, you know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the head of strategic planning at Dell talks about, "It's not a zero sum game." And I think, you know, you're right, Jay. I think initially people felt like, "Oh wow, it's, it is a zero sum game." But it's clearly not, and this idea of of, whether you call it supercloud or ubercloud or multicloud, clearly Dell is headed in in that direction. And I, you know, look at some of their future projects. There's their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out, Jim, here. (group laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table. And we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the, the name DXC and that, that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to, "What's unique?" You know, you hear a lot about partnerships. You guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think, go ahead, Jim. >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that, that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a, play a key role in that. So we, we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And, and the right approach might include mainframe. It might include an on-premises infrastructure. It could include private cloud, public cloud, and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. >> If you were... >> That is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. Chime in here. (Jay chuckles) >> And now, if you were speaking specifically to Dell here, like they, they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They, they, they've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO. We've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QBR meetings. We have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client, with the partners, you know, and, and the, and the GSI community. And I, I've been with several GSIs, and, and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on, on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them. You know, there's other OEM partners, of course, in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and in our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation, is a lot of it's about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, the kind of, over the, over the years taking your arrows, you know, of over decades. And, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. (chuckles) (Dave chuckles) >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Dave, thank you. >> Jay, Jim, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCube. Be right back. (upbeat guitar music) (keyboard clicks) Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante, and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. So, Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain like what is Industry 4.0 all about, and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while. And it's got, it's gone by multiple different names, as you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory, but it all really means the same thing. Its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time?" So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this not as a one-off, two-off, individual use case point of view. But instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this, not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum." I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's predictive maintenance, and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor. But it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And, and, and really, to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it, and truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future, or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right? And so really that's a key thing, and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah so, Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation, what we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments, or improving the quality of products, right? So I think these are a lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you. And maybe this is a bit esoteric. But when I first started researching IoT and, and, and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage in a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. Its like, blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive, but, so, but they got to continue. The incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So my question is, How are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing and the, the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right, for the machines. For example, industrial IoT, having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at, "How do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine?" And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right? So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right? So perhaps they start with the innovation program, and then they look at the business case, and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security. Because if you think about the operations technology, you know, folks, historically, they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It, it, it absolutely is Dave. And, and you know, you can no longer just segment that because really, to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory. But then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from a, kind of that, that hybrid, you know, "write once, run anywhere" on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of the things we're seeing, too, is to help distinguish between what is the edge, and that, and, and bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT. And also help that, what Aditi talked about, is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. Is, it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plan. It consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about, "How do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it?" And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is, is, needs to be done because that's the only way that its going to, it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise and applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the, the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it, it, it's, (chuckles) it, it, so. Yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that, in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, we, this is not new. Smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's, people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch, or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here, and a gateway there, and a server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a, or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this at enterprise all the time. We, we know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications, really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory, and start to bring that same capabilities down into the, on the factory floor." That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers, yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that, think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that, what you've done in that one factory, and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories, including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat, almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these, to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean definitely, a lot. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is, is important. But the, the digital skillset sets like, you know, IoT, having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right, that experience that comes with it, data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So you know, it's a lot more connectivity software, data driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of skill, resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We, we, we recruit. We, we train our talent to, to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership. You know, and we work very closely together to, to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we, we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right, how that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right? So we have several areas that we collaborate in. And our approach is that we, we want to bring solutions to our client, and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question, kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where do you, are you confident that, you know, you're going to be, deliver the best value to, to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things. And just, and, and, and that's, that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is, we do the optimization, the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together, right? The power of our scalables, enterprise-grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global, trusted, trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And, and Dell's infrastructure, and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that, at that scalable infrastructure, to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions, it's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases, but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, the, you're right, the partnership has gone, I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010, May of 2010, we had you, you guys both on theCube. I think you were talking about converged infrastructure. And I had a customer on, and it was, actually a manufacturing customer, was quite interesting. And back then it was, "How do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud?" And, and you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation, and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCube. (bright music) Welcome back to the program and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on Cloud and Infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome. Good to have you. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface, and, and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart. They adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware. Makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've, we've adapted, and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, "Let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can. But then, let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful." So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and, and as Jim is saying, you, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like. When you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right, how you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe CMBD data, or an active directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails so that you can protect it and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put on a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, (chuckles) you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. You, so, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it. And then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So compliance is no longer the driver, is, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, it's, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, the bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to, to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly on, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table, too. So you can't just rely on, "Oh we need to do, you know, A, B and C because our regulators require it." You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with a strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target. The bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place. Let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we, we might say a cyber vault. Although, there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this, is prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business resilient. And they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We, we take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency. It includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then, how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution since we architect these specific to each client needs, right, when we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real time, how to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress, putting together with our security operations centers, a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client, and then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect, and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep them out to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO. I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky. Or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But, but it, I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery? How hard is it to, to, to test that recovery, and, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data. Again, a financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple of days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected. It's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is, you have to think about different scenarios. So there are scenarios where the attack might be small. It might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that, that recovery kind of muscle, muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down, "What are those critical applications? What do we need, what's most important? What has to come back first?" And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to, how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCube, especially lately, is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors, you know, can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering. We've seen, you know, a USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IoT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been been talking about where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IoT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your, your business is, right? So when, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what what data entails to put in the vault from an IoT perspective is just as critical as as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the, the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly. But there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected. You understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point. I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable. They're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of, of cyber from the good guy's perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave. So that, that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be hundred percent capable every single time, and let's figure that out, right? That's, that's real world stuff. So just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities. But there's a lot more information sharing. There's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You, you brought up a point earlier. It used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings. It's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a, on a really important topic. Keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (bright music) Okay, we hope you enjoyed the program and learned some things about cloud transformation and modernizing your business that will inspire you to action. Now if you want to learn more, go to the Dell DXC partner page shown here, or click on the URL in the description. Thanks for watching everybody and on behalf of our supporters, Dell and DXC, good luck. And as always, get in touch if we can be of any assistance. (bright music)

>> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud Transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today, welcome to The Cube. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, Dave, appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeroes to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well there are really 3 aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeroes. One is cost optimization. And that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, in governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment. Which, the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these 3 aspects. Cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, thank you for that, so, Jay, I got to ask you, the current climate, ever body's sort of concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization, that seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are, consolidating redundant vendors, and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mine today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and agility piece. At least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. >> Sure >> And then the business resilience piece is really interesting, because, you know, prior to the pandemic, people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow my business may not be that resilient. So, Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers, what's the priority today? >> You know, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients, and what their branding is. What we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that, but, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on Pram or, in other environments, in the hybrid environment or multi cloud environment, and still be very optimized from a cost/spend standpoint. And also put yourself in position for modernization and be able to bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO etc. trying to use IT as a leverage to drive business and to drive business acceleration and to drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients, environments, and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So, lets talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in the context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We already talked about people, process, and technology. Technology oftentimes CIO's will tell us 'Well that's the easy part. We'll figure that out.' Whether it's true or not; but I agree. People and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by Best in Class models. And there's many people who that have got on cloud juries have been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet, or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now. There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try and look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they want to go, what their destiny is and based on what we've learned with other clients and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own challenges, if you would. So they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. >> Yeah Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue? You know, bench strength? Are their other considerations from your perspective? >> We've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change; in moving to cloud. When it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the other cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want; and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy, and timing your investments are really important to maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your costs savings, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You mentioned multi-cloud just then. On January 17th we had our Super Cloud 2 event. And Super Cloud is basically what multi-cloud should have been I like to say. So it's creating a common experience across clouds. You guys were talking about you know, there's different governance, different securities, different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you'd talk about your partnership strategy? What do partners bring to the table? What is DXC's unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great >> We've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and the history of the company. I use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology. They're a great partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge. They've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought a lot of value to us as a partner. You can look at Dell Technology as somebody that might have a victim effect because of all of the hyper-scaling activity and all of the cloud activity but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said listen not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they like to be apart of those discussions to see how they can, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, both private and public to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's the best optimal running environment for us to be able to bring the greatest value to the business with speed, with security and the the things that they want to keep close to the business are often things that you want to keep on your premise or keep in your own data centers. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced this well, partnered in this well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah you know Jim, Matt Baker who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not zero-sum game and I think you're right Jay. I think initially people felt like oh wow, it is a zero-sum game but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it Super Cloud or Uber Cloud or Multi Cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction. Look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to end to end? Wondering if you could help us understand that. >> Help us figure it out Jim, here. >> Glad to expand on that. Well, one of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customer's changing needs overtime. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now; pre-dates the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think- go ahead Jim >> I would say our unique approach is, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include main frame, it might include and on-premises infrastructure it could include private cloud, public cloud and SAS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah Jay please. Let me tell you, this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. But, chime in here. >> Yeah if you're speaking specifically to Dell here like, they also walk the talk right. They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground. Their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell, arm in arm, in front of clients. And it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QVR meetings. We have regular executive touch-point meetings. It's really important that you keep high level of intimacy with the clients, with the partners in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell Technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there, and continue to show a lot of support both for them. And there's other OEM partners of course in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us and our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust over the years. Ticking your arrows over decades, and that just doesn't happen overnight. Guys I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting Cloud Right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you >> Jay, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on The CUBE. We'll be right back.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. We're so glad that you're still with us. It's the Cube Live at the MGM Grand. This is our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is takeaways from Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with two really smart guys, Dave Valante. Dave, we're joined by one of our cube alumni, a friend, a friend of the, we say friend of the Cube. >>Yeah, otc. A friend of the Cube >>Karala joined us. Guys, it's great to have you here. It's been an exciting show. A lot of cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But I'd love to get some of the big takeaways from both of you. Dave, we'll start with you. >>A breathing room from two weeks ago. Yeah, that was, that was really pleasant. You know, I mean, I know was, yes, you sat in the analyst program, interested in what your takeaways were from there. But, you know, coming into this, we wrote a piece, Palo Alto's Gold Standard, what they need to do to, to keep that, that status. And we hear it a lot about consolidation. That's their big theme now, which is timely, right? Cause people wanna save money, they wanna do more with less. But I'm really interested in hearing zeus's thoughts on how that's playing in the market. How customers, how easy is it to just say, oh, hey, I'm gonna consolidate. I wanna get into that a little bit with you, how well the strategy's working. We're gonna get into some of the m and a activity and really bring your perspectives to the table. Well, >>It's, it's not easy. I mean, people have been calling for the consolidation of security for decades, and it's, it's, they're the first company that's actually made it happen. Right? And, and I think this is what we're seeing here is the culmination of this long term strategy, this company trying to build more of a platform. And they, you know, they, they came out as a firewall vendor. And I think it's safe to say they're more than firewall today. That's only about two thirds of their revenue now. So down from 80% a few years ago. And when I think of what Palo Alto has become, they're really a data company. Now, if you look at, you know, unit 42 in Cortex, the, the, the Cortex Data Lake, they've done an excellent job of taking telemetry from their products and from the acquisitions they have, right? And bringing that together into one big data lake. >>And then they're able to use that to, to do faster threat notification, forensics, things like that. And so I think the old model of security of create signatures for known threats, it's safe to say it never really worked and it wasn't ever gonna work. You had too many day zero exploits and things. The only way to fight security today is with a AI and ML based analytics. And they have, they're the gold standard. I think the one thing about your post that I would add the gold standard from a data standpoint, and that's given them this competitive advantage to go out and become a platform for a security. Which, like I said, the people have tried to do that for years. And the first one that's actually done it, well, >>We've heard this from some of the startups, like Lacework will say, oh, we treat security as a data problem. Of course there's a startup, Palo Alto's got, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years of, of, of history. But one of the things I wanted to explore with you coming into this was the notion of can you be best of breed and develop a suite? And we, we've been hearing a consistent answer to that question, which is, and, and do you need to, and the answer is, well, best of breed in security requires that full spectrum, that full view. So here's my question to you. So, okay, let's take Esty win relatively new for these guys, right? Yeah. Okay. And >>And one of the few products are not top two, top three in, right? Exactly. >>Yeah. So that's why I want to take that. Yeah. Because in bakeoffs, they're gonna lose on a head-to-head best of breed. And so the customer's gonna say, Hey, you know, I love your, your consolidation play, your esty win's. Just, okay, how about a little discount on that? And you know, these guys are premium priced. Yes. So, you know, are they in essentially through their pricing strategies, sort of creating that stuff, fighting that, is that friction for them where they've got, you know, the customer says, all right, well forget it, we're gonna go stove pipe with the SD WAN will consolidate some of the stuff. Are you seeing that? >>Yeah, I, I, I still think the sales model is that way. And I think that's something they need to work on changing. If they get into a situation where they have to get down into a feature battle of my SD WAN versus your SD wan, my firewall versus your firewall, frankly they've already lost, you know, because their value prop is the suite and, and is the platform. And I was talking to the CISO here that told me, he realizes now that you don't need best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, best of breed everywhere leads to suboptimal threat protection. Cuz you have all these data data sets that are in silos, right? And so from a data scientist standpoint, right, there's the good data leads to good insights. Well, partial data leads to fragmented insights and that's, that's what the best, best of breed approach gives you. And so I was talking with Palo about this, can they have this vision of being best of breed and platform? I don't really think you can maintain best of breed everywhere across this portfolio this big, but you don't need to. >>That was my second point of my >>Question. That's the point. >>Yeah. And so, cuz cuz because you know, we've talked about this, that that sweets always win in the long run, >>Sweets >>Win. Yeah. But here's the thing, I, I wonder to your your point about, you know, the customer, you know, understanding that that that, that this resonates with them. I, my guess is a lot of customers, you know, at that mid-level and the fat middle are like still sort of wed, you know, hugging that, that tool. So there's, there's work to be done here, but I think they, they, they got it right Because if they devolve, to your point, if they devolve down to that speeds and feeds, eh, what's the point of that? Where's their valuable? >>You do not wanna get into a knife fight. And I, and I, and I think for them the, a big challenge now is convincing customers that the suite, the suite approach does work. And they have to be able to do that in actual customer examples. And so, you know, I I interviewed a bunch of customers here and the ones that have bought into XDR and xor and even are looking at their sim have told me that the, the, so think of soc operations, the old way heavily manually oriented, right? You have multiple panes of glass and you know, and then you've got, so there's a lot of people work before you bring the tools in, right? If done correctly with AI and ml, the machines would do all the heavy lifting and then you'd bring people in at the end to clean up the little bits that were missed, right? >>And so you, you moved to, from something that was very people heavy to something that's machine heavy and machines can work a lot faster than people. And the, and so the ones that I've talked that have, that have done that have said, look, our engineers have moved on to a lot different things. They're doing penetration testing, they're, you know, helping us with, with strategy and they're not fighting that, that daily fight of looking through log files. And the only proof point you need, Dave, is look at every big breach that we've had over the last five years. There's some SIM vendor up there that says, we caught it. Yeah. >>Yeah. We we had the data. >>Yeah. But, but, but the security team missed it. Well they missed it because you're, nobody can look at that much data manually. And so the, I I think their approach of relying heavily on machines to fight the fight is actually the right way. >>Is that a differentiator for them versus, we were talking before we went live that you and I first hit our very first segment back in 2017 at Fort Net. Is that, where do the two stand in your >>Yeah, it's funny cuz if you talk to the two vendors, they don't really see each other in a lot of accounts because Fort Net's more small market mid-market. It's the same strategy to some degree where Fort Net relies heavily on in-house development and Palo Alto relies heavily on acquisition. Yeah. And so I think from a consistently feature set, you know, Fort Net has an advantage there because it, it's all run off their, their their silicon. Where, where Palo's able to innovate very quickly. The, it it requires a lot of work right? To, to bring the front end and back ends together. But they're serving different markets. So >>Do you see that as a differentiator? The integration strategy that Palo Alto has as a differentiator? We talk to so many companies who have an a strong m and a strategy and, and execution arm. But the challenge is always integrating the technology so that the customer to, you know, ultimately it's the customer. >>I actually think they're, they're underrated as a, an acquirer. In fact, Dave wrote a post to a prior on Silicon Angle prior to Accelerate and he, he on, you put it on Twitter and you asked people to rank 'em as an acquirer and they were in the middle of the pack, >>Right? It was, it was. So it was Oracle, VMware, emc, ibm, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto. Yeah. Or Oracle got very high marks. It was like 8.5 out of, you know, 10. Yeah. VMware I think was 6.5. Nice. Era was high emc, big range. IBM five to seven. Cisco was three to eight. Yeah. Yeah, right. ServiceNow was a seven. And then, yeah, Palo Alto was like a five. And I, which I think it was unfair. >>Well, and I think it depends on how you look at it. And I, so I think a lot of the acquisitions Palo Altos made, they've done a good job of integrating their backend data and they've almost ignored the front end. And so when you buy some of the products, it's a little clunky today. You know, if you work with Prisma Cloud, it could be a little bit cleaner. And even with, you know, the SD wan that took 'em a long time to bring CloudGenix in and stuff. But I think the approach is right. I don't, I don't necessarily believe you should integrate the front end until you've integrated the back end. >>That's >>The hard part, right? Because UL ultimately what you're gonna get, you're gonna get two panes of glass and one pane of glass and it might look pretty all mush together, but ultimately you're not solving the bigger problem, right. Of, of being able to create that big data like the, the fight security. And so I think, you know, the approach they've taken is the right one. I think from a user standpoint, maybe it doesn't show up as neatly because you don't see the frontend integration, but the way they're doing it is the right way to do it. And I'm glad they're doing it that way versus caving to the pressures of what, you know, the industry might want >>Showed up in the performance of the company. I mean, this company was basically gonna double revenues to 7 billion from 2020 to >>2023. Three. Think about that at that, that >>Make a, that's unbelievable, right? I mean, and then and they wanna double again. Yeah. You know, so, well >>What did, what did Nikesh was quoted as saying they wanna be the first cyber company that's a hundred billion dollars. He didn't give a timeline market cap. >>Right. >>Market cap, right. Do what I wanna get both of your opinions on what you saw and heard and felt this week. What do you think the likelihood is? And and do you have any projections on how, you know, how many years it's gonna take for them to get there? >>Well, >>Well I think so if they're gonna get that big, right? And, and we were talking about this pre-show, any company that's becoming a big company does it through ecosystem >>Bingo. >>Right? And that when you look around the show floor, it's not that impressive. And if that, if there's an area they need to focus on, it's building that ecosystem. And it's not with other security vendors, it's with application vendors and it's with the cloud companies and stuff. And they've got some relationships there, but they need to do more. I actually challenge 'em on that. One of the analyst sessions. They said, look, we've got 800 cortex partners. Well where are they? Right? Why isn't there a cortex stand here with a bunch of the small companies here? So I do think that that is an area they need to focus on. If they are gonna get to that, that market caps number, they will do so do so through ecosystem. Because every company that's achieved that has done it through ecosystem. >>A hundred percent agree. And you know, if you look at CrowdStrike's ecosystem, it's pretty similar. Yeah. You know, it doesn't really, you know, make much, much, not much different from this, but I went back and just looked at some, you know, peak valuations during the pandemic and shortly thereafter CrowdStrike was 70 billion. You know, that's what their roughly their peak Palo Alto was 56, fortune was 59 for the actually diverged. Right. And now Palo Alto has taken the, the top mantle, you know, today it's market cap's 52. So it's held 93% of its peak value. Everybody else is tanking. Even Okta was 45 billion. It's been crushed as you well know. But, so Palo Alto wasn't always, you know, the number one in terms of market cap. But I guess my point is, look, if CrowdStrike could got to 70 billion during Yeah. During the frenzy, I think it's gonna take, to answer your question, I think it's gonna be five years. Okay. Before they get back there. I think this market's gonna be tough for a while from a valuation standpoint. I think generally tech is gonna kind of go up and down and sideways for a good year and a half, maybe even two years could be even longer. And then I think there's gonna be some next wave of productivity innovation that that hits. And then you're gonna, you're almost always gonna exceed the previous highs. It's gonna take a while. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. But I think their ability to disrupt the SIM market actually is something I, I believe they're gonna do. I've been calling for the death of the sim for a long time and I know some people at Palo Alto are very cautious about saying that cuz the Splunks and the, you know, they're, they're their partners. But I, I think the, you know, it's what I said before, the, the tools are catching them, but they're, it's not in a way that's useful for the IT pro and, but I, I don't think the SIM vendors have that ecosystem of insight across network cloud endpoint. Right. Which is what you need in order to make a sim useful. >>CISO at an ETR roundtable said, if, if it weren't for my regulators, I would chuck my sim. >>Yes. >>But that's the only reason that, that this person was keeping it. So, >>Yeah. And I think the, the fact that most of those companies have moved to a perpetual MO or a a recurring revenue model actually helps unseat them. Typically when you pour a bunch of money into something, you remember the old computer associate days, nobody ever took it out cuz the sunk dollars you spent to do it. But now that you're paying an annual recurring fee, it's actually makes it easier to take out. So >>Yeah, it's it's an ebb and flow, right? Yeah. Because the maintenance costs were, you know, relatively low. Maybe it was 20% of the total. And then, you know, once every five years you had to do a refresh and you were still locked into the sort of maintenance and, and so yeah, I think you're right. The switching costs with sas, you know, in theory anyway, should be less >>Yeah. As long as you can migrate the data over. And I think they've got a pretty good handle on that. So, >>Yeah. So guys, I wanna get your perspective as a whole bunch of announcements here. We've only been here for a couple days, not a big conference as, as you can see from behind us. What Zs in your opinion was Palo Alto's main message and and what do you think about it main message at this event? And then same question for you. >>Yeah, I, I think their message largely wrapped around disruption, right? And, and they, in The's keynote already talked about that, right? And where they disrupted the firewall market by creating a NextGen firewall. In fact, if you look at all the new services they added to their firewall, you, you could almost say it's a NextGen NextGen firewall. But, but I do think the, the work they've done in the area of cloud and cortex actually I think is, is pretty impressive. And I think that's the, the SOC is ripe for disruption because it's for, for the most part, most socks still, you know, run off legacy playbooks. They run off legacy, you know, forensic models and things and they don't work. It's why we have so many breaches today. The, the dirty little secret that nobody ever wants to talk about is the bad guys are using machine learning, right? And so if you're using a signature based model, all they're do is tweak their model a little bit and it becomes, it bypasses them. So I, I think the only way to fight the the bad guys today is with you gotta fight fire with fire. And I think that's, that's the path they've, they've headed >>Down and the bad guys are hiding in plain sight, you know? >>Yeah, yeah. Well it's, it's not hard to do now with a lot of those legacy tools. So >>I think, I think for me, you know, the stat that we threw out earlier, I think yesterday at our keynote analysis was, you know, the ETR data shows that are, that are that last survey around 35% of the respondents said we are actively consolidating, sorry, 44%, sorry, 35 says we're actively consolidating vendors, redundant vendors today. That number's up to 44%. Yeah. It's by far the number one cost optimization technique. That's what these guys are pitching. And I think it's gonna resonate with people and, and I think to your point, they're integrating at the backend, their beeps are technical, right? I mean, they can deal with that complexity. Yeah. And so they don't need eye candy. Eventually they, they, they want to have that cuz it'll allow 'em to have deeper market penetration and make people more productive. But you know, that consolidation message came through loud and clear. >>Yeah. The big change in this industry too is all the new startups are all cloud native, right? They're all built on Amazon or Google or whatever. Yeah. And when your cloud native and you buy a cloud native integration is fast. It's not like having to integrate this big monolithic software stack anymore. Right. So I I think their pace of integration will only accelerate from here because everything's now cloud native. >>If a customer comes to you or when a customer comes to you and says, Zs help us with this cyber transformation we have, our board isn't necessarily with our executives in terms of execution of a security strategy. How do you advise them where Palo Alto is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, a lot, a lot of this is just fighting legacy mindset. And I've, I was talking with some CISOs here from state and local governments and things and they're, you know, they can't get more budget. They're fighting the tide. But what they did find is through the use of automation technology, they're able to bring their people costs way down. Right. And then be able to use that budget to invest in a lot of new projects. And so with that, you, you have to start with your biggest pain points, apply automation where you can, and then be able to use that budget to reinvest back in your security strategy. And it's good for the IT pros too, the security pros, my advice to, to it pros is if you're doing things today that aren't resume building, stop doing them. Right? Find a way to automate the money your job. And so if you're patching systems and you're looking through log files, there's no reason machines can't do that. And you go do something a lot more interesting. >>So true. It's like storage guys 10 years ago, provisioning loans. Yes. It's like, stop doing that. Yeah. You're gonna be outta a job. And so who, last question I have is, is who do you see as the big competitors, the horses on the track question, right? So obviously Cisco kind of service has led for a while and you know, big portfolio company, CrowdStrike coming at it from end point. You know who, who, who do you see as the real players going for that? You know, right now the market's three to 4%. The leader has three, three 4% of the market. You know who they're all going for? 10, 15, maybe 20% of the market. Who, who are the likely candidates? Yeah, >>I don't know if CrowdStrike really has the breadth of portfolio to compete long term though. I I think they've had a nice run, but I, we might start to see the follow 'em. I think Microsoft is gonna be for middle. They've laid down the gauntlet, right? They are a security vendor, right? We, we were at Reinvent and a AWS is the platform for security vendors. Yes. Middle, somewhere in the middle. But Microsoft make no mistake, they're in security. They've got some good products. I think a lot of 'em are kind of good enough and they, they tie it to the licensing and I'm not sure that works in security, but they've certainly got the ear of a lot of it pros. >>It might work in smb. >>Yeah. Yeah. It, it might. And, and I do like Zscaler. I, I know these guys poo poo the proxy model, but they've, they've done about as much with proxies as you can. And I, I think it's, it's a battle of, I love the, the, the near, you know, proxies are dead and Jay's model, you know, Jay over at c skater throw 'em back at 'em. So I, it's good to see that kind of fight going on between the two. >>Oh, it's great. Well, and, and again, ZScaler's coming at it from their cloud security angle. CrowdStrike's coming at it from endpoint. I, I do think CrowdStrike has an opportunity to build out the portfolio through m and a and maybe ecosystem. And then obviously, you know, Palo Alto's getting it done. How about Cisco? >>Yeah. Cisco's interesting. And I, I think if Cisco can make the network matter in security and it should, right? We're talking about how a lot of you need a lot of forensics to fight security today. Well, they're gonna see things long before anybody else because they have all that network data. If they can tie network security, I, I mean they could really have that business take off. But we've been saying that about Cisco for 20 years. >>But big install based though. Yeah. It's hard for a company, any company to just say, okay, hey Cisco customer sweep the floor and come with us. That's, that's >>A tough thing. They have a lot of good peace parts, right? And like duo's a good product and umbrella's a good product. They've, they've not done a good job. >>They're the opposite of these guys. >>They've not done a good job of the backend integration that, that's where Cisco needs to, to focus. And I do think g G two Patel there fixed the WebEx group and I think he's now, in fact when you talk to him, he's doing very little on WebEx that that group's running itself and he's more focused in security. So I, I think we could see a resurgence there. But you know, they have a, from a revenue perspective, it's a little misleading cuz they have this big legacy base that's in decline while they're moving to cloud and stuff. So, but they, but they, there's a lot of work there're trying to, to tie to network. >>Right. Lots of fuel for conversation. We're gonna have to carry this on, on Silicon angle.com guys. Yes. And Wikibon, lets do see us. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me giving us your insights as to this event. Where are you gonna be next? Are you gonna be on vacation? >>There's nothing more fun than mean on the cube, so, right. What's outside of that though? Yeah, you know, Christmas coming up, I gotta go see family and do the obligatory, although for me that's a lot of travel, so I guess >>More planes. Yeah. >>Hopefully not in Vegas. >>Not in Vegas. >>Awesome. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, no, >>We love it. We >>Love it. Although I will say my year started off with ces. Yeah. And it's finishing up with Palo Alto here. The bookends. Yeah, exactly. In Vegas bookends. >>Well thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Dave. Always a pleasure to host a show with you and hear your insights. Reading your breaking analysis always kicks off my prep for show and it's always great to see, but predictions come true. So thank you for being my co-host bet. All right. For Dave Valante Enz as Carla, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. We're so glad that you're still with us. It's the Cube Live at the MGM Grand. This is our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is takeaways from Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with two really smart guys, Dave Valante. Dave, we're joined by one of our cube alumni, a friend, a friend of the, we say friend of the Cube. >>Yeah, F otc. A friend of the Cube >>Karala joins us. Guys, it's great to have you here. It's been an exciting show. A lot of cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But I'd love to get some of the big takeaways from both of you. Dave, we'll start with >>You. A breathing room from two weeks ago. Yeah, that was, that was really pleasant. You know, I mean, I know was, yes, you sat in the analyst program, interested in what your takeaways were from there. But, you know, coming into this, we wrote a piece, Palo Alto's Gold Standard, what they need to do to, to keep that, that status. And we hear it a lot about consolidation. That's their big theme now, which is timely, right? Cause people wanna save money, they wanna do more with less. But I'm really interested in hearing zeus's thoughts on how that's playing in the market. How customers, how easy is it to just say, oh, hey, I'm gonna consolidate. I wanna get into that a little bit with you, how well the strategy's working. We're gonna get into some of the m and a activity and really bring your perspectives to the table. Well, >>It's, it's not easy. I mean, people have been calling for the consolidation of security for decades, and it's, it's, they're the first company that's actually made it happen. Right? And, and I think this is what we're seeing here is the culmination of this long-term strategy, this company trying to build more of a platform. And they, you know, they, they came out as a firewall vendor. And I think it's safe to say they're more than firewall today. That's only about two thirds of their revenue now. So down from 80% a few years ago. And when I think of what Palo Alto has become, they're really a data company. Now, if you look at, you know, unit 42 in Cortex, the, the, the Cortex Data Lake, they've done an excellent job of taking telemetry from their products and from the acquisitions they have, right? And bringing that together into one big data lake. >>And then they're able to use that to, to do faster threat notification, forensics, things like that. And so I think the old model of security of create signatures for known threats, it's safe to say it never really worked and it wasn't ever gonna work. You had too many days, zero exploits and things. The only way to fight security today is with a AI and ML based analytics. And they have, they're the gold standard. I think the one thing about your post that I would add, they're the gold standard from a data standpoint. And that's given them this competitive advantage to go out and become a platform for security. Which, like I said, the people have tried to do that for years. And the first one that's actually done it, well, >>We've heard this from some of the startups, like Lacework will say, oh, we treat security as a data problem. Of course there's a startup, Palo Alto's got, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years of, of, of history. But one of the things I wanted to explore with you coming into this was the notion of can you be best of breed and develop a suite? And we, we've been hearing a consistent answer to that question, which is, and, and do you need to, and the answer is, well, best of breed in security requires that full spectrum, that full view. So here's my question to you. So, okay, let's take Estee win relatively new for these guys, right? Yeah. Okay. And >>And one of the few products are not top two, top three in, right? >>Exactly. Yeah. So that's why I want to take that. Yeah. Because in bakeoffs, they're gonna lose on a head-to-head best of breed. And so the customer's gonna say, Hey, you know, I love your, your consolidation play, your esty win's. Just, okay, how about a little discount on that? And you know, these guys are premium priced. Yes. So, you know, are they in essentially through their pricing strategies, sort of creating that stuff, fighting that, is that friction for them where they've got, you know, the customer says, all right, well forget it, we're gonna go stove pipe with the SD WAN will consolidate some of the stuff. Are you seeing that? >>Yeah, I, I, I still think the sales model is that way. And I think that's something they need to work on changing. If they get into a situation where they have to get down into a feature battle of my SD WAN versus your SD wan, my firewall versus your firewall, frankly they've already lost, you know, because their value prop is the suite and, and is the platform. And I was talking with the CISO here that told me, he realizes now that you don't need best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, best of breed everywhere leads to suboptimal threat protection. Cuz you have all these data data sets that are in silos, right? And so from a data scientist standpoint, right, there's the good data leads to good insights. Well, partial data leads to fragmented insights and that's, that's what the best, best of breed approach gives you. And so I was talking with Palo about this, can they have this vision of being best of breed and platform? I don't really think you can maintain best of breed everywhere across this portfolio this big, but you don't need to. >>That was my second point of my question. That's the point I'm saying. Yeah. And so, cuz cuz because you know, we've talked about this, that that sweets always win in the long run, >>Sweets win. >>Yeah. But here's the thing, I, I wonder to your your point about, you know, the customer, you know, understanding that that that, that this resonates with them. I, my guess is a lot of customers, you know, at that mid-level and the fat middle are like still sort of wed, you know, hugging that, that tool. So there's, there's work to be done here, but I think they, they, they got it right Because if they devolve, to your point, if they devolve down to that speeds and feeds, eh, what's the point of that? Where's their >>Valuable? You do not wanna get into a knife fight. And I, and I, and I think for them the, a big challenge now is convincing customers that the suite, the suite approach does work. And they have to be able to do that in actual customer examples. And so, you know, I I interviewed a bunch of customers here and the ones that have bought into XDR and xor and even are looking at their sim have told me that the, the, so think of soc operations, the old way heavily manually oriented, right? You have multiple panes of glass and you know, and then you've got, so there's a lot of people work before you bring the tools in, right? If done correctly with AI and ml, the machines would do all the heavy lifting and then you'd bring people in at the end to clean up the little bits that were missed, right? >>And so you, you moved to, from something that was very people heavy to something that's machine heavy and machines can work a lot faster than people. And the, and so the ones that I've talked that have, that have done that have said, look, our engineers have moved on to a lot different things. They're doing penetration testing, they're, you know, helping us with, with strategy and they're not fighting that, that daily fight of looking through log files. And the only proof point you need, Dave, is look at every big breach that we've had over the last five years. There's some SIM vendor up there that says, we caught it. Yeah. >>Yeah. We we had the data. >>Yeah. But, but, but the security team missed it. Well they missed it because you're, nobody can look at that much data manually. And so the, I I think their approach of relying heavily on machines to fight the fight is actually the right way. >>Is that a differentiator for them versus, we were talking before we went live that you and I first hit our very first segment back in 2017 at Fort Net. Is that, where do the two stand in your >>Yeah, it's funny cuz if you talk to the two vendors, they don't really see each other in a lot of accounts because Fort Net's more small market mid-market. It's the same strategy to some degree where Fort Net relies heavily on in-house development in Palo Alto relies heavily on acquisition. Yeah. And so I think from a consistently feature set, you know, Fort Net has an advantage there because it, it's all run off their, their their silicon. Where, where Palo's able to innovate very quickly. The, it it requires a lot of work right? To, to bring the front end and back ends together. But they're serving different markets. So >>Do you see that as a differentiator? The integration strategy that Palo Alto has as a differentiator? We talk to so many companies who have an a strong m and a strategy and, and execution arm. But the challenge is always integrating the technology so that the customer to, you know, ultimately it's the customer. >>I actually think they're, they're underrated as a, an acquirer. In fact, Dave wrote a post to a prior on Silicon Angle prior to Accelerate and he, he on, you put it on Twitter and you asked people to rank 'em as an acquirer and they were in the middle of the pack, >>Right? It was, it was. So it was Oracle, VMware, emc, ibm, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto. Yeah. Or Oracle got very high marks. It was like 8.5 out of, you know, 10. Yeah. VMware I think was 6.5. Naira was high emc, big range. IBM five to seven. Cisco was three to eight. Yeah. Yeah, right. ServiceNow was a seven. And then, yeah, Palo Alto was like a five. And I, which I think it was unfair. Well, >>And I think it depends on how you look at it. And I, so I think a lot of the acquisitions Palo Alto's made, they've done a good job of integrating the backend data and they've almost ignored the front end. And so when you buy some of the products, it's a little clunky today. You know, if you work with Prisma Cloud, it could be a little bit cleaner. And even with, you know, the SD wan that took 'em a long time to bring CloudGenix in and stuff. But I think the approach is right. I don't, I don't necessarily believe you should integrate the front end until you've integrated the back end. >>That's >>The hard part, right? Because UL ultimately what you're gonna get, you're gonna get two panes of glass and one pane of glass and it might look pretty and all mush together, but ultimately you're not solving the bigger problem, right. Of, of being able to create that big data lake to, to fight security. And so I think, you know, the approach they've taken is the right one. I think from a user standpoint, maybe it doesn't show up as neatly because you don't see the frontend integration, but the way they're doing it is the right way to do it. And I'm glad they're doing it that way versus caving to the pressures of what, you know, the industry might want or >>Showed up in the performance of the company. I mean, this company was basically gonna double revenues to 7 billion from 2020 to >>2023. Think about that at that. That makes, >>I mean that's unbelievable, right? I mean, and then and they wanna double again. Yeah. You know, so, well >>What did, what did Nikesh was quoted as saying they wanna be the first cyber company that's a hundred billion dollars. He didn't give a timeline market >>Cap. Right. >>Market cap, right. Do what I wanna get both of your opinions on what you saw and heard and felt this week. What do you think the likelihood is? And and do you have any projections on how, you know, how many years it's gonna take for them to get there? >>Well, >>Well I think so if they're gonna get that big, right? And, and we were talking about this pre-show, any company that's becoming a big company does it through ecosystem >>Bingo >>Go, right? And that when you look around the show floor, it's not that impressive. No. And if that, if there's an area they need to focus on, it's building that ecosystem. And it's not with other security vendors, it's with application vendors and it's with the cloud companies and stuff. And they've got some relationships there, but they need to do more. I actually challenge 'em on that. One of the analyst sessions. They said, look, we've got 800 cortex partners. Well where are they? Right? Why isn't there a cortex stand here with a bunch of the small companies here? So I do think that that is an area they need to focus on. If they are gonna get to that, that market caps number, they will do so do so through ecosystem. Because every company that's achieved that has done it through ecosystem. >>A hundred percent agree. And you know, if you look at CrowdStrike's ecosystem, it's, I mean, pretty similar. Yeah. You know, it doesn't really, you know, make much, much, not much different from this, but I went back and just looked at some, you know, peak valuations during the pandemic and shortly thereafter CrowdStrike was 70 billion. You know, that's what their roughly their peak Palo Alto was 56, fortune was 59 for the actually diverged. Right. And now Palo Alto has taken the, the top mantle, you know, today it's market cap's 52. So it's held 93% of its peak value. Everybody else is tanking. Even Okta was 45 billion. It's been crushed as you well know. But, so Palo Alto wasn't always, you know, the number one in terms of market cap. But I guess my point is, look, if CrowdStrike could got to 70 billion during Yeah. During the frenzy, I think it's gonna take, to answer your question, I think it's gonna be five years. Okay. Before they get back there. I think this market's gonna be tough for a while from a valuation standpoint. I think generally tech is gonna kind of go up and down and sideways for a good year and a half, maybe even two years could be even longer. And then I think there's gonna be some next wave of productivity innovation that that hits. And then you're gonna, you're almost always gonna exceed the previous highs. It's gonna take a while. Yeah. >>Yeah, yeah. But I think their ability to disrupt the SIM market actually is something that I, I believe they're gonna do. I've been calling for the death of the sim for a long time and I know some people of Palo Alto are very cautious about saying that cuz the Splunks and the, you know, they're, they're their partners. But I, I think the, you know, it's what I said before, the, the tools are catching them, but they're, it's not in a way that's useful for the IT pro and, but I, I don't think the SIM vendors have that ecosystem of insight across network cloud endpoint. Right. Which is what you need in order to make a sim useful. >>CISO at an ETR round table said, if, if it weren't for my regulators, I would chuck my sim. >>Yes. >>But that's the only reason that, that this person was keeping it. No. >>Yeah. And I think the, the fact that most of those companies have moved to a perpetual MO or a a recurring revenue model actually helps unseat them. Typically when you pour a bunch of money into something, you remember the old computer associate says nobody ever took it out cuz the sunk dollars you spent to do it. But now that you're paying an annual recurring fee, it's actually makes it easier to take out. So >>Yeah, it's just an ebb and flow, right? Yeah. Because the maintenance costs were, you know, relatively low. Maybe it was 20% of the total. And then, you know, once every five years you had to do a refresh and you were still locked into the sort of maintenance and, and so yeah, I think you're right. The switching costs with sas, you know, in theory anyway, should be less >>Yeah. As long as you can migrate the data over. And I think they've got a pretty good handle on that. So, >>Yeah. So guys, I wanna get your perspective as a whole bunch of announcements here. We've only been here for a couple days, not a big conference as, as you can see from behind us. What Zs in your opinion was Palo Alto's main message and and what do you think about it main message at this event? And then same question for you. >>Yeah, I, I think their message largely wrapped around disruption, right? And, and they, and The's keynote already talked about that, right? And where they disrupted the firewall market by creating a NextGen firewall. In fact, if you look at all the new services they added to their firewall, you, you could almost say it's a NextGen NextGen firewall. But, but I do think the, the work they've done in the area of cloud and cortex actually I think is, is pretty impressive. And I think that's the, the SOC is ripe for disruption because it's for, for the most part, most socks still, you know, run off legacy playbooks. They run off legacy, you know, forensic models and things and they don't work. It's why we have so many breaches today. The, the dirty little secret that nobody ever wants to talk about is the bad guys are using machine learning, right? And so if you're using a signature based model, all they gotta do is tweak their model a little bit and it becomes, it bypasses them. So I, I think the only way to fight the the bad guys today is with you're gonna fight fire with fire. And I think that's, that's the path they've, they've headed >>Down. Yeah. The bad guys are hiding in plain sight, you know? Yeah, >>Yeah. Well it's, it's not hard to do now with a lot of those legacy tools. So >>I think, I think for me, you know, the stat that we threw out earlier, I think yesterday at our keynote analysis was, you know, the ETR data shows that are, that are that last survey around 35% of the respondents said we are actively consolidating, sorry, 44%, sorry, 35 says who are actively consolidating vendors, redundant vendors today that number's up to 44%. Yeah. It's by far the number one cost optimization technique. That's what these guys are pitching. And I think it's gonna resonate with people and, and I think to your point, they're integrating at the backend, their beeps are technical, right? I mean, they can deal with that complexity. Yeah. And so they don't need eye candy. Eventually they, they, they want to have that cuz it'll allow 'em to have deeper market penetration and make people more productive. But you know, that consolidation message came through loud and clear. >>Yeah. The big change in this industry too is all the new startups are all cloud native, right? They're all built on Amazon or Google or whatever. Yeah. And when your cloud native and you buy a cloud native integration is fast. It's not like having to integrate this big monolithic software stack anymore. Right. So I, I think their pace of integration will only accelerate from here because everything's now cloud native. >>If a customer comes to you or when a customer comes to you and says, Zs help us with this cyber transformation we have, our board isn't necessarily aligned with our executives in terms of execution of a security strategy. How do you advise them where Palo Alto is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, a lot, a lot of this is just fighting legacy mindset. And I've, I was talking with some CISOs here from state and local governments and things and they're, you know, they can't get more budget. They're fighting the tide. But what they did find is through the use of automation technology, they're able to bring their people costs way down. Right. And then be able to use that budget to invest in a lot of new projects. And so with that, you, you have to start with your biggest pain points, apply automation where you can, and then be able to use that budget to reinvest back in your security strategy. And it's good for the IT pros too, the security pros, my advice to the IT pros is, is if you're doing things today that aren't resume building, stop doing them. Right. Find a way to automate the money your job. And so if you're patching systems and you're looking through log files, there's no reason machines can't do that. And you go do something a lot more interesting. >>So true. It's like storage guys 10 years ago, provisioning loans. Yes. It's like, stop doing that. Yeah. You're gonna be outta a job. So who, last question I have is, is who do you see as the big competitors, the horses on the track question, right? So obviously Cisco kind of service has led for a while and you know, big portfolio company, CrowdStrike coming at it from end point. You know who, who, who do you see as the real players going for that? You know, right now the market's three to 4%. The leader has three, three 4% of the market. You know who they're all going for? 10, 15, maybe 20% of the market. Who, who are the likely candidates? Yeah, >>I don't know if CrowdStrike really has the breadth of portfolio to compete long term though. I I think they've had a nice run, but I, we might start to see the follow 'em. I think Microsoft is gonna be for middle. They've laid down the gauntlet, right? They are a security vendor, right? We, we were at Reinvent and a AWS is the platform for security vendors. Yes. Middle, somewhere in the middle. But Microsoft make no mistake, they're in security. They've got some good products. I think a lot of 'em are kind of good enough and they, they tie it to the licensing and I'm not sure that works in security, but they've certainly got the ear of a lot of it pros. >>It might work in smb. >>Yeah, yeah. It, it might. And, and I do like Zscaler. I, I know these guys poo poo the proxy model, but they've, they've done about as much with prox as you can. And I, I think it's, it's a battle of, I love the, the, the near, you know, proxies are dead and Jay's model, you know, Jay over at csca, throw 'em back at 'em. So I, it's good to see that kind of fight going on between the >>Two. Oh, it's great. Well, and, and again, ZScaler's coming at it from their cloud security angle. CrowdStrike's coming at it from endpoint. I, I do think CrowdStrike has an opportunity to build out the portfolio through m and a and maybe ecosystem. And then obviously, you know, Palo Alto's getting it done. How about Cisco? >>Yeah, Cisco's interesting. And I I think if Cisco can make the network matter in security and it should, right? We're talking about how a lot of you need a lot of forensics to fight security today. Well, they're gonna see things long before anybody else because they have all that network data. If they can tie network security, I, I mean they could really have that business take off. But we've been saying that about Cisco for 20 years. >>But big install based though. Yeah. It's hard for a company, any company to say, okay, hey Cisco customer sweep the floor and come with us. That's, that's >>A tough thing. They have a lot of good peace parts, right? And like duo's a good product and umbrella's a good product. They've, they've not done a good job. >>They're the opposite of these guys. >>They've not done a good job of the backend integration and that, that's where Cisco needs to, to focus. And I do think g G two Patel there fixed the WebEx group and I think he's now, in fact when you talk to him, he's doing very little on WebEx that that group's running itself and he's more focused in security. So I, I think we could see a resurgence there. But you know, they have a, from a revenue perspective, it's a little misleading cuz they have this big legacy base that's in decline while they're moving to cloud and stuff. So, but they, but they, there's a lot of Rick there trying to, to tie to network. >>Lots of fuel for conversation. We're gonna have to carry this on, on Silicon angle.com guys. Yes. And Wi KeePon. Lets do see us. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me giving us your insights as to this event. Where are gonna be next? Are you gonna be on >>Vacation? There's nothing more fun than mean on the cube. So what's outside of that though? Yeah, you know, Christmas coming up, I gotta go see family and be the obligatory, although for me that's a lot of travel, so I guess >>More planes. Yeah. >>Hopefully not in Vegas. >>Not in Vegas. >>Awesome. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, no, >>We love it. We love >>It. Although I will say my year started off with ces. Yeah. And it's finishing up with Palo Alto here. The bookends. Yeah, exactly. In Vegas bookends. >>Well thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Dave. Always a pleasure to host a show with you and hear your insights. Reading your breaking analysis always kicks off my prep for show. And it, it's always great to see, but predictions come true. So thank you for being my co-host bet. All right. For Dave Valante Enz as Carla, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are live from the AWS Reinvent Show floor here with the cube. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with Dave Valante, and we have a very exciting conversation with you. Two, two companies you may have heard of. We've got AWS and Red Hat in the house. Manu and Joel, thank you so much for being here. Love this little fist bump. Started off, that's right. Before we even got rolling, Manu, you said that you wanted this to be the best segment of, of the cubes airing. We we're doing over a hundred segments, so you're gonna have to bring the heat. >>We're ready. We're did go. Are we ready? Yeah, go. We're ready. Let's bring it on. >>We're ready. All right. I'm, I'm ready. Dave's ready. Let's do it. How's the show going for you guys real quick before we dig in? >>Yeah, I think after Covid, it's really nice to see that we're back into the 2019 level and, you know, people just want to get out, meet people, have that human touch with each other, and I think a lot of trust gets built as a functional that, so it's super amazing to see our partners and customers here at Reedman. Yeah, >>And you've got a few in the house. That's true. Just a few maybe, maybe a couple >>Very few shows can say that, by the way. Yeah, it's maybe a handful. >>I think one of the things we were saying, it's almost like the entire Silicon Valley descended in the expo hall area, so >>Yeah, it's >>For a few different reasons. There's a few different silicon defined. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't have strong on for you. So far >>It's, it's, it is amazing. It's the 10th year, right? It's decade, I think I've been to five and it's, it grows every single year. It's the, you have to be here. It's as simple as that. And customers from every single industry are here too. You don't get, a lot of shows have every single industry and almost every single location around the globe. So it's, it's a must, must be >>Here. Well, and the personas evolved, right? I was at reinvent number two. That was my first, and it was all developers, not all, but a lot of developers. And today it's a business mix, really is >>Totally, is a business mix. And I just, I've talked about it a little bit down the show, but the diversity on the show floor, it's the first time I've had to wait in line for the ladies' room at a tech conference. Almost a two decade career. It is, yeah. And it was really refreshing. I'm so impressed. So clearly there's a commitment to community, but also a commitment to diversity. Yeah. And, and it's brilliant to see on the show floor. This is a partnership that is robust and has been around for a little while. Money. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the partnership here? >>Yes. So Red Hand and AWS are best friends, you know, forever together. >>Aw, no wonder we got the fist bumps and all the good vibes coming out. I know, it's great. I love that >>We have a decade of working together. I think the relationship in the first phase was around running rail bundled with E two. Sure. We have about 70,000 customers that are running rail, which are running mission critical workloads such as sap, Oracle databases, bespoke applications across the state of verticals. Now, as more and more enterprise customers are finally, you know, endorsing and adopting public cloud, I think that business is just gonna continue to grow. So a, a lot of progress there. The second titration has been around, you know, developers tearing Red Hat and aws, Hey, listen, we wanna, it's getting competitive. We wanna deliver new features faster, quicker, we want scale and we want resilience. So just entire push towards devs containers. So that's the second chapter with, you know, red Hat OpenShift on aws, which launched as a, a joint manage service in 2021 last year. And I think the third phase, which you're super excited about, is just bringing the ease of consumption, one click deployment, and then having our customers, you know, benefit from the joint committed spend programs together. So, you know, making sure that re and Ansible and JBoss, the entire portfolio of Red Hat products are available on AWS marketplace. So that's the 1, 2, 3, it of our relationship. It's a decade of working together and, you know, best friends are super committed to making sure our customers and partners continue successful. >>Yeah, that he said it, he said it perfectly. 2008, I know you don't like that, but we started with Rel on demand just in 2008 before E two even had a console. So the partnership has been there, like Manu says, for a long time, we got the partnership, we got the products up there now, and we just gotta finalize that, go to market and get that gas on the fire. >>Yeah. So Graviton Outpost, local zones, you lead it into all the new stuff. So that portends, I mean, 2008, we're talking two years after the launch of s3. >>That's right. >>Right. So, and now look, so is this a harbinger of things to come with these new innovations? >>Yeah, I, I would say, you know, the innovation is a key tenant of our partnership, our relationship. So if you look at from a product standpoint, red Hat or Rel was one of the first platforms that made a support for graviton, which is basically 40% better price performance than any other distribution. Then that translated into making sure that Rel is available on all of our regions globally. So this year we launched Switzerland, Spain, India, and Red Hat was available on launch there, support for Nitro support for Outpost Rosa support on Outpost as well. So I think that relationship, that innovation on the product side, that's pretty visible. I think that innovation again then translates into what we are doing on marketplace with one click deployments we spoke about. I think the third aspect of the know innovation is around making sure that we are making our partners and our customers successful. So one of the things that we've done so far is Joe leads a, you know, a black belt team that really goes into each customer opportunity, making sure how can we help you be successful. We launched and you know, we should be able to share that on a link. After this, we launched like a big playlist, which talks about every single use case on how do you get successful and running OpenShift on aws. So that innovation on behalf of our customers partners to make them successful, that's been a key tenant for us together as >>Well. That's right. And that team that Manu is talking about, we're gonna, gonna 10 x that team this year going into January. Our fiscal yield starts in January. Love that. So yeah, we're gonna have a lot of no hiring freeze over here. Nope. No ma'am. No. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And you know what I love about working with aws and, and, and Manu just said it very, all of that's customer driven. Every single event that we, that he just talked about in that timeline, it's customer driven, right? Customers wanted rail on demand, customers want JBoss up in the cloud, Ansible this week, you know, everything's up there now. So it's just getting that go to market tight and we're gonna, we're gonna get that done. >>So what's the algorithm for customer driven in terms of taking the input? Because if every customers saying, Hey, I this a >>Really similar >>Question right up, right? I, that's what I want. And if you know, 95% of the customers say it, Jay, maybe that's a good idea. >>Yeah, that's right. Trends. But >>Yeah. You know, 30% you might be like, mm, you know, 20%, you know, how do you guys decide when to put gas on the fire? >>No, that, I think, as I mentioned, there are about 70,000 large customers that are running rail on Easy Two, many of these customers are informing our product strategy. So we have, you know, close to about couple of thousand power users. We have customer advisory booths, and these are the, you know, customers are informing us, Hey, let's get all of the Red Hat portfolio and marketplace support for graviton, support for Outpost. Why don't we, why are we not able to dip into the consumption committed spend programs for both Red Hat and aws? That's right. So it's these power users both at the developer level as well as the guys who are actually doing large commercial consumption. They are the ones who are informing the roadmap for both Red Hat and aws. >>But do, do you codify the the feedback? >>Yeah, I'm like, I wanna see the database, >>The, I think it was, I don't know, it was maybe Chasy, maybe it was Besos, that that data beats intuition. So do you take that information and somehow, I mean, it's global, 70,000 customers, right? And they have different weights, different spending patterns, different levels of maturity. Yeah. Do you, how do you codify that and then ultimately make the decision? Yeah, I >>If, I mean, well you, you've got the strategic advisory boards, which are made up of customers and partners and you know, you get, you get a good, you gotta get a good slice of your customer base to get, and you gotta take their feedback and you gotta do something with it, right? That's the, that's the way we do it and codify it at the product level, I'm sure open source. That's, that's basically how we work at the product level, right? The most elegant solution in open source wins. And that's, that's pretty much how we do that at the, >>I would just add, I think it's also just the implicit trust that the two companies had built with each other, working in the trenches, making our customers and partners successful over the last decade. And Alex, give an example. So that manifests itself in context of like, you know, Amazon and Red Hat just published the entire roadmap for OpenShift. What are the new features that are becoming over the next six to nine to 12 months? It's open source available on GitHub. Customers can see, and then they can basically come back and give feedback like, Hey, you know, we want hip compliance. We just launched. That was a big request that was coming from our >>Customers. That is not any process >>Also for Graviton or Nvidia instances. So I I I think it's a, >>Here's the thing, the reason I'm pounding on this is because you guys have a pretty high hit rate, and I think as a >>Customer, mildly successful company >>As, as a customer advocate, the better, you know, if, if you guys make bets that pay off, it's gonna pay off for customers. Right. And because there's a lot of failures in it. Yeah. I mean, let's face it. That's >>Right. And I think, I think you said the key word bets. You place a lot of small bets. Do you have the, the innovation engine to do that? AWS is the perfect place to place those small bets. And then you, you know, pour gas on the fire when, when they take off. >>Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, it's not expensive to experiment. Yeah. >>Especially in the managed service world. Right? >>And I know you love taking things to market and you're a go to market guy. Let's talk gtm, what's got your snow pumped about GTM for 2023? >>We, we are gonna, you know, 10 x the teams that's gonna be focused on these products, right? So we're gonna also come out with a hybrid committed spend program for our customers that meet them where they want to go. So they're coming outta the data center going into a cloud. We're gonna have a nice financial model for them to do that. And that's gonna take a lot of the friction out. >>Yeah. I mean, you've nailed it. I, I think the, the fact that now entire Red Hat portfolio is available on marketplace, you can do it on one click deployment. It's deeply integrated with Amazon services and the most important part that Joel was making now customers can double dip. They can drive benefit from the consumption committed spend programs, both from Red Hat and from aws, which is amazing. Which is a game changer That's right. For many of our large >>Customers. That's right. And that, so we're gonna, we're gonna really go to town on that next year. That's, and all the, all the resources that I have, which are the technology sellers and the sas, you know, the engineers we're growing this team the most out that team. So it's, >>When you say 10 x, how many are you at now? I'm >>Curious to see where you're headed. Tell you, okay. There's not right? Oh no, there's not one. It's triple digit. Yeah, yeah. >>Today. Oh, sweet. Awesome. >>So, and it's a very sizable team. They're actually making sure that each of our customers are successful and then really making sure that, you know, no customer left behind policy. >>And it's a great point that customers love when Amazonians and Red Hats show up, they love it and it's, they want to get more of it, and we're gonna, we're gonna give it to 'em. >>Must feel great to be loved like that. >>Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I would say yes. >>Seems like it's safe to say that there's another decade of partnership between your two companies. >>Hope so. That's right. That's the plan. >>Yeah. And I would say also, you know, just the IBM coming into the mix here. Yeah. I, you know, red Hat has informed the way we have turned around our partnership with ibm, essentially we, we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with the company. All of IBM software now runs on Rosa. So that is now also providing a lot of tailwinds both to our rail customers and as well as Rosa customers. And I think it's a very net creative, very positive for our partnership. >>That's right. It's been very positive. Yep. Yeah. >>You see the >>Billboards positive. Yeah, right. Also that, that's great. Great point, Dave. Yep. We have a, we have a new challenge, a new tradition on the cube here at Reinvent where we're, well, it's actually kind of a glamor moment for you, depending on how you leverage it. We're looking for your 32nd hot take your Instagram reel, your sizzle thought leadership, biggest takeaway, most important theme from this year's show. I know you want, right, Joel? I mean, you TM boy, I feel like you can spit the time. >>Yeah. It is all about Rosa for us. It is all in on that, that's the native OpenShift offering on aws and that's, that's the soundbite we're going go to town with. Now, I don't wanna forget all the other products that are in there, but Rosa is a, is a very key push for us this year. >>Fantastic. All right. Manu. >>I think our customers, it's getting super competitive. Our customers want to innovate just a >>Little bit. >>The enterprise customers see the cloud native companies. I wanna do what these guys are doing. I wanna develop features at a fast clip. I wanna scale, I wanna be resilient. And I think that's really the spirit that's coming out. So to Joel's point, you know, move to worlds containers, serverless, DevOps, which was like, you know, aha, something that's happening on the side of an enterprise is not becoming mainstream. The business is demanding it. The, it is becoming the centerpiece in the business strategy. So that's been really like the aha. Big thing that's happening here. >>Yeah. And those architectures are coming together, aren't they? That's correct. Right. You know, VMs and containers, it used to be one architecture and then at the other end of the spectrum is serverless. People thought of those as different things and now it's a single architecture and, and it's kind of right approach for the right job. >>And, and a compliments say to Red Hat, they do an incredible job of hiding that complexity. Yeah. Yes. And making sure that, you know, for example, just like, make it easier for the developers to create value and then, and you know, >>Yeah, that's right. Those, they were previously siloed architectures and >>That's right. OpenShift wanna be place where you wanna run containers or virtual machines. We want that to be this Yeah. Single place. Not, not go bolt on another piece of architecture to just do one or the other. Yeah. >>And hey, the hybrid cloud vision is working for ibm. No question. You know, and it's achievable. Yeah. I mean, I just, I've said unlike, you know, some of the previous, you know, visions on fixing the world with ai, hybrid cloud is actually a real problem that you're attacking and it's showing the results. Agreed. Oh yeah. >>Great. Alright. Last question for you guys. Cause it might be kind of fun, 10 years from now, oh, we're at another, we're sitting here, we all look the same. Time has passed, but we are not aging, which is a part of the new technology that's come out in skincare. That's my, I'm just throwing that out there. Why not? What do you guys hope that you can say about the partnership and, and your continued commitment to community? >>Oh, that's a good question. You go first this time. Yeah. >>I think, you know, the, you know, for looking into the future, you need to look into the past. And Amazon has always been driven by working back from our customers. That's like our key tenant, principle number 1 0 1. >>Couple people have said that on this stage this week. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think our partnership, I hope over the next decade continues to keep that tenant as a centerpiece. And then whatever comes out of that, I think we, we are gonna be, you know, working through that. >>Yeah. I, I would say this, I think you said that, well, the customer innovation is gonna lead us to wherever that is. And it's, it's, it's gonna be in the cloud for sure. I think we can say that in 10 years. But yeah, anything from, from AI to the quant quantum computing that IBM's really pushing behind that, you know, those are, those are gonna be things that hopefully we show up on a, on a partnership with Manu in 10 years, maybe sooner. >>Well, whatever happens next, we'll certainly be covering it here on the cube. That's right. Thank you both for being here. Joel Manu, fantastic interview. Thanks to see you guys. Yeah, good to see you brought the energy. I think you're definitely ranking high on the top interviews. We >>Love that for >>The day. >>Thank >>My pleasure >>Job, guys. Now that you're competitive at all, and thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here from AWS Reinvent in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Dave Valante. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching The Cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>>We are back in the final stretch at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I'm your host Paul Gillum with my co-host Dave Nicholson, and we've been talking to so many smart people this week. It just, it makes, boggles my mind are next guest. J Poso is the HPC and AI technology strategist at Dell. Jay also has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Texas. And I'm guessing you were up watching the Artemis launch the other night? >>I, I wasn't. I really should have been, but, but I wasn't, I was in full super computing conference mode. So that means discussions at, you know, various venues with people into the wee hours. >>How did you make the transition from a PhD in astronomy to an HPC expert? >>It was actually really straightforward. I did theoretical astrophysics and I was modeling what white dwarfs look like when they create matter and then explode as type one A super Novi, which is a class of stars that blow up. And it's a very important class because they blow up almost exactly the same way. So if you know how bright they are physically, not just how bright they appear in the sky, but if you can determine from first principles how bright they're, then you have a standard ruler for the universe when they go off in a galaxy, you know how far the galaxy is about how faint it is. So to model these though, you had to understand equations of physics, including electron degeneracy pressure, as well as normal fluid dynamics kinds of of things. And so you were solving for an explosive burning front, ripping through something. And that required a supercomputer to have anywhere close to the fat fidelity to get a reasonable answer and, and hopefully some understanding. >>So I've always said electrons are degenerate. I've always said it and I, and I mentioned to Paul earlier, I said, finally we're gonna get a guest to consort through this whole dark energy dark matter thing for us. We'll do that after, after, after the segment. >>That's a whole different, >>So, well I guess super computing being a natural tool that you would use. What is, what do you do in your role as a strategist? >>So I'm in the product management team. I spend a lot of time talking to customers about what they want to do next. HPC customers are always trying to be maximally productive of what they've got, but always wanting to know what's coming next. Because if you think about it, we can't simulate the entire human body cell for cell on any supercomputer day. We can simulate parts of it, cell for cell or the whole body with macroscopic physics, but not at the, you know, atomic level, the entire organism. So we're always trying to build more powerful computers to solve larger problems with more fidelity and less approximations in it. And so I help people try to understand which technologies for their next system might give them the best advance in capabilities for their simulation work, their data analytics work, their AI work, et cetera. Another part of it is talking to our great technology partner ecosystem and learning about which technologies they have. Cause it feeds the first thing, right? So understanding what's coming, and Dell has a, we're very proud of our large partner ecosystem. We embrace many different partners in that with different capabilities. So understanding those helps understand what your future systems might be. That those are two of the major roles in it. Strategic customers and strategic technologies. >>So you've had four days to wander the, this massive floor here and lots of startups, lots of established companies doing interesting things. What have you seen this week that really excites you? >>So I'm gonna tell you a dirty little secret here. If you are working for someone who makes super computers, you don't get as much time to wander the floor as you would think because you get lots of meetings with people who really want to understand in an NDA way, not just in the public way that's on the floor, but what's, what are you not telling us on the floor? What's coming next? And so I've been in a large number of customer meetings as well as being on the floor. And while I can't obviously share the everything, that's a non-disclosure topic in those, some things that we're hearing a lot about, people are really concerned with power because they see the TDP on the roadmaps for all the silicon providers going way up. And so people with power comes heat as waste. And so that means cooling. >>So power and cooling has been a big topic here. Obviously accelerators are, are increasing in importance in hpc not just for AI calculations, but now also for simulation calculations. And we are very proud of the three new accelerator platforms we launched here at the show that are coming out in a quarter or so. Those are two of the big topics we've seen. You know, there's, as you walk the floor here, you see lots of interesting storage vendors. HPC community's been do doing storage the same way for roughly 20 years. But now we see a lot of interesting players in that space. We have some great things in storage now and some great things that, you know, are coming in a year or two as well. So it's, it's interesting to see that diversity of that space. And then there's always the fun, exciting topics like quantum computing. We unveiled our first hybrid classical quantum computing system here with I on Q and I can't say what the future holds in this, in this format, but I can say we believe strongly in the future of quantum computing and that this, that future will be integrated with the kind of classical computing infrastructure that we make and that will help make quantum computing more powerful downstream. >>Well, let's go down that rabbit hole because, oh boy, boy, quantum computing has been talked about for a long time. There was a lot of excitement about it four or five years ago, some of the major vendors were announcing quantum computers in the cloud. Excitement has kind of died down. We don't see a lot of activity around, no, not a lot of talk around commercial quantum computers, yet you're deep into this. How close are we to have having a true quantum computer or is it a, is it a hybrid? More >>Likely? So there are probably more than 20 and I think close to 40 companies trying different approaches to make quantum computers. So, you know, Microsoft's pursuing a topol topological approach, do a photonics based approach. I, on Q and i on trap approach. These are all different ways of trying to leverage the quantum properties of nature. We know the properties exist, we use 'em in other technologies. We know the physics, but trying the engineering is very difficult. It's very difficult. I mean, just like it was difficult at one point to split the atom. It's very difficult to build technologies that leverage quantum properties of nature in a consistent and reliable and durable way, right? So I, you know, I wouldn't wanna make a prediction, but I will tell you I'm an optimist. I believe that when a tremendous capability with, with tremendous monetary gain potential lines up with another incentive, national security engineering seems to evolve faster when those things line up, when there's plenty of investment and plenty of incentive things happen. >>So I think a lot of my, my friends in the office of the CTO at Dell Technologies, when they're really leading this effort for us, you know, they would say a few to several years probably I'm an optimist, so I believe that, you know, I, I believe that we will sell some of the solution we announced here in the next year for people that are trying to get their feet wet with quantum. And I believe we'll be selling multiple quantum hybrid classical Dell quantum computing systems multiple a year in a year or two. And then of course you hope it goes to tens and hundreds of, you know, by the end of the decade >>When people talk about, I'm talking about people writ large, super leaders in supercomputing, I would say Dell's name doesn't come up in conversations I have. What would you like them to know that they don't know? >>You know, I, I hope that's not true, but I, I, I guess I understand it. We are so good at making the products from which people make clusters that we're number one in servers, we're number one in enterprise storage. We're number one in so many areas of enterprise technology that I, I think in some ways being number one in those things detracts a little bit from a subset of the market that is a solution subset as opposed to a product subset. But, you know, depending on which analyst you talk to and how they count, we're number one or number two in the world in supercomputing revenue. We don't always do the biggest splashy systems. We do the, the frontier system at t, the HPC five system at ENI in Europe. That's the largest academic supercomputer in the world and the largest industrial super >>That's based the world on Dell. Dell >>On Dell hardware. Yep. But we, I think our vision is really that we want to help more people use HPC to solve more problems than any vendor in the world. And those problems are various scales. So we are really concerned about the more we're democratizing HPC to make it easier for more people to get in at any scale that their budget and workloads require, we're optimizing it to make sure that it's not just some parts they're getting, that they are validated to work together with maximum scalability and performance. And we have a great HPC and AI innovation lab that does this engineering work. Cuz you know, one of the myths is, oh, I can just go buy a bunch of servers from company X and a network from company Y and a storage system from company Z and then it'll all work as an equivalent cluster. Right? Not true. It'll probably work, but it won't be the highest performance, highest scalability, highest reliability. So we spend a lot of time optimizing and then we are doing things to try to advance the state of HPC as well. What our future systems look like in the second half of this decade might be very different than what they look like right. Now. >>You mentioned a great example of a limitation that we're running up against right now. You mentioned an entire human body as a, as a, as an organism >>Or any large system that you try to model at the atomic level, but it's a huge macro system, >>Right? So will we be able to reach milestones where we can get our arms entirely around something like an entire human organism with simply quantitative advances as opposed to qualitative advances? Right now, as an example, let's just, let's go down to the basics from a Dell perspective. You're in a season where microprocessor vendors are coming out with next gen stuff and those next NextGen microprocessors, GPUs and CPUs are gonna be plugged into NextGen motherboards, PCI e gen five, gen six coming faster memory, bigger memory, faster networking, whether it's NS or InfiniBand storage controllers, all bigger, better, faster, stronger. And I suspect that systems like Frontera, I don't know, but I suspect that a lot of the systems that are out there are not on necessarily what we would think of as current generation technology, but maybe they're n minus one as a practical matter. So, >>But yeah, I mean they have a lifetime, so Exactly. >>The >>Lifetime is longer than the evolution. >>That's the normal technologies. Yeah. So, so what some people miss is this is, this is the reality that when, when we move forward with the latest things that are being talked about here, it's often a two generation move for an individual, for an individual organization. Yep. >>So now some organizations will have multiple systems and they, the system's leapfrog and technology generations, even if one is their real large system, their next one might be newer technology, but smaller, the next one might be a larger one with newer technology and such. Yeah. So the, the biggest super computing sites are, are often running more than one HPC system that have been specifically designed with the latest technologies and, and designed and configured for maybe a different subset of their >>Workloads. Yeah. So, so the, the, to go back to kinda the, the core question, in your opinion, do we need that qualitative leap to something like quantum computing in order to get to the point, or is it simply a question of scale and power at the, at the, at the individual node level to get us to the point where we can in fact gain insight from a digital model of an entire human body, not just looking at a, not, not just looking at an at, at an organ. And to your point, it's not just about human body, any system that we would characterize as being chaotic today, so a weather system, whatever. Do you, are there any milestones that you're thinking of where you're like, wow, you know, I have, I, I understand everything that's going on, and I think we're, we're a year away. We're a, we're, we're a, we're a compute generation away from being able to gain insight out of systems that right now we can't simply because of scale. It's a very, very long question that I just asked you, but I think I, but hopefully, hopefully you're tracking it. What, what are your, what are your thoughts? What are these, what are these inflection points that we, that you've, in your mind? >>So I, I'll I'll start simple. Remember when we used to buy laptops and we worried about what gigahertz the clock speed was Exactly. Everybody knew the gigahertz of it, right? There's some tasks at which we're so good at making the hardware that now the primary issues are how great is the screen? How light is it, what's the battery life like, et cetera. Because for the set of applications on there, we we have enough compute power. We don't, you don't really need your laptop. Most people don't need their laptop to have twice as powerful a processor that actually rather up twice the battery life on it or whatnot, right? We make great laptops. We, we design for all of those, configure those parameters now. And what, you know, we, we see some customers want more of x, somewhat more of y but the, the general point is that the amazing progress in, in microprocessors, it's sufficient for most of the workloads at that level. Now let's go to HPC level or scientific and technical level. And when it needs hpc, if you're trying to model the orbit of the moon around the earth, you don't really need a super computer for that. You can get a highly accurate model on a, on a workstation, on a server, no problem. It won't even really make it break a sweat. >>I had to do it with a slide rule >>That, >>That >>Might make you break a sweat. Yeah. But to do it with a, you know, a single body orbiting with another body, I say orbiting around, but we both know it's really, they're, they're both ordering the center of mass. It's just that if one is much larger, it seems like one's going entirely around the other. So that's, that's not a super computing problem. What about the stars in a galaxy trying to understand how galaxies form spiral arms and how they spur star formation. Right now you're talking a hundred billion stars plus a massive amount of inter stellar medium in there. So can you solve that on that server? Absolutely not. Not even close. Can you solve it on the largest super computer in the world today? Yes and no. You can solve it with approximations on the largest super computer in the world today. But there's a lot of approximations that go into even that. >>The good news is the simulations produce things that we see through our great telescopes. So we know the approximations are sufficient to get good fidelity, but until you really are doing direct numerical simulation of every particle, right? Right. Which is impossible to do. You need a computer as big as the universe to do that. But the approximations and the science in the science as well as the known parts of the science are good enough to give fidelity. So, and answer your question, there's tremendous number of problem scales. There are problems in every field of science and study that exceed the der direct numerical simulation capabilities of systems today. And so we always want more computing power. It's not macho flops, it's real, we need it, we need exo flops and we will need zeta flops beyond that and yada flops beyond that. But an increasing number of problems will be solved as we keep working to solve problems that are farther out there. So in terms of qualitative steps, I do think technologies like quantum computing, to be clear as part of a hybrid classical quantum system, because they're really just accelerators for certain kinds of algorithms, not for general purpose algorithms. I do think advances like that are gonna be necessary to solve some of the very hardest problem. It's easy to actually formulate an optimization problem that is absolutely intractable by the larger systems in the world today, but quantum systems happen to be in theory when they're big and stable enough, great at that kind of problem. >>I, that should be understood. Quantum is not a cure all for absolutely. For the, for the shortage of computing power. It's very good for certain, certain >>Problems. And as you said at this super computing, we see some quantum, but it's a little bit quieter than I probably expected. I think we're in a period now of everybody saying, okay, there's been a lot of buzz. We know it's gonna be real, but let's calm down a little bit and figure out what the right solutions are. And I'm very proud that we offered one of those >>At the show. We, we have barely scratched the surface of what we could talk about as we get into intergalactic space, but unfortunately we only have so many minutes and, and we're out of them. Oh, >>I'm >>J Poso, HPC and AI technology strategist at Dell. Thanks for a fascinating conversation. >>Thanks for having me. Happy to do it anytime. >>We'll be back with our last interview of Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. This is Paul Gillen with Dave Nicholson. Stay with us.

>>Collibra is a company that was founded in 2008 right before the so-called modern big data era kicked into high gear. The company was one of the first to focus its business on data governance. Now, historically, data governance and data quality initiatives, they were back office functions and they were largely confined to regulatory regulated industries that had to comply with public policy mandates. But as the cloud went mainstream, the tech giants showed us how valuable data could become and the value proposition for data quality and trust. It evolved from primarily a compliance driven issue to becoming a lynchpin of competitive advantage. But data in the decade of the 2010s was largely about getting the technology to work. You had these highly centralized technical teams that were formed and they had hyper specialized skills to develop data architectures and processes to serve the myriad data needs of organizations. >>And it resulted in a lot of frustration with data initiatives for most organizations that didn't have the resources of the cloud guys and the social media giants to really attack their data problems and turn data into gold. This is why today for example, this quite a bit of momentum to rethinking monolithic data architectures. You see, you hear about initiatives like data mesh and the idea of data as a product. They're gaining traction as a way to better serve the the data needs of decentralized business Uni users, you hear a lot about data democratization. So these decentralization efforts around data, they're great, but they create a new set of problems. Specifically, how do you deliver like a self-service infrastructure to business users and domain experts? Now the cloud is definitely helping with that, but also how do you automate governance? This becomes especially tricky as protecting data privacy has become more and more important. >>In other words, while it's enticing to experiment and run fast and loose with data initiatives kinda like the Wild West, to find new veins of gold, it has to be done responsibly. As such, the idea of data governance has had to evolve to become more automated. And intelligence governance and data lineage is still fundamental to ensuring trust as data. It moves like water through an organization. No one is gonna use data that isn't trusted. Metadata has become increasingly important for data discovery and data classification. As data flows through an organization, the continuously ability to check for data flaws and automating that data quality, they become a functional requirement of any modern data management platform. And finally, data privacy has become a critical adjacency to cyber security. So you can see how data governance has evolved into a much richer set of capabilities than it was 10 or 15 years ago. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube's coverage of Data Citizens made possible by Calibra, a leader in so-called Data intelligence and the host of Data Citizens 2022, which is taking place in San Diego. My name is Dave Ante and I'm one of the hosts of our program, which is running in parallel to data citizens. Now at the Cube we like to say we extract the signal from the noise, and over the, the next couple of days, we're gonna feature some of the themes from the keynote speakers at Data Citizens and we'll hear from several of the executives. Felix Von Dala, who is the co-founder and CEO of Collibra, will join us along with one of the other founders of Collibra, Stan Christians, who's gonna join my colleague Lisa Martin. I'm gonna also sit down with Laura Sellers, she's the Chief Product Officer at Collibra. We'll talk about some of the, the announcements and innovations they're making at the event, and then we'll dig in further to data quality with Kirk Hasselbeck. >>He's the vice president of Data quality at Collibra. He's an amazingly smart dude who founded Owl dq, a company that he sold to Col to Collibra last year. Now many companies, they didn't make it through the Hado era, you know, they missed the industry waves and they became Driftwood. Collibra, on the other hand, has evolved its business. They've leveraged the cloud, expanded its product portfolio, and leaned in heavily to some major partnerships with cloud providers, as well as receiving a strategic investment from Snowflake earlier this year. So it's a really interesting story that we're thrilled to be sharing with you. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy the program. >>Last year, the Cube Covered Data Citizens Collibra's customer event. And the premise that we put forth prior to that event was that despite all the innovation that's gone on over the last decade or more with data, you know, starting with the Hado movement, we had data lakes, we'd spark the ascendancy of programming languages like Python, the introduction of frameworks like TensorFlow, the rise of ai, low code, no code, et cetera. Businesses still find it's too difficult to get more value from their data initiatives. And we said at the time, you know, maybe it's time to rethink data innovation. While a lot of the effort has been focused on, you know, more efficiently storing and processing data, perhaps more energy needs to go into thinking about the people and the process side of the equation, meaning making it easier for domain experts to both gain insights for data, trust the data, and begin to use that data in new ways, fueling data, products, monetization and insights data citizens 2022 is back and we're pleased to have Felix Van Dema, who is the founder and CEO of Collibra. He's on the cube or excited to have you, Felix. Good to see you again. >>Likewise Dave. Thanks for having me again. >>You bet. All right, we're gonna get the update from Felix on the current data landscape, how he sees it, why data intelligence is more important now than ever and get current on what Collibra has been up to over the past year and what's changed since Data Citizens 2021. And we may even touch on some of the product news. So Felix, we're living in a very different world today with businesses and consumers. They're struggling with things like supply chains, uncertain economic trends, and we're not just snapping back to the 2010s. That's clear, and that's really true as well in the world of data. So what's different in your mind, in the data landscape of the 2020s from the previous decade, and what challenges does that bring for your customers? >>Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think you said it well, Dave, and and the intro that that rising complexity and fragmentation in the broader data landscape, that hasn't gotten any better over the last couple of years. When when we talk to our customers, that level of fragmentation, the complexity, how do we find data that we can trust, that we know we can use has only gotten kinda more, more difficult. So that trend that's continuing, I think what is changing is that trend has become much more acute. Well, the other thing we've seen over the last couple of years is that the level of scrutiny that organizations are under respect to data, as data becomes more mission critical, as data becomes more impactful than important, the level of scrutiny with respect to privacy, security, regulatory compliance, as only increasing as well, which again, is really difficult in this environment of continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous growing complexity and fragmentation. >>So it's become much more acute. And, and to your earlier point, we do live in a different world and and the the past couple of years we could probably just kind of brute for it, right? We could focus on, on the top line. There was enough kind of investments to be, to be had. I think nowadays organizations are focused or are, are, are, are, are, are in a very different environment where there's much more focus on cost control, productivity, efficiency, How do we truly get value from that data? So again, I think it just another incentive for organization to now truly look at data and to scale it data, not just from a a technology and infrastructure perspective, but how do you actually scale data from an organizational perspective, right? You said at the the people and process, how do we do that at scale? And that's only, only only becoming much more important. And we do believe that the, the economic environment that we find ourselves in today is gonna be catalyst for organizations to really dig out more seriously if, if, if, if you will, than they maybe have in the have in the best. >>You know, I don't know when you guys founded Collibra, if, if you had a sense as to how complicated it was gonna get, but you've been on a mission to really address these problems from the beginning. How would you describe your, your, your mission and what are you doing to address these challenges? >>Yeah, absolutely. We, we started Colli in 2008. So in some sense and the, the last kind of financial crisis, and that was really the, the start of Colli where we found product market fit, working with large finance institutions to help them cope with the increasing compliance requirements that they were faced with because of the, of the financial crisis and kind of here we are again in a very different environment, of course 15 years, almost 15 years later. But data only becoming more important. But our mission to deliver trusted data for every user, every use case and across every source, frankly, has only become more important. So what has been an incredible journey over the last 14, 15 years, I think we're still relatively early in our mission to again, be able to provide everyone, and that's why we call it data citizens. We truly believe that everyone in the organization should be able to use trusted data in an easy, easy matter. That mission is is only becoming more important, more relevant. We definitely have a lot more work ahead of us because we are still relatively early in that, in that journey. >>Well, that's interesting because, you know, in my observation it takes seven to 10 years to actually build a company and then the fact that you're still in the early days is kind of interesting. I mean, you, Collibra's had a good 12 months or so since we last spoke at Data Citizens. Give us the latest update on your business. What do people need to know about your, your current momentum? >>Yeah, absolutely. Again, there's, there's a lot of tail organizations that are only maturing the data practices and we've seen it kind of transform or, or, or influence a lot of our business growth that we've seen, broader adoption of the platform. We work at some of the largest organizations in the world where it's Adobe, Heineken, Bank of America, and many more. We have now over 600 enterprise customers, all industry leaders and every single vertical. So it's, it's really exciting to see that and continue to partner with those organizations. On the partnership side, again, a lot of momentum in the org in, in the, in the markets with some of the cloud partners like Google, Amazon, Snowflake, data bricks and, and others, right? As those kind of new modern data infrastructures, modern data architectures that are definitely all moving to the cloud, a great opportunity for us, our partners and of course our customers to help them kind of transition to the cloud even faster. >>And so we see a lot of excitement and momentum there within an acquisition about 18 months ago around data quality, data observability, which we believe is an enormous opportunity. Of course, data quality isn't new, but I think there's a lot of reasons why we're so excited about quality and observability now. One is around leveraging ai, machine learning, again to drive more automation. And the second is that those data pipelines that are now being created in the cloud, in these modern data architecture arch architectures, they've become mission critical. They've become real time. And so monitoring, observing those data pipelines continuously has become absolutely critical so that they're really excited about about that as well. And on the organizational side, I'm sure you've heard a term around kind of data mesh, something that's gaining a lot of momentum, rightfully so. It's really the type of governance that we always believe. Then federated focused on domains, giving a lot of ownership to different teams. I think that's the way to scale data organizations. And so that aligns really well with our vision and, and from a product perspective, we've seen a lot of momentum with our customers there as well. >>Yeah, you know, a couple things there. I mean, the acquisition of i l dq, you know, Kirk Hasselbeck and, and their team, it's interesting, you know, the whole data quality used to be this back office function and, and really confined to highly regulated industries. It's come to the front office, it's top of mind for chief data officers, data mesh. You mentioned you guys are a connective tissue for all these different nodes on the data mesh. That's key. And of course we see you at all the shows. You're, you're a critical part of many ecosystems and you're developing your own ecosystem. So let's chat a little bit about the, the products. We're gonna go deeper in into products later on at, at Data Citizens 22, but we know you're debuting some, some new innovations, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the the under the covers in security, sort of making data more accessible for people just dealing with workflows and processes as you talked about earlier. Tell us a little bit about what you're introducing. >>Yeah, absolutely. We're super excited, a ton of innovation. And if we think about the big theme and like, like I said, we're still relatively early in this, in this journey towards kind of that mission of data intelligence that really bolts and compelling mission, either customers are still start, are just starting on that, on that journey. We wanna make it as easy as possible for the, for our organization to actually get started because we know that's important that they do. And for our organization and customers that have been with us for some time, there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity to kind of expand the platform further. And again, to make it easier for really to, to accomplish that mission and vision around that data citizen that everyone has access to trustworthy data in a very easy, easy way. So that's really the theme of a lot of the innovation that we're driving. >>A lot of kind of ease of adoption, ease of use, but also then how do we make sure that lio becomes this kind of mission critical enterprise platform from a security performance architecture scale supportability that we're truly able to deliver that kind of an enterprise mission critical platform. And so that's the big theme from an innovation perspective, From a product perspective, a lot of new innovation that we're really excited about. A couple of highlights. One is around data marketplace. Again, a lot of our customers have plans in that direction, how to make it easy. How do we make, how do we make available to true kind of shopping experience that anybody in your organization can, in a very easy search first way, find the right data product, find the right dataset, that data can then consume usage analytics. How do you, how do we help organizations drive adoption, tell them where they're working really well and where they have opportunities homepages again to, to make things easy for, for people, for anyone in your organization to kind of get started with ppia, you mentioned workflow designer, again, we have a very powerful enterprise platform. >>One of our key differentiators is the ability to really drive a lot of automation through workflows. And now we provided a new low code, no code kind of workflow designer experience. So, so really customers can take it to the next level. There's a lot more new product around K Bear Protect, which in partnership with Snowflake, which has been a strategic investor in kib, focused on how do we make access governance easier? How do we, how do we, how are we able to make sure that as you move to the cloud, things like access management, masking around sensitive data, PII data is managed as much more effective, effective rate, really excited about that product. There's more around data quality. Again, how do we, how do we get that deployed as easily and quickly and widely as we can? Moving that to the cloud has been a big part of our strategy. >>So we launch more data quality cloud product as well as making use of those, those native compute capabilities in platforms like Snowflake, Data, Bricks, Google, Amazon, and others. And so we are bettering a capability, a capability that we call push down. So actually pushing down the computer and data quality, the monitoring into the underlying platform, which again, from a scale performance and ease of use perspective is gonna make a massive difference. And then more broadly, we, we talked a little bit about the ecosystem. Again, integrations, we talk about being able to connect to every source. Integrations are absolutely critical and we're really excited to deliver new integrations with Snowflake, Azure and Google Cloud storage as well. So there's a lot coming out. The, the team has been work at work really hard and we are really, really excited about what we are coming, what we're bringing to markets. >>Yeah, a lot going on there. I wonder if you could give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you, you talked about, you know, the marketplace, you know, you think about data mesh, you think of data as product, one of the key principles you think about monetization. This is really different than what we've been used to in data, which is just getting the technology to work has been been so hard. So how do you see sort of the future and, you know, give us the, your closing thoughts please? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I, and I think we we're really at this pivotal moment, and I think you said it well. We, we all know the constraint and the challenges with data, how to actually do data at scale. And while we've seen a ton of innovation on the infrastructure side, we fundamentally believe that just getting a faster database is important, but it's not gonna fully solve the challenges and truly kind of deliver on the opportunity. And that's why now is really the time to deliver this data intelligence vision, this data intelligence platform. We are still early, making it as easy as we can. It's kind of, of our, it's our mission. And so I'm really, really excited to see what we, what we are gonna, how the marks gonna evolve over the next, next few quarters and years. I think the trend is clearly there when we talk about data mesh, this kind of federated approach folks on data products is just another signal that we believe that a lot of our organization are now at the time. >>The understanding need to go beyond just the technology. I really, really think about how do we actually scale data as a business function, just like we've done with it, with, with hr, with, with sales and marketing, with finance. That's how we need to think about data. I think now is the time given the economic environment that we are in much more focus on control, much more focused on productivity efficiency and now's the time. We need to look beyond just the technology and infrastructure to think of how to scale data, how to manage data at scale. >>Yeah, it's a new era. The next 10 years of data won't be like the last, as I always say. Felix, thanks so much and good luck in, in San Diego. I know you're gonna crush it out there. >>Thank you Dave. >>Yeah, it's a great spot for an in-person event and, and of course the content post event is gonna be available@collibra.com and you can of course catch the cube coverage@thecube.net and all the news@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Valante for the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hi, I'm Jay from Collibra's Data Office. Today I want to talk to you about Collibra's data intelligence cloud. We often say Collibra is a single system of engagement for all of your data. Now, when I say data, I mean data in the broadest sense of the word, including reference and metadata. Think of metrics, reports, APIs, systems, policies, and even business processes that produce or consume data. Now, the beauty of this platform is that it ensures all of your users have an easy way to find, understand, trust, and access data. But how do you get started? Well, here are seven steps to help you get going. One, start with the data. What's data intelligence? Without data leverage the Collibra data catalog to automatically profile and classify your enterprise data wherever that data lives, databases, data lakes or data warehouses, whether on the cloud or on premise. >>Two, you'll then wanna organize the data and you'll do that with data communities. This can be by department, find a business or functional team, however your organization organizes work and accountability. And for that you'll establish community owners, communities, make it easy for people to navigate through the platform, find the data and will help create a sense of belonging for users. An important and related side note here, we find it's typical in many organizations that data is thought of is just an asset and IT and data offices are viewed as the owners of it and who are really the central teams performing analytics as a service provider to the enterprise. We believe data is more than an asset, it's a true product that can be converted to value. And that also means establishing business ownership of data where that strategy and ROI come together with subject matter expertise. >>Okay, three. Next, back to those communities there, the data owners should explain and define their data, not just the tables and columns, but also the related business terms, metrics and KPIs. These objects we call these assets are typically organized into business glossaries and data dictionaries. I definitely recommend starting with the topics that are most important to the business. Four, those steps that enable you and your users to have some fun with it. Linking everything together builds your knowledge graph and also known as a metadata graph by linking or relating these assets together. For example, a data set to a KPI to a report now enables your users to see what we call the lineage diagram that visualizes where the data in your dashboards actually came from and what the data means and who's responsible for it. Speaking of which, here's five. Leverage the calibra trusted business reporting solution on the marketplace, which comes with workflows for those owners to certify their reports, KPIs, and data sets. >>This helps them force their trust in their data. Six, easy to navigate dashboards or landing pages right in your platform for your company's business processes are the most effective way for everyone to better understand and take action on data. Here's a pro tip, use the dashboard design kit on the marketplace to help you build compelling dashboards. Finally, seven, promote the value of this to your users and be sure to schedule enablement office hours and new employee onboarding sessions to get folks excited about what you've built and implemented. Better yet, invite all of those community and data owners to these sessions so that they can show off the value that they've created. Those are my seven tips to get going with Collibra. I hope these have been useful. For more information, be sure to visit collibra.com. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of Data Citizens 2022 Collibra's customer event. My name is Dave Valante. With us is Kirk Hasselbeck, who's the vice president of Data Quality of Collibra Kirk, good to see you. Welcome. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. Excited to be here. >>You bet. Okay, we're gonna discuss data quality observability. It's a hot trend right now. You founded a data quality company, OWL dq, and it was acquired by Collibra last year. Congratulations. And now you lead data quality at Collibra. So we're hearing a lot about data quality right now. Why is it such a priority? Take us through your thoughts on that. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's definitely exciting times for data quality, which you're right, has been around for a long time. So why now and why is it so much more exciting than it used to be? I think it's a bit stale, but we all know that companies use more data than ever before and the variety has changed and the volume has grown. And, and while I think that remains true, there are a couple other hidden factors at play that everyone's so interested in as, as to why this is becoming so important now. And, and I guess you could kind of break this down simply and think about if Dave, you and I were gonna build, you know, a new healthcare application and monitor the heartbeat of individuals, imagine if we get that wrong, you know, what the ramifications could be, what, what those incidents would look like, or maybe better yet, we try to build a, a new trading algorithm with a crossover strategy where the 50 day crosses the, the 10 day average. >>And imagine if the data underlying the inputs to that is incorrect. We will probably have major financial ramifications in that sense. So, you know, it kind of starts there where everybody's realizing that we're all data companies and if we are using bad data, we're likely making incorrect business decisions. But I think there's kind of two other things at play. You know, I, I bought a car not too long ago and my dad called and said, How many cylinders does it have? And I realized in that moment, you know, I might have failed him because, cause I didn't know. And, and I used to ask those types of questions about any lock brakes and cylinders and, and you know, if it's manual or, or automatic and, and I realized I now just buy a car that I hope works. And it's so complicated with all the computer chips, I, I really don't know that much about it. >>And, and that's what's happening with data. We're just loading so much of it. And it's so complex that the way companies consume them in the IT function is that they bring in a lot of data and then they syndicate it out to the business. And it turns out that the, the individuals loading and consuming all of this data for the company actually may not know that much about the data itself, and that's not even their job anymore. So we'll talk more about that in a minute, but that's really what's setting the foreground for this observability play and why everybody's so interested. It, it's because we're becoming less close to the intricacies of the data and we just expect it to always be there and be correct. >>You know, the other thing too about data quality, and for years we did the MIT CDO IQ event, we didn't do it last year, Covid messed everything up. But the observation I would make there thoughts is, is it data quality? Used to be information quality used to be this back office function, and then it became sort of front office with financial services and government and healthcare, these highly regulated industries. And then the whole chief data officer thing happened and people were realizing, well, they sort of flipped the bit from sort of a data as a, a risk to data as a, as an asset. And now as we say, we're gonna talk about observability. And so it's really become front and center just the whole quality issue because data's so fundamental, hasn't it? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's imagine we pull up our phones right now and I go to my, my favorite stock ticker app and I check out the NASDAQ market cap. I really have no idea if that's the correct number. I know it's a number, it looks large, it's in a numeric field. And, and that's kind of what's going on. There's, there's so many numbers and they're coming from all of these different sources and data providers and they're getting consumed and passed along. But there isn't really a way to tactically put controls on every number and metric across every field we plan to monitor, but with the scale that we've achieved in early days, even before calibra. And what's been so exciting is we have these types of observation techniques, these data monitors that can actually track past performance of every field at scale. And why that's so interesting and why I think the CDO is, is listening right intently nowadays to this topic is, so maybe we could surface all of these problems with the right solution of data observability and with the right scale and then just be alerted on breaking trends. So we're sort of shifting away from this world of must write a condition and then when that condition breaks, that was always known as a break record. But what about breaking trends and root cause analysis? And is it possible to do that, you know, with less human intervention? And so I think most people are seeing now that it's going to have to be a software tool and a computer system. It's, it's not ever going to be based on one or two domain experts anymore. >>So, So how does data observability relate to data quality? Are they sort of two sides of the same coin? Are they, are they cousins? What's your perspective on that? >>Yeah, it's, it's super interesting. It's an emerging market. So the language is changing a lot of the topic and areas changing the way that I like to say it or break it down because the, the lingo is constantly moving is, you know, as a target on this space is really breaking records versus breaking trends. And I could write a condition when this thing happens, it's wrong and when it doesn't it's correct. Or I could look for a trend and I'll give you a good example. You know, everybody's talking about fresh data and stale data and, and why would that matter? Well, if your data never arrived or only part of it arrived or didn't arrive on time, it's likely stale and there will not be a condition that you could write that would show you all the good in the bads. That was kind of your, your traditional approach of data quality break records. But your modern day approach is you lost a significant portion of your data, or it did not arrive on time to make that decision accurately on time. And that's a hidden concern. Some people call this freshness, we call it stale data, but it all points to the same idea of the thing that you're observing may not be a data quality condition anymore. It may be a breakdown in the data pipeline. And with thousands of data pipelines in play for every company out there there, there's more than a couple of these happening every day. >>So what's the Collibra angle on all this stuff made the acquisition, you got data quality observability coming together, you guys have a lot of expertise in, in this area, but you hear providence of data, you just talked about, you know, stale data, you know, the, the whole trend toward real time. How is Calibra approaching the problem and what's unique about your approach? >>Well, I think where we're fortunate is with our background, myself and team, we sort of lived this problem for a long time, you know, in, in the Wall Street days about a decade ago. And we saw it from many different angles. And what we came up with before it was called data observability or reliability was basically the, the underpinnings of that. So we're a little bit ahead of the curve there when most people evaluate our solution, it's more advanced than some of the observation techniques that that currently exist. But we've also always covered data quality and we believe that people want to know more, they need more insights, and they want to see break records and breaking trends together so they can correlate the root cause. And we hear that all the time. I have so many things going wrong, just show me the big picture, help me find the thing that if I were to fix it today would make the most impact. So we're really focused on root cause analysis, business impact, connecting it with lineage and catalog metadata. And as that grows, you can actually achieve total data governance at this point with the acquisition of what was a Lineage company years ago, and then my company Ldq now Collibra, Data quality Collibra may be the best positioned for total data governance and intelligence in the space. >>Well, you mentioned financial services a couple of times and some examples, remember the flash crash in 2010. Nobody had any idea what that was, you know, they just said, Oh, it's a glitch, you know, so they didn't understand the root cause of it. So this is a really interesting topic to me. So we know at Data Citizens 22 that you're announcing, you gotta announce new products, right? You're yearly event what's, what's new. Give us a sense as to what products are coming out, but specifically around data quality and observability. >>Absolutely. There's this, you know, there's always a next thing on the forefront. And the one right now is these hyperscalers in the cloud. So you have databases like Snowflake and Big Query and Data Bricks is Delta Lake and SQL Pushdown. And ultimately what that means is a lot of people are storing in loading data even faster in a SaaS like model. And we've started to hook in to these databases. And while we've always worked with the the same databases in the past, they're supported today we're doing something called Native Database pushdown, where the entire compute and data activity happens in the database. And why that is so interesting and powerful now is everyone's concerned with something called Egress. Did your, my data that I've spent all this time and money with my security team securing ever leave my hands, did it ever leave my secure VPC as they call it? >>And with these native integrations that we're building and about to unveil, here's kind of a sneak peek for, for next week at Data Citizens. We're now doing all compute and data operations in databases like Snowflake. And what that means is with no install and no configuration, you could log into the Collibra data quality app and have all of your data quality running inside the database that you've probably already picked as your your go forward team selection secured database of choice. So we're really excited about that. And I think if you look at the whole landscape of network cost, egress, cost, data storage and compute, what people are realizing is it's extremely efficient to do it in the way that we're about to release here next week. >>So this is interesting because what you just described, you know, you mentioned Snowflake, you mentioned Google, Oh actually you mentioned yeah, data bricks. You know, Snowflake has the data cloud. If you put everything in the data cloud, okay, you're cool, but then Google's got the open data cloud. If you heard, you know, Google next and now data bricks doesn't call it the data cloud, but they have like the open source data cloud. So you have all these different approaches and there's really no way up until now I'm, I'm hearing to, to really understand the relationships between all those and have confidence across, you know, it's like Jak Dani, you should just be a note on the mesh. And I don't care if it's a data warehouse or a data lake or where it comes from, but it's a point on that mesh and I need tooling to be able to have confidence that my data is governed and has the proper lineage, providence. And, and, and that's what you're bringing to the table, Is that right? Did I get that right? >>Yeah, that's right. And it's, for us, it's, it's not that we haven't been working with those great cloud databases, but it's the fact that we can send them the instructions now, we can send them the, the operating ability to crunch all of the calculations, the governance, the quality, and get the answers. And what that's doing, it's basically zero network costs, zero egress cost, zero latency of time. And so when you were to log into Big Query tomorrow using our tool or like, or say Snowflake for example, you have instant data quality metrics, instant profiling, instant lineage and access privacy controls, things of that nature that just become less onerous. What we're seeing is there's so much technology out there, just like all of the major brands that you mentioned, but how do we make it easier? The future is about less clicks, faster time to value, faster scale, and eventually lower cost. And, and we think that this positions us to be the leader there. >>I love this example because, you know, Barry talks about, wow, the cloud guys are gonna own the world and, and of course now we're seeing that the ecosystem is finding so much white space to add value, connect across cloud. Sometimes we call it super cloud and so, or inter clouding. All right, Kirk, give us your, your final thoughts and on on the trends that we've talked about and Data Citizens 22. >>Absolutely. Well, I think, you know, one big trend is discovery and classification. Seeing that across the board, people used to know it was a zip code and nowadays with the amount of data that's out there, they wanna know where everything is, where their sensitive data is. If it's redundant, tell me everything inside of three to five seconds. And with that comes, they want to know in all of these hyperscale databases how fast they can get controls and insights out of their tools. So I think we're gonna see more one click solutions, more SAS based solutions and solutions that hopefully prove faster time to value on, on all of these modern cloud platforms. >>Excellent. All right, Kurt Hasselbeck, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and previewing Data Citizens 22. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. >>You're welcome. Right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more coverage from the Cube. Welcome to the Cube's virtual Coverage of Data Citizens 2022. My name is Dave Valante and I'm here with Laura Sellers, who's the Chief Product Officer at Collibra, the host of Data Citizens. Laura, welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Nice to be here. >>Yeah, your keynote at Data Citizens this year focused on, you know, your mission to drive ease of use and scale. Now when I think about historically fast access to the right data at the right time in a form that's really easily consumable, it's been kind of challenging, especially for business users. Can can you explain to our audience why this matters so much and what's actually different today in the data ecosystem to make this a reality? >>Yeah, definitely. So I think what we really need and what I hear from customers every single day is that we need a new approach to data management and our product teams. What inspired me to come to Calibra a little bit a over a year ago was really the fact that they're very focused on bringing trusted data to more users across more sources for more use cases. And so as we look at what we're announcing with these innovations of ease of use and scale, it's really about making teams more productive in getting started with and the ability to manage data across the entire organization. So we've been very focused on richer experiences, a broader ecosystem of partners, as well as a platform that delivers performance, scale and security that our users and teams need and demand. So as we look at, Oh, go ahead. >>I was gonna say, you know, when I look back at like the last 10 years, it was all about getting the technology to work and it was just so complicated. But, but please carry on. I'd love to hear more about this. >>Yeah, I, I really, you know, Collibra is a system of engagement for data and we really are working on bringing that entire system of engagement to life for everyone to leverage here and now. So what we're announcing from our ease of use side of the world is first our data marketplace. This is the ability for all users to discover and access data quickly and easily shop for it, if you will. The next thing that we're also introducing is the new homepage. It's really about the ability to drive adoption and have users find data more quickly. And then the two more areas of the ease of use side of the world is our world of usage analytics. And one of the big pushes and passions we have at Collibra is to help with this data driven culture that all companies are trying to create. And also helping with data literacy, with something like usage analytics, it's really about driving adoption of the CLE platform, understanding what's working, who's accessing it, what's not. And then finally we're also introducing what's called workflow designer. And we love our workflows at Libra, it's a big differentiator to be able to automate business processes. The designer is really about a way for more people to be able to create those workflows, collaborate on those workflow flows, as well as people to be able to easily interact with them. So a lot of exciting things when it comes to ease of use to make it easier for all users to find data. >>Y yes, there's definitely a lot to unpack there. I I, you know, you mentioned this idea of, of of, of shopping for the data. That's interesting to me. Why this analogy, metaphor or analogy, I always get those confused. I let's go with analogy. Why is it so important to data consumers? >>I think when you look at the world of data, and I talked about this system of engagement, it's really about making it more accessible to the masses. And what users are used to is a shopping experience like your Amazon, if you will. And so having a consumer grade experience where users can quickly go in and find the data, trust that data, understand where the data's coming from, and then be able to quickly access it, is the idea of being able to shop for it, just making it as simple as possible and really speeding the time to value for any of the business analysts, data analysts out there. >>Yeah, I think when you, you, you see a lot of discussion about rethinking data architectures, putting data in the hands of the users and business people, decentralized data and of course that's awesome. I love that. But of course then you have to have self-service infrastructure and you have to have governance. And those are really challenging. And I think so many organizations, they're facing adoption challenges, you know, when it comes to enabling teams generally, especially domain experts to adopt new data technologies, you know, like the, the tech comes fast and furious. You got all these open source projects and get really confusing. Of course it risks security, governance and all that good stuff. You got all this jargon. So where do you see, you know, the friction in adopting new data technologies? What's your point of view and how can organizations overcome these challenges? >>You're, you're dead on. There's so much technology and there's so much to stay on top of, which is part of the friction, right? It's just being able to stay ahead of, of and understand all the technologies that are coming. You also look at as there's so many more sources of data and people are migrating data to the cloud and they're migrating to new sources. Where the friction comes is really that ability to understand where the data came from, where it's moving to, and then also to be able to put the access controls on top of it. So people are only getting access to the data that they should be getting access to. So one of the other things we're announcing with, with all of the innovations that are coming is what we're doing around performance and scale. So with all of the data movement, with all of the data that's out there, the first thing we're launching in the world of performance and scale is our world of data quality. >>It's something that Collibra has been working on for the past year and a half, but we're launching the ability to have data quality in the cloud. So it's currently an on-premise offering, but we'll now be able to carry that over into the cloud for us to manage that way. We're also introducing the ability to push down data quality into Snowflake. So this is, again, one of those challenges is making sure that that data that you have is d is is high quality as you move forward. And so really another, we're just reducing friction. You already have Snowflake stood up. It's not another machine for you to manage, it's just push down capabilities into Snowflake to be able to track that quality. Another thing that we're launching with that is what we call Collibra Protect. And this is that ability for users to be able to ingest metadata, understand where the PII data is, and then set policies up on top of it. So very quickly be able to set policies and have them enforced at the data level. So anybody in the organization is only getting access to the data they should have access to. >>Here's Topica data quality is interesting. It's something that I've followed for a number of years. It used to be a back office function, you know, and really confined only to highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare and government. You know, you look back over a decade ago, you didn't have this worry about personal information, g gdpr, and, you know, California Consumer Privacy Act all becomes, becomes so much important. The cloud is really changed things in terms of performance and scale and of course partnering for, for, with Snowflake it's all about sharing data and monetization, anything but a back office function. So it was kind of smart that you guys were early on and of course attracting them and as a, as an investor as well was very strong validation. What can you tell us about the nature of the relationship with Snowflake and specifically inter interested in sort of joint engineering or, and product innovation efforts, you know, beyond the standard go to market stuff? >>Definitely. So you mentioned there were a strategic investor in Calibra about a year ago. A little less than that I guess. We've been working with them though for over a year really tightly with their product and engineering teams to make sure that Collibra is adding real value. Our unified platform is touching pieces of our unified platform or touching all pieces of Snowflake. And when I say that, what I mean is we're first, you know, able to ingest data with Snowflake, which, which has always existed. We're able to profile and classify that data we're announcing with Calibra Protect this week that you're now able to create those policies on top of Snowflake and have them enforce. So again, people can get more value out of their snowflake more quickly as far as time to value with, with our policies for all business users to be able to create. >>We're also announcing Snowflake Lineage 2.0. So this is the ability to take stored procedures in Snowflake and understand the lineage of where did the data come from, how was it transformed with within Snowflake as well as the data quality. Pushdown, as I mentioned, data quality, you brought it up. It is a new, it is a, a big industry push and you know, one of the things I think Gartner mentioned is people are losing up to $15 million without having great data quality. So this push down capability for Snowflake really is again, a big ease of use push for us at Collibra of that ability to, to push it into snowflake, take advantage of the data, the data source, and the engine that already lives there and get the right and make sure you have the right quality. >>I mean, the nice thing about Snowflake, if you play in the Snowflake sandbox, you, you, you, you can get sort of a, you know, high degree of confidence that the data sharing can be done in a safe way. Bringing, you know, Collibra into the, into the story allows me to have that data quality and, and that governance that I, that I need. You know, we've said many times on the cube that one of the notable differences in cloud this decade versus last decade, I mean ob there are obvious differences just in terms of scale and scope, but it's shaping up to be about the strength of the ecosystems. That's really a hallmark of these big cloud players. I mean they're, it's a key factor for innovating, accelerating product delivery, filling gaps in, in the hyperscale offerings cuz you got more stack, you know, mature stack capabilities and you know, it creates this flywheel momentum as we often say. But, so my question is, how do you work with the hyperscalers? Like whether it's AWS or Google, whomever, and what do you see as your role and what's the Collibra sweet spot? >>Yeah, definitely. So, you know, one of the things I mentioned early on is the broader ecosystem of partners is what it's all about. And so we have that strong partnership with Snowflake. We also are doing more with Google around, you know, GCP and kbra protect there, but also tighter data plex integration. So similar to what you've seen with our strategic moves around Snowflake and, and really covering the broad ecosystem of what Collibra can do on top of that data source. We're extending that to the world of Google as well and the world of data plex. We also have great partners in SI's Infosys is somebody we spoke with at the conference who's done a lot of great work with Levi's as they're really important to help people with their whole data strategy and driving that data driven culture and, and Collibra being the core of it. >>Hi Laura, we're gonna, we're gonna end it there, but I wonder if you could kind of put a bow on, you know, this year, the event your, your perspectives. So just give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, definitely. So I, I wanna say this is one of the biggest releases Collibra's ever had. Definitely the biggest one since I've been with the company a little over a year. We have all these great new product innovations coming to really drive the ease of use to make data more valuable for users everywhere and, and companies everywhere. And so it's all about everybody being able to easily find, understand, and trust and get access to that data going forward. >>Well congratulations on all the pro progress. It was great to have you on the cube first time I believe, and really appreciate you, you taking the time with us. >>Yes, thank you for your time. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you're watching the coverage of Data Citizens 2022 on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>So data modernization oftentimes means moving some of your storage and computer to the cloud where you get the benefit of scale and security and so on. But ultimately it doesn't take away the silos that you have. We have more locations, more tools and more processes with which we try to get value from this data. To do that at scale in an organization, people involved in this process, they have to understand each other. So you need to unite those people across those tools, processes, and systems with a shared language. When I say customer, do you understand the same thing as you hearing customer? Are we counting them in the same way so that shared language unites us and that gives the opportunity for the organization as a whole to get the maximum value out of their data assets and then they can democratize data so everyone can properly use that shared language to find, understand, and trust the data asset that's available. >>And that's where Collibra comes in. We provide a centralized system of engagement that works across all of those locations and combines all of those different user types across the whole business. At Collibra, we say United by data and that also means that we're united by data with our customers. So here is some data about some of our customers. There was the case of an online do it yourself platform who grew their revenue almost three times from a marketing campaign that provided the right product in the right hands of the right people. In other case that comes to mind is from a financial services organization who saved over 800 K every year because they were able to reuse the same data in different kinds of reports and before there was spread out over different tools and processes and silos, and now the platform brought them together so they realized, oh, we're actually using the same data, let's find a way to make this more efficient. And the last example that comes to mind is that of a large home loan, home mortgage, mortgage loan provider where they have a very complex landscape, a very complex architecture legacy in the cloud, et cetera. And they're using our software, they're using our platform to unite all the people and those processes and tools to get a common view of data to manage their compliance at scale. >>Hey everyone, I'm Lisa Martin covering Data Citizens 22, brought to you by Collibra. This next conversation is gonna focus on the importance of data culture. One of our Cube alumni is back, Stan Christians is Collibra's co-founder and it's Chief Data citizens. Stan, it's great to have you back on the cube. >>Hey Lisa, nice to be. >>So we're gonna be talking about the importance of data culture, data intelligence, maturity, all those great things. When we think about the data revolution that every business is going through, you know, it's so much more than technology innovation. It also really re requires cultural transformation, community transformation. Those are challenging for customers to undertake. Talk to us about what you mean by data citizenship and the role that creating a data culture plays in that journey. >>Right. So as you know, our event is called Data Citizens because we believe that in the end, a data citizen is anyone who uses data to do their job. And we believe that today's organizations, you have a lot of people, most of the employees in an organization are somehow gonna to be a data citizen, right? So you need to make sure that these people are aware of it. You need that. People have skills and competencies to do with data what necessary and that's on, all right? So what does it mean to have a good data culture? It means that if you're building a beautiful dashboard to try and convince your boss, we need to make this decision that your boss is also open to and able to interpret, you know, the data presented in dashboard to actually make that decision and take that action. Right? >>And once you have that why to the organization, that's when you have a good data culture. Now that's continuous effort for most organizations because they're always moving, somehow they're hiring new people and it has to be continuous effort because we've seen that on the hand. Organizations continue challenged their data sources and where all the data is flowing, right? Which in itself creates a lot of risk. But also on the other set hand of the equation, you have the benefit. You know, you might look at regulatory drivers like, we have to do this, right? But it's, it's much better right now to consider the competitive drivers, for example, and we did an IDC study earlier this year, quite interesting. I can recommend anyone to it. And one of the conclusions they found as they surveyed over a thousand people across organizations worldwide is that the ones who are higher in maturity. >>So the, the organizations that really look at data as an asset, look at data as a product and actively try to be better at it, don't have three times as good a business outcome as the ones who are lower on the maturity scale, right? So you can say, ok, I'm doing this, you know, data culture for everyone, awakening them up as data citizens. I'm doing this for competitive reasons, I'm doing this re reasons you're trying to bring both of those together and the ones that get data intelligence right, are successful and competitive. That's, and that's what we're seeing out there in the market. >>Absolutely. We know that just generally stand right, the organizations that are, are really creating a, a data culture and enabling everybody within the organization to become data citizens are, We know that in theory they're more competitive, they're more successful. But the IDC study that you just mentioned demonstrates they're three times more successful and competitive than their peers. Talk about how Collibra advises customers to create that community, that culture of data when it might be challenging for an organization to adapt culturally. >>Of course, of course it's difficult for an organization to adapt but it's also necessary, as you just said, imagine that, you know, you're a modern day organization, laptops, what have you, you're not using those, right? Or you know, you're delivering them throughout organization, but not enabling your colleagues to actually do something with that asset. Same thing as through with data today, right? If you're not properly using the data asset and competitors are, they're gonna to get more advantage. So as to how you get this done, establish this. There's angles to look at, Lisa. So one angle is obviously the leadership whereby whoever is the boss of data in the organization, you typically have multiple bosses there, like achieve data officers. Sometimes there's, there's multiple, but they may have a different title, right? So I'm just gonna summarize it as a data leader for a second. >>So whoever that is, they need to make sure that there's a clear vision, a clear strategy for data. And that strategy needs to include the monetization aspect. How are you going to get value from data? Yes. Now that's one part because then you can leadership in the organization and also the business value. And that's important. Cause those people, their job in essence really is to make everyone in the organization think about data as an asset. And I think that's the second part of the equation of getting that right, is it's not enough to just have that leadership out there, but you also have to get the hearts and minds of the data champions across the organization. You, I really have to win them over. And if you have those two combined and obviously a good technology to, you know, connect those people and have them execute on their responsibilities such as a data intelligence platform like s then the in place to really start upgrading that culture inch by inch if you'll, >>Yes, I like that. The recipe for success. So you are the co-founder of Collibra. You've worn many different hats along this journey. Now you're building Collibra's own data office. I like how before we went live, we were talking about Calibra is drinking its own champagne. I always loved to hear stories about that. You're speaking at Data Citizens 2022. Talk to us about how you are building a data culture within Collibra and what maybe some of the specific projects are that Collibra's data office is working on. >>Yes, and it is indeed data citizens. There are a ton of speaks here, are very excited. You know, we have Barb from m MIT speaking about data monetization. We have Dilla at the last minute. So really exciting agen agenda. Can't wait to get back out there essentially. So over the years at, we've doing this since two and eight, so a good years and I think we have another decade of work ahead in the market, just to be very clear. Data is here to stick around as are we. And myself, you know, when you start a company, we were for people in a, if you, so everybody's wearing all sorts of hat at time. But over the years I've run, you know, presales that sales partnerships, product cetera. And as our company got a little bit biggish, we're now thousand two. Something like people in the company. >>I believe systems and processes become a lot important. So we said you CBRA isn't the size our customers we're getting there in of organization structure, process systems, et cetera. So we said it's really time for us to put our money where is and to our own data office, which is what we were seeing customers', organizations worldwide. And they organizations have HR units, they have a finance unit and over time they'll all have a department if you'll, that is responsible somehow for the data. So we said, ok, let's try to set an examples that other people can take away with it, right? Can take away from it. So we set up a data strategy, we started building data products, took care of the data infrastructure. That's sort of good stuff. And in doing all of that, ISA exactly as you said, we said, okay, we need to also use our product and our own practices and from that use, learn how we can make the product better, learn how we make, can make the practice better and share that learning with all the, and on, on the Monday mornings, we sometimes refer to eating our dog foods on Friday evenings. >>We referred to that drinking our own champagne. I like it. So we, we had a, we had the driver to do this. You know, there's a clear business reason. So we involved, we included that in the data strategy and that's a little bit of our origin. Now how, how do we organize this? We have three pillars, and by no means is this a template that everyone should, this is just the organization that works at our company, but it can serve as an inspiration. So we have a pillar, which is data science. The data product builders, if you'll or the people who help the business build data products. We have the data engineers who help keep the lights on for that data platform to make sure that the products, the data products can run, the data can flow and you know, the quality can be checked. >>And then we have a data intelligence or data governance builders where we have those data governance, data intelligence stakeholders who help the business as a sort of data partner to the business stakeholders. So that's how we've organized it. And then we started following the CBRA approach, which is, well, what are the challenges that our business stakeholders have in hr, finance, sales, marketing all over? And how can data help overcome those challenges? And from those use cases, we then just started to build a map and started execution use of the use case. And a important ones are very simple. We them with our, our customers as well, people talking about the cata, right? The catalog for the data scientists to know what's in their data lake, for example, and for the people in and privacy. So they have their process registry and they can see how the data flows. >>So that's a starting place and that turns into a marketplace so that if new analysts and data citizens join kbra, they immediately have a place to go to, to look at, see, ok, what data is out there for me as an analyst or a data scientist or whatever to do my job, right? So they can immediately get access data. And another one that we is around trusted business. We're seeing that since, you know, self-service BI allowed everyone to make beautiful dashboards, you know, pie, pie charts. I always, my pet pee is the pie chart because I love buy and you shouldn't always be using pie charts. But essentially there's become proliferation of those reports. And now executives don't really know, okay, should I trust this report or that report the reporting on the same thing. But the numbers seem different, right? So that's why we have trusted this reporting. So we know if a, the dashboard, a data product essentially is built, we not that all the right steps are being followed and that whoever is consuming that can be quite confident in the result either, Right. And that silver browser, right? Absolutely >>Decay. >>Exactly. Yes, >>Absolutely. Talk a little bit about some of the, the key performance indicators that you're using to measure the success of the data office. What are some of those KPIs? >>KPIs and measuring is a big topic in the, in the data chief data officer profession, I would say, and again, it always varies with to your organization, but there's a few that we use that might be of interest. Use those pillars, right? And we have metrics across those pillars. So for example, a pillar on the data engineering side is gonna be more related to that uptime, right? Are the, is the data platform up and running? Are the data products up and running? Is the quality in them good enough? Is it going up? Is it going down? What's the usage? But also, and especially if you're in the cloud and if consumption's a big thing, you have metrics around cost, for example, right? So that's one set of examples. Another one is around the data sciences and products. Are people using them? Are they getting value from it? >>Can we calculate that value in ay perspective, right? Yeah. So that we can to the rest of the business continue to say we're tracking all those numbers and those numbers indicate that value is generated and how much value estimated in that region. And then you have some data intelligence, data governance metrics, which is, for example, you have a number of domains in a data mesh. People talk about being the owner of a data domain, for example, like product or, or customer. So how many of those domains do you have covered? How many of them are already part of the program? How many of them have owners assigned? How well are these owners organized, executing on their responsibilities? How many tickets are open closed? How many data products are built according to process? And so and so forth. So these are an set of examples of, of KPIs. There's a, there's a lot more, but hopefully those can already inspire the audience. >>Absolutely. So we've, we've talked about the rise cheap data offices, it's only accelerating. You mentioned this is like a 10 year journey. So if you were to look into a crystal ball, what do you see in terms of the maturation of data offices over the next decade? >>So we, we've seen indeed the, the role sort of grow up, I think in, in thousand 10 there may have been like 10 achieve data officers or something. Gartner has exact numbers on them, but then they grew, you know, industries and the number is estimated to be about 20,000 right now. Wow. And they evolved in a sort of stack of competencies, defensive data strategy, because the first chief data officers were more regulatory driven, offensive data strategy support for the digital program. And now all about data products, right? So as a data leader, you now need all of those competences and need to include them in, in your strategy. >>How is that going to evolve for the next couple of years? I wish I had one of those balls, right? But essentially I think for the next couple of years there's gonna be a lot of people, you know, still moving along with those four levels of the stack. A lot of people I see are still in version one and version two of the chief data. So you'll see over the years that's gonna evolve more digital and more data products. So for next years, my, my prediction is it's all products because it's an immediate link between data and, and the essentially, right? Right. So that's gonna be important and quite likely a new, some new things will be added on, which nobody can predict yet. But we'll see those pop up in a few years. I think there's gonna be a continued challenge for the chief officer role to become a real executive role as opposed to, you know, somebody who claims that they're executive, but then they're not, right? >>So the real reporting level into the board, into the CEO for example, will continue to be a challenging point. But the ones who do get that done will be the ones that are successful and the ones who get that will the ones that do it on the basis of data monetization, right? Connecting value to the data and making that value clear to all the data citizens in the organization, right? And in that sense, they'll need to have both, you know, technical audiences and non-technical audiences aligned of course. And they'll need to focus on adoption. Again, it's not enough to just have your data office be involved in this. It's really important that you're waking up data citizens across the organization and you make everyone in the organization think about data as an asset. >>Absolutely. Because there's so much value that can be extracted. Organizations really strategically build that data office and democratize access across all those data citizens. Stan, this is an exciting arena. We're definitely gonna keep our eyes on this. Sounds like a lot of evolution and maturation coming from the data office perspective. From the data citizen perspective. And as the data show that you mentioned in that IDC study, you mentioned Gartner as well, organizations have so much more likelihood of being successful and being competitive. So we're gonna watch this space. Stan, thank you so much for joining me on the cube at Data Citizens 22. We appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me over >>From Data Citizens 22, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. >>Okay, this concludes our coverage of Data Citizens 2022, brought to you by Collibra. Remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. And don't forget to check out silicon angle.com for all the news and wiki bod.com for our weekly breaking analysis series where we cover many data topics and share survey research from our partner ETR Enterprise Technology Research. If you want more information on the products announced at Data Citizens, go to collibra.com. There are tons of resources there. You'll find analyst reports, product demos. It's really worthwhile to check those out. Thanks for watching our program and digging into Data Citizens 2022 on the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you soon.

>>Good afternoon, brilliant humans, and welcome back to the Cube. We're live in Detroit, Michigan at Cub Con, and I'm joined by John Furrier. John three exciting days buzzing. How you doing? >>That's great. I mean, we're coming down to the third day. We're keeping the energy going, but this segment's gonna be awesome. The CD foundation's doing amazing work. Developers are gonna be running businesses and workflows are changing. Productivity's the top conversation, and you're gonna start to see a coalescing of the communities who are continuous delivery, and it's gonna be awesome. >>And, and our next guess is an outstanding person to talk about this. We are joined by Stephen Chin, the chair of the CD Foundation. Steven, thanks so much for being here. >>No, no, my pleasure. I mean, this has been an amazing week quote that CubeCon with all of the announcements, all of the people who came out here to Detroit and, you know, fantastic. Like just walking around, you bump into all the right people here. Plus we held a CD summit zero day events, and had a lot of really exciting announcements this week. >>Gotta love the shirt. I gotta say, it's one of my favorites. Love the logos. Love the love the branding. That project got traction. What's the news in the CD foundation? I tried to sneak in the back. I got a little laid into your co-located event. It was packed. Everyone's engaged. It was really looked, look really cool. Give us the update. >>What's the news? Yeah, I know. So we, we had a really, really powerful event. All the key practitioners, the open source leads and folks were there. And one of, one of the things which I think we've done a really good job in the past six months with the CD foundation is getting back to the roots and focusing on technical innovation, right? This is what drives foundations, having strong projects, having people who are building innovation, and also bringing in a new innovation. So one of the projects which we added to the CD foundation this week is called Persia. So it's a, it's a decentralized package repository for getting open source libraries. And it solves a lot of the problems which you get when you have centralized infrastructure. You don't have the right security certificates, you don't have the right verification libraries. And these, these are all things which large companies provision and build out inside of their infrastructure. But the open source communities don't have the benefit of the same sort of really, really strong architecture. A lot of, a lot of the systems we depend upon. It's >>A good point, yeah. >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the systems that developers depend upon, we depend upon, you know, npm, ruby Gems, Mayn Central, and these systems been around for a while. Like they serve the community well, right? They're, they're well supported by the companies and it's, it's, it's really a great contribution that they give us. But every time there's an outage or there's a security issue, guess, guess how many security issues that our, our research team found at npm? Just ballpark. >>74. >>So there're >>It's gotta be thousands. I mean, it's gotta be a lot of tons >>Of Yeah, >>They, they're currently up to 60,000 >>Whoa. >>Vulnerable, malicious packages in NPM and >>Oh my gosh. So that's a super, that's a jar number even. I know it was gonna be huge, but Holy mo. >>Yeah. So that's a software supply chain in actually right there. So that's, that's open source. Everything's out there. What's, how do, how does, how do you guys fix that? >>Yeah, so per peria kind of shifts the whole model. So when, when you think about a system that can be sustained, it has to be something which, which is not just one company. It has to be a, a, a set of companies, be vendor neutral and be decentralized. So that's why we donated it to the Continuous Delivery Foundation. So that can be that governance body, which, which makes sure it's not a single company, it is to use modern technologies. So you, you, you just need something which is immutable, so it can't be changed. So you can rely on it. It has to have a strong transaction ledger so you can see all of the history of it. You can build up your software, build materials off of it, and it, it has to have a strong peer-to-peer architecture, so it can be sustained long term. >>Steven, you mentioned something I want to just get back to. You mentioned outages and disruption. I, you didn't, you didn't say just the outages, but this whole disruption angle is interesting if something happens. Talk about the impact of the developer. They stalled, inefficiencies create basically disruption. >>No, I mean, if, if, so, so if you think about most DevOps teams in big companies, they support hundreds or thousands of teams and an hour of outage. All those developers, they, they can't program, they can't work. And that's, that's a huge loss of productivity for the company. Now, if you, if you take that up a level when MPM goes down for an hour, how many millions of man hours are wasted by not being able to get your builds working by not being able to get your codes to compile. Like it's, it's >>Like, yeah, I mean, it's almost hard to fathom. I mean, everyone's, It's stopped. Exactly. It's literally like having the plug pulled >>Exactly on whenever you're working on, That's, that's the fundamental problem we're trying to solve. Is it, it needs to be on a, like a well supported, well architected peer to peer network with some strong backing from big companies. So the company is working on Persia, include J Frog, which who I work for, Docker, Oracle. We have Deploy hub, Huawei, a whole bunch of other folks who are also helping out. And when you look at all of those folks, they all have different interests, but it's designed in a way where no single party has control over the network. So really it's, it's a system system. You, you're not relying upon one company or one logo. You're relying upon a well-architected open source implementation that everyone can rely >>On. That's shared software, but it's kind of a fault tolerant feature too. It's like, okay, if something happens here, you have a distributed piece of it, decentralized, you're not gonna go down. You can remediate. All right, so where's this go next? I mean, cuz we've been talking about the role of developer. This needs to be a modern, I won't say modern upgrade, but like a modern workflow or value chain. What's your vision? How do you see that? Cuz you're the center of the CD foundation coming together. People are gonna be coalescing multiple groups. Yeah. >>What's the, No, I think this is a good point. So there, there's a, a lot of different continuous delivery, continuous integration technologies. We're actually, from a Linux Foundation standpoint, we're coalescing all the continued delivery events into one big conference >>Next. You just made an announcement about this earlier this week. Tell us about CD events. What's going on, what's in, what's in the cooker? >>Yeah, and I think one of the big announcements we had was the 0.1 release of CD events. And CD events allows you to take all these systems and connect them in an event scalable, event oriented architecture. The first integration is between Tecton and Capin. So now you can get CD events flowing cleanly between your, your continuous delivery and your observability. And this extends through your entire DevOps pipeline. We all, we all need a standards based framework Yep. For how we get all the disparate continuous integration, continuous delivery, observability systems to, to work together. That's also high performance. It scales with our needs and it, it kind of gives you a future architecture to build on top of. So a lot of the companies I was talking with at the CD summit Yeah. They were very excited about not only using this with the projects we announced, but using this internally as an architecture to build their own DevOps pipelines on. >>I bet that feels good to hear. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. >>Yeah. You mentioned Teton, they just graduated. I saw how many projects have graduated? >>So we have two graduated projects right now. We have Jenkins, which is the first graduated project. Now Tecton is also graduated. And I think this shows that for Tecton it was, it was time, the very mature project, great support, getting a lot of users and having them join the set of graduated projects. And the continuous delivery foundation is a really strong portfolio. And we have a bunch of other projects which also are on their way towards graduation. >>Feels like a moment of social proof I bet. >>For you all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it's really good. Yeah. >>How long has the CD Foundation been around? >>The CD foundation has been around for, i, I won't wanna say the exact number of years, a few years now. >>Okay. >>But I, I think that it, it was formed because what we wanted is we wanted a foundation which was purpose built. So CNCF is a great foundation. It has a very large umbrella of projects and it takes kind of that big umbrella approach where a lot of different efforts are joining it, a lot of things are happening and you can get good traction, but it produces its own bottlenecks in process. Having a foundation which is just about continuous delivery caters to more of a DevOps, professional DevOps audience. I think this, this gives a good platform for best practices. We're working on a new CDF best practices Yeah. Guide. We're working when use cases with all the member companies. And it, it gives that thought leadership platform for continuous delivery, which you need to be an expert in that area >>And the best practices too. And to identify the issues. Because at the end of the day, with the big thing that's coming out of this is velocity and more developers coming on board. I mean, this is the big thing. More people doing more. Yeah. Well yeah, I mean you take this open source continuous thunder away, you have more developers coming in, they be more productive and then people are gonna even either on the DevOps side or on the straight AP upside. And this is gonna be a huge issue. And the other thing that comes out that I wanna get your thoughts on is the supply chain issue you talked about is hot verifications and certifications of code is such big issue. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because Yeah, this is become, I won't say a business model for some companies, but it's also becoming critical for security that codes verified. >>Yeah. Okay. So I, I think one of, one of the things which we're specifically doing with the Peria project, which is unique, is rather than distributing, for example, libraries that you developed on your laptop and compiled there, or maybe they were built on, you know, a runner somewhere like Travis CI or GitHub actions, all the libraries being distributed on Persia are built by the authorized nodes in the network. And then they're, they're verified across all of the authorized nodes. So you nice, you have a, a gar, the basic guarantee we're giving you is when you download something from the Peria network, you'll get exactly the same binary as if you built it yourself from source. >>So there's a lot of trust >>And, and transparency. Yeah, exactly. And if you remember back to like kind of the seminal project, which kicked off this whole supply chain security like, like whirlwind it was SolarWinds. Yeah. Yeah. And the exact problem they hit was the build ran, it produced a result, they modified the code of the bill of the resulting binary and then they signed it. So if you built with the same source and then you went through that same process a second time, you would've gotten a different result, which was a malicious pre right. Yeah. And it's very hard to risk take, to take a binary file Yep. And determine if there's malicious code in it. Cuz it's not like source code. You can't inspect it, you can't do a code audit. It's totally different. So I think we're solving a key part of this with Persia, where you're freeing open source projects from the possibility of having their binaries, their packages, their end reduces, tampered with. And also upstream from this, you do want to have verification of prs, people doing code reviews, making sure that they're looking at the source code. And I think there's a lot of good efforts going on in the open source security foundation. So I'm also on the governing board of Open ssf >>To Do you sleep? You have three jobs you've said on camera? No, I can't even imagine. Yeah. Didn't >>You just spin that out from this open source security? Is that the new one they >>Spun out? Yeah, So the Open Source Security foundation is one of the new Linux Foundation projects. They, they have been around for a couple years, but they did a big reboot last year around this time. And I think what they really did a good job of now is bringing all the industry players to the table, having dialogue with government agencies, figuring out like, what do we need to do to support open source projects? Is it more investment in memory, safe languages? Do we need to have more investment in, in code audits or like security reviews of opensource projects. Lot of things. And all of those things require money investments. And that's what all the companies, including Jay Frogger doing to advance open source supply chain security. I >>Mean, it's, it's really kind of interesting to watch some different demographics of the developers and the vendors and the customers. On one hand, if you're a hardware person company, you have, you talk zero trust your software, your top trust, so your trusted code, and you got zero trust. It's interesting, depending on where you're coming from, they're all trying to achieve the same thing. It means zero trust. Makes sense. But then also I got code, I I want trust. Trust and verified. So security is in everything now. So code. So how do you see that traversing over? Is it just semantics or what's your view on that? >>The, the right way of looking at security is from the standpoint of the hacker, because they're always looking for >>Well said, very well said, New >>Loop, hope, new loopholes, new exploits. And they're, they're very, very smart people. And I think when you, when you look some >>Of the smartest >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I work with, well former hackers now, security researchers, >>They converted, they're >>Recruited. But when you look at them, there's like two main classes of like, like types of exploits. So some, some attacker groups. What they're looking for is they're looking for pulse zero days, CVEs, like existing vulnerabilities that they can exploit to break into systems. But there's an increasing number of attackers who are now on the opposite end of the spectrum. And what they're doing is they're creating their own exploits. So, oh, they're for example, putting malicious code into open source projects. Little >>Trojan horse status. Yeah. >>They're they're getting their little Trojan horses in. Yeah. Or they're finding supply chain attacks by maybe uploading a malicious library to NPM or to pii. And by creating these attacks, especially ones that start at the top of the supply chain, you have such a large reach. >>I was just gonna say, it could be a whole, almost gives me chills as we're talking about it, the systemic, So this is this >>Gnarly nation state attackers, like people who wanted serious >>Damages. Engineered hack just said they're high, highly funded. Highly skilled. Exactly. Highly agile, highly focused. >>Yes. >>Teams, team. Not in the teams. >>Yeah. And so, so one, one example of this, which actually netted quite a lot of money for the, for the hacker who exposed it was, you guys probably heard about this, but it was a, an attack where they uploaded a malicious library to npm with the same exact namespace as a corporate library and clever, >>Creepy. >>It's called a dependency injection attack. And what happens is if you, if you don't have the right sort of security package management guidelines inside your company, and it's just looking for the latest version of merging multiple repositories as like a, like a single view. A lot of companies were accidentally picking up the latest version, which was out in npm uploaded by Alex Spearson was the one who did the, the attack. And he simultaneously reported bug bounties on like a dozen different companies and netted 130 k. Wow. So like these sort of attacks that they're real Yep. They're exploitable. And the, the hackers >>Complex >>Are finding these sort of attacks now in our supply chain are the ones who really are the most dangerous. That's the biggest threat to us. >>Yeah. And we have stacker ones out there. You got a bunch of other services, the white hat hackers get the bounties. That's really important. All right. What's next? What's your vision of this show as we end Coan? What's the most important story coming outta Coan in your opinion? And what are you guys doing next? >>Well, I, I actually think this is, this is probably not what most hooks would say is the most exciting story to con, but I find this personally the best is >>I can't wait for this now. >>So, on, on Sunday, the CNCF ran the first kids' day. >>Oh. >>And so they had a, a free kids workshop for, you know, underprivileged kids for >>About, That's >>Detroit area. It was, it was taught by some of the folks from the CNCF community. So Arro, Eric hen my, my older daughter, Cassandra's also an instructor. So she also was teaching a raspberry pie workshop. >>Amazing. And she's >>Here and Yeah, Yeah. She's also here at the show. And when you think about it, you know, there's always, there's, there's, you know, hundreds of announcements this week, A lot of exciting technologies, some of which we've talked about. Yeah. But it's, it's really what matters is the community. >>It this is a community first event >>And the people, and like, if we're giving back to the community and helping Detroit's kids to get better at technology, to get educated, I think that it's a worthwhile for all of us to be here. >>What a beautiful way to close it. That is such, I'm so glad you brought that up and brought that to our attention. I wasn't aware of that. Did you know that was >>Happening, John? No, I know about that. Yeah. No, that was, And that's next generation too. And what we need, we need to get down into the elementary schools. We gotta get to the kids. They're all doing robotics club anyway in high school. Computer science is now, now a >>Sport, in my opinion. Well, I think that if you're in a privileged community, though, I don't think that every school's doing robotics. And >>That's why Well, Cal Poly, Cal Poly and the universities are stepping up and I think CNCF leadership is amazing here. And we need more of it. I mean, I'm, I'm bullish on this. I love it. And I think that's a really great story. No, >>I, I am. Absolutely. And, and it just goes to show how committed CNF is to community, Putting community first and Detroit. There has been such a celebration of Detroit this whole week. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Best Wishes with the CD Foundation. John, thanks for the banter as always. And thank you for tuning in to us here live on the cube in Detroit, Michigan. I'm Savannah Peterson and we are having the best day. I hope you are too.

foreign [Music] welcome to this Cube showcase accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on aw it's a solution Innovation conversation with two great guests Fred Ward and VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan bardawaj who's the VP and general manager of cloud Solutions at VMware gentlemen thanks for uh joining me on the Showcase great to be here hey thanks for having us on it's a great topic you know we we've been covering this VMware Cloud on AWS since since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch The Evolution from people saying oh it's the worst thing I've ever seen what's this mean uh and depressed we're we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision but as it played out as you guys had announced together it did work out great for VMware it did work out great for a divs and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going obviously multiple years where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware Explorer just recently and going in to reinvent uh which is only a couple weeks away uh this feels like tomorrow but you know as we prepare a lot going on where are we with the evolution of the solution I mean the first thing I want to say is you know October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of I.T right when bad girls singer and Andy jassy came together to announce this and I think John you were there at the time I was there it was a great great moment we launched the solution in 2017 the year after that at vmworld back when we called it vmworld I think we've gone from strength to strength one of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also and the process is this notion of working backwards so we're really really focused on customer feedback as we build the service offering now five years old pretty remarkable Journey uh you know in the first years we tried to get across all the regions you know that was a big Focus because there was so much demand for it in the second year we started going really on Enterprise great features we invented this pretty awesome feature called stretch clusters where you could stretch a vsphere cluster using vsan NSX across two azs in the same region pretty phenomenal for lines of availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature and we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect Transit gateways with our own Advanced networking capabilities uh you know along the way Disaster Recovery we punched out you need two new Services just focused on that and then more recently we launched our outposts partnership we were up on the stage at reinvent again with Pat and Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well the federal Empire certification more recently so all in all we're super excited we're five years old the customer momentum is really really strong we are scaling the service massively across all GEOS and industries that's great great update and I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship and this has kind of been the theme for AWS man since I can remember from day one Fred you guys do the heavy lifting as as it's always say for the customers here VMware comes on board takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat continues to move their workloads that everyone's using you know vsphere and these are these are Big workloads on AWS what's the AWS perspective on this how do you see it yeah uh it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's that's evolving quickly and and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about uh but that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution uh to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads uh drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the for the customer so it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint from a business standpoint and obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and and responding to what customers want so pretty pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to uh BMC yeah that's a great value probably we've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud they can have their own super cloud as we call it if you take advantage of all the capex and investment Amazon's made and AWS is made and and continues to make in performance I as and pass all great stuff I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market what makes it different what's the combination you mentioned jointly engineered what are some of the key differentias of the service compared to others yeah I think one of the key things red talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one we were the earlier doctors of the AWS Nitro platform right the reinvention of ec2 back five years ago and so we've been you know having a very very strong engineering partnership at that level I think from uh we have a customer standpoint you get the full software-defined data center compute storage networking on ec2 bare metal across all regions you can scale that elastically up and down it's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency Global right on AWS ec2 Global regions now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service right and this was somewhat new to VMware this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers are to provision rack stack Hardware configure the software on top and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top so we took away all of that pain as customers transition to VMware cloud and AWS in fact my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for Jay debacle the industry was just going through that right favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race uh this issue to us we sent them a notification saying uh we already patched all of your systems no action from you the customers were super thrilled I mean these are large Banks many other customers around the world super thrill they had to take no action for a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing that's a great point you know the whole managed service piece brings up the security and you're kind of teasing at it but you know there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you're doing complex logic and as you grow your Solutions there's more bits you know Fred we were commenting before we came on cameras more bits than ever before and and at the physics layer too as well as the software so you never know when there's going to be a zero day vulnerability out there just it happens we saw one with Fortinet this week um this came out of the woodwork but moving fast on those patches is huge this brings up the whole support angle I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well because to me we see the value when we when we talk to customers on the cube about this you know it was a real real easy understanding of how what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS but the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle the support together well what's interesting about this is that it's it's done mutually we have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer including all the way up into the app layer as you think about some of the other workloads like sap we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them uh and on top of that we look at where where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies so from an availability and reliability standpoint it's it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land we're going to go help the customer resolve that works really well on the VMware side let's spend the feedback there what's the what's some of the updates same scene yeah yeah I think uh look I mean VMware owns and operates the service will be a phenomenal back in relationship with AWS customers call VMware for the service for any issues and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS in the back end for support issues for any hardware issues capacity management that we jointly do right all the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about uh I think on the front end we also have a really good group of solution Architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution do complex things like Cloud migration which is much much easier with VMware on AWS we're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways and so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day you know you had mentioned a list here some of the Innovations the you mentioned the stretch clustering you know getting the GEOS working Advanced Network disaster recovery um you know fed fed ramp public sector certifications outposts all good you guys are checking the boxes every year you got a good good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship the question that I'm interested in is what's next what uh recent Innovations are you doing are you making investments in what's on the list this year what items will be next year how do you see the the new things the list of the cosmos people want to know what's next they don't want to see stagnant uh growth here they want to see more action you know as as uh Cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications Cloud native you're seeing more and more containers more and more you know more CF CI CD pipelining with with modern apps putting more pressure on the system what's new what's the new Innovations absolutely and I think as a five-year-old service offering uh Innovation is top of mind for us every single day so just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer um first of all uh our new platform i4i dot metal it's isolate based it's pretty awesome it's the latest and greatest uh all the speeds and beats that you would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship we announced two different storage options this notion of working from customer feedback allowing customers even more price reductions really take off that storage and park it externally right and you know separate that from compute so two different storage offerings there one is with AWS FSX NetApp on tap which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well and the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex story vmware's own managed storage offering beyond that we've done a lot of other Innovations as well I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts you know host is 36 to 48 cores give or take but with VMware cloudflex compute we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vcpu memory and storage that maps to the applications however small they might be so this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year and then last but not least topper ransomware of course it's a Hot Topic in the industry we are seeing many many customers ask for this we are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud VR solution a lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots backups are actually safe to use so there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well a lot of networking Innovations with project North Star the ability to have layer 4 through layer seven uh you know new SAS services in that area as well keep in mind that the service already supports managed kubernetes for containers it's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines and so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMS and containers is sort of at the heart of our option the networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on every year it's the same same conversation get better faster networking more more options there the flex computes interesting if you don't mind me getting a quick clarification could you explain the address between resource defined versus Hardware defined because this is kind of what we had saw at explore coming out that notion of resource defined versus Hardware defined what's that what does that mean yeah I mean I think we've been super successful in this Hardware defined notion where we're scaling by the hardware unit uh that we present as software-defined data centers right so that's been super successful but we you know customers wanted more especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally right lower the cost even more and so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very very interesting as a way to think about you know here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customer's requested it would be for fiber machines five containers its size exactly for that and then as utilization grows we elastically behind the scenes were able to grow it through policies so that's a whole different dimension it's a whole different service offering that adds value when customers are comfortable they can go from one to the other they can go back to that post-based model if they so choose to and there's a jump off point across these two different economic models it's kind of cloud flexibility right there I like the name Fred let's get into some of the uh examples of customers if you don't mind let's get into some of these we have some time I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments one of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship they love the cloud positioning of it and then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great it's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level Services kind of that adoption Next Level happens um and because it's in the cloud so so can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware Cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there how does it evolve can you just walk us through a couple use cases sure um there's a well there's a couple one it's pretty interesting that you know like you said as there's more and more bids you need better and better hardware and networking and we're super excited about the I-4 uh and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds but what customers are doing with it like the college in New Jersey they're accelerating their deployment on a on onboarding over like 7 400 students over a six to eight month period and they've really realized a ton of savings but what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native Services too so connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this um the the options there obviously are tied to all the Innovation that we have across any Services whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS so so there's there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing which is moved quickly with full compliance whether it's in like health care or regulatory business is is allowed to then consume and use things for example with text extract or any other really cool service that has you know monthly and quarterly Innovations so there's things that you just can't could not do before that are coming out uh and saving customers money and building Innovative applications on top of their uh their current uh app base in in a rapid fashion so pretty excited about it there's a lot of examples I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here yeah but that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform now Ryan what's your perspective from the VMware psychics you know you guys have now a lot of head room to offer customers with Amazon's you know higher level services and or whatever's homegrown what is being rolled out because you now have a lot of hybrid too so so what's your what's your take on what what's happening and with customers I mean it's been phenomenal the customer adoption of this and you know Banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications tier one applications on the service over the last five years and so you know I have a couple of really good examples SNP Global is one of my favorite examples large Bank the merch with IHS Market big sort of conglomeration now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways and with the uh with the use case one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these Global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers and then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the globe of which there were many and so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand one thousand workloads to VMware cloud and AWS in just six weeks pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point a to VMware point B the the lowest cost lowest risk approach to adopting we have our cloud in AWS so that's uh you know one of my favorite examples there are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see the good thing is we're seeing rapid expansion across the globe we're constantly entering new markets uh with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap it's great to see I mean the data center migrations go from months many many months to weeks it's interesting to see some of those success stories so congratulations another one of the other uh interesting uh and fascinating uh uh benefits is the sustainability Improvement in terms of being green so the efficiency gains that we have both in current uh generation and New Generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic they're also saving power which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time they're they're seeing those benefits if you're running really inefficiently in your own data center that is just a not a great use of power so the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is are pretty phenomenal just in being more green which I like we just all need to do our part there and and this is a big part of it here it's a huge it's a huge point about sustainability for everyone glad you called that out the other one I would say is supply chain issues another one you see that constrains I can't buy hardware and the third one is really obvious but no one really talks about it it's security right I mean um I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago this is like 2013 and um you know at that time people saying the Cloud's not secure and he's like listen it's more secure in the cloud than on premise and if you look at the security breaches it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities not so much Hardware so there's a lot you gotta the the stay current on on the isolation there is hard so I think I think the security and supply chain threat is another one do you agree I I absolutely agree uh it's it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays we put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them run them more efficiently yeah and then like you said on the security Point Security is job one it is it is the only P1 and if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers there's nothing more important and Narayan your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better all right final question I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase it's really been a great conversation uh Fred you had made a comment earlier I want to kind of end with the kind of a curveball and put you guys on the spot we're talking about a modern a new modern shift it's another we're seeing another inflection point we've been documenting it it's almost like Cloud hitting another inflection point um with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side so the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market so it's kind of like we want more of the same here but also things have changed radically and better here what are the what's what's changed for better and where what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on can you share your perspective I'll I'll tackle it um you know uh businesses are complex and they're often unique uh that that's the same uh what's changed is how fast you can innovate the ability to combine manage services and new Innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today leveraging world-class Hardware uh that you don't have to worry about that's elastic you could not do that even five ten years ago to the degree you can today especially with the Innovation so Innovation is accelerating uh at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the the set of services that are available to them it's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of Engineers can go actually develop in a week it is phenomenal so super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that that's my take there I am you got a lot of platform to compete on with Amazon I got a lot to build on the memory which then you're right on your side what's your what's your answer to that question I think we're seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers [Music] I think uh what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly uh you know build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently I think we are seeing uh you know we're at the very start of that sort of uh of Journey um of course we have invested in kubernetes means to an end but it's so much more Beyond that's happening in the industry and I think we're at the very very beginning of this Transformations Enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we're inherently part of it yeah well gentlemen I really appreciate that we're seeing the same things more the same here on you know solving these complexities with abstractions whether it's you know higher level services with large-scale infrastructure um at your fingertips infrastructure is code infrastructure to be provisioned serverless all the good stuff happening Fred with AWS on your side and we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again being a cloud operator and developer so the developer Ops is kind of devops is kind of changing too so all for the better thank you for spending the time we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and it was getting getting along great together so thanks for sharing your perspectives they appreciate it thank you so much okay thank you John okay this is thecube and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation VMware Cloud on AWS jointly engineered solution bringing Innovation to the VMware customer base going to the cloud and Beyond I'm John Furrier your host thanks for watching [Music]

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of the cube coverage here at VMware VMware Explorer, not world 12 years. The Cube's been covering VMware is end user conference this year. It's called explore previously world. We got two great guests, friends of the cube friend, cube, alumni and cloud rod, Keith Townson, principal CTO advisor, air streaming his way into world this year in a big way. Congratulations. And course James Erhard principal technology, a at tan zoo cloud ARA. He's been in cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time, even before cloud was cloud. So great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to >>Be here. So day threes are kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will, will trash it. We'll debate. It'll be controversial and say this damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tansu, but really the end of the game is, is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're we're totally into it. And we've been saying infrastructure is code as the end state. We want to get there. Right? DevOps and infrastructure is code has always been the, the, the underlying fire burning in, in all the innovation, but it's now getting legitimately enterprised it's adopted in, in, in large scale, Amazon web services. We saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I gotta say, you know, the Broadcom thing has put like an electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem cuz they don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of gotta spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous, energy or excitement around something happening, it's all cloud native. So, you know, as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi cloud's the story. Right? So, so messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys let's, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream you're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you what's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future. >>Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing. And what I mean by that is the, the abstractions that sort of bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is, is the strong evidence of that. But also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that we're strong evidence of that. So I think what's, what's starting to happen now then is, is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from, from anything other than saying, I need compute, I need network. I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we've figured out how to do that at a team level, like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or, or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right >>Now. I mean the, the developer we talking, we're going on camera before you came on camera Keith around, you know, your contr statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry. It's, it's at an all time high and relative to euphoria, you know, sit on the beach with sunglasses. You couldn't be better if you were a developer open source, booming, everything's driving to their doorstep, self service. They're at the center of the security conversation, which shift left. Yeah. There's some things there, but it's, it's a good time. If you're a developer now is VMware gonna be changing that and, and you know, are they gonna meet the developers where they are? Are they gonna try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but, but you have a take on this, Keith, what's your, what's your position on this? How do the developer experience core and tangential played? >>Yeah, we're I think we're doing a disservice to the industry and I think it's hurting and, or D I think I'm gonna stand by my statement. It's damaging the in industry to, to an extent VMware >>What's damaging to the >>Industry. The focusing over focusing on developer experience developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience the, the detriment of infrastructure, the infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core to meet the developer where the developer, the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when we're, when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations, like adding block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer down the road? >>It should mean nothing because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right. >>It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay. >>I see the damage there. The, >>The, when you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just simply provide Dr. Service for my on-prem service to this new block level stores, because I can do that in a enterprise today. Non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap and we're, you know, and then I think we, we, when buyers look at what we say, and we, we say VMware, isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds. I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the, the, the, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way. I gotta talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and, and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space, the right >>Latitude. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay. If I'm a, if the developers are key to the, to the cloud native role, which I, I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want, and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting the weeds in which some lot people love to do. I wanna just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service, I don't care about locking someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm gonna just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure. And I'm moving on being creative and doing my thing, building apps. Okay. That's the kind of the generic, generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to >>Get there? Yeah. Someone, someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move as 400, still propagate the data center. They're still H P X running SAP, E there's still, you know, 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP. And most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Yeah. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do Dr. Between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes, the, the Kubernetes consuming that, that work isn't done. Yeah. It >>Is. It's an >>Opportunity. It's on paper. >>It's an opportunity though. It's not, I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix a lot of gaps. All right. I want Jay, I wanna bring you in, because we had a panel at super cloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, beaker was on here. Yeah. He's always snarky, but he's building, he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his, his hands dirty, rolling up his sleeves. The title of panel was originally called the innovators dilemma with a question, mark, you know, haha you know, innovators, dilemma, little goof on that. Cuz you know, there's challenges and trade offs like, like he's talking about, he says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state. >>But there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are, are key to this API security. One of the most talked about things. I mean I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So yeah. I mean I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. Yeah. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked. And so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so, so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations, what's your read on this to make the complexity go away. You guys have the, the chaos rain here, which I actually like that Dave does too, but you know, Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that reign in the chaos mode. Now what's your take on what Keith was saying around. Yeah. >>So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's it's there's in fact, and, and I, I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's there's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level works with VMs works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available, makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. >>It makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications, but ultimately creates an in environment that begins to pull away from having to know, to write code about infrastructure. Right. And so infrastructure's, code's great. But if you have a right platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually D declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. Yeah. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing >>With. Yeah. I remember when we first Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, gonna go out and a couple companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds and our, our dream at that time was Hey. And, and we, we mentioned and Stratus in our, our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that now look at Kubernetes. Now it's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me, that's not nowhere in the market today. Nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds. >>It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was, was using AKs for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS. And they said it took them a couple of hours to, to get through the few issues they ran into. >>Yeah. I talked to a customer who who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle cloud on Oracle cloud's VMware solution. And he raved about now he has a inherent backup Dr. For his O CVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And >>How did he do >>That? The, there there's a solution. And this is where the white space is. James talked about in the past exists. When, when I go to a conference like Cuban, the cube will be there in, in Detroit, in, in, in about 45 days or so. I talk to platform group at the platform group. That's doing the work that VMware red had hash Corp all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim while we rave and, and talk about the power Kubernetes. That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of their, for the platform right now there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap one, 1.3. And the thing that I'm surprised, the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever, and now it, it just magically happens. The marketing at the end of developing the application. Think if you're in you're, you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications, there's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. >>Well guys, thanks for coming on the cube. I really appreciate we're on a time deadline, which we're gonna do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. No problem. See you pleasure. Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with more live coverage. You, after this short break, stay with us.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.