>>Welcome back. Everyone live here at the I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got a special insertion here off the program. Jerry Chen Greylock, 10 years with the Cube coming on. 10 years ago when the cube first came here, Jerry, you were in the hallway. We didn't have any guess list. He was like, Hey, you wanna come up in the cube so much. Now we got three sets. We're gonna do hundreds of interviews already. We're gonna have probably over 200 streaming live. Love it Shorts, Instagram reels, data lake. The cubes expanded. You've been there from the whole >>Time. Its like the, its like the, the mcu, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Cube Cinematic universe. You know, it's, its a whole franchise. Congratulations and happy early birthday, John. Thank you very much. Thanks >>For having me. Yeah, you know, I was just graduated high school when I first came to aws. Look, I wanna get your thoughts on, we're gonna do a quick segment here before AMD comes on. Got some great interviews with those guys. You've been here 10 years, you're out in the trenches. Just Andy, Adam Celski, just talked to the VCs, the investment thesis economy. Yeah. This headwinds, tailwinds, depending on which side you're on, you're gonna have a tailwind or headwind. What's the outlook? What's your take of reinvent this year? Aws, the ecosystem and the investment market. >>You know, I think it's, it is a great rebound. The energy's back when it was like pre covid, right? We're saying last year was kind of half the size and you know, be postcode. But I think the show, the energy's great. And Amazon just amazing, right? It's in this economy, what's going on right now in the world. They're still growing, still kicking butt. I think you're gonna see a lot of both enterprise customers and startups start to worry about cost, right? Because I think Amazon's gonna focus like, Hey, how can they help the customers? But the economy for the next year, I think we're gonna see some headwinds. So I think a lot of startups, a lot of customers are gonna worry about cost. >>You're on the board of a lot of startups that are in the cloud, rock sets. One we've covered. I think they're gonna come on here too tomorrow or today. What's your advice on the board level? Go to market. Dial up. Dial down. Sure. What's the strategy marketplace? I mean, how do you give the advice to start? What's the, what's the north star? What's the, what's the advice as the investor? >>Two or three things for most startups, hard roi, like how can you save money? So all the kinda fluffy marketing value you gotta have hard dollar savings, right? Number one, if can save money, you'll do well. Number two, to your point, the marketplace is becoming the channel for startups. These lot of large customers have deals with Amazon through the marketplace. So startup can sell through the marketplace to customers. These lot of CFOs are doing no new vendors, right? It's getting hard, hard to get approved as a startup. So the marketplace become a bigger, bigger deal. >>What about existing ecosystem partners that have been around for the past 10 years? They're independent. They may have their toe in the marketplace, may not, some of them not making their numbers, they're starting to hear things like maybe they'll be re pivoting. People are tooling up. What's the advice for the existing ecosystem partners? Because they're either gonna be like the next data bricks or kind of like maybe >>Everyone's looking for the next data bricks, right? You know, I think for existing partners, you're seeing what's happened. John deals are getting smaller, taking longer to close, right? It's just the reality of what's happening right now. And so for those partners are saying, Hey, focus on the heart roi, be okay with the smaller land and just expand in 23, 24. So just get kind of creative of how you work with customers. And I, like you said, I think Marketplace is is kind of a, a go-to light >>Book. So today, Aruba, the new leader of the, of the partner network, they've merged eight PN with the marketplace. They've now won Coherent organization, not fragmented, I was talking to them last night. They have more startups than ever before coming on board. So the velocity of new venture creation is up, up and to the right still, even in this economy. And as they always say, best time to invest is in a down market. That's like BC 1 0 1, entrepreneurship 1 0 1. What's your advice right now for builders out there looking for that round, trying to get some traction. The agility with the cloud still is there. You can still get time to value. You can still get traction fast. That doesn't go away. What's your advice for the startups? >>Narrow, narrower wedge, right. So I think with like 5,000 startups every single year, there's so much noise. John, look across the floor, a lot of great companies. B, a lot of noise. So I think the more focused wedge you have as a startup and how you can land deliver value, the better land, the very, very sharp wedge expand over time. But just be very specific how you land. >>Awesome. Jerry, great to have you on. I know we wanna make some room on appreciate AMD for squeezing a couple minutes out of their hour and the next hour we're gonna spend with them for your Sage advice final kind of new Insta challenge that Savannah put together, A new host instant challenge, instant challenges. If you had to do an Instagram reel right now, oh, about reinvent this year, what would that Instagram reel be right now? >>I would, I would do the expos scavenger hunt, right? We would have a race of different VCs. You give me a list of five companies, the VCs find the first five companies on the list wins. The wins the race. I think that would be a great challenge. >>All right. What's the most important story this year at Reinvent that you could share with the folks that you could share in terms of what's important, what they should pay attention to, or what's not being told? >>Well, I, I think you talked about your interview with Adam Slosky is the solutions and the what you call the next gen cloud. These high level services. What AWS is doing around these services, it's super interesting. They kind of don't say lead the way, but the responded customers. So they lead the way by kind of following where the customer's going and if, when Slutsky and AWS are doing these solutions, supply chain, et cetera, that tells you kind of where the market's >>Headed. Next Gen Cloud, Jerry, Chad, thanks. Coming on, you're watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. I'm John Furrier. Will be right back with more cube coverages. Day two, day three, here at Reinvent at the short break.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage, day one wrap-up. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We have Jerry Chen, special guest who's been with us every year on theCUBE since inception. Certainly every AWS re:Invent, nine years straight. Jerry Chen, great to see you for our guest analyst's wrap up VC general partner, Greylock partners, good to see you. >> John, Dave, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for having me again. It wouldn't be re:Invent without the three of us sitting here and we missed last year, right, because of COVID. So we have to make up for lost time. >> John: We did a virtual one- >> Dave: we did virtual stuff= >> John: wasn't the same as in-person. >> Dave: Definitely not the same. >> Jerry: Not the same thing. So, it's good to see you guys again in person, and less than 6 feet apart. >> Cheers, yeah. >> And 7,000 people here, showing that the event's still relevant. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Some people would kill for those numbers, it's a bad year for Amazon, down from 60,000. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> So, ecosystem's booming. Okay, let's get to it. Day one in the books, new CEO, new sheriff in town, his name's Adam Selipsky. Your take? >> Well, Adam's new, but he's old, right? Something, you know, like something new, something old, something blue, right? It's so, Adam was early Amazon, so he had that founding DNA. Left, you know, CEO of Tableau, acquired by Salesforce, came back few months ago. So I think it was a great move, because one, he's got the history and culture under Jassy, so he's definitely the Bezos Jassy tree of leadership, but yet he's been outside the bubble. Right? So he actually knows what it means to run a company not on the Amazon platform. So, I think Adam's a great choice to lead AWS for what we call it, like maybe act two, right? Act one, the first X years with Jassy, and maybe this is the second act under Adam. >> Yeah. And he's got- and he was very technical, hung around all the techies, James Hamilton, DeSantis, all the engineers, built that core primitives. Now, as they say, this cloud next gen's here, act two, it's about applications. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Infrastructure as code is in place. Interesting area. Where's the growth come from? So, look, you know, the ecosystem has got to build these super clouds, or as you say, Castles on the Cloud, which you coined, but you brought this up years ago, that the moats and the value has to be in there somewhere. Do you want to revise that prediction now that you see what's coming from Selipsky? >> Okay, well, so let's refresh. Greylock.com/castles has worked out, like we did, but a lot of thought leadership and the two of you, have informed my thinking at Castles in the Cloud, how to compete against Amazon in the cloud. So you'd argue act one, the startup phase, the first, you know, X years at Amazon was from 2008 to, you know, 2021, the first X years, building the platform, digging the moats. Right? So what did you have? You have castle the platform business, economies of scale, which means decreasing marginal costs and natural network effects. So once the moat's in place and you had huge market share, what do you for act two, right? Now the moats are in place, you can start exploring the moats for I think, Adam talked about in your article, horizontal and verticals, right? Horizontal solutions up the stack, like Amazon Connect, CRM solutions, right? Horizontal apps, maybe the app layer, and verticals, industrials, financials, healthcare, et cetera. So, I think Jassy did a foundation of the castle and now we're seeing, you know, what Adam and his generation would do for act two. >> So he's, so there's almost like an act one A, because if you take the four hyperscalers, they're about, maybe do 120 billion this year, out of, I don't know, pick a number, it's many hundreds of billions, at least in infrastructure. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And those four hyperscalers growing at 35% collectively, right? So there's some growth there, but I feel like there's got to be deeper business integration, right? It's not just about IT transformation, it's about deeper- So that's maybe where this Connect like stuff comes, but are there enough of those? You know, I didn't, I haven't, I didn't hear a lot of that this morning. I heard a little bit, ML- >> Jerry: Sure. >> AI into Connect, but where's the next Connect, right? They've got to do dozens of those in order to go deeper. >> Either, Dave, dozens of those Connects or more of those premise, so the ML announcement was today. So you look at what Twilio did by buying Segment, right? Deconstruct a CRM to compete against Adam Selipsky's old acquire of Salesforce.com. They bought Segment, so Twilio now has communicates, like texting, messaging, email, but all the data come from Segment. >> Dave: With consumption-based pricing. >> With consumption-based pricing. So, right? So that's an example of kind of what the second act of cloud looks like. It may not look like full SaaS apps like Salesforce.com, but these primitives, both horizontally vertically, because again, what does Amazon have as an asset that other guys don't? Install based developers. Developers aren't going to necessarily build or consume SaaS apps, but they're going to consume things like these API's and primitives. And so you look around, what's cloud act two look like? It may not be VM's or containers. It may be API's like Stripe and Billing, Twilio messaging, right? Concepts like that. So, we'll see what the next act at cloud looks like. And they announced a bunch of stuff today, serverless for the data analytics, right? So serverless is this move towards not consuming raw compute and storage, but APIs. >> What about competition? Microsoft is nipping at the heels of AWS. >> Dave: John put them out of business earlier today. [John and Dave Laugh] >> No, I said, quote, I'll just- let me rephrase. I said, if Amazon goes unchecked- >> Jerry: Sure. >> They'll annihilate Microsoft's ecosystem. Because if you're an ISV, why wouldn't you want to run on the best platform? >> Jerry: Sure. >> Speeds and feeds matter when you have these shifts of software development. >> Jerry: You want them both. >> So, you know, I mean, you thought about the 80's, if you were at database, you wanted the best processor. So I think this Annapurna vertical integrated stacks are interesting because if my app runs better and I have a platform, prefabricated or purpose-built platform, to be there for me, I'm going to build a great SaaS app. If it runs faster and it cost less, I'm going to flop to Amazon. That's just, that's my prediction. >> So I think better changes, right? And so I think if you're Amazon, you say cheaper, better, faster, and they're investing in chips, proprietary silicon to run better, faster, their machine learning training chips, but if you're Azure or Google, you got to redefine what better is. And as a startup investor, we're always trying to do category definition, right? Like here's a category by spin. So now, if you're Azure or Google, there are things you can say that are better, and Google argued their chips, their TensorFlow, are better. Azure say our regions, our security, our enterprise readiness is better. And so all of a sudden, the criteria "what's better" changes. So from faster and cheaper to maybe better compliance, better visibility, better manageability, different colors, I don't know, right? You have to change the game , because if you play the same game on Amazon's turf, to your point, John, it- it's game over because they have economies of scale. But I think Azure and Google and other clouds, the superclouds, or subclouds are changing the game, what it means to compete. And so I think what's going on, just two more seconds, from decentralized cloud, being Web 3 and crypto, that's a whole 'nother can of worms, to Edge compute, what Cloudflare are doing with R2 and storage, they're trying to change the name of the game. >> Well, that's right. If you go frontal against Amazon, you're got to get decimated. You got to move the goalposts for better. And I think that's a good way to look at it, Dave. What does better mean? So that's the question that's on the table. What does that look like? And I think that's an unknown, that's coming. Okay, back to the start-ups. Category definition. That's an awesome term. That to me is a key thing. How do you look at what a category is on your sub- on your Castles of the Cloud, you brought up how many categories of- >> Jerry: 33 markets and a bunch of submarkets, yeah. >> Yeah. Explain that concept. >> So, we did Castle in the Clouds where my team looked at all the services offered at Azure, Google, and Amazon. We downloaded the services and recategorized them to like, 30 plus markets and a bunch of submarkets. Because, the reason why is apples to apples, you know, Amazon, Google, Azure all have databases, but they might call them different things. And so I think first things first is, let's give developers and customers kind of apples to apples comparisons. So I think those are known markets. The key in investing in the cloud, or investing in general, is you're either investing in budget replacement, replacing a known market, cheaper, better database, to your point, or a net new market, right? Which is always tricky. So I think the biggest threat to a lot of the startups and incumbents, the biggest threat by startups and incumbents, is either one, do something cheaper, better in a current market, or find a net new market that they haven't thought about yet. And if you can win that net new market before the rest, then that's unbelievable. We call it the, you know, the blue ocean strategy, >> Dave: Is that essentially what Snowflake has done, started with cheaper, better, and now they're building the data cloud? >> Jerry: I think there's- it's evolution, correct. So they said cheaper, better. And the Castle in the Cloud, we talked about, they actually built deep IP. So they went a known category, data warehouses, right? You had Teradata, Redshift, Snowflake cheaper, better, faster. And now let's say, okay, once you have the customers, let's change the name of the game and create a data cloud. And it's TBD whether or not Snowflake can win data cloud. Like we talked about Rockset, one of my investments that's actually move the goalpost saying, oh, data cloud is nice, but real time data is where it's at, and Snowflake and those guys can't play in real time. >> Dave: No, they're not in a position to play in real time data. >> Jerry: Right. >> Dave: I mean, that's right. >> So again, so that's an example of a startup moving the goalpost on what previously was a startup that moved the goalpost on an incumbent. >> Dave: And when you think about Edge, it's going to be real-time AI inferencing at the Edge, and you're right, Snowflake's not set up well at all for that. >> John: So competition wise, how do the people compete? Because this is what Databricks did the same exact thing. I have Ali on the record going back years, "Well, we love Amazon. We're only on Amazon." Now he's talking multicloud. >> So, you know, once you get there, you kind of change your tune cause you've got some scale, but then you got new potential entrants coming in, like Rockset. >> Jerry: Correct. >> So. >> Dave: But then, and if you add up the market caps of just those two companies, Databricks and Snowflake, it's much larger than the database market. So this, we're defining new markets now. >> Jerry: I think there's market cap, especially Snowflake that's in the public market, Databricks is still private, is optimism that there's a second or third act in the database space left to be unlocked. And you look at what's going on in that space, these real-time analytics or real-time apps, for sure there's optimism there. But, but to John's point, you're right, like you earn the right to play the next act, but it's tricky because startups disrupt incumbents and become incumbents, and they're also victims their own success, right? So you're- there's technical debt, there's also business model debt. So you're victims of your own business model, victims of your own success. And so what got you here may not get you to the next phase. And so I think for Amazon, that's a question. For Databricks and Snowflake, that's a question, is what got them here? Can they play to the next act? And look, Apple did it, multiple acts. >> John: Well, I mean, I think I- [Crosstalk] >> John: I think it's whether you take shortcuts or not, if you have debt, you make it a little bit of a shortcut bet. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Okay. That's cool. But ultimately what you're getting at here is beachhead thinking. Get a beachhead- >> Jerry: Correct. >> Get in the market, and then sequence to a different position. Classic competitive strategy, 101. That's hard to do because you want to win the beachhead- >> I know. >> John: And take a little technical debt and business model debt, cheat a little bit, and then, is it not fortified yet? So beachhead to expansion is the question. >> Jerry: That's every board meeting, John and Dave, that we're in, right? It's called you need a narrow enough wedge to land. And it is like, I don't want the tip of the spear, I want the poison on the tip of a spear, right? [Dave and John Laugh] >> You want, especially in this cloud market, a super focused wedge to land. And the problem is, as a founder, as investor, you're always thinking about the global max, right? Like the ultimate platform winner, but you don't get the right to play the early- the late innings if you don't make it out of the early innings. And so narrow beachhead, sharp wedge, but you got to land in a space, a place of real estate with adjacent tan, adjacent markets, right? Like Uber, black cars, taxi's, food, whatever, right? Snowflake, data warehouse, data cloud. And so I think the key with all startups is you'll hit some ceiling of market size. Is there a second ramp? >> Dave: So it's- the art is when to scale and how fast to scale. >> Right. Picking when, how fast, in which- which best place, it was tough. And so, the best companies are always thinking about their second or third act while the first act's still going. >> John: Yeah. And leveraging cloud to refactor, I think that's the key to Snowflake, was they had the wedge with data warehouse, they saw the position, but refactored and in the cloud with services that they knew Teradata wouldn't use. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And they're in. From there, it's just competitive IP, crank, go to market. >> And then you have the other unnatural things. You have channel, you have installed base of customers, right? And then you start selling more stuff to the same channel, to the same customers. That's what Amazon's doing. All the incumbent's do that. Amazon's got, you know, 300 services now, launching more this week, so now they have channel distribution, right? Every credit card for all the developers, and they have installed base of customers. And so they will just launch new things and serve the customers. So the startups had to disrupt them somehow. >> Well, it's always great to chat with Jerry. Every year we discover and we riff and we identify, in real time, new stuff. We were talking about this whole vertical, horizontal scale and kind of castles early on, years ago. And now it's happened. You were right. Congratulations. That's a great thesis. There's real advantages to build on a cloud. You can get the- you can build a business there. >> Jerry: Right. >> John: That's your thesis. And by the way, these markets are changing. So if you're smart, you can actually compete. >> Jerry: I think you beat, and to Dave's earlier point, you have to adapt, right? And so what's the Darwin thing, it's not the strongest, but the most adaptable. So both- Amazon's adapt and the startups who are the most adaptable will win. >> Dave: Where are you, you guys might've talked about this, where do you stand on the cost of goods sold issue? >> Jerry: Oh, I think everything's true, right? I think you can save money at some scale to repatriate your cloud, but again, Wall Street rewards growth versus COGS, right? So I think you've got a choice between a dollar of growth versus a dollar reducing COGS, people choose growth right now. That may not always be the case, but at some point, if you're a company at some scale and the dollars of growth is slowing down, you definitely have to reduce the dollars in cost. And so you start optimizing cloud costs, and that could be going to Amazon, Azure, or Google, reducing COGS. >> Dave: Negotiate, yeah. >> John: Or, you have no visibility on new net new opportunities. So growth is about new opportunities. >> Correct. >> If you repatriating things, there's no growth. >> Jerry: It's not either, or- >> That's my opinion. >> Jerry: COGS or growth, right? But they're both valid, definitely, so you can do both. And so I don't think- it's what's your priorities, you can't do everything at once. So if I'm a founder or CEO or in this case investor, and I said, "Hey, Dave, and John, if you said I can either save you 25 basis points in gross margin, or I can increase another 10% top line this year", I'm going to say increase the top line, we'll deal with the gross margin later. Not that it's not important, but right now the early phase- >> Priorities. >> Jerry: It's growth. >> Yeah. All right, Jerry Chen, great to see you. Great to have you on, great CUBE alumni, great guest analyst. Thanks for breaking it down. CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for re:Invent, back in person. Of course, it's a virtual event, we've got a hybrid event for Amazon, as well as theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching the leader in worldwide tech coverage. Thanks for watching. (Gentle music)

>>Hey, welcome back everyone to cube Cod's coverage and cloud native con the I'm John for your husband, David Nicholson cube analyst, cloud analyst. Co-host you got two great guests, KIPP alumni, Jerry Chen needs no introduction partner at Greylock ventures have been on the case many times, almost like an analyst chair. It's great to see you. I got guest analyst and Martin mal who's the CEO co-founder of Chronosphere just closed a whopping $200 million series C round businesses. Booming. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Hey, first of all, congratulations on the business translations, who would have known that observability and distributed tracing would be a big deal. Jerry, you predicted that in 2013, >>I think we predicted jointly cloud was going to be a big deal with 2013, right? And I think the rise of cloud creates all these markets behind it, right. This, you know, I always say you got to ride a wave bigger than you. And, uh, and so this ride on cloud and scale is the macro wave and, you know, Marty and Robin cryosphere, they're just drafted behind that wave, bigger scale, high cardinality, more data, more apps. I mean, that's, that's where the fuck. >>Yeah. Martin, all kidding aside. You know, we joke about this because we've had conversations where the philosophy of you pick the trend is your friend that you know, is going to be happening. So you can kind of see the big waves coming, but you got to stay true to it. And one of the things that we talk about is what's the next Amazon impact gonna look like? And we were watching the rise of Amazon. You go, if this continues a new way to do things is going to be upon us. Okay, you've got dev ops now, cloud native, but observability became really a key part of that. It's like almost the, I call it the network management in the cloud. It's like in a new way, you guys have been very successful. There's a lot of solutions out there. What's different. >>Yeah. I'd say for Kearney sphere, there's really three big differences. The first thing is that we're a platform. So we're still an observability platform. And by that, I mean, we solved the problem end to end. If thinking about observability and monitoring, you want to know when something's wrong, you want to be able to see how bad it is. And then you want to able to figure out what the root cause is. Often. There are solutions that do a part of that, that that problem might solve a part of the problem really well for a platform that does the whole thing. And 10 that's that's really the first thing. Second thing is we're really built for not just the cloud, but cloud native environments. So a microservices architecture on container-based infrastructure. And that is something that, uh, we, we have saw coming maybe 20 17, 20 18, but luckily for us, we were already solving this problem at Uber. That's where myself, my co-founder were back in 20 14, 20 15. So we already had the sort of perfect technology to solve this problem ahead of where the, the trend was going in the industry and therefore a purpose-built solution for this type of environment, a lot more effective than a lot of the existing. >>It's interesting, Jerry, you know, the view investing companies that have their problem, that they have to solve themselves as the new thing, versus someone says, Hey, there's a market. Let's build a solution for something. I don't really know. Well, that's kind of what's going on here. Right? It's >>That's why we love founders. Like Martin Marna, rod that come out with these hyperscale comes Uber's like we say, they've seen the future. You know, like there were Uber, they looked at the existing solutions out there trying to scale Promethease or you know, data dogs and the vendors. And it didn't work. It fell over, was too expensive. And so Martin Rob saw solid future. Like, this is where the world's going. We're going to solve it. They built MP3. It became cryosphere. And um, so I don't take any credit for that. You know, I just look fine folks that can see the future. >>Yeah. But they were solving their problem. No one else had anything. There's no general purpose software that managed servers you could buy, you guys were cutting your teeth into solving the pain. You had Uber. When did you guys figure out like, oh, well this is pretty big. >>Uh, probably about 20 17, 20 18 with a rise in popularity of Kubernetes. That's when we knew, oh wait, the whole world is shifting to this. It's not, no one could really it to just goober and the big tech giants of the world. And that's when we really knew, okay. The whole, the whole whole world is shifting here. And again, it's, it's sheer blind luck that we already had the ideal solution for this particular environment. It wasn't planned it. Wasn't what we were planning for back then. But, um, yeah. Get everything. >>It makes a lot of difference. When you walk into a customer and say, we had this problem, I can empathize with you. Not just say we've got solved. Exactly. Jerry, how do they compete in the cloud? We always talk about how Amazon and Azure want to eat up anything that they see that might, you know, something on AWS. Um, this castle in the cloud opportunity here. Okay. >>In the cloud. I mean, you know, we talked last time about how to fight the big three, uh, Amazon Azure and, uh, and Google. And I think for sure they have basic offerings, right. You know, Google Stackdriver years ago, they've done basically for Pete's offerings, basic modern offerings. I think you have like basic, simple needs. It's a great way to get started, but customers don't want kind of a piecemeal solution all the time. They want a full product. Like Datadog shows a better user experience, but full product is going to, you know, the better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. So first you can build a better product versus these point solutions. Number two is at some scale and some level complexity, those guys can handle like the demanding users that current affairs handling right now, right? The door dash, the world. >>And finally don't want the Fox guarding the hen house. You know, you don't want to say like Amazon monitoring, you can't depend on Amazon service monitoring your Amazon apps or Google service monitor your Google apps, having something that is independent and multi-cloud, that can dual things, Marta said, you know, see a triage, fixed your issues is kind of what you want. And, um, that's where the market's skilling. So I do believe that cloud guys will have an offering the space, but in our castle and cloud research, we saw that, yeah, there's a plenty of startups being funded. There's plenty of opportunity. And that the scoreboard between Splunk Datadog and all these other companies, that there's a huge amount of market and value to be created in this piece. So, >>So with, at, at the time, when you, you know, uh, uh, necessity is the mother of invention, you're an Uber, you have a practical problem to solve and use you look around you and you see that you're not the only entity out there that has this problem. Where are we in that wave? So not everyone is at, cloud-scale not everyone has adopted completely Kubernetes and cloud native for everything. Are we just at the beginning of this wave? How far from the >>Beach are we, we think we're just at the beginning of this wave right now. Um, and if you think about most enterprises today, they're still using on, and they're not even in perhaps in the cloud at all right. Are you still using perhaps APM and solutions, uh, on premise? So, um, if you look at that wave, we're just at the beginning of it. But when, but when we talked to a lot of these companies and you ask them for their three year vision, Kubernetes is a huge piece of that because everyone wants to be multi-cloud everyone to be hybrid eventually. And that's going to be the enabler of that. So, uh, we're just in the beginning now, but it seems like an inevitable wave that is coming. >>So obviously people evaluated that exactly the way you're evaluating that. Right. Thus the funding, right. Because no one makes that kind of investment without thinking that there is a multiplier on that over time. So that's pretty, that's a pretty exciting place. >>Yeah. I think to your point, a lot of companies are running into that situation right now, and they're looking at existing solutions there for us. It was necessity because there wasn't anything out there now that there is a lot of companies are not using their sort of precious engineering resources to build their own there. They would prefer to buy a solution because this is something that we can offer to all the companies. And it's not necessarily a business differentiating technology for the businesses themselves >>Distributed tracing in that really platform. That's the news. Um, and you mentioned you've got this, a good bid. You do some good business. Is scale the big differentiator for you guys? Or is it the functionality? Because it sounds like with clients like door dash, and it looks a lot like Uber, they're doing a lot of stuff too, and I'm sure everyone needs the card. Other people doing the same kind of thing, that scale, massive amount of consumer data coming in on the edge. Yeah. Is that the differentiation or do you work for the old one, you know, main street enterprise, right. >>Um, that is a good part of the differentiation and for our product thus far before we had a distributor tracing for monitoring and metric data, that was the main differentiation is the sheer volume of data that gets produced so much higher, really excited about distributor tracing because that's actually not just a scale problem. It's, it's a space that everybody can see the potential distributor tracing yet. No one has really realized that potential. So our offering right now is fairly unique. It does things that no other vendors out there can do. And we're really excited about that because we think that that fundamentally solves the problem differently, not just at a larger scale, >>Because you're an expert, what is distributed tracing. >>Yeah. Uh, it's, it's, it's a great question. So really, if you look at this retracing, it captures the details of a particular request. So a particular customer interaction with your business and it captures how that request flows through your complex architecture, right? So you have every detail of that at every step of the way. And you can imagine this data is extremely rich and extremely useful to figure out what the underlying root causes of issues are. The problem with that is it's very bit boast. It's a lot of data gets produced. A ton of data gets produced, every interaction, every request. So one of the main issues are in this space is that people can't afford cost effectively to store all of this data. Right? So one of the main differentiators for our product is we made it cost efficient enough to store everything. And when you have all the data, you have far better analytics and you have >>Machine learning is better. Everything's better with data. That's right. Yeah. Great. What's the blind spot out. Different customers, as cybersecurity is always looking for corners and threats that some people say it's not what you want. It's what you don't see that kills you. That's, that's a tracing issue. That's a data problem. How do you see that evolving in your customer base clients, trying to get a handle of the visibility into the data? >>Yeah. Um, I think right now, again, it's, it's very early in this space of people are just getting started here and you're completely correct where, you know, you need that visibility. And again, this is why it's such a differentiator to have all the data. If you can imagine with only 10% of the data or 1% of data, how can you actually detect any of these particular issues? Right. So, uh, uh, data is key to solving that >>Feel great to have you guys on expert and congratulations on the funding, Jerry. Good to see you take a minute to give a plug for the company. What do you guys do? And actually close around the funding, told you a million dollars. Congratulations. What are you looking for for hiring? What are your milestones? What's on your plan plan. >>Yeah. Uh, so with the spanning, it's really to, to, uh, continue to grow the company, right? So we're sort of hiring, as I told you earlier, we are, uh, we grew our revenue this year by, by 10 X in the sense of the 10 months of this year, thus far. So our team hasn't really grown 10 X. So, so we, we need to keep up with that grid. So hiring across the board on engineering side, on the go to market side, and I just continue to >>Beat that. The headquarters, your virtual, if you don't mind, we've gone >>Completely distributed. Now we're mostly in the U S have a bunch of folks in Seattle and in New York, however, we going completely remote. So hiring anyone in the U S anywhere in Europe, uh, >>Oh, I got you here. What's your investment thesis. Now you got castles in the cloud, by the way, if you haven't seen the research from Greylock, Jerry and the team called castles in the cloud, you can Google it. What's your thesis now? What are you investing in? >>Yeah, it is. It is hard to always predict the next wave. I mean, my job is to find the right founders, but I'd say the three core areas are still the same one is this cloud disruption to Martin's point we're. So early days, the wave, I say, number two, uh, there's vertical apps, different SAS applications be finance, healthcare construction, all are changing. I think healthcare, especially the past couple of years through COVID, we've seen that's a market that needs to be digitized. And finally, FinTech, we talked about this before everything becomes a payments company, right? And that's why Stripe is such a huge juggernaut. You know, I don't think the world's all Stripe, but be it insurance payments, um, you know, stuff in crypto, whatever. I think fintechs still has a lot of, a lot of market to grow. >>It's making things easier. It's a good formula right now. If you can reduce complexity, it makes things easy in every market. You're going to seems to be the formula. >>And like the next great thing is making today's crappy thing better. Right? So the next, the next brace shows making this cube crappy thing. Yeah, >>We're getting better every day on our 11th season or year, I'm calling things seasons now, episodes and season for streaming, >>All the seasons drop a Netflix binge, watch them all the >>Cube plus and NFTs for our early videos. There'll be worth something because they're not that good, Jerry. How, of course you're great. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thanks for coming on it. Cubes coverage here in a physical event, 2021 cloud being the con CubeCon I'm John farrier and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching.

>>let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there? He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of work out out of the ether, not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's, we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all, I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time, but you've been on this for a while it's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, The new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all, Winner take most. And if it is winner take most. Where are the white spaces for some starts to to emerge clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey we've seen big companies data breaks, snowflakes, elastic mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers amazon google and as you're winning, you know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors but there are like 500 plus um startups, competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska Mongo snowflake, No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the most being on land, but now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before, not just from the cloud players, but from companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets, you, I think you call it 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of sub market, which means that there's like, we used to call it white space back in the day. Remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did, we downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right. And you know what as recalls a database or database service, like a document dB and amazon is like Cosmo, dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples, # one. Number two, is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know, you and I can rock. Right, That's what amazon as well. And google think about it is very different. And the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle as a single database for all your needs, they're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um, analytics, databases we're talking rocks at later today, right? Um uh, document databases like mongo search database like elastic and so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market and 30 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good uses for a start up, you can find plenty of white speech solving a pain point very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up the power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services but also this big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon and re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition literally >>you snowflake has created like storm create a hole that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set real time analytics, It's Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse, but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, your parallel argument. Even the big optics snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like media. >>And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase, um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud. If you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like, it's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented. So a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills, they're still there. So again, repatriation comes back. That's a big conversation that's come up. Um, what's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation, the other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator? Slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud. So that I think has been going for the past eight years. There's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not repatriation of my own data center, but it's kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS East or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud, the cloud. The of the $38 billion invested uh this quarter. Um uh Ai and ml number one um analytics number two, security number three. Actually security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud, you could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property, it's a protocol. >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I p So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because the powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake, right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys. Just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. Uh, we're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh, no, you put it out there. Great, love the research. I think you're on point on this one. Where did, where's it go from here? >>We have to follow pieces. Um, in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon. And how that's been a powerful strategy a second is this kind of disaggregated of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us Or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022 we'll see the difference were the more unicorns, were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff And, and congratulations on the Southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns? Congratulations that great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on And congratulations. You nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for for sharing. >>Thanks john, Thanks for having me as >>always.

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're a virtual this year. But we'll be in real life soon, right around the corner, as we come out of COVID. We got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow VP, CTO for IBM automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since almost since the early days of theCUBE. Good to see you >> Yeah, John. Thrilled to be back again. Thank you. >> What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt. You're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called "The Art of Automation", which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and Hybrid Cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First give us a little background for the folks that may not know you, about your history with IBM and who you are. >> Yeah. So thanks John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM blockchain initiative and now all about AI powered automation. Which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, really enjoying the topic. >> It's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in Computer Science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering AKA now DevOps, DevSecOps, coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts. Whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position, you've been there done that, now you're on the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. That literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around and in its simplest form, automation whether it was back then, whether it was in the eighties or today it's about applying technology that uses technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us, humans. But now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, it's a sentence of two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills. And to use automation, to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. >> And it's interesting too, as a student of the history of the computer industry, as you are and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second. You're starting to see the intersection of these concerts and not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation. And it is the innovation, innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, jeez, look around us. The pandemic has made, transformation and specifically digital transformation, the default. So everything is digital. Whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine, or this zoom WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10 X more users, they can't hire 10 X more support staff. And think about it. I forgot my password, does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that that comes into play, which is just in time. So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this, businesses like cars have become computers. So they're programmable. So automation software just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla model three, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >> Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. And I was just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business you're implying, you said the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second. If it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, okay. Let's go in the old days you had a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, applications software construct. If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM will kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could, because they're not breaking system company. So if Hybrid Cloud is the system, edge, hybrid, then you got the application suite is all software for the business. >> That's right. That's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's Hybrid Cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. You mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is, is that automation sometimes gets stuck. It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. With that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI and its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and, and Hybrid Cloud Park. Well, think about it this way, when you shop, how many stores do you... You don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special catsup, I don't know or mustard. (audio cuts) In one store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google, involving search and AI related to search. And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. From that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy. They're going to be using Salesforce or Servicenow, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud. So when you think about automating that world, it's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud. The Hybrid Cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red hat really does. >> It's interesting. I'll just share with you though. When I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM when he was at Red Hat summit 2019 in San Francisco. Before he made the acquisition, I was peppering him with questions. Like, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling. He just wanted to say it, he wanted to just say it. And I think Red hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS of the middleware, which is now software which is software defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called "Art of Automation". We want to get that in there, for the folks watching. Search for the podcast, "Art of Automation". This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories, from this phenomena. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >> Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customer. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned, and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion, and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then, we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside. Starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation in healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them, about automation is not going to take the place of doctors. But automation will help better read x-rays and look at those shades of gray on the x-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for Cooperators, to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Akkiraju, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research. Talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code and all the modern programming languages. And really automating application modernization and the like. Four keyed episodes in, we have those under our belt. About 6,000 downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. >> The key is you're a content creator now, as well as a fellow. And this is the democratization, as we say direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an ebook. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug for the ebook. >> The book echoes the podcast. Chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. >> All right, Jerry Cuomo. IBM fellow VP, CTO, IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast "Art of Automation." Jerry, we're going to list it out on our Silicon angle and our cube sites, gets you some extra love on that. Love the podcast, love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john for a year host of the cube. We're virtual this year in real life. Soon, right around the corner as we come out of code, we've got a great guest cube alumni jerry, cuomo IBM fellow V P C T O for IBM automation jerry, Great to see you uh nonsense got almost since the early days of the cube. Good to see you, >>john thrilled to be back again. Thank you >>what I love about our conversations. One is your super technical, you've got patents under your belt during the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You constantly riding the wave and also your creator of a great podcast called the art of automation, which is the subject of this discussion as automation becomes central in cloud operations and hybrid cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry so great to see you. Uh First team is a little background for the folks that may not know you about your history with IBM and who you are. >>Yeah, so thanks john, So I'm I'm jerry Carrillo, I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet and I've been incredibly fortunate, as you mentioned to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades. Internet software middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of web sphere software, uh I recently helped launch the IBM Blockchain initiative and now all about aI powered automation, which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI and graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, you know, really you know, enjoying the topic. >>You know, these funny, you mentioned aI in graduate school, I was really kind of into a I when I was an undergraduate and get a masters degree in computer science, I kind of went the NBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you've got this confluence of computer science and engineering A. K A. Now devops sec cops coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts, whether it's A I and systems and computer science and engineering into the automation. Could you share your view on this because you're in a unique position, you've been there, done that now. You're on the cutting edge with your thoughts. >>Yeah, absolutely, john And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new, literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era. Right? So automation has been around and and in the simplest form automation, whether it was back then, um whether it was in the 80s or today, it's about applying technology and that that performs, that uses like technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us humans. Right? So, but now what we're seeing is a I coming into the picture and and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, you know, automation is this two step dance of both eliminating repetitive, mundane tasks. That helped reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, as I said, it's a two step dance, that's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills right? And and to use automation to help augment our skills and we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with a I automation is evolving with technology >>and it's interesting to its you know, as a student of the history of the computer industry as you are and now a creator with your podcast which we'll get to in a second, you're starting to see the intersection of these concepts are not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation. Digital, transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone but they work better together transformation. And is the innovation innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skill set into higher integrated areas. Can you share >>your john Yeah no right on there when you talk about transformation, jeez look around us, the pandemic has made transformation and specifically digital transformation the default so everything is digital. You know whether it's ordering a pizza, you know visiting a doctor through telemedicine or or this zoom webex based workplace that we live in. But picture of telemedicine environment right? Talking about transformation and going digital With 10 x more users. They can't hire 10 x more support staff and think about it I forgot my password. Um Does does this work on my version of the Apple iphone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks or lit up? Right. So uh as they scale digitally automation is the relief that that comes into play which is which is just in time. Right? So the digital transformation needs automation and john I think about it like this um businesses like cars are have become computers right? So they are programmable. So automation software just like in the cars it makes you know the car self driving? I think about the Tesla model three which I recently test drove. Um so with this digital acceleration digital opens the door for automation And now we can use about a self driving business. We can use about uh maybe that's step one, right? That's the um remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot so it doesn't eat us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate Digital is the peanut butter, automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >>You know, that's a really, that's a really interesting insight and I will just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self driving business, you're implying, you said the computer, the business is a computer. So if you just just think about that mind blowing concept for a second, if it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, Okay, let's go in the old days at a Windows machine and you had office, which is a system software, applications, software construct. Okay, If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red hat and IBM kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hackett because they're not bring system company. So if hybrid cloud is the system mm hybrid, then you got the applications suite is all software for the That's >>right. That's right. And if you, you know, if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands words, hybrid cloud and and think red hat as as, you know, kind of the core element of that with open shift in a I right. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the hybrid cloud and red hat thing in a second. Let's just talk about you know Watson and Ai, you know, which is the application and you mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. You know a I could help scale automation. And the trick is is that ai automation sometimes gets stuck right? It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. Right? So there's a lot of structured data in your organization and it it with that we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data unstructured noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what a I can start to do a I. And its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. Right? So that's that's the way I part you mentioned Red hat and and hybrid cloud part. We'll think about it this way. When you shop, how many stores do you don't just shop in one store? Right. You you go to specialty stores to pick up that special uh ketchup, I don't know or must store and maybe do shopping another store, customers using clouds john aren't very different. You know, they have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads and google involving search and a I related to search, right? And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. Right? So from that perspective, that's a view of hybrid, you know, customers today, you know, take that shopping analogy, they're going to be using sales force or service Now, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud, right? So, when you think about automating that world, All right. It's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud, right? So the hybrid cloud is a reality. Um and how do you make sense of a high of that? Right, Because when when an average customer has five clouds, How do you deal with five things? Right. How do you make it easy normalize? And that's what red hat really >>does. It's interesting. I just just share with you the and I interviewed Arvin um who is now the ceo of IBM when he was at Red Hat some in 2019 in SAn Francisco before he made the acquisition here that I was, I was peppered with questions like you know, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves clouds. So so he was smiling, he just wanted to say it, I wanted to just say it and I think Red Hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the Os >>yes of the middle >>where which is now software which is software to find business. And this kind of is the talk of your, your your views. Now you have a podcast called Art of automation. Want to get that in there for the folks watching uh search for the podcast, Art of automation. This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories from this phenomenon. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >>Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customers. So we're hearing from customers that Ai and automation is where they're investing in 2021. Um for all the reasons we briefly mentioned and and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made a I powered automation of priority but john in the pursuit of making it a priority. I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion and their stories. And I said we can't keep this to ourselves, we can't keep this locked away, we have to share it, we have to let it out. So, so basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside, starting with customers, we had claus Jensen who is the ceo of memorial clones Kettering hospital to talk about automation and health care. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them about. Automation is not going to take the place of doctors, but automation will help better read um x rays and look at those shades of gray on the X ray and interpret it much better than we can and be able to ingest all of the up to date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. Right. So the two working together or better than any individual carol Poulsen recently joined me to talk and she's the C. I. O. For cooperators to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories to uh so john with that a bunch of IBM great IBM fellows like Rama Agra jew, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research, talking about Ai ops and also Russia near pori talking and Russia has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching ai to code and all the modern programming languages and really automating application modernization and the like uh, 14 episodes in we have those under our belt, About 6000 downloads so far. So it's it's coming along pretty well. Thanks. >>Thanks for being done. Yeah. The key is your your content creator now as well as a fellow and this is the democratization, as we say, direct to audience, share those stories also here. And thank you released an e book. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug. >>The book echoes the podcast chapters relate to the, to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available um, and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts and uh I really, you know, suggest you go out and check it out. >>Alright, jerry, cuomo IBM fellow VPC T IBM automation um also a content creator podcast, art of automation, jerry. We're gonna lift it listed on our silicon angle and our cube sites. Get you some extra love on that. Love the podcast. Love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me again, john >>Okay. I'm John Fryer with the Cube here for IBM think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>on the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello and welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage Cube live here in Palo Alto, California, with the Virtual Cube this year because we can't be there in person. I'm your host, John Fairy year. We're kicking off Day two of the three weeks of reinvent a lot of great leadership sessions to review, obviously still buzzing from the Andy Jassy three. Our keynote, which had so many storylines, is really hard to impact. We're gonna dig that into into into that today with Jerry Chan, who has been a Cube alumni since the beginning of our AWS coverage. Going back to 2013, Jerry was wandering the hallways as a um, in between. You were in between vm ware and V C. And then we saw you there. You've been on the Cube every year at reinvent with us. So special commentary from you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, John, Thanks for having me and a belated happy birthday as well. If everyone out there John's birthday was yesterday. So and hardest. Howard's working man in technology he spent his entire birthday doing live coverage of Amazon re events. Happy birthday, buddy. >>Well, I love my work. I love doing this. And reinvent is the biggest event of the year because it really is. It's become a bellwether and eso super excited to have you on. We've had great conversations by looking back at our conversations over the Thanksgiving weekend. Jerry, the stuff we were talking about it was very proposed that Jassy is leaning in with this whole messaging around change and horizontal scalability. He didn't really say that, but he was saying you could disrupt in these industries and still use machine learning. This was some of the early conversations we were having on the Cube. Now fast forward, more mainstream than ever before. So big, big part of the theme there. >>Yeah, it z you Amazon reinvent Amazon evolution to your point, right, because it's both reinventing what countries are using with the cloud. But also what Amazon's done is is they're evolving year after year with their services. So they start a simple infrastructure, you know, s three and e c. Two. And now they're building basically a lot of what Andy said you actually deconstructed crm? Ah, lot of stuff they're doing around the call centers, almost going after Salesforce with kind of a deconstructed CRM services, which is super interesting. But the day you know, Amazon announces all those technologies, not to mention the AI stuff, the seminar stuff you have slack and inquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. So ah, lot of stuff going on in the cloud world these days, and it's funny part of it, >>you know, it really is interesting. You look up the slack acquisition by, um, by Salesforce. It's interesting, you know, That kind of takes slack out of the play here. I mean, they were doing really well again. Message board service turns into, um, or collaboration software. They hit the mainstream. They have great revenue. Is that going to really change the landscape of the industry for Salesforce? They've got to acquire it. It opens the door up from, or innovation. And it's funny you mention the contact Center because I was pressing Jassy on my exclusive one on one with him. Like they said, Andy, my my daughter and my sons, they don't use the phone. They're not gonna call. What's this? Is it a call center deal? And he goes, No, it's the It's about the contact. So think about that notion of the contact. It's not about the call center. It's the point of contact. Okay, Linked in is with Microsoft. You got slack and Salesforce Contact driven collaboration. Interesting kind of play for Microsoft to use voice and their data. What's your take on that? >>I think it's, um you know, I have this framework. As you know, I talked my friend systems of engagement over systems intelligence and systems record. Right? And so you could argue voice email slack because we're all different systems of engagement, and they sit on top of system of record like CRM customer support ticketing HR. Something like that. Now what sells first did by buying slack is they now own a system engagement, right? Not on Lee is slack. A system engagement for CRM, but also system engagement for E. R. P Service. Now is how you interact with a bunch of applications. And so if you think about sales for strategy in the space, compete against Marcus Soft or serves now or other large AARP's now they own slack of system engagement, that super powerful way to actually compete against rival SAS companies. Because if you own the layer engagement layer, you can now just intermediate what's in the background. Likewise, the context center its own voice. Email, chat messaging, right? You can just inter mediate this stuff in the back, and so they're trying to own the system engagement. And then, likewise, Facebook just bought that company customer a week ago for a billion dollars, which also Omni Channel support because it is chat messaging voice. It's again the system engagement between End User, which could be a customer or could be employees. >>You know, this really gonna make Cit's enterprise has been so much fun over the past 10 years, I gotta say, in the past five, you know, it's been even more fun, has become or the new fun area, you know, And the impact to enterprise has been interesting because and we're talking about just engaging system of record. This is now the new challenge for the enterprise. So I wanna get your thoughts, Jerry, because how you see the Sea, X O's and CSOs and the architects out there trying to reinvent the enterprise. Jassy saying Look and find the truth. Be on the right side of history here. Certainly he's got himself service interest there, but there is a true band eight with Cove it and with digital acceleration for the enterprise to change. Um, given all these new opportunities Thio, revolutionize or disrupt or radically improve, what's the C. C X's do? What's your take on? How do you see that? >>It's increasingly messy for the CXS, and I don't I don't envy them, right? Because back in the day they kind of controlled all the I t spend and kind of they had a standard of what technologies they use in the company. And then along came Amazon in cloud all of sudden, like your developers and Dio Hey, let me swipe my credit card and I'm gonna access to a bunch of a P I s around computing stories. Likewise. Now they could swipe the credit card and you strike for billing, right? There's a whole bunch of services now, so it becomes incumbent upon CSOs. They need Thio new set of management tools, right? So not only just like, um, security tools they need, they need also observe ability, tools, understanding what services are being used by the customers, when and how. And I would say the following John like CSOs is both a challenge for them. But I think if I was a C X, so I'll be pretty excited because now I have a bunch of other weapons and other bunch of services I could offer. My end users, my developers, my employees, my customers and, you know it's exciting for them is not only could they do different things, but they also changed how their business being done. And so I think both interact with their end users. Be a chat like slack or be a phone like a contact center or instagram for your for your for your kids. It's actually a new challenge if I were sick. So it's it's time to build again, you know, I think Cove it has said it is time to build again. You can build >>to kind of take that phrase from the movie Shawshank Redemption. Get busy building or get busy dying. Kinda rephrase it there. And that's kind of the theme I'm seeing here because covert kind of forced people saying, Look, this things like work at home. Who would have thought 100% people would be working at home? Who would have thought that now the workloads gonna change differently? So it's an opportunity to deconstruct or distant intermediate these services. And I think, you know, in all the trends that I've seen over my career, it's been those inflection points where breaking the monolith or breaking the proprietary piece of it has always been an opportunity for for entrepreneur. So you know, and and for companies, whether you're CEO or startup by decomposing and you can come in and create value E I think to me, snowflake going public on the back of Amazon. Basically, this is interesting. I mean, so you don't have to be. You could kill one feature and nail it and go big. >>I think we talked to the past like it's Amazon or Google or Microsoft Gonna win. Everything is winner take all winner take most, and you could argue that it's hard to find oxygen as a start up in a broad platform play. But we think Snowflake and other companies have done and comes like mongo DB, for example, elastic have shown that if you can pick a service or a problem space and either developed like I p. That's super deep or own developer audience. You can actually fight the big guys. The Big Three cloud vendors be Amazon, Google or or market soft in different markets. And I think if you're a startup founder, you should not be afraid of competing with the big cloud vendors because there there are success patterns and how you can win and you know and create a lot of value. So I have found Investor. I'm super excited by that because, you know, I don't think you're gonna find a company takedown Amazon completely because they're just the scale and the network effects is too large. But you can create a lot of value and build Valuable comes like snowflake in and around the Amazon. Google Microsoft Ecosystem. >>Yeah, I want to get your thoughts. You have one portfolio we've covered rock rock set, which does a lot of sequel. Um, one of your investments. Interesting part of the Kino yesterday was Andy Jassy kind of going after Microsoft saying Windows sequel server um, they're targeting that with this new, uh, tool, but, you know, sucks in the database of it is called the Babel Fish for Aurora for post Chris sequel. Um, well, how was your take on that? I mean, obviously Microsoft big. Their enterprise sales tactics are looking like more like Oracle, which he was kind of hinting at and commenting on. But sequel is Lingua Franca for data >>correct. I think we went to, like, kind of a no sequel phase, which was kind of a trendy thing for a while and that no sequel still around, not only sequel like mongo DB Document TV. Kind of that interface still holds true, but your point. The world speaks sequel. All your applications be sequel, right? So if you want backwards, compatibility to your applications speaks equal. If you want your tire installed base of employees that no sequel, we gotta speak sequel. So, Rock said, when the first public conversations about what they're building was on on the key with you and Me and vent hat, the founder. And what Rock said is doing their building real time. Snowflake Thio, Lack of better term. It's a real time sequel database in the cloud that's super elastic, just like Snowflake is. But unlike snowflake, which is a data warehouse mostly for dashboards and analytics. Rock set is like millisecond queries for real time applications, and so think of them is the evolution of where cloud databases air going is not only elastic like snowflake in the cloud like Snowflake. We're talking 10 15 millisecond queries versus one or two second queries, and I think what any Jassy did and Amazon with bowel officials say, Hey, Sequels, Legal frank of the cloud. There's a large installed base of sequel server developers out there and applications, and we're gonna use Babel fish to kind of move those applications from on premise the cloud or from old workload to the new workloads. And, I think, the name of the game. For for cloud vendors across the board, big and small startups thio Google markets, often Amazon is how do you reduce friction like, How do you reduce friction to try a new service to get your data in the cloud to move your data from one place to the next? And so you know, Amazon is trying to reduce friction by using Babel fish, and I think it is a great move by them. >>Yeah, by the way. Not only is it for Aurora Post Chris equal, they're also open sourcing it. So that's gonna be something that is gonna be interesting to play out. Because once they open source it essentially, that's an escape valve for locking. I mean, if you're a Microsoft customer, I mean, it ultimately is. Could be that Gateway drug. It's like it is ultimately like, Hey, if you don't like the licensing, come here. Now there's gonna be some questions on the translations. Um, Vince, um, scuttlebutt about that. But we'll see it's open source. We'll see what goes on. Um great stuff on on rocks that great. Great. Start up next. Next, uh, talk track I wanna get with you is You know, over the years, you know, we've talked about your history. We're gonna vm Where, uh, now being a venture capitalist. Successful, wanted Greylock. You've seen the waves, and I would call it the two ways pre cloud Early days of cloud. And now, with co vid, we're kind of in the, you know, not just born in the cloud Total cloud scale cloud operations. This is kind of what jazz he was going after. E think I tweeted Cloud is eating the world and on premise and the edges. What it's hungry for. It kind of goof on mark injuries since quote a software eating the world. This is where it's going. So it's a whole another chapter coming. You saw the pre cloud you saw Cloud. Now we've got basically global I t everything else >>It's cloud only I would say, You know, we saw pre cloud right the VM ware days and before that he called like, you know, data centers. I would say Amazon lawns of what, 6 4007, the Web services. So the past 14 15 years have been what I've been calling cloud transition, right? And so you had cos technologies that were either doing on migration from on premise and cloud or hybrid on premise off premise. And now you're seeing a generation of technologies and companies. Their cloud only John to your point. And so you could argue that this 15 year transitions were like, you know, Thio use a bad metaphor like amphibians. You're half in the water, half on land, you know, And like, you know, you're not You're not purely cloud. You're not purely on premise, but you can do both ways, and that's great. That's great, because that's a that's a dominant architecture today. But come just like rock set and snowflake, your cloud only right? They're born in the cloud, they're built on the cloud And now we're seeing a generation Startups and technology companies that are cloud only. And so, you know, unlike you have this transitionary evolution of like amphibians, land and sea. Now we have ah, no mammals, whatever that are Onley in the cloud Onley on land. And because of that, you can take advantage of a whole different set of constraints that are their cloud. Only that could build different services that you can't have going backwards. And so I think for 2021 forward, we're going to see a bunch of companies or cloud only, and they're gonna look very, very different than the previous set of companies the past 15 years. And as an investor, as you covering as analysts, is gonna be super interesting to see the difference. And if anything, the cloud only companies will accelerate the move of I t spending the move of mawr developers to the cloud because the cloud only technologies are gonna be so much more compelling than than the amphibians, if you will. >>Yeah, insisting to see your point. And you saw the news announcement had a ton of news, a ton of stage making right calls, kind of the democratization layer. We'll look at some of the insights that Amazon's getting just as the monster that they are in terms of size. The scope of what? Their observation spaces. They're seeing all these workloads. They have the Dev Ops guru. They launched that Dev Ops Guru thing I found interesting. They got data acquisition, right? So when you think about these new the new data paradigm with cloud on Lee, it opens up new things. Um, new patterns. Um, S o. I think I think to me. I think that's to me. I see where this notion of agility moves to a whole nother level, where it's it's not just moving fast, it's new capabilities. So how do you How do you see that happening? Because this is where I think the new generation is gonna come in and be like servers. Lambs. I like you guys actually provisioned E c. Two instances before I was servers on data centers. Now you got ec2. What? Lambda. So you're starting to see smaller compute? Um, new learnings, All these historical data insights feeding into the development process and to the application. >>I think it's interesting. So I think if you really want to take the next evolution, how do you make the cloud programmable for everybody? Right. And I think you mentioned stage maker machine learning data scientists, the sage maker user. The data scientists, for example, does not on provisioned containers and, you know, kodama files and understand communities, right? Like just like the developed today. Don't wanna rack servers like Oh, my God, Jerry, you had Iraq servers and data center and install VM ware. The generation beyond us doesn't want to think about the underlying infrastructure. You wanna think about it? How do you just program my app and program? The cloud writ large. And so I think where you can see going forward is two things. One people who call themselves developers. That definition has expanded the past 10, 15 years. It's on Lee growing, so everyone is gonna be developed right now from your white collar knowledge worker to your hard core infrastructure developer. But the populist developers expanding especially around machine learning and kind of the sage maker audience, for sure. And then what's gonna happen is, ah, law. This audience doesn't want to care about the stuff you just mentioned, John in terms of the online plumbing. So what Amazon Google on Azure will do is make that stuff easy, right? Or a starved could make it easy. And I think that the move towards land and services that moved specifically that don't think about the underlying plumbing. We're gonna make it easy for you. Just program your app and then either a startup, well, abstract away, all the all the underlying, um, infrastructure bits or the big three cloud vendors to say, you know, all this stuff would do in a serverless fashion. So I think serverless as, ah paradigm and have, quite frankly, a battlefront for the Big Three clouds and for startups is probably one in the front lines of the next generation. Whoever owns this kind of program will cloud model programming the Internet program. The cloud will be maybe the next platform the next 10 or 15 years. I still have two up for grabs. >>Yeah, I think that is so insightful. I think that's worth calling out. I think that's gonna be a multi year, um, effort. I mean, look at just how containers now, with ks anywhere and you've got the container Service of control plane built in, you got, you know, real time analytics coming in from rock set. And Amazon. You have pinned Pandora Panorama appliance that does machine learning and computer vision with sensors. I mean, this is just a whole new level of purpose built stuff software powered software operated. So you have this notion of Dev ops going to hand in the glove software and operations? Kind of. How do you operate this stuff? So I think the whole new next question was Okay, this is all great. But Amazon's always had this problem. It's just so hard. Like there's so much good stuff. Like, who do you hired operate it? It is not yet programmable. This has been a big problem for them. Your thoughts on that, >>um e think that the data illusion around Dev ops etcetera is the solution. So also that you're gonna have information from Amazon from startups. They're gonna automate a bunch of the operations. And so, you know, I'm involved to come to Kronos Fear that we talked about the past team kind of uber the Bilson called m three. That's basically next generation data dog. Next generation of visibility platform. They're gonna collect all the data from the applications. And once they have their your data, they're gonna know how to operate and automate scaling up, scaling down and the basic remediation for you. So you're going to see a bunch of tools, take the information from running your application infrastructure and automate exactly how to scale and manager your app. And so AI and machine learning where large John is gonna be, say, make a lot of plumbing go away or maybe not completely, but lets you scale better. So you, as a single system admin are used. A single SRE site reliability engineer can scale and manage a bigger application, and it's all gonna be around automation and and to your point, you said earlier, if you have the data, that's a powerful situations. Once have the data can build models on it and can start building solutions on the data. And so I think What happens is when Bill this program of cloud for for your, you know, broad development population automating all this stuff becomes important. So that's why I say service or this, You know, automation of infrastructure is the next battleground for the cloud because whoever does that for you is gonna be your virtualized back and virtualized data center virtualized SRE. And if whoever owns that, it's gonna be a very, very strategic position. >>Yeah, it's great stuff. This is back to the theme of this notion of virtualization is now gone beyond server virtualization. It's, you know, media virtualization with the Cube. My big joke here with the Q virtual. But it's to your point. It's everything can now be replicated in software and scale the cloud scale. So it's super big opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies. Thio, pivot and differentiate. Uh, the question I have for you next is on that thread Huge edge discussion going on, right. So, you know, I think I said it two years ago or three years ago. The data center is just a edges just a big fat edge. Jassy kind of said that in his keynote Hey, looks at that is just a Nedum point with his from his standpoint. But you have data center. You have re alleges you've got five G with wavelength. This local zone concept, which is, you know, Amazon in these metro areas reminds me the old wireless point of presence kind of vibe. And then you've got just purpose built devices like cameras and factory. So huge industrial innovation, robotics, meet software. I mean, whole huge edge development exploding, Which what's your view of this? And how do you look at that from? Is an investor in industry, >>I think edges both the opportunity for start ups and companies as well as a threat to Amazon, right to the reason why they have outposts and all the stuff the edges if you think about, you know, decentralizing your application and moving into the eggs from my wearable to my home to my car to my my city block edges access Super interesting. And so a couple things. One companies like Cloudflare Fastly company I'm involved with called Kato Networks that does. SAS is secure access service edge write their names and the edges In the category definition sassy is about How do you like get compute to the edge securely for your developers, for your customers, for your workers, for end users and what you know comes like Cloudflare and Kate have done is they built out a network of pops across the world, their their own infrastructure So they're not dependent upon. You know, the big cloud providers, the telco providers, you know, they're partnering with Big Cloud, their parting with the telcos. But they have their own kind of system, our own kind of platform to get to the edge. And so companies like Kato Networks in Cloud Player that have, ah, presence on the edge and their own infrastructure more or less, I think, are gonna be in a strategic position. And so Kate was seen benefits in the past year of Of of Cove it and locked down because more remote access more developers, Um, I think edge is gonna be a super great area development going forward. I think if you're Amazon, you're pushing to the edge aggressively without post. I think you're a developer startup. You know, creating your own infrastructure and riding this edge wave could be a great way to build a moat against a big cloud guy. So I'm super excited. You think edge in this whole idea of your own infrastructure. Like what Kato has done, it is gonna be super useful going forward. And you're going to see more and more companies. Um, spend the money to try to copy kind of, ah, Cloudflare Kato presence around the world. Because once you own your own kind of, um, infrastructure instead of pops and you're less depend upon them a cloud provider, you're you're in a good position because there's the Amazon outage last week and I think like twilio and a bunch of services went down for for a few hours. If you own your own set of pops, your independent that it is actually really, really secure >>if you and if they go down to the it's on you. But that was the kinesis outage that they had, uh, they before Thanksgiving. Um, yeah, that that's a problem. So on this on. So I guess the question for you on that is that Is it better to partner with Amazon or try to get a position on the edge? Have them either by you or computer, create value or coexist? How do you see that that strategy move. Do you coexist? Do you play with them? >>E think you have to co exist? I think that the partner coexist, right? I think like all things you compete with Amazon. Amazon is so broad that will be part of Amazon and you're gonna compete with and that's that's fair game, you know, like so Snowflake competes against red shift, but they also part of Amazon's. They're running Amazon. So I think if you're a startup trying to find the edge, you have to coexist in Amazon because they're so big. Big cloud, right, The Big three cloud Amazon, Google, Azure. They're not going anywhere. So if you're a startup founder, you definitely coexist. Leverage the good things of cloud. But then you gotta invest in your own edge. Both both figure early what? Your edge and literally the edge. Right. And I think you know you complement your edge presence be it the home, the car, the city block, the zip code with, you know, using Amazon strategically because Amazon is gonna help you get two different countries, different regions. You know you can't build a company without touching Amazon in some form of fashion these days. But if you're a star found or doing strategically, how use Amazon and picking how you differentiate is gonna be key. And if the differentiation might be small, John. But it could be super valuable, right? So maybe only 10 or 15%. But that could be ah Holton of value that you're building on top of it. >>Yeah, and there's a little bit of growth hack to with Amazon if you you know how it works. If you compete directly against the core building blocks like a C two has three, you're gonna get killed, right? They're gonna kill you if the the white space is interest. In the old days in Microsoft, you had a white space. They give it to you or they would roll you over and level you out. Amazon. If you're a customer and you're in a white space and do better than them, they're cool with that. They're like, basically like, Hey, if you could innovate on behalf of the customer, they let you do that as long as you have a big bill. Yeah. Snowflakes paying a lot of money to Amazon. Sure, but they also are doing a good job. So again, Amazon has been very clear on that. If you do a better job than us for, the customer will do it. But if they want Amazon Red Shift, they want Amazon Onley. They can choose that eso kind of the playbook. >>I think it is absolutely right, John is it sets from any jassy and that the Amazon culture of the customer comes first, right? And so whatever is best for the customer that's like their their mission statement. So whatever they do, they do for the customer. And if you build value for the customer and you're on top of Amazon, they'll be happy. You might compete with some Amazon services, which, no, the GM of that business may not be happy, but overall. Net Net. Amazon's getting a share of those dollars that you're that you're charging the customer getting a share of the value you're creating. They're happy, right? Because you know what? The line rising tide floats all the boats. So the Mork cloud usage is gonna only benefit the Big Three cloud providers Amazon, particularly because they're the biggest of the three. But more and more dollars go the cloud. If you're helping move more. Absolute cloud helping build more solutions in the cloud. Amazon is gonna be happy because they know that regardless of what you're doing, you will get a fraction of those dollars. Now, the key for a startup founder and what I'm looking for is how do we get mawr than you know? A sliver of the dollars. How to get a bigger slice of the pie, if you will. So I think edge and surveillance or two areas I'm thinking about because I think there are two areas where you can actually invest, own some I p owned some surface area and capture more of the value, um, to use a startup founder and, you know, are built last t to Amazon. >>Yeah. Great. Great thesis. Jerry has always been great. You've been with the Cube since the beginning on our first reinvented 2013. Um, and so we're now on our eighth year. Great to see your success. Great investment. You make your world class investor to great firm Greylock. Um great to have you on from your perspective. Final take on this year. What's your view of Jackie's keynote? Just in general, What's the vibe. What's the quick, um, soundbite >>from you? First, I'm so impressed and you can do you feel like a three Archy? No more or less by himself. Right then, that is, that is, um, that's a one man show, and I'm All of that is I don't think I could pull that off. Number one. Number two It's, um, the ability to for for Amazon to execute at so many different levels of stack from semiconductors. Right there, there there ai chips to high level services around healthcare solutions and legit solutions. It's amazing. So I would say both. I'm impressed by Amazon's ability. Thio go so broad up and down the stack. But also, I think the theme from From From Andy Jassy is like It's just acceleration. It's, you know now that we will have things unique to the cloud, and that could be just a I chips unique to the cloud or the services that are cloud only you're going to see a tipping point. We saw acceleration in the past 15 years, John. He called like this cloud transition. But you know, I think you know, we're talking about 2021 beyond you'll see a tipping point where now you can only get certain things in the cloud. Right? And that could be the underlying inference. Instances are training instances, the Amazons giving. So all of a sudden you as a founder or developer, says, Look, I guess so much more in the cloud there's there's no reason for me to do this hybrid thing. You know, Khyber is not gonna go away on Prem is not going away. But for sure. We're going to see, uh, increasing celebration off cloud only services. Um, our edge only services or things. They're only on functions that serve like serverless. That'll be defined the next 10 years of compute. And so that for you and I was gonna be a space and watch >>Jerry Chen always pleasure. Great insight. Great to have you on the Cube again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Congrats to you guys in the Cube. Seven years growing. It's amazing to see all the content put on. So you think it isn't? Just Last point is you see the growth of the curve growth curves of the cloud. I'd be curious Johnson, The growth curve of the cube content You know, I would say you guys are also going exponential as well. So super impressed with what you guys have dealt. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much. Cute. Virtual. We've been virtualized. Virtualization is coming here, or Cubans were not in person this year because of the pandemic. But we'll be hybrid soon as events come back. I'm John for a year. Host for AWS reinvent coverage with the Cube. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more coverage all day. Next three weeks. Stay with us from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of aws reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel >>and AWS. Welcome back here to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE I'm in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios here with the quarantine crew, doing the remote interviews during this time of COVID. Of course, we want to check in with all of our great esteemed guests and CUBE alumni. We're here with Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock. Jerry, great to see you, it's been a while. Hope you're sheltering in place, nice camera, nice set up you got there at home, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. I set up all the cameras are just for you. Everybody needs their quarantine hobbies, and for me, I kind of dust off the audio visual playbook and set this up, just for theCUBE interviews. But it's good to see you. Glad you and the family are healthy and sane as well. >> Yeah, and same to you. Let's just jump into it, obviously, COVID-19 has caused the virtualization trend, virtual everything. You're no stranger to virtualization, and VMware back in the day really changed the game on server virtualization, but the whole world's becoming virtual. And it's very interesting because now people are feeling, but we in the industry have been talking about inside the ropes for a long time, which is, the future is there, it's going to be about interactions online, software, cloud scale, these things just got accelerated, and the disruption, the change of behavior, Zoom fatigue, Webexing, all this stuff that's happening, people are kind of like, "Wow! This is the future." This is a real impact, and it's mainstream, everyone's feeling about business, to personal, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft had this quote recently that they've seen two decade's worth of digital acceleration and transformation in just two months, and I think what we've seen the past four months, John is all the kind of first order effects of virtualization events, not just infrastructure, but like virtualization meetings and people, telemedicine, telehealth, online education, delivery of food, all those trends are just accelerated. We're buying stuff on eCommerce, and Amazon, and Instacart before hand, that's just accelerated. We're moving towards virtualized events, online education, online healthcare, that's just accelerated. So I think we're seeing the first order effects of changing not only how we work, how we communicate, but how we shop, interact, and socialize, it compress two decades within two, three months. And so I think that's changing both how you and I interact and how we build relationships, also how companies interact with their customers, and how companies interact with employees. and it's been exciting time, because one, when there's disruption, there's opportunity, but two is giving guys like you and me a chance to kind of dust off or try new skills, and you and I are both figuring out how to exist and thrive in this role where we're now interacting in this virtualized world. >> And it's still the same game personal relationships. Content is now data. This is stuff that we've been preaching on theCUBE. You've been on many times talking about, I going to get your thoughts as a venture capitalist, whether you're making bets on the future for investments, you have a 10 year horizon, and roughly speaking average on VC deals, enterprises and customers who are building a cloud and data centers, they got to make new bets or double down on stuff they've been doing, or cancel stuff that they had going on, and refactoring. So I want to to get your thoughts on one, first on the VC side, how have you guys refactored your thinking, your meetings, and your bets? >> Yeah, so I would say, three areas, one is how we operate as a VC firm what's changed? Number two, I'll talk about what we're investing in what's good or bad, and thirdly is like, what I think changes for our portfolio companies and how startups think. So first and foremost obviously, we've gone all virtual too, with shelter-in-place, our entire team is now working remotely, working from home, but we're still open for business and we're looking to find new investments, we are investing aggressively right now, and we're just doing things over Zoom. And so we're either A, doing video calls as a partnership, or doing video calls with startups that we're meeting and founders, but I'll be honest, one thing I've done John, is I've turned off the screen more or less, I've done more phone calls because I find that a video call is great for the first or second meeting, but with a founder or executive you have relationship with, it's just really nice to actually, go on a virtual walk where me and the founder of both put AirPods or take the phone to walk outside and kind of have a conversation, that's a little of a higher bandwidth. So, I think how we're operating has changed a little bit, but to your point, is the same business, connecting with a person one-on-one, reading the market, reading the founder, and making a bet. So that hasn't changed. I think on the stuff we're investing in, like you said, all the trends around cloud and APIs and SaaS, that's accelerated. So all the trends around the new workplace, SaaS companies, collaboration, going cloud that's accelerated faster, so some of our companies like Cato Networks that does software defined, wide area networks plus cloud security that just accelerated there in this market called secure access serves edge. We've seen kind of a nice tailwind from that, more and more data is going to cloud so companies like Rockset, that's a database company that you had on theCUBE, they're going to see a benefit from that because more and more data is now in the cloud. Then finally for the founders we work with, the way to go to market, the way to sell like no one's flying around selling one-on-one anymore, you're not meeting a CSO, or the CIO over steak dinner, or you're not going to a conference anymore. So a lot of our companies are figuring out how to do more online sales, bottoms ups adoption, that could be an API, that could be open source, we're trying to find a couple more of our line of business entry to the company and sell that way, versus go to a conference or for one-on-one meeting. So it's interesting, everything's moved faster, but then this slight curve ball on how you connect with your customer has changed. And so what's the Darwin line, it's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. So we're seeing the companies that founders that are most adaptable right now, they're going to thrive. >> It's interesting, we've always talked about from a tech standpoint with DevOps and cloud-native, integration or horizontally scalable has been that ethos of value creation, you've talked about moats in the past, but now it's more real life, is becoming immersed into software, and so I want to get your thoughts on this, and we have a phrase here in theCUBE team is that, every company will become a media company, that's something that we believe in, and you starting to see that people are doing more Zooms, doing more digital events, you mentioned some of the other things. Can you see any other examples where a company has to become blank? Because media is just one element of the new realities of life, right? You got to broadcast, and you got to share your stories and formats, that's media, is there other areas we're seeing, that things that weren't on the radar before with COVID, where companies have to become something like, every company will be blank? Fill in the blank. >> I would say, it's trite to say one, one, was every company is a data company, people have been saying that for a while, that's more true than ever. Number two, I'll be honest, every company now is a healthcare company, right? Because be it in health insurance for employees, the current pandemic is making the reality of both physical health, and emotional health, and mental health key for employees. And so if that was a top cost factor for hiring employees, this could be even more important going forward that every company is a health care company. And thirdly, like you said, every company becomes media company, I would say every company is also either one or two things, they're a Fintech company, because every company is now going online with their content. They wanting to create a one-to-one commercial relationship with a customer, right? That could be ads, could be transaction, could be selling something, so you're now doing business directly with your customer, so every company is a Fintech company, and I would say every company's now also, like you said, content company, right? It's the media creating, but also the data you're taking, the value you add on top of the data you're creating, and then how you share that back to your customer. So you as an enterprise company or a consumer company, you collect data from users, you're to use that data to improve your product, and this could be a SaaS offering, this could be an application, but then take that data through real time analytics, then make your product better and so because of that, if you're a data company, real time data, like our database company mentioned earlier, Rockset becomes more important. If you're a Fintech company, so all things around payments or commercial banking and relationship with your customer make sense. And if a you're a healthcare company because all your employees are now caring about healthcare, just thinking about how to make communication of healthcare with employees a lot more efficient, and a part of the reason why to work for theCUBE and work for a startup is important, so I think those three things are top of mind for all employees and all employers. I think things could change the next six or nine months, but right now I see those three being front and center. >> It's interesting. I wonder if you can add real estate company to that because if you look at the work from home, it's dynamic. >> Yeah >> I had a friend who was a fellow dad with my son's lacrosse team, he lives in Los Gatos, he's been involved in Google, Tesla, building up their facilities, and he had an interesting guest post on SiliconANGLE, and he was saying, it's not just give them some extra pay for their internet access, companies got to rethink the facilities question, right? Because do you pay rent for your employees? Do you provide the VPN, beyond VPN security, for instance? So again, you start to see these new opportunities or challenges, open up new thinking, this is going to be a wave of opportunity. >> Well, that virtualization between work and home has now been blurred like you said earlier, John and so if you're a technology company that enables remote access or distribute access, like Cato Networks when the portfolio comes and Greylock around our road office, home office, that is now how to right? So I had this conversation with Jason of Austin, askSpoke, one of our companies, there's like a mass of hierarchy for working out, and at the base of the mass of hierarchy is like good internet access, right? That's the how to, you need security, right? Because if you don't have secure access, you can't work, and then you have information management, knowledge management, how to communicate, right? And then collaboration, so, you have now this new hierarchy of what is required you to work in this new world, but also the tools and the technologies, be it secured access service edge like CATO or IT Helpdesk for all employees like askSpoke, both of those things become dial tone for any remote work. Just like videoconferencing, we couldn't do this in the same way, 10, 15 years ago, that's become kind of a must have, and so I think it'd be fascinating how we went from the office world where I gave you a laptop, or a computer, or a desk to this home office world, where maybe you now I have to pay for my fancy camera setup and my VPN. >> Well certainly you're getting good ROI on your setup and sure Greylock will take care of that plenty of dough big, billions of dollars under management. And by the way, must have hire things in our houses, ping and internet access, so we fight for that ping time, I got 12 I'm like what's going on? Who's gaming? We have to get the kids off of Twitch, and whatnot. but in all seriousness, this is what the reality is. So now for the average person out there, there's a lot of discussion around mental health, you mentioned taking it off the video conferencing and going for a walk, or just talking on the phone, this speaks to the humanization aspect of what's going on, mental health, social interaction, we're social creatures, collaboration has to be re-imagined. What's your view on all this? >> I think absolutely, look, humans are social creatures by nature, and I think part of the reason why I had this conversation with my founders early during COVID-19, that it's both a healthcare crisis. It's an economic crisis with all the million and millions of people unemployed, but it's also an emotional crisis because one, we're not connected to family, friends, and loved ones, and we're sheltering home with either ourselves or just a handful of people. And so we're trying to figure out ways to like, recreate social connections, and that's a phone call, it's a video call, it's Zoom dinners, it's Zoom dinners, the Zoom parties, is key. I think, going on socially just in walks is another thing to kind of like, play and experience things together. But my two cents is if you're a startup, right now, it can help connect people work-wise or socially, that's just going to be super critical for the new experience. And I think people are discovering new ways to use technology, so Zoom was never meant to be used the way it is today, I think that's amazing. I think how people think about voice video, and email, and chat are changing as well. So I'll finding new ways to like, play games online with my nieces, or communicate with them. And I think as an employer in these companies, like HR software, and how you like manage, and coach, and lead your employees is going to change as well. And so, you have this world where we're all in one building, and think about how you as a CEO, or as a leader now can actually coach, develop, and enable your employees across the world. >> I want to get your thoughts on cloud, we've had many conversations around cloud computing as to rise of AWS, I remember one it was a big Twitter conversation, I think about last year where what enabled Amazon and I think one of the things that came out of it was virtualization enabled them to have all these different servers. What do you see coming out of this virtualization of our lives with the COVID-19, as people start to figure out beyond the triage of stabilization, and as they get foundationally set up in COVID, coming out of it, companies and people have to have a growth strategy, whether it's life or business, people want to come out of this on the upside, whether it's emotional or with their business, what do you see being enabled? What needs to be in place? What kind of scale? What kind of environment? Because this is where I think the entrepreneurs are really going to sharpen their energy on their creativities looking at the expectations and experience needed coming out of this, it may look completely different than what we were talking about a year ago. What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think individually, people can use this time to prove their skills in different ways. So I think as an employee, as CEO, as a founder, you take the time to like invest in new skills, and that could be, "Hey, how do our community collaborate and manage my team remotely?" So I think CEOs and founders that can understand how to motivate, educate, train their employees in this new world, well, those are skills going forward. So communication has always been a great skill John, for any leader, any founder, it's 10X more important in this new virtualized work role, communication, motivation, and leading people over remote work is going to be a new skill that people have. Managing remote teams, managing fully distributed teams or half distributed, half headquarters, so understanding how to organize and lead your team in this kind of half in the office half out of the office role, that's going to be a challenge as well. So any tools, technology and tips there, but I think in terms of the founders that can now hire employees, find customers, sell customers, and manage a distributed team, those three things in this new world, even post COVID-19, we're not going back to the way we were, so the ability to actually use skills around email, creating content, Slack, Zoom, video chat, online conferences, what was that? "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first MTV Video. So, COVID-19, and Zoom, and video collaboration, what's that do to the old skills or the old founders? And what do they enable? So just like TV replaced radio as a medium, and now this virtualized world is going to replace kind of the medium we had beforehand, so, there'll be new generation of founders and investors coming out of this generation that would be for the next 10, 15 years, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Yeah, and it's super big opportunity, because you have these kind of medium changes, new protocols get developed, new responsibilities and roles emerge, value creation capture, equations change, right? So you're looking at things like online events, for instance, they don't happen anymore, and even when they do come back they'll probably be hybrid anyway. So you got virtual, hybrid, public it sounds like a cloud play to me, public events, hybrid events, and private events, I guess. >> Yeah, virtual private events, but the same thing holds, just like cloud internet increased the reach, right? So all of a sudden, you can reach a bigger audience than just radio, TV, or the newspaper. Now you have these virtualized events like say private events, public events, hybrid events, you as a company or a media property, like theCUBE can now reach a larger audience, right? It's global, you don't have to be there in person, you're going to have the remote audience as a first class citizen, now more than ever, it's just like the internet replacing newspaper and print, people really care about print and newspaper, but really the reach online is always a magnitude larger than print, so all of a sudden you thought more about the print, so the online audience more than print audience. So now going forward, you're going to think about the virtual audience that's remote versus the physical audience. And so you're going to have to create experiences that are their world class or both properties. So just like the cloud, you think about the big three cloud providers, private cloud, as a technology company, you think about all three venues, all three infrastructures as a first class citizen. It's not going to be all one cloud, it's not all going to be one note, if you will. So it forces everyone to think, not just kind of one path, but multiple paths, so like classic problems a lot of founders think, okay, I'm going to do an enterprise private cloud strategy only or I'm going to do a cloud only SaaS strategy. Now founders of this do both the same time, I got to address the private cloud on premise business at the same time as the cloud business, and not just one cloud, three or four clouds around the world. So it forces founders to be able to do more things at one time and the ability for a company to attack multiple venues or multiple territories at the same time, they'll be successful. And the days where I can just do one cloud or one venue, or one audience, those are gone, and so, folks like yourself, John, and what you've built here at theCUBE with everyone else, they can reach multiple audiences at the same time, that's going to be very powerful. >> And we're going to be marketing and doing a lot more online events, like you said, it's going to be easier to tap into our 7000 plus alumni to get people together to create great content. And again, content value to remote audience is interesting. So that shifts into the conversation that everyone talks about the remote worker. Well, what about the remote customer, the remote prospects? So this is going to change how companies have to be change of behaviors. And it's going to be driven by developers, because it's not like one app can solve it, 'cause you got to integrate, you got to have some integration points. So this is the question, are we moving away from that monolithic SaaS app? Or is it going to be some SaaS apps that need to integrate with others? Will there be an abstraction layer of innovation around? Because at the end of the day, these new workloads and new apps going to be built. If you're going to run an event, if I'm a SAP or a big company, I'm not going to rely or may not want to rely on a vendor. In fact, the CEO of SAP said, 'cause their site crashed for their event, "I'm not going to rely on a third party to run my business event." 'Cause their business model is the event, not just a supplier selection for a SaaS app. So interesting kind of new surge of online activity might tip the scales for the supplier side. >> I think you're right John, I think because now the, just like the IT technology is now your business, you're going to basically do one or two things, one, vet the IT technology provider that much higher or harder. But number two to your point, I think the way you sell and you reach companies is going to be through developers and yes, you're going to have these large monolithic SaaS apps before, but almost every SaaS app now has APIs for integration, and so to your point, is that integration and the ability to have multiple companies work together, and share data, and collaborate, that's going to be more important. And so really at Greylock and myself, I've been investing in developer-led technologies and developer-led adoption, or API, or open source-led adoption, for seven plus years now. And the truth of matter is, that's going to be even more powerful going forward. Nassim Taleb would say that's anti-fragile, right? So having one giant app is fragile, but having a bunch of small apps, or a bunch of APIs, or a bunch of developers using your open source technology, or using your API technology to build an application, that's anti-fragile, because at the end of the day, that's going to be more reliable for your customer than a single point of failure, which can be one giant application. So all the big apps like Salesforce, have now other platforms, right? They have APIs, they have extensibility, they understand that there's a long fat tail of solutions needed to build. And all the new startups are doing open source, or API-led adoption 'cause they understand that the fastest route to create value for the customer, is also the most robust technology stack that a customer can build upon. I think that's super insightful, in fact, that is, I think so compelling, because if you think about it, that's the formula for great investments from a startup standpoint. But now, because of COVID, you said, everything's been pulled forward and accelerated at the same time, there's a collision, not all the enterprises are that strong, they're not that developer-led. So I think, to the point about acceleration, now, the enterprises, and we've seen pockets of this with cybersecurity where they have their own, in-house teams doing a variety of different development. The customers have to be developer-led, because that's where the value is, so they have to have a supplier with the right stack and integration frameworks. Now, the customers who haven't really been developer-led, have to be developer-led, what's your take on that? >> Absolutely true. 20 years ago, the CIO of a company that used to be the monopoly supplier technology for the company, they decided what hardware to use, what servers, what stores to use, what applications to buy. And then all of a sudden, like Amazon came around and said, "Well, look, here's a set of APIs, go build what you want." And so the competition for kind of like the centralized decision making became Amazon. And guess what? CIOs reacted, they got better, they got smarter, and those that embrace kind of like an API developer-led adoption, became the CIOs you wanted to have in the company. So I think, CIOs in this cloud mobile era have adopted that philosophy that, look, my job now as the CIO is to enable my developers, my employees, which really the assets of the company is the people, to have the right tools. So you're asked a bunch of cloud APIs, like Rockset or whatever for data, or here's a bunch of resources, or open source technologies for you to pull. So like I invested in a company recently called Chronosphere, it's an open source technology around metrics and monitoring. So, "Hey, use this open source time series database for monitoring your cloud and build upon that," and they're not going to say, "We're going to pick one large vendor that's monolithic," we're going to say, "Here's an open source tech company or a cloud API, go build upon that." And the companies that are embracing that philosophy of API-led or developer-led, John, they're going to be far ahead the better CIOs, the better companies, because the rate of digital adoption has just gone exponential, so we were on this super fast path already, and with quarantine in COVID, we've accelerated all that digital transformation, so every brick-and-mortar retailer now has to be eCommerce retailer. So they're making a slow digital transformation to go from brick-and-mortar stores to online stores. Now like brick-and-mortar retail is pretty much not happening, and probably won't come back to the same levels for a while, they need to accelerate their move towards digital transformation, right? >> And IT certainly exposes the people who haven't really made those investments, because literally action and the mandate, now take action, make those changes, totally want to dig into this developer-led vision, because I think that's very real. And the new decision is going to be made on what to do. I'm happy to see the DevOps thinking, the agile, speed become the table stakes. So with that, this week, Google is having their nine-week digital event of 200 plus sessions, essentially, an asynchronous event, it's going to be sprinkled out, they've kind of pretty much released the videos, most of them today. Over the next eight, nine weeks, you're going to see a lot of videos. Google, one of the big three got AWS, Azure, Google, what's your assessment of the horses on the track relative to the cloud? >> I've been talking about this for seven, eight, nine years, I first met it, like in the first or second Amazon reinvent and what was the forecast? And we said, well, it's not a winner take all, but right now, it's a winner take most. Amazon's clearly the market share leader, Azure coming up quickly behind the enterprise, Google's a third but they're doing some smart things around technology. Google announced a bunch of things today, which I think are very smart. So for example, they announced BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery that's in query, their kind of a data warehouse, also query data and private cloud Azure or Amazon. And so strategically, if you're the number three player, you're going to push a multi-cloud agenda with BigQuery Omni, or Google Anthos, which is kind of a multi-cloud platform. And for Google, I think is the right strategy. I also think it's the right strategy for most customers to be multi-cloud, because you can't be dependent upon, a single point of failure in your applications. You can't be dependent on a single cloud as well. So I think multi-cloud is probably the direction we're headed as cloud matures. And I think Google's making a bunch of the right choices around embracing multi-cloud, and today they made that choice with BigQuery Omni, and so I think they're playing catch up but they're playing that game. I think Amazon's clue is still in the lead and still it blows my mind, and it's continuing to impress me what they've done over the past 10 years in terms of improving the cloud offering and the cloud services up and down the stack, and I think the past five, six years, what Azure has done, has been super impressive in terms of, Microsoft embracing, open source embracing, cloud as an ethos against their legacy business of operating systems and servers on premise, they've done a great job of embracing the next generation. But I do think, looking around the corner this new developer-led mindset is going to matter, right? So the cloud tomorrow will be APIs, like Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication. So I see the next evolution not just being VMs and containers, but also a bunch of cloud services around data, security, and privacy. And the cloud vendors can build this next generation of database APIs, or privacy APIs, security APIs, that they're going to be in the catbird seat for the next 10 years of applications are going to be built. >> And it'll be interesting to your developer-led position, our conversation around that, if the developer is going to be leading, is it going to be an abstraction layer across multiple clouds? Or do I have to have my Google developers, and my Amazon developers, and my Azure developers? How do you see that playing out? Because I do believe developer-led is the way, the question is, how do you avoid forking resources, right? So you might want to have an (mumbles) I get that, but if I'm going to go double down on say, a cloud, I'm going to go deep, I'm going to hire developers. >> It's interesting, history suggests you have multiple teams remember, we used to have a Unix team or a Sun team inside companies, right? You had a Windows team, you had a kind of a Solaris and Linux team, and there's a Microsoft team, and a non-Microsoft team, in most companies and they didn't really work well together and they had kind of two groups in most companies. I think that was an okay way to get started, but ultimately, to your point, that was not cost effective at all, it was defeating, you see now you had to like have to rethink it, what was my data backup strategy? Okay, I have a Windows backup strategy, and a Unix Solaris backup strategy. So I think we're not going to make the same mistake again, right? I think what will happen, we'll going to have multiple clouds, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then on premise private cloud, so call it, three, four, or five clouds. And then you're going to have a set of tools that can abstract away, not 100% of the clouds, but I think the best developer tools, the best APIs will be multi-cloud. So I can get 80% or 90% of what I want to be done through this developer-led layer of APIs, be it databases or analytics. And then, 10 to 20% of the code, you can write will be able to take care of what's unique to Amazon, what's unique to Azure, what's unique to Google or what's unique to your own private cloud. But I think we're seeing a layer of technology and that's true to all the startups. With back and true to all the startups I see that lets you get most of the way done with a single platform, seamlessly AI technologies, and that's what customers want, right? They don't want to create modal fiefdoms, they want-- >> They want choice. The want choice, but the reality is they don't always get it. I want to go through a throwback to 2010 when Paul Maritz, head of the VMware our first CUBE gig, he said, there's a hardened top. Okay, the hardened top was, you don't worry about what's underneath the top, we're just going to focus on top of the stack that was classic kind of, the stack would develop and you'd had standardization. You mentioned you had Windows teams and Unix teams, but also you could argue that, back then you had Cisco and Wellfleet vendors, but you didn't have two teams of routers, you had one standard that ran the remote interoperability, and OSPF routing, or whatever you had going on, so you had some standardization, how do you view that? Because you want some standardization to have the interoperability, the SLAs and the security, at the same time you want to have flexibility, kind of above what may be called a hardened top, is there a hardened top in multi-cloud? >> I'd say hard top doesn't exist in same way. I think back in the day, you had proprietary technologies, operating systems and firmware, right? So windows was closed, a lot of the network operating systems were closed source. Now you can't get away with that. So you have open source technologies today and public APIs. And so the pressure of both one, competition, two, public APIs that people can read, copy, adjust, three, open source, and it's just customer demand not to be locked into a hard top anymore, that's largely going to go away. So I think most of the major vendors success will try to kind of more or less lock you in and keep you stuck on their platform, their technology, and that's fine, right? Every successful company should be able to do that. But I think the ability to lock you in through proprietary software or operating systems, that's not going to happen anymore. I see through cloud and open source, what we've seen is kind of interoperability, and flexibility is the default, if you can't meet those needs, customers will go other ways. There'll be proprietary technologies, proprietary extensions along the way, but 60, 70% of what you want is going to be compatible with most technologies and most clouds. If you're not going to offer choice and freedom to our customers, they'll go elsewhere. If you don't offer a flexible solution, John, someone else will, and the customers will choose a more flexible solution. >> I would agree with you. Outside of latency, which is laws of physics, value is the lock in, if you're creating value, that's really what the customers want, they get to capture that value. Well, Jerry, great to have you on. I love the new setup. We're going to have to make this more of it. We can bring you in on the podcast when we get Zooms over the weekend, maybe put a panel together. Let's get Carl Eschenbach some VMware alarms to come on, give the perspective, what's going on. And I thank you for taking the time and great to see that you're healthy and doing well. Thanks. >> Me too. Thanks, john. Anytime, I love to be on theCUBE, so I look forward to my next trip. >> All right, Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, our first interview over nine years ago, he brought that up. That was at the second reinvent, boy has the world changed, and it's only going to accelerate even faster. Everything's changing new bets are being made, decisions have to be evolving quickly and faster. If you're not fast, you will be in the pile of dead companies and not making it. So, Jerry Chen breaking it down as venture capitalist for Greylock. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. Everybody we're back. This is Dave Vellante the cube, and this is our wall-to-wall coverage, IBM's digital thing experienced for 2020. We're really excited to have Jerry Cuomo on. He's the, uh, vice president of blockchain technologies and an IBM fellow and longtime cube alum. Jerry, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on and wish we were face to face, but yeah, this'll do. Good to see you too. Yes, thanks for having me. So we've been talking a lot of and talking to, I've been running a CEO series a, of course, a lot of the interviews around, uh, IBM think are focused on, on COBIT 19. But I wonder if you could start off by just talking a little bit about, you know, blockchain, why blockchain, why now, especially in the context of this pandemic. >>David's, it's as if we've been working out in the gym, but not knowing why we needed to be fixed. And I know now why we need to be fit. You know, blockchain is coming just in time. Mmm. You know, with the trust factor and the preserving privacy factor. Okay. The way we move forward the world is now becoming more digital than ever people working from home. Um, the reliance and online services is, that's critical. our ability to work as a community accompanies companies. The shared data is critical. you know, blockchain brings a magical ingredient and that's the ingredient of trust, you know, in sharing data. Okay. When, if that data and the sources that are providing that data arc okay. From verified and trusted, we're more likely to use that data and you the, any friction that's caused for fear of trepidation that the data is going to be misused. >>Mmm. It goes start to go away. And when that happens, you speed up an exchange and we need speed. Time is of the essence. So blockchain brings a platform for trusted data exchange while preserving privacy. And that provides a foundation. I can do some amazing things in this time of crisis, right? Yeah. And it's, it's not only trust, it's also expediency and you know, cutting out a lot of the red tape. And I want to talk about some of the applications. You're heavily involved in that in the distributed ledger, a project, you know, one of the early leads on that. Um, talk about some of the ways in which you're flying that distributed a ledger. And let's go into some of the examples. So we're, we're really fortunate to be an early adopter blockchain and, and provider of blockchain technology and kind of the fruit of that. >>Um, as I said, it couldn't happen any sooner where we have, Mmm, I would say over a thousand, alright. Users using IBM blockchain, which is powered by the opensource Hyperledger fabric, I'd say over a hundred of those users, um, have reached a level of production networks. you know, it's been great to see some of the proprietors of those networks now repurpose the networks towards hastening the relief of, uh, and one, a couple of examples that stand out, Dave. Mmm. You've seen what's happening to our supply chain. And then I think we got some rebound happening as we speak, but companies all of a sudden woke up one morning and their supply chains were, I'm exhausted. So suppliers, we're out of key goods and the buyers needed very rapidly to expand. They're, the supplier is in their, in their supply chain. there are laws and regulations about what it takes to onboard a new supplier. >>You want to make sure you're not onboarding bad actors. So in IBM for example, we have over 20,000 suppliers to our business and it takes 30 to 40 days who, uh, validate and verify one of those suppliers. We don't have 30 to 45 days, you know, think about you're a healthcare company or a food company. So working with a partner called Jane yard, uh, co-created a network called trust yourself buyer. And we've been able to repurpose, trust your supplier now or companies that are looking, you know, around Kobe 19 to rapidly okay, expand, you know, their, their supply chain. So if you imagine that taking us 45 days or 40 days to onboard a new supplier, okay. Pick, pick a company in our supply chain, Lenovo, that supplier may very well want to go to Lenovo to and provide services to them. Well guess what, it's going to take 40 days, the onboard to Lenovo. >>But if they're part of the trust or supplier network and they've already onboarded to IBM, they're well on their way. You're being visible to all of these other buyers that are part of the IBM network, like Lenovo and many others. And instead of taking 40 days, maybe it only takes five days. All right. So radically, radically, you know, improving the time it takes them. You know, with companies like Ford making ventilators and masks, it will kind of be able to onboard Ford into, you know, health care, uh, companies. But you know, we want to be able to do it with speed. So trust your supplier is a great use of blockchain. Two, expand a buyer and suppliers. Mmm. Exposure. Mmm. And they expand their network to quickly onboard. And you know, with the trust that you get an exchanging data from blockchain with the Mmm provenance, that Hey, this company information was truly vetted by one of the trusted members of the network. >>There's no fee or trepidation that somehow these records were tampered with or, or misused. So that's one example they have of using blockchain. That's a huge, uh, example that you gave because you're right, there are thousands and thousands of companies that are pivoting to making, like you said, ventilators and masks and yeah, they're moving so fast and there's gotta be a trust involved. On the one hand, they're moving fast to try to save their businesses or you know, in the case of Ford, you help save the, the country or the world. On the other hand, you know, there's risks there. So that, that helps. I want to understand me. Pasa basically is, if I understand it, you can privately share, uh, information on folks that are asymptomatic but might be carriers of covert 19. Am I getting that right on? Okay. So me Pasa starts as a project, uh, from a company called has Sarah and their CEO Jonathan Levy. >>And among other things, Jonathan Levy is an amazing, uh, software developer and he's helped us and the community at large, bill, the Hyperledger fabric, uh, blockchain technology, that's part of IBM. Mmm. The power is IBM blockchain. So Jonathan, I have this idea because w what was happening is there were many, many data sources, you know, from the very popular and well known, uh, Johns Hopkins source. And we have information coming from the weather company. There are other governments, um, putting out data. Jonathan had this, this idea of a verified Mmm. Data hub, right? So how do we kind of bring that information together in a hub where a developer can now to get access to not just one feed, but many feeds knowing that both the data is an a normalized format. So that's easy to consume. And like if you're consuming 10 different data sources, you don't have to think about 10 different ways to interact it. >>No kind of normalizing it through a fewer, like maybe one, but also that we really authentically know that this is the world health organization. This is indeed John Hopkins. So we have that trust. So, okay. Yeah. With me, Pasa being I'm a data hub four, uh, information verified information related to the Kronos virus, really laying a foundation now for a new class of applications that can mash up information to create new insights, perhaps applying Mmm. Artificial intelligence machine learning to really look not just at any one of those, uh, data sources, but now look across data sources, um, and start to make some informed decisions. No, I have to say operate with the lights on, uh, and with certainty that the information is correct. So me Pasa is that foundation and we have a call for code happening that IBM is hosting for developers to come out and okay. Bring their best ideas forward and X for exposing me Pasa as a service to the, in this hackathon so that developers can bring some of their best ideas and kind of help those best ideas come alive with me. Me has a resource. >>That's great. So we've got two, we got the supply chain, we just need to share the Pasa. There's the other one then I think we can all relate to is the secure key authentication, >>which I love. >>Uh, maybe you can explain that and talk about the role that blockchain >>we're launching fits, right. So you know, there is people working from home and digital identity verification. It is key. You know, think about it. You're working remotely, you're using tools like zoom. Um, there's a huge spike in calls and online requests from tele-health or government benefits programs. Yeah. So this is all happening. Everything behind the scenes is, yeah. Around that is, is this user who they say they are, is this doctor who they say they are, et cetera. And there are scams and frauds out there. So working with speed, it means working with certainty. and with the verified me networks set out to do a couple of years ago and the beautiful part is, you know, it's ready to go now for this, for this particular usage it's been using. Mmm. Basically think about it as my identity is my identity and I get to lease out information too different institutions to use it for my benefit, not necessarily just for their benefit. >>So it's almost like digital rights management. Like if you put out a digital piece of art or music, you can control the rights. Who gets to use it? What's the terms and conditions, um, on, on your terms? So verified me, um, allows through a mobile app users to invite institutions who represent them, verify them. No. And so I'll allow my department of motor vehicle and my employer, Mmm. Two to verify me, right? Because I want to go back to work sooner. I want to make sure my work environment, um, I'm making this up. I want to make sure my work environment, the people have been tested and vaccinated, but I don't want to necessarily, you know, kind of abuse people's privacy. Right? So I'll opt in, I'll share that information. I'll get my, my doctor and my, uh, department of motor vehicle to say, yes, this is Gary. >>He's from this address. Yes, he has been vaccinated and now I can kind of onboard to services as much quicker whether that service is going through TSA. Do you get on an airplane badging back into my office or you know, signing on to a, you know, telemedicine, a service or government, a benefits program, et cetera. So verify me is using the self, uh, at the station through a mobile application to help speed up the process of knowing that that is truly you and you truly want this service. Uh, and you are also calling the shots as to that. What happens with your information that, you know, it's not spread all over the interweb it's under your control at all time. Right. So I think it's the best of all worlds. The national Institute for standards and technology looked at, verified me. They're like, Oh my gosh, this is like the perfect storm of goodness for identity. >>They actually appointed, yeah, it has a term, it's called triple blind data exchange. It sounds like a magical act. A triple blind data exchange means the requester. Mmm. Doesn't know who the provider is and less know the requester. Um, allows the provider to know, Mmm, the provider doesn't know who the requester requested, doesn't know who the prior provider is that is double-blind. And then the network provider doesn't know either. Right. But somehow across disformed and that's the magic of blockchain. I'm allowing that to happen and with that we can move forward knowing we're sharing information where it matters without the risk of it leaking out to places we don't want to do. So great application of secure key and verified me. Yeah, I love that. Then the whole concept of being able to control your own data. You hear so much today about, you know, testing and in contact tracing using mobile technology to do that. >>But big privacy concerns. I've always felt like, you know, blockchain for so many applications in healthcare or just being able to, as you say, control your own data. I want to better understand the technology behind this. When I think about blockchain, Mmm. I obviously you don't think about it. Cryptography, you've mentioned developers a number of times. There's software engineering. Yeah. Distributed ledger. Um, I mean there's, there's game theory in the, in the, in the cryptocurrency world, we're not talking about that, but there's the confluence of these technologies coming to them. What's the technology underneath these, these applications? Talking about it there, there is an open source, an organization called Hyperledger. It's part of the Linux foundation. They're the gold standard and open source, openly governed, Mmm. Technology you know, early on in 2018 yep. 18, 26. I mean, we got involved, started contributing code and developers. >>Two Hyperledger fabric, which is the industry's first permissioned blockchain technology. Permission meaning members are accountable. So the network versus Bitcoin where members are anonymous and to pass industry Reggie regulations, you can't be anonymous. You have to be accountable. Um, that's not to say that you can't, okay. Work privately, you know, so you're accountable. But transactions in the network, Mmm. Only gets shared with those that have a need, need to know. So that the foundation is Hyperledger fabric. And IBM has a commercial offering called the IBM blockchain platform that embodies that. That kind of is a commercial distribution of Hyperledger fabric plus a set of advanced tools to make it really easy to work with. The open source. All the networks that I talked about are operating their network across the worldwide IBM public cloud. And so cloud technology lays a really big part of blockchain because blockchains are networks. >>Mmm. You know, our technology, IBM blockchain platform runs really well in the IBM wow. But it also allows you to run anywhere, right? Or like to say where it matters most. So you may have companies, I'm running blockchain nodes in the IBM cloud. You may have others running it on their own premises behind their firewall. You might have others running an Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Right. So we use, um, you may have heard of red hat open shift, the container technology so that we can run Mmm. Parts of a blockchain network, I guess they said where they matter most and you get strengthened a blockchain network based on the diversity of the operators. Because if it was all operated by one operator, there would be a chance maybe that there can be some collusion happening. But now if you could run it know across different geographies across the IBM cloud. >>So almost three networks all run on use this technology or run on the IBM cloud. And Dave, one more thing. If you look at these applications, they're just modern application, you know, their mobile front ends, their web portals and all of that kind of, okay. Okay. The blockchain part of these applications, usually it's only 20% of the overall endeavor that companies are going through. The other 80% it's business as usual. I'm building a modern cloud application. So what we're doing in IBM with, but you know, red hat with OpenShift with our cloud packs, which brings various enterprise software across different disciplines, blends and domains like integration, application, data, security. All of those things come together to fill the other 80% the above and beyond blockchain. So these three companies, okay. You know, 99 plus others are building applications as modern cloud applications that leverage this blockchain technology. So you don't have to be a cryptographer or you know, a distributed database expert. It's all, it's all embodied in this code. Mmm. Available on the IBM cloud, 29 cents a CPU hour. It was approximately the price. So it's quite affordable. And you know, that's what we've delivered. >>Well, the thing about that, that last point about the cloud is it law, it allows organizations, enterprises to experiment very cheaply, uh, and so they can get, uh, an MVP out or a proof of concept out very quickly, very cheaply, and then iterate, uh, extremely quickly. That to me is the real benefit, the cloud era and the pricing model. >>I just mentioned, David, as I said it when I started, you know, it's like we were working out in a gym, but we weren't quite sure. We knew why we were, we were so keen on getting fit. And what I see now is this, you know, blossoming of users who are looking at, you know, a new agreement. We thought we understood digital transformation. Mmm. But there's a whole new nice to be digitized right now. You know, we're probably not going to be jumping on planes and trains, uh, working as, as, as more intimately as we were face to face. So the need for new digital applications that link people together. Uh, w we're seeing so many use cases from, um, trade finance to food safety, to proxy voting for stock, know all of these applications that we're kind of moving along at a normal speed. I've been hyper accelerated, uh, because of the crisis we're in. So blockchain no. Couldn't come any sooner. >>Yeah. You know, I want to ask you, as a technologist, uh, you know, I've learned over the years, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. Um, could you do the types of things that you're talking about without blockchain? Um, I'm, I'm sure there are ways, but, but why is blockchain sort of the right path, >>Dave? Mmm. You can, you can certainly do things with databases. Mmm. But if you want the trust, it's as simple as this. A database traditionally has a single administrator that sets the rules up for when a transaction comes in. Mmm. What it takes to commit that transaction. And if the rules are met, the transactions committed, um, the database administrator has access who commands like delete and update. So at some level you can never be a hundred percent sure that that data was the data that was intended in there. With a blockchain, there's multiple administrators to the ledger. So the ledger is distributed and shared across multiple administrators. When a transaction is submitted, it is first proposed for those administrators, a process of consent happens. And then, and only then when the majority of the group agrees that it's a valid transaction, is it committed? And when it's committed, it's committed in a way that's cryptographically linked two other transactions in the ledger, I'm making it. >>Mmm tamper-proof right. Or very difficult to tamper with. And unlike databases, blockchains are append only so they don't have update and delete. Okay. All right. So if you really want that center of trusted data that is a tested, you know, that has checks and balances across different organizations, um, blockchain is the key to do it, you know? So could you do it in data with a database? Yes. But you have to trust that central organization. And for many applications, that's just fine. All right. But if we want to move quickly, we really want to share systems of record. Mmm. I hear you. Sharing a system of record, you have regulatory obligations, you can say, Oh, sorry, the record was wrong, but it was put in there by, by this other company. Well, they'll say, well, >>okay, >>nice for the other company, but sorry, you're the one in trouble. So with a blockchain, we have to bring assurances that we can't get into that kind of situation, right? So that shared Mmm. Distributed database that is kind of provides this tamper resistant audit log becomes the Colonel cross. And then with the privacy preservation that you get from encryption and privacy techniques, um, like we have like these things, both channels, um, you can transact, um Hm. And be accountable, but also, Mmm. Only share of transactions with those that have a need to know, right? So you get that level of privacy in there. And that combination of trust and privacy is the secret sauce that makes blockchain unique and quite timely for this. So yeah, check it out. I mean, on the IBM cloud, it's effortless. So to get up and running, you know, building a cloud native application with blockchain and you know, if you're used to doing things, um, on other clouds or back at the home base, we have the IBM blockchain software, which you can deploy. Yeah. Open shift anywhere. So we have what you need in a time of need. >>And as a technologist, again, you're being really, I think, honest and careful about the word tamper. You call it tamper resistant. And if I understand it right, that, I mean, obviously you can fish for somebody's credentials. Yeah. That's, you know, that's one thing. But if I understand that, that more than 50% of the peers in the community, it must agree to tamper in order for the system. You tampered with it. And, and that is the beauty of, of blockchain and the brilliance. Okay. >>Okay. Yeah. And, and, and for, um, performance reasons we've created optimizations. Like you can set a consensus policy up because maybe one transaction it's okay just to have a couple people agree and say, Oh, well, you know, out of the a hundred nodes, Mmm. Three agree, it's good enough. Okay. Other, other policies may be more stringent depending on the nature of the data and the transaction, right? So you can tone, you can kind of tune that in based on the class of transaction. And so it's kind of good and that's how we can get performance levels in the, you know, thousand plus. In fact, IBM and RBC, um, recently did, um, a series of performance analysis because RBC said, Hey, can I use this for some of my bank to bank exchanges and we need to support over a thousand transactions per second. They were able, in their use case, there's support over 3000. Transact for a second. Okay. Mmm. You know, that we were very encouraged by that. I'm glad you clarified that because, so essentially you're saying you can risk adjust the policies if you will. >>That's great to know. Mmm. I could go on forever on this topic. Well, we're unfortunately, Jerry, we're well over our time, but I want to thank you for coming back, planning this important topic. Thrilled. IBM has taken a leadership position here, and I think, you know, to your point, this pandemic is just going to, can accelerate a lot of things and blockchain is, but in my view anyway, one of them. Thank you, Dave. Oh, great questions and I really appreciate it. So everyone out there, um, stay safe. Stay healthy. All right. Thank you Jerry, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Our coverage of the IBM think digital 2020 event. We'll be right back. Perfect. The short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with it's Ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back, everyone theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for AWS reInvent. It's theCUBE's 10th year of operations, it's our seventh AWS reInvent and every year, it gets better and better and every year, we've had theCUBE at reInvent, Jerry Chen has been on as a guest. He's a VIP, Jerry Chen, now a general partner at Greylock Tier One, one of the leading global Venture capitals at Silicon Valley. Jerry, you've been on the journey with us the whole time. >> I guess I'm your good luck charm. >> (laughs) Well, keep it going. Keep on changing the game. So, thanks for coming on. >> Jerry: Thanks for having me. >> So, now that you're a seasoned partner now at Greylock. You got a lot of investments under your belt. How's it going? >> It's great, I mean look, every single year, I look around the landscape thinking, "What else could be coming? "What if we surprise this year?" What's the new trends? What both macro-trends, also company trends, like, who's going to buy who, who's going to go public? Every year, it just gets busier and busier and bigger and bigger. >> All these new categories are emerging with this new architecture. I call it Cloud 2.0, maybe next gen Cloud, whatever you want to call it, it's clear visibility now into the fact that DevOps is working, Cloud operations, large scale operations with Cloud is certainly a great value proposition. You're seeing now multiple databases, pick the tool, I think Jassy got that right in his keynote, I believe that, but now the data equation comes over the top. So, you got DevOps infrastructure as code, you got data now looking like it's going to go down that same path of data as code where developers don't have to deal with all the different nuances of how data's stored, how it's handled, where is it, warm or cold or at glacier. So, developers still don't have that yet today. Seems to be an area of Amazon. What's your take on all this? >> I think you saw, so what drove DevOps? Speed, right? It's basically how developers shows you operations, merging of two groups. So, we're seeing the same trend DataOps, right? How data engineers and data scientists can now have the same speeds developers had for the past 10 years, DataOps. So, A, what does that mean? Give me the menu of what I want like, Goldilocks, too big, too small, just right. Too hot, too cold, just right. Like, give me the storage tier, the data tier, the size I want, the temperature I want and the speed I want. So, you're seeing DataOps give the same kind of Goldilocks treatment as developers. >> And on terms of like Cloud evolution again, you've seen the movie from the beginning at VM where now through Amazon, seventh year. What jumps out at you, what do you look at as squinting through the trend lines and the fashion of the features, it still seems to be the same old game, compute memory storage and software. >> Well I mean, compute memory storage, there's an atomic building blocks of a compute, right? So, regardless of services these high level frameworks, deep down, you still have compute networking and storage. So, that's the building blocks but I think we're seeing 10th year of reInvent this kind of, it's not one size fits all but this really big fat long tail, small instances, micro-instances, server lists, big instances for like jumbo VMs, bare metal, right? So, you're seeing not one architecture but folks can kind of pick and choose buy compute by the drip, the drop or buy compute by the whole VM or whole server full. >> And a lot of people are like, the builders love that. Amazon owns the builder market. I mean, if anyone who's doing a startup, they pretty much start on Amazon. It's the most robust, you pick your tools, you build, but Steve Malaney was just on before us says, "Enterprise don't want power tools, "they're going to cut their hand off." (laughs) Right so, Microsoft's been winning with this approach of consumable Cloud and it's a nice card to play because they're not yet there with capabilities with Amazon, so it's a good call, they got an Enterprise sales force. Microsoft playing a different game than AWS because they have to. >> Sure I mean, what's football now, you have a running game, you need a passing game, right? So, if you can't beat them with the running game, you go with a passing game and so, Amazon has kind of like the fundamental building blocks or power tools for the builders. There's a large segment of population out there that don't want that level of building blocks but they want us a little bit more prescriptive. Microsoft's been around Enterprise for many many years, they understand prescriptive tools and architectures. So, you're going to become a little bit more prefab, if you will. Here's how you can actually construct the right application, ML apps, AI apps, et cetera. Let me give you the building blocks at a higher level abstraction. >> So, I want to get your take on value creations. >> Jerry: Sure. >> So, if it's still early (mumbles), it's took a lot more growth, you start to see Jassy even admit that in his keynotes that he said quote, "There are two types "of developers and customers. "People want the building blocks "or people who want solutions." Or prefab or some sort of more consumable. >> More prescriptive, yeah. >> So, I think Amazon's going to start going that way but that being said, there's still opportunities for startups. You're an investor, you invest in startups. Where do you see opportunities? If you're looking at the startup landscape, what is the playbook? How should you advise startups? Because ya know, have the best team or whatever but you look at Amazon, it's like, okay, they got large scale. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> I'm going to be a little nervous. Are they going to eat my lunch? Do I take advantage of them? Do I draft off them? There are wide spaces as vertical market's exploding that are available. What's your view on how startups should attack the wealth creation opportunity value creation? >> There, I mean, Amazon's creating a new market, right? So, you look at their list of many services. There's just like 175 services out there, which is basically too many for any one company to win every single service. So, but you look at that menu of services, each one of those services themselves can be a startup or a collection of services can be a startup. So, I look at that as a roadmap for opportunity of companies can actually go in and create value around AI, around data, around security, around observability because Amazon's not going to naturally win all of those markets. What they do have is distribution, right? They have a lot of developer mind share. So, if you're a startup, you play one or three themes. So like, one is how do I pick one area and go deep for IP, right? Like, cheaper, better, faster, own some IP and though, they're going to execute better and that's doable over and over again in different markets. Number two is, we talked about this before, there's not going to be a one Cloud wins all, Amazon's clearly in the lead, they have won most of the Cloud, so far, but it'll be a multi-Cloud world, it'll be On Premise world. So, how do I play a multi-Cloud world, is another angle, so, go deep in IP, go multi-Cloud. Number three is this end to end solution, kind of prescriptive. Amazon can get you 80% of the way there, 70% of the way there but if you're like, an AI developer, you're a CMO, you're a marketing developer, you kind of want this end to end solution. So, how can I put together a full suite of tools from beginning to end that can give me a product that's a better experience. So, either I have something that's a deeper IP play a seam between multiple Clouds or give it end to end solutions around a problem and solve that one problem for our customer. >> And in most cases, the underlay is Amazon or Azure. >> Or Google or Alley Cloud or On Premises. Not going to wait any time soon, right? And so, how do I create a single fabric, if you will that looks similar? >> I want to riff with you in real time here on theCUBE around data. So, data scale is obviously a big discussion that's starting to happen now, data tsunami, we've heard that for years. So, there's two scale benefits, horizontal scale with data and then vertical specialism, vertical scale or ya know, using AI machine learning in apps, having data, so, how do you view that? What's your reaction to the notion of creating the horizontal scale value and vertical specialism value? >> Both are a great place for startups, right? They're not mutually exclusive but I think if you go horizontal, the amount of data being created by your applications, your infrastructure, your sensors, time stories data, ridiculously large amount, right? And that's not going away any time soon. I recently did investment in ChronoSphere, 'cause you guys covered over at CUBEcon a few weeks ago, that's talking about metrics and observability data, time stories data. So, they're going to handle that horizontal amount of data, petabytes and petabytes, how can we quarry this quickly, deeply with a lot of insight? That's one play, right? Cheaper, better, faster at scale. The next play, like you said, is vertical. It's how do I own data or slice the data with more contacts than I know I was going to have? We talked about the virtual cycle of data, right? Just the system of intelligence, as well. If I own a set of data, be it healthcare, government or self-driving car data, that no one else has, I can build a solution end to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography, you can go either way. It's hard to do both, though. >> It's hard for startup. >> For a startup. >> Any big company. >> Very few companies can do two things well, startups especially, succeed by doing one thing very well. >> I think my observation is that I think looking at Amazon, is that they want the horizontal and they're leaving offers on the table for our startups, the vertical. >> Yeah, if you look at their strategy, the lower level Amazon gets, the more open-sourced, the more ubiquitous you try to be for containers, server lists, networking, S3, basic sub straits, so, horizontal horizontal, low price. As you get higher up from like, deep mind like, AI technologies, perception, prediction, they're getting a little bit more specialized, right? As you see these solutions around retail, healthcare, voice, so, the higher up in the stack, they can build more narrow solutions because like any startup of any product, you need the right wedge. What's the right wedge in the customers? At the base level of developers, building blocks, ubiquitous. For solutions marketing, healthcare, financial services, retail, how do I find a fine point wedge? >> So, the old Venture business was all enamored with consumers over the years and then, maybe four years ago, Enterprise got hot. We were lowly Enterprise guys where no one-- >> Enterprise has been hot forever in my mind, John but maybe-- >> Well, first of all, we've been hot on Enterprise, we love Enterprise but then all of a sudden, it just seemed like, oh my God, people had an awakening like, and there's real value to be had. The IT spend has been trillions and the stats are roughly 20 or so percent, yet to move to the Cloud or this new next gen architecture that you're investing companies in. So, a big market... that's an investment thesis. So, a huge enterprise market, Steve Malaney of Aviation called it a thousand foot wave. So, there's going to be a massive enterprise money... big bag of money on the table. (laughs) A lot of re-transformations, lot of reborn on the Cloud, lot of action. What's your take on that? Do you see it the same way because look how they're getting in big time, Goldman Sachs on stage here. It's a lot of cash. How do you think it's going to be deployed and who's going to be fighting for it? >> Well, I think, we talked about this in the past. When you look to make an investment, as a startup founder or as a VC, you want to pick a wave bigger than you, bigger than your competitors. Right so, on the consumer side, ya know, the classic example, your Instagram fighting Facebook and photo sharing, you pick the mobile first wave, iPhone wave, right, the first mobile native photo sharing. If you're fighting Enterprise infrastructure, you pick the Cloud data wave, right? You pick the big data wave, you pick the AI waves. So, first as a founder startup, I'm looking for these macro-waves that I see not going away any time soon. So, moving from BaaS data to streaming real time data. That's a wave that's happening, that's inevitable. Dollars are floating from slower BaaS data bases to streaming real time analytics. So, Rocksett, one of the investors we talked about, they're riding that wave from going BaaS to real time, how to do analytics and sequel on real time data. Likewise, time servers, you're going from like, ya know, BaaS data, slow data to massive amounts of time storage data, Chronosphere, playing that wave. So, I think you have to look for these macro-waves of Cloud, which anyone knows but then, you pick these small wavelettes, if that's a word, like a wavelettes or a smaller wave within a wave that says, "Okay, I'm going to "pick this one trend." Ride it as a startup, ride it as an investor and because that's going to be more powerful than my competitors. >> And then, get inside the wave or inside the tornado, whatever metaphor. >> We're going to torch the metaphors but yeah, ride that wave. >> All right, Jerry, great to have you on. Seven years of CUBE action. Great to have you on, congratulations, you're VIP, you've been with us the whole time. >> Congratulations to you, theCUBE, the entire staff here. It's amazing to watch your business grow in the past seven years, as well. >> And we soft launch our CUBE 365, search it, it's on Amazon's marketplace. >> Jerry: Amazing. >> SaaS, our first SaaS offering. >> I love it, I mean-- >> John: No Venture funding. (laughs) Ya know, we're going to be out there. Ya know, maybe let you in on the deal. >> But now, like you broadcast the deal to the rest of the market. >> (laughs) Jerry, great to have you on. Again, great to watch your career at Greylock. Always happy to have ya on, great commentary, awesome time, Jerry Chen, Venture partner, general partner of Greylock. So keep coverage, breaking down the commentary, extracting the signal from the noise here at reInvent 2019, I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (energetic electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, our 10th year. We actually call this one the Valley set, over on the other side, it's in the middle of a meadow, and this was in the valley. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for this segment is, of course, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And joining us, the quintessential Valley guest that we have, Jerry Chen. Long time participant in the program, climbing up the leaderboard here of theCUBE Times at VMworld. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, John, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so we knew you back when you worked for VMware. >> Jerry: Right. >> You're now a partner at Greylock. We watched some of your amazing startups, we've had many of them on our program. Just a little bit going on in your world this day, maybe we'll start there. >> Sure, it amazes me, both being at VMworld 10 years since you guys started covering. For me, I joined VMware back in 2003. So I was at the first Vmworld, through every single one of them, and seeing this ecosystem reinvent itself, and juxtapose that with every other conference at Moscone. So Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, VMworld. And I would say five years ago, no one would have thought Dreamforce itself, or Salesforce as an ecosystem big enough for investors. But yes, now they can invest in startups. All they do is sell to the Salesforce ecosystem. You can always invest in a startup. All they sell to is the VMware ecosystem. And for sure, when, you and I, three of us go to Amazon or an event, that ecosystem just continues to grow exponentially year over year. >> And this some of the highlights of Datadog, we were talking before we came on camera. They always had a big booth, they bet on the AWS ecosystem, not a lot of Datadog here, but monitoring turns into observability, a key component, which basically was a white space. I mean, monitoring was boring. A little sector, but because of the nature of the data security auditing, this has become kind of a killer category. >> I think last week you saw SignalFX get acquired by Splunk, which is another huge enterprise company, and Datadog filed their S-1. No one thought monitoring would be a big enough market to support multiple billion plus companies, and what we've learned is making a bet on just cloud-native companies like Datadog did, purely in the Amazon Ecosystem, was a great bet because they've grown super fast, and that market turned out to be very big. In addition, it could be Splunk, and they could bet on logging for mostly on-premise companies. That turned out to be a large market. So I think five, 10 years ago, no one thought that these markets would be so big and so gigantic. The cloud itself, you can have a multi-billion dollar company like Datadog purely on a cloud-native application and cloud-native companies, if you will. >> You know, it's interesting, you're a VC and the enterprise specialist at Greylock. Consumer used to be all the rage in venture. "Oh, we're going to consumer against Facebook," Facebook breaks democracy, all kinds of problems. Being regulated. But enterprise became really hot with the cloud, and then you have an interesting dynamic. Now a thousand flowers are blooming on the startup side, so yes, there's a lot of action in startups, but the buyers of startups and the IPO markets is where the liquidity happens, which you care about, right? So now you have liquidity options for IPO for fast-growing flit scalers as you guys call it, and then the M and A market are buying the companies. So I got to ask you, with seeing Splunk as a great example, where they own the log market, log files, bring SignalFX in, former VMware guys and Facebook guys, comes in, they add some servability piece to it. Splunk's got more power now because of the acquisition. It's not just token acquisition. This is the market, product market slash M and A market. What's your thoughts on that? Because that's a key exit opportunity, and the numbers are pretty sizable when you think about it. >> I think just going back to the opportunity, the market's so big that you have multiple multi-billion dollar companies, so like Splunk's a huge company, great company. We're investors in a company called Sumo Logic. That's going to also be a successful company, and also a big-- >> John: And filed for IPO. >> And a big company that's OZA, Amazon, and Vmworld. So I think what you have here is each of these markets are monitoring, APM, the log, infrastructure, are turning out to be multi multi-billion, and larger than we anticipated. So I think before, to your analogy in the consumer, we always knew consumer markets had huge TAMs. Like how many billion in people are on Facebook? How many billion people are on Twitter? What we're learning now is the market and the TAM for these enterprise software companies, be it SAAS, be it LOG, be it Metrics, be it security, those TAMs are actually bigger than we thought beforehand as well. >> And the driver of that is what? Cloud, transformation, just replatforming, modernization? The businesses are businesses still. >> I think the move to cloud is accelerate, I think your last line, "businesses are businesses," is what's key. Like every business now is being touched by software. They all got to go cloud so I'm an investor in a company called Blend that does mortgage software. So the entire financial services industry, from mortgages to car loans and consumer lending, that's all going digital. That's all going online. Jobs that were like mortgage brokers are going to be an app on your phone now. So finance, retail, healthcare, construction, so all these markets now are going to the cloud, going digital, so these TAMs are expanding exponentially. >> Yeah, Jerry, want to get your take on the ecosystem. You know, we look at VMware, they built a big ecosystem, the end user computing space, you know. You've coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, from that environment there was an ecosystem around there. I see VMware at a lot of shows, and they have a good presence there, and there's some overlap between the public cloud space. Like when I go to this show, and I walk through the expo hall, oh my gosh. Data protection is everywhere, and all of those companies are at a all of the cloud environment, but do you see a transition from, you know, where VMware is in kind of the cloud-native space? Is there a lot of overlap, or what's your thinking on those kind of dynamics? >> I think all above. I think VMware at Vwworld, and like all these tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves and expanding. So you have, as a VC, say it's this company I'm looking at, when it's two individuals, and a dog, and PowerPoint. Is it a feature, is it a product, or is it a company? It's a feature, it's okay. You know, it's probably not worth the investment, but it's worthwhile. It'll get acquired for something. Is it a product? Some companies are just one killer product, right? And you can ride that product for the arc of the company. But then some startups turn out be companies, multi-product companies. And there always have one or two great products, and then you start adding new things as the market evolves, and VMware has done that. And so, as a result of adding server virtualization, desktop virtualization, Cloud Foundry which I helped build, out in the Kubernetes stuff. So they're adding multiple products to their company. I think the great companies can do that. Look at Amazon. They keep launching 10 new products every single month. Microsoft has done a great job reinventing themselves. So I think the great companies can reinvent, but not transform, they just add to what they have, and just to be a multi-product family. >> Stu: All right, so you mentioned Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah. >> Pivotal, of course, is now back in the mothership where it started there. When Cloud Foundry first started it was, "Well, we're not going to take the hypervisor "and put it all of these places." We needed a slightly different footprint. Well, five years later, we're talking about Kubernetes is going to be baked into Vsphere, and Vsphere is going to be a main piece of VMware's cloud-native strategy. Has the market changed or some of those technology pieces, you know, still a challenge? What's your take there? >> You know, it's a great question because I think what we're seeing is there's never ever in technology as you guys know, on platforms, it's a zero-sum game. It's never always going to all mainframe, all client server, all VMs, all microservers, all Serverless, right? And I think we're seeing is it's also never going to be all Amazon, it's never going to be all Google, it's never going to be all Azure, right? I think we talked about early days, it's not a winner take all. It may be, you know, what one-third, two-thirds, or something, 25-40% market share, but it's not going to be all or nothing. And so we're seeing companies now have architectures on multiple clouds, multiple technologies, and so just like 10 years ago, you had a mainframe team, you had a Windows team, you had a Solaris team. Remember Sun and Spark? And a Linux team. Now you have a Google team, and Azure team, an Amazon team, and an on-prem team. And so you just had these different stacks evolve, and I think what's interesting to see is like, we've kind of had this swing of momentum around Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, but at the same time you see a bunch of folks realize, okay, what's happening is I'm choosing how much I want to consume. Like an API, a container, or a whole VM, right? And people realizing, yes, maybe consuming the APIs is our right level of consumption, but quite frankly, Stu, John, buying whole VMs also what I want. So you see a bunch of companies say, I'm just going to build better monolithic applications around VMware, I'm going to build better microservices around Docker and Kubernetes, and then we'll use Serverless where I think I need to use Serverless. >> Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things we hear from customers we talk to, and there's two types of enterprise customers, at least in the enterprise infrastructure side, classic CIOs and then CISOs. Two different spectrums. CIOs, old, traditional, multi-vendor means a good thing, no lock in, I know how to deal with that world. CISOs, they want to build their own stacks, manage their own technology, then push APIs out to the suppliers, and rechange the supplier relationship because security is so important they're forced to the cutting edge. So I look at that a kind of canary in the coal mine, and want to get your thought on that, because we're seeing a trend where enterprises are building software. They're saying, hey, you know, I want a stack internally that we're going to do for a variety of different reasons, security or whatever, and that doesn't really blend well for the multi-cloud team approach, because not everyone can have three killer teams building stacks, so you're seeing some people saying, you know, I'm going to pick a cloud here and go all in on certain things, build the stack, and then have a backup cloud there. And then some CIOs say, hey, you know what? I want all the cloud guys in there negotiating their best price maybe, or whatever. >> I think it's great nuance you pointed out. Even just like we had a Windows team and a Linux team, you still had a single database team that ran across both, or storage teams are ran across both. So I think the nuance here is certain parts of the stack should be Azure, Amazon, VMware. Certain parts of the stack should be, I think that the ultimate expression is just an API with service errors. So one of the companies you guys are familiar with, Roxette, it's a search and Serverless analytics company. It's basically an API in the cloud, multi-cloud, to do search and analytics. And just like you had a database team that's independent across all these stacks, for certain parts of the architecture, you're going to want something like Roxette, that's going to be independent of the architecture stacks. And so it's not all isolated, it's not siloed, it's not all horizontal, depending on the part of the stack, you're going to either want a horizontal cross-cloud solution, or a team that's going to go deep on one. >> So it's really a contextual decision based on what the environment looks like, or business. >> And there's certain areas of technology that we know from history that lends themself to either full stacks versus horizontals. Just like I said, there was a storage team and a database team, right? That's Oracle, or something that ran across Windows and Linux and Sun, you're going to see someone like Roxette become this search and Serverless analytics team across multiple cloud stacks. >> This is why the investment is such a great opportunity for the enterprise VCs right now because, I mean, there's so many dimensions of opportunities for companies to grow and become pretty large, and the markets are shifting so the TAM is pretty big. Michael Dell was just on the other side, I interviewed him. He says, you know, he was getting kind of in Dave's grill saying, "Well, the TAM for enterprise is bigger than cloud TAM." I go, "Well that TAM is going to be replatformized, so like that's going away and moving, shifting, so the numbers are big but they're shifting so tons of opportunities. >> It depends if you're a big company like Dell versus a small startup. Oftentimes, this true that the TAM for enterprise is still much larger than cloud, but your point is what's shifting were the dollars growing fast. >> The TAM for horses was huge at one point, and then, you know, cars came along, right? So you know. >> Every startup, what you want to do, you want to attach to a growing budget. You don't want to attach to a flat to shrinking budget. And so right now, if you're a founder, and say, "Okay, where are the budget dollars flowing to?" Everyone's got a kind of a cloud strategy, just like they had a VMware virtualization strategy, so if I'm like a startup G, metrics, or data analytics, I'm going to try to attach to where the dollars are flowing. That's a cloud strategy, that's an AI application strategy, security strategy. >> So let me ask you one question. So if I'm going to start up, this is a hypothetical startup, startups got an opportunity. It's a SaaS-based startup, they say, "You know what? "This is a feature in the market "that's part of a bigger system, "but I'm going to innovate on that." I think that with the markets shifting, that could evolve into a large TAM to your point about Datadog. What's the strategy, from an investment standpoint, that you would take? Would you say go all in on the single product? Do you want to have one or two features? What's the makeup of that approach, because you want to have some maybe defensibility, is it go all in on the one thing and hope that you return into like a Salesforce, then you bolt stuff on, or do you go in and try to do a little platform play underneath? >> It depends where you are in the startup world. We're in lifecycle. Look, startups succeed because they do one thing better, right? And so focus, focus, focus. And you have to have something that's like 10 times faster, 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or something different. Something the world hasn't seen before. But if you do that one thing well, either A, you're taking budget dollars from incumbents, or B, you're something net new, the world hasn't seen, people will come to you when they see utility. As an investor I like to see that focus, I like to see, you know, some founders you get say, hey, Stu, think bigger. Some founders like John think smaller. Like what's your wedge? What's that initial entry point to the customer you're going to hit? Because once you land that, you get the right to do the next product, the next feature. >> That's the land, adopt, expand, like Xoom did. Or they picked video, >> Correct, voice, et cetera. >> I mean who the hell thought that was going to be a big market? It's a legacy market but they innovated with the cloud. >> Absolutely. I have all these sayings that I try to say like, "You don't get to play the late innings, "if you don't make it out the early innings," right? You know, and so if you want and have this strategy for this large platform, that's great, and every VC wants to see a path there. But they want to see execute from we're going to land, and we're expand. Now, startups fail because either where they land, they picked incorrectly. Like you decided to storm the wrong beach, right? Or it's either to small, or it's too big. The initial landing spot is too big, and they can't hold that ground. And so part of the art of navigating from Point A to Point B, or where I say, Act one, Act two, Act three of a lifecycle is make sure that you land correctly, earn your keep, show a lot of value, win that first battle, if you will, Act one, and then they move to Act two, Act three, and you can see a company like VMware clearly on their second, third act, right? And they've done a nice job of owning one product category, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, now expanding to other adjacent categories, buying companies like Carbon Black, right? In terms of security. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, VMware started in 1998. I was there when there was about 200 employees. People forget Amazon's been, gosh 27, 1998, when Bezos started selling books. Now they're selling books, movies, food, groceries, video, right? >> When did you first use AWS? Was it when the EC2 launched? I mean, everyone kicked the tires on that puppy. >> We all kicked the tires. I was at VMware as a Product Manager, I think it was '06 when they launched, right? And we all kind of kicked the tires on it. And it was a classic innoverse dilemna. We saw this thing that you thought was small and a very narrow surface area. Amazon started with an EC2, >> Two building blocks, storage and EC2. >> S-3, right, that's it. And then they said, "Okay, we're going to give a focus, focus on basic compute and basic object storage," and people were like, "What can you do with S-3? "Nothing," right? It's not a Sand, it's an availability. It's going to fail all the time, but people just started innovating and working their way through it. >> All right, so Jerry, when you look at the overall marketscape out there today, it seems like you still feel pretty confident that it's a good time for startups. Would you say that's true? >> Absolutely. >> All right, I want to get your final word here. 10 years in theCUBE at Vmworld, you know, you've known John for a long time. Did you think we'd make it? Any big memories as to what you've seen as we've changed over the years. >> I've plenty, let's go back to, >> John: Okay, now you can embarrass us. >> 10 year anniversary of VMworld. For your first Vmworld 10 years ago, I was like a Product Manager, and John Furrier, I think I met at a Press dinner, and he's like, "Hey, Chen," walking by, "come here, sit down," and they turn the camera on, and we had no idea what was going on, and he just started asking a bunch of random questions. I'm like, sure, I haven't cleared this with marketing or anyone else, but why not? >> John: Hijack interview, we call that. >> Hijack interview, and then it's been amazing to watch the two of you, Dave, John, everybody, grow SiliconANGLE and theCUBE in particular, and to this, the immediate franchise, in terms of both having a presence at all these shows, like Amazon, Oracle World, DreamForce, Vmworld, etc. But also the content you guys have, right? So now you have 10 years of deep content, and embarrassingly enough, 10 years, I guess, of videos of yours truly, which is always painful to watch, like either what I was saying, or you know, what my hair looked like back then. >> Stu: Jerry, you still have hair though, so. (laughing) >> Well, the beautiful thing is that we can look at the reputation trajectory of what people say and what actually happens. You always had good picks, loved the post you did on MOATs. That turned out to be very timeless content, and yeah, sometimes you miss it, we sometimes cringe. >> We miss a bunch. >> I remember starting one time with no headset on. Lot of great memories, Jerry. Great to have you in the community. Thanks for all your contribution. >> I look forward to the next 10 years of theCUBE, so I got to be here for the 20th anniversary, and now if I walk away, come back on right away, do I get another notch on my CUBE attending list so I can go up and catch Hared in the best? >> If you come on the other set, that counts as another interview. >> Perfect, so I got to catch up with Steve and the rest of the guys. >> Steve just lost it to Eric Herzog just a minute ago. We had a ceremony. It was like a walk through the supermarket, the doors thing, and the confetti came down. 11th time so you got to get to 11 now. So 12 is the high water mark. >> Done, we need t-shirts. (laughing) >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for joining us again. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, and you can go to theCUBE.net, if you search for Jerry Chen, there's over 16 interviews on there. I know I've gone back and watched some of them. Some great discussions we've had over the years. Thanks so much, and stay tuned for lots more coverage here at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California. It's theCUBE, covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at Fisherman's Wharf at the IBM CDO conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, Joe Selle is here. He's the Global Advanced Analytics and Cognitive Lead at IBM, Boston base. Joe, good to see you again. >> You to Dave. >> And Jerry Gupta, the Senior Vice President and Digital Catalyst at Swiss Re Institute at Swiss Re, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me Dave. >> You're very welcome. So Jerry, you've been at this event now a couple of years, we've been here I think the last four or five years and in the early, now this goes back 10 years this event, now 10 years ago, it was kind of before the whole big data meme took off. It was a lot of focus I'm sure on data quality and data compliance and all of a sudden data became the new source of value. And then we rolled into digital transformation. But how from your perspective, how have things changed? Maybe the themes over the last couple of years, how have they changed? >> I think, from a theme perspective, I would frame the question a little bit differently, right? For me, this conference is a must have on my calendar, because it's very relevant. The topics are very current. So two years ago, when I first attended this conference, it was about cyber and when we went out in the market, they were not too many companies talking about cyber. And so you come to a place like this and you're not and you're sort of blown away by the depth of knowledge that IBM has, the statistics that you guys did a great job presenting. And that really helped us inform ourselves about the cyber risk that we're going on in cyber and so evolve a little bit the consistent theme is it's relevant, it's topical. The other thing that's very consistent is that you always learn something new. The struggle with large conferences like this is sometimes it becomes a lot of me too environment. But in conference that IBM organizes the CDO, in particular, I always learn something new because the practitioners, they do a really good job curating the practitioners. >> And Joe, this has always been an intimate event. You do 'em in San Francisco and Boston, it's, a couple hundred people, kind of belly to belly interactions. So that's kind of nice. But how do you scale this globally? >> Well, I would say that is the key question 'cause I think the AI algorithms and the machine learning has been proven to work. And we've infiltrated that into all of the business processes at IBM, and in many of our client companies. But we've been doing proof of concepts and small applications, and maybe there's a dozen or 50 people using it. But the the themes now are around scale AI at scale. How do you do that? Like we have a remit at IBM to get 100,000 IBMers that's the real number. On our Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform by the end of this calendar year, and we're making great progress there. But that's the key question, how do you do that? and it involves cultural issues of teams and business process owners being willing to share the data, which is really key. And it also involves technical issues around cloud computing models, hybrid public and private clouds, multi cloud environments where we know we're not the only game in town. So there's a Microsoft Cloud, there's an IBM Cloud, there's another cloud. And all of those clouds have to be woven together in some sort of a multi-cloud management model. So that's the techie geek part. But the cultural change part is equally as challenging and important and you need both to get to 100,000 users at IBM. >> You know guys what this conversation brings into focus for me is that for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's laws, as the innovation engine for our industry, that feels like just so yesterday. Today, it's like you've got this data bedrock that we built up over the last decade. You've got machine intelligence or AI, that you now can apply to that data. And then for scale, you've got cloud. And there's all kinds of innovation coming in. Does that sort of innovation cocktail or sandwich makes sense in your business? >> So there's the innovation piece of it, which is new and exciting, the shiny, new toy. And that's definitely exciting and we definitely tried that. But from my perspective and the perspective of my company, it's not the shiny, new toy that's attractive, or that really moves the needle for us. It is the underlying risk. So if you have the shiny new toy of an autonomous vehicle, what mayhem is it going to cause?, right? What are the underlying risks that's what we are focused on. And Joe alluded to, to AI and algorithms and stuff. And it clearly is a very, it's starting to become a very big topic globally. Even people are starting to talk about the risks and dangers inherent in algorithms and AI. And for us, that's an opportunity that we need to study more, look into deeply to see if this is something that we can help address and solve. >> So you're looking for blind spots, essentially. And then and one of them is this sort of algorithmic risk. Is that the right way to look at it? I mean, how do you think about risk of algorithms? >> So yeah, so algorithmic risk would be I would call blind spot I think that's really good way of saying it. We look at not just blind spots, so risks that we don't even know about that we are facing. We also look at known risks, right? >> So we are one of the largest reinsurers in the world. And we insure just you name a risk, we reinsure it, right? so your auto risk, your catastrophe risk, you name it, we probably have some exposure to it. The blind spot as you call it are, anytime you create something new, there are pros and cons. The shiny, new toy is the pro. What risks, what damage, what liability can result there in that's the piece that we're starting to look at. >> So you got the potentially Joe these unintended consequences of algorithms. So how do you address that? Is there a way in which you've thought through, some kind of oversight of the algorithms? Maybe you could talk about IBM's point of view there. >> Well we have >> Yeah and that's a fantastic and interesting conversation that Jerry and I are having together on behalf of our organizations. IBM knowing in great detail about how these AI algorithms work and are built and are deployed, Jerry and his organization, knowing the bigger risk picture and how you understand, predict, remediate and protect against the risk so that companies can happily adopt these new technologies and put them everywhere in their business. So the name of the game is really understanding how as we all move towards a digital enterprise with big data streaming in, in every format, so we use AI to modify the data to a train the models and then we set some of the models up as self training. So they're learning on their own. They're enhancing data sets. And once we turn them on, we can go to sleep, so they do their own thing, then what? We need a way to understand how these models are producing results. Are they results that we agree with? Are these self training algorithms making these, like railroad trains going off the track? Or are they still on the track? So we want to monitor understand and remediate, but it's at scale again, my earlier comments. So you might be an organization, you might have 10,000 not models at work. You can't watch those. >> So you're looking at the intersection of risk and machine intelligence and then you're, if I understand it correctly applying AI, what I call machine intelligence to oversee the algorithms, is that correct? >> Well yes and you could think of it as an AI, watching over the other AI. That's really what we have 'cause we're using AI in as we envision what might or might not be the future. It's an AI and it's watching other AI. >> That's kind of mind blowing. Jerry, you mentioned autonomous vehicles before that's obviously a potential disruptor to your business. What can you share about how you guys are thinking about that? I mean, a lot of people are skeptical. Like there's not enough data, every time there's a another accident, they'll point to that. What's your point of view on that? From your corporation standpoint are you guys thinking is near term, mid term, very long term or it's sort of this journey, that there's quasi-autonomous that sort of gets us there. >> So on autonomous vehicles or algorithmic risk? >> On autonomous vehicles. >> So, the journey towards full automation is a series of continuous steps, right? So it's a continuum and to a certain extent, we are in a space now, where even though we may not have full autonomy while we're driving, there is significant feedback and signals that a car provides and acts or not in an automated manner that eventually move us towards full autonomy, right? So for example, the anti-lock braking system. That's a component of that, right? which is it prevents the car from skidding out of control. So if you're asking for a time horizon when it might have happened, yeah, at our previous firm, we had done some analysis and the horizons were as sort of aggressive as 15 years to as conservative as 50 years. But the component that we all agreed to where there was not such a wide range was that the cars are becoming more sophisticated because the cars are not just cars, any automobile or truck vehicles, they're becoming more automated. Where does risk lie at each piece? Or each piece of the value chain, right? And the answer is different. If you look at commercial versus personal. If you look at commercial space, autonomous fleets are already on the road. >> Right >> Right? And so the question then becomes where does liability lie? Owner, manufacturer, driver >> Shared model >> Shared, manual versus automated mode, conditions of driving, what decisions algorithm is making, which is when you know, the physics don't allow you to avoid an accident? Who do you end up hitting? (crosstalk) >> Again, not just the technology problem. Now, last thing is you guys are doing a panel, on wowing customers making customers the king, I think, is what the title of it is. What's that all about? And get into that a little bit? >> Sure. Well, we focus as IBM mostly on a B2B framework. So the example that I that I'll share to you is, somewhere between like making a customer or making a client the king, the example is that we're using some of our AI to create an alert system that we call Operations Risks Insights. And so the example that I wanted to share was that, we've been giving this away to nonprofit relief agencies who can deploy it around a geo-fenced area like say, North Carolina and South Carolina. And if you're a relief agency providing flood relief or services to people affected by floods, you can use our solution to understand the magnitude and the potential damage impact from a storm. We can layer up a map with not only normal geospatial information, but socio-economic data. So I can say find the relief agency and I've got a huge storm coming in and I can't cover the entire two-state area. I can say okay, well show me the area where there's greater population density than 1000 per square kilometer and the socio-economic level is, lower than a certain point and those are the people that don't have a lot of resources can't move, are going to shelter in place. So I want to know that because they need my help. >> That's where the risk is. Yeah, right they can't get out >> And we use AI to do to use that those are happy customers, and I've delivered wow to them. >> That's pretty wow, that's right. Jerry, anything you would add to that sort of wow customer experience? Yeah, absolutely, So we are a B2B company as well. >> Yeah. >> And so the span of interaction is dictated by that piece of our business. And so we tried to create wow, by either making our customers' life easier, providing tools and technologies that make them do their jobs better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently, or by helping create, goal create, modify products, such that, it accomplishes the former, right? So, Joe mentioned about the product that you launched. So we have what we call parametric insurance and we are one of the pioneers in the field. And so we've launched three products in that area. For earthquake, for hurricanes and for flight delay. And so, for example, our flight delay product is really unique in the market, where we are able to insure a traveler for flight delays. And then if there is a flight delay event that exceeds a pre established threshold, the customer gets paid without even having to file a claim. >> I love that product, I want to learn more about that. You can say (mumbles) but then it's like then it's not a wow experience for the customer, nobody's happy. So that's for Jerry. Guys, we're out of time. We're going to leave it there but Jerry, Joe, thanks so much for. >> We could go on Dave but thank you Let's do that down the road. Maybe have you guys in Boston in the fall? it'll be great. Thanks again for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM CDO in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon web services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, here at AWS re:Invent 2018, their sixth year of theCUBE coverage, two sets wall-to-wall coverage here, two more sets in other locations, getting all the content, bringing it in, ingesting it into our video cloud service on AWS, ah, Dave, >> Lot of content, John. >> Lot of people don't know that we have that video cloud service, but we're going to have a lot of fun, ton of content, ton of stories, and a special analyst segment, Jerry Chen, guest here today, CUBE alumni, famous Venture Capitalist and Greylock partners, partnering with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, great set of partners at Greylock , great firm, tier one, doing a lot of great deals, Rockset, recent one. >> Thanks, yeah. >> You're also, on the record, these six years ago, calling the shot of Babe Ruth predicting the future. You've got a good handle on, you've got VM where you have the cloud business, now you're making investments, you're seeing a lot of stuff on the landscape, certainly, as a Venture Capitalist, you're funding projects, what better time now of innovation to actually put money to work, to hit market share, and then the big guys are getting bigger, they're creating more robust platforms, game is changing big-time, want to get your perspective, Dave, so, Jerry, what's your take on the announcements, slew of announcements, which ones jumped out at you? >> I think there's kind of two or three areas, there's definitely the hybrid cloud story with the Outpost, there's a bunch of stuff around ML and AI services, and a bunch of stuff on data and storage, and for me I think what they're doing around the ML services, the prediction, the personalization, the text OCR, what Amazon's doing at that app layer is now creating AI building blocks for modern application, so you want to do forecasts, you want to do personalization, you want to do text analysis, you have a simple API to basically build these modern apowered apps, he's doing to the app infrastructure layer what he's done to the cloud infrastructure layer, by deconstructing these services. >> And API is also the center, that's what web services are, so question for you is, do you see that the core cloud players, Aussie, Amazon, Bigly, Google, Microsoft, others, it's a winner take most, you called that six years ago, and that's true, but as they grow there's going to be now a new cloudification going on for business apps, new entrepreneurs coming to market, who's vulnerable, who wins, who loses, as this evolution continues because it's going to enable a lot of opportunity. >> Yeah, well I mean Amazon in cloud in general is going to create a lot of winners and losers, like you said, so I think you have a shift of dollars from on prem and old legacy vendors, databay storage, compute, to the cloud, so I think there's a shift of dollars, there are winner and losers, but I think what's going to happen is, with all these services around AI, ML, and Cloud as a distribution model, a lot of applications are going to be rebuilt. So I think that the entire application stack from all the big SaaS players to small SaaS companies, you're going to see this kind of a long tale of new SaaS applications being built on top of the Cloud that you didn't see in the past. >> And the ability to get to markets faster, so the question I have for you is, if you're an entrepreneur out there, looking for funding and I can to market quicker, what's the playbook, and two, Jassie talked on stage about a new persona, a new kind of developer, one that can rethink and reimagine and reinvent something that someone else has already done, so if you're an entrepreneur, you got to think to take someone else's territory, so how does an entrepreneur go out and identify whose lunch to eat, so if I want to take down a company, I got to have a strategy, how do I use the cloud to >> I think it's always a combination when a founder in a thing attacks your market it's a combination of where are the dollars, where can I create some advantage IP or advantage angle, and thirdly where do I have a distribution advantage, how can I actually get my product in the hands of the users differently? And so I think those are the three things, you find intersection of a great market, you have a unique angle, and you have a unique route to market, then you have a powerful story. So, you think about cloud changing the game, think about the mobile app you can consist of, for consumers, that is also a new platform, a new distribution method, the mobile app stores, and so what happened, you had a new category of developers, mode developers, creating this long tale, a thousand thousand apps, for everything from groceries to cars to your Fantasy Football score. So I think you're going to see distribution in the cloud, making it easy to get your apps out there, going to see a bunch of new markets open up, because we're seeing verticals like healthcare, construction, financial services, that didn't have special apps beforehand, be disrupted with technology. Autodesk just bought PlanGrid for 800 million dollars, I mean that's unheard of, construction software company. So you can see a bunch of new inverdics like that be opened up, and then I think with this cloud technology, with compute storage network becomes free and you have this AI layer on top of it, you can power these new applications using AI, that I think is pretty damn exciting. >> Yes, you described this sort of, we went from client server to the cloud, brought a whole bunch of new app providers, obviously Salesforce was there but Workday, Service Now, what you described is a set of composeable digital services running on top of a cloud, so that's ripe for disruption, so do I have to own my own data centers if I'm big SaaS company, what happens to those big guys? >> I don't think you have to, well, you don't have to own your own data center as a company, but you could if you wanted to, right, so at some point in scale, a lot of big players build their own data centers, like AirBNB is on Amazon, but Dropbox built their own storage on Amazon early, then their own data center later. Uber has their own data center, right, so you can argue that at some point of scale it makes sense to build your own, so you don't need to be on Amazon or Google as your start, but it does give you a head start. Now the question is, in the future, can you build a SaaS application entirely on Amazon, Azure, or Google, without any custom code, right, can you hide read write call private SaaS, like a single instance of my SaaS application for you, John, or for you, Dave, that's your data, your workflow, your information personalized for you, so instead of this multi-tenet CRM system like Salesforce, I have a custom CRM system just for Dave, just for Jeff, just for Jerry, just for theCUBE, right? >> I think yes, for that, I think that's definitely a trend I would see happening. >> It's what Infor is trying to do, right, Charles Phillips says "Friends don't let friends "build data centers," but they've still got a big loss in legacy there, but it's an interesting model, focused on verticals or microverticals or like the healthcare example that you're giving, and lot of potential for something. >> Well here's why I think I like this because, I think, and I said this before in theCUBE maybe it's not the best way to say it is that, if you look at the benefit of AI, data-driven, the quality of the data and the power of the compute has to be there. AI will work well with all that stuff, but it's also specialized around the application's use case. So you have specialism around the application, but you don't have to build a full stack to do that, you could use a horizontally scalable cloud distribution system in your word, and then only create custom unique workloads for the app, where machine learning's involved, and AI, that's unique to the app, that's differentiation, that could be the business model, or the utility. So, multitenancy could exist in theory, at the scalable level, but unique at the top of the level so yes I would say I'd want that hosted in the most customized, agile, flexible way. So I would argue that that's the scenario. >> I think that's the future, I mean one of my, I think you were saying, Dave, friends don't let friends build data centers anymore, it's you probably don't need to build a data center anymore because you can actually build your own application on top of one of the two or three large cloud providers. So it's interesting to see what happens the next three, four years, we're going to see kind of a thousand flowers bloom of different apps, not everyone's going to make it, not everyone's going to be a huge Salesforce-like outcome, but there'll be a bunch of applications out there. >> And the IoT stuff is interesting to me, so observing a lot of what the IT guys are doing, it reminds me of people trying to make the Windows mobile phone, they're just trying to force IT standards down the IoT, what I've seen from AWS today is more of a bottoms up approach, build applications for operations technology people, which I think is the right way to go, what do you see in an IoT, IoT apps, what's the formula there? >> I think what Amazon announced today with their time series database, right, their Timestream prediction engine, plus their Outpost offering with the Vmware themselves, you're really seeing a combination of IoT and Edge, right, it's the whole idea is, one, there's a bunch of use cases for time series in IoT, because sentry data, cameras, self-driving cars, drones, et cetera, there's more data coming at you, it adds all of that. >> And Splunk has proven that big-time. >> Correct, Splunk's let 18 billion Marcap company, all on time series data, but number two, what's happening is, it's not necessarily centralized data, right, it's happening at the edge, your self-driving car, your cell phone, et cetera, so Outpost is really a way for Amazon to get closer to the edge, by pushing their compute towards your data center, towards remote office, branch office, and get closer to where the data is, so I think that'll be super interesting. >> Well the Elastic Inference engine is critical, now we got elasticity around inference, and then they got the chip set that worked Inferentia, that can work with the elastic service. That's a powerful combination. >> The AI plumbing war between Google and TetraFlow as technology there's like PyTorch, Google TPUs versus what Amazon is doing with inference chips today, versus what I'm sure Microsoft and else is doing, is fascinating to watch in terms of how you had a kind of a Intel Nvidia duopoly for a long time, and now you have Intel, Nvidia, and then everyone from Amazon, Google, Microsoft doing their own soul again, it's pretty fascinating to watch. >> What was the stat, he said 85% of the TensorFlow, cloud TensorFlow's running on AWS? >> Makes a lot of sense, I think he said Aurora's customers logoslide doubled, but let's break down real quick, to end the segment with the key areas that we see going on, at least my perspective, I want to get your reaction. Storage, major disruption, he emphasized a lot of that in the keynote, spent a lot of time on stores, actually I think more than EC2 if you look at it, two, databases, database war, storage rate configuration, and a holy trinity of networking, storage, and compute, that's evolving, databases, SageMaker, machine learning. All there and then over the top, yesterday's announcement of satellite as a service, that essentially kills the edge of the network, cause there is no edge if we have space satellites shooting connectivity to any device the world is now, there's no more edge, it's everywhere. So, your thoughts, those areas. Which one pops out as the most surprising or most relevant? >> I think it's consistent Amazon strategy, on the lowest layer they're trying to draw the cost to zero, so on storage, cheaper cheaper cheaper, they're driving the bottom layer to zero to get all your data. I think the second thing, the database layer, it makes sense, it's not open-source, right, time scale or time series, it's not, Timestream's not their open-source database, it's their own, so open-source, low cost, the lowest layer, their database stuff is mostly their own, Aurora, Dynamo, Timestream, right, because there's some level lock in there, which I think customers are worried about, so that's clever, it's not by accident, that's all proprietary, and then ML Services, on top of that, that's all cares with developers, and it's API locking, so clearly low-cost open-source for the bottom, proprietary data services that they're trying to own, and then API's on top of it. And so the higher up in the stack, the more and more Amazon, you look, the more and more Amazon you have to adopt as kind of a lock in stack, so it's a brilliant strategy the guys have been executing for the past six, seven years as you guys have seen firsthand, I think the most exciting thing, and the most shocking thing to me is this move towards this battle for the AI front, this ML AI front, I think we saw ML's the new sequel, right, that's the new war, right, against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. >> And that's the future of applications, cause this is >> But you're right on, it's a knife fight for the data, and then you layer on machine intelligence on top of that, and you get cloud scale, and that's the innovation engine for the next 10 years. >> Alright Jerry Chen just unpacked the State of the Union of cloud, of course as an investor I got to ask the final question, how are you investing to take advantage of this wave, versus being on the wrong side of history? >> I have framers for everything, there's a framer on how to attack the cloud vendors, and so I'm looking at a couple things, one, a seams in between the clouds, right, or in between services, because they can't do everything well, and there were kind of these large continents, Amazon, Google, Azure, so I'm looking for seams between the three of them, I'm looking for two, deep areas of IP that they're not going into that you actually have proprietary tap, and then verticals of data, like source of the data, or workflows that these guys aren't great, and then finally kind of cross-data cross-cloud solution, so, something that gives you the ability to run on prem, off prem, Microsoft, Google, Azure. >> Yeah, fill in the white spaces, there are big white spaces, and then hope that could develop into, good. Jerry Chen, partner in Greylock , partners formerly Vmware part of the V Mafia, friend of theCUBE, great guest analysis here, with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, thanks for watching us, stay with us, more live coverage, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage at re:Invent, 52,000 people, the whole industry's here, you can see the formations, we're getting all of the data, we're bringing it to you, stay with us.

[Music] we're on welcome to the special cube conversation we're here with some breaking news we got some startup investment news here in the Q studios palo alto I'm John for your host here at Jerry Chen partnered Greylock and the CEO of rock said Venkat Venkat Rahmani welcome to the cube you guys announcing hot news today series a and seed and Series A funding 21 million dollars for your company congratulations thank you Roxette is a data company jerry great this is one of your nest you kept this secret forever it was John was really hard you know over the past two years every time I sat in this seat I'd say and one more thing you know I knew that part of the advantage was rocks I was a special company and we were waiting to announce it and that's right time so it's been about two and half years in the making I gotta give you credit Jerry I just want to say to everyone I try to get the secrets out of you so hard you are so strong and keeping a secret I said you got this hot startup this was two years ago yeah I think the probe from every different angle you can keep it secrets all the entrepreneurs out there Jerry Chen's your guide alright so congratulations let's talk about the startup so you guys got 21 million dollars how much was the seed round this is the series a the seed was three million dollars both Greylock and Sequoia participating and the series a was eighteen point five all right so other investors Jerry who else was in on this I just the two firms former beginning so we teamed up with their French from Sequoia and the seed round and then we over the course of a year and half like this is great we're super excited about the team bank had Andrew bhai belt we love the opportunity and so Mike for an office coin I said let's do this around together and we leaned in and we did it around alright so let's just get into the other side I'm gonna read your your about section of the press release roxette's visions to Korea to build the data-driven future provide a service search and analytics engine make it easy to go from data to applications essentially building a sequel layer on top of the cloud for massive data ingestion I want to jump into it but this is a hot area not a lot of people are doing this at the level you guys are now and what your vision is did this come from what's your background how did you get here did you wake up one Wednesday I'm gonna build this awesome contraction layer and build an operating system around data make this thing scalable how did it all start I think it all started from like just a realization that you know turning useful data to useful apps just requires lots of like hurdles right you have to first figure out what format the data is in you got to prepare the data you gotta find the right specialized you know data database or data management system to load it in and it often requires like weeks to months before useful data becomes useful apps right and finally you know after I you know my tenure at Facebook when I left the first thing I did was I was just talking you know talking to a lot of people with real-world companies and reload problems and I started walking away from moremore of them thinking that this is way too complex I think the the format in which a lot of the data is coming in is not the format in which traditional sequel based databases are optimized for and they were built for like transaction processing and analytical processing not for like real-time streams of data but there's JSON or you know you know parque or or any of these other formats that are very very popular and more and more data is getting produced by one set of applications and getting consumed by other applications but what we saw it was what is this how can we make it simpler why do we need all this complexity right what is a simple what is the most simple and most powerful system we can build and pulled in the hands of as many people as possible and so we very sort of naturally relate to developers and data scientists people who use code on data that's just like you know kind of like our past lives and when we thought about it well why don't we just index the data you know traditional databases were built when every byte mattered every byte of memory every byte on disk now in the cloud the economics are completely different right so when you rethink those things with fresh perspective what we said was like what if we just get all of this data index it in a format where we can directly run very very fast sequel on it how simple would the world be how much faster can people go from ideas to do experiments and experiments to production applications and how do we make it all faster also in the cloud right so that's really the genesis of it well the real inspiration came from actually talking to a lot of people with real-world problems and then figuring out what is the simplest most powerful thing we can build well I want to get to the whole complexity conversation cuz we were talking before we came on camera here about how complexity can kill and why and more complexity on top of more complexity I think there's a simplicity angle here that's interesting but I want to get back to your background of Facebook and I want to tell a story you've been there eight years but you were there during a very interesting time during that time in history Facebook was I think the first generation we've taught us on the cube all the time about how they had to build their own infrastructure at scale while they're scaling so they were literally blitzscaling as reid hoffman and would say and you guys do it the Greylock coverage unlike other companies at scale eBay Microsoft they had old-school one dotto Technology databases Facebook had to kind of you know break glass you know and build the DevOps out from generation one from scratch correct it was a fantastic experience I think when I started in 2007 Facebook had about 40 million monthly actives and I had the privilege of working with some of the best people and a lot of the problems we were very quickly around 2008 when I went and said hey I want to do some infrastructure stuff the mandate that was given to me and my team was we've been very good at taking open source software and customizing it to our needs what would infrastructure built by Facebook for Facebook look like and we then went into this journey that ended up being building the online data infrastructure at Facebook by the time I left the collectively these systems were surveying 5 plus billion requests per second across 25 plus geographical clusters and half a dozen data centers I think at that time and now there's more and the system continues to chug along so it was just a fantastic experience I think all the traditional ways of problem solving just would not work at that scale and when the user base was doubling early in the early days every four months every five months yeah and what's interesting you know you're young and here at the front lines but you're kind of the frog in boiling water and that's because you are you were at that time building the power DevOps equation automating scale growth everything's happening at once you guys were right there building it now fast forward today everyone who's got an enterprise it's it wants to get there they don't they're not Facebook they don't have this engineering staff they want to get scale they see the cloud clearly the value property has got clear visibility but the economics behind who they hire so they have all this data and they get more increasing amount of data they want to be like Facebook but can't be like Facebook so they have to build their own solutions and I think this is where a lot of the other vendors have to rebuild this cherry I want to ask you because you've been looking at a lot of investments you've seen that old guard kind of like recycled database solutions coming to the market you've seen some stuff in open source but nothing unique what was it about Roxette that when you first talk to them that but you saw that this is going to be vectoring into a trend that was going to be a perfect storm yeah I think you nailed it John historic when we have this new problems like how to use data the first thing trying to do you saw with the old technology Oh existing data warehouses akin databases okay that doesn't work and then the next thing you do is like okay you know through my investments in docker and B and the boards or a cloud aerosol firsthand you need kind of this rise of stateless apps but not stateless databases right and then I through the cloud area and a bunch of companies that I saw has an investor every pitch I saw for two or three years trying to solve this data and state problem the cloud dudes add more boxes right here's here's a box database or s3 let me solve it with like Oh another database elastic or Kafka or Mongo or you know Apache arrow and it just got like a mess because if almond Enterprise IT shop there's no way can I have the skill the developers to manage this like as Beckett like to call it Rube Goldberg machination of data pipelines and you know I first met Venkat three years ago and one of the conversations was you know complexity you can't solve complex with more complexity you can only solve complexity with simplicity and Roxette and the vision they had was the first company said you know what let's remove boxes and their design principle was not adding another boxes all a problem but how to remove boxes to solve this problem and you know he and I got along with that vision and excited from the beginning stood to leave the scene ah sure let's go back with you guys now I got the funding so use a couple stealth years to with three million which is good a small team and that goes a long way it certainly 2021 total 18 fresh money it's gonna help you guys build out the team and crank whatnot get that later but what did you guys do in the in those two years where are you now sequel obviously is lingua franca cool of sequel but all this data is doesn't need to be scheming up and built out so were you guys that now so since raising the seed I think we've done a lot of R&D I think we fundamentally believe traditional data management systems that have been ported over to run on cloud Williams does not make them cloud databases I think the cloud economics is fundamentally different I think we're bringing this just scratching the surface of what is possible the cloud economics is you know it's like a simple realization that whether you rent 100 CPUs for one minute or or one CPU 400 minutes it's cost you exactly the same so then if you really ask why is any of my query is slow right I think because your software sucks right so basically what I'm trying to say is if you can actually paralyze that and if you can really exploit the fluidity of the hardware it's not easy it's very very difficult very very challenging but it's possible I think it's not impossible and if you can actually build software ground-up natively in the cloud that simplifies a lot of this stuff and and understands the economics are different now and it's system software at the end of the day is how do I get the best you know performance and efficiency for the price being paid right and the you know really building you know that is really what I think took a lot of time for us we have built not only a ground-up indexing technique that can take raw data without knowing the shape of the data we can turn that and index it in ways and store them maybe in more than one way since for certain types of data and then also have built a distributed sequel engine that is cloud native built by ground up in the cloud and C++ and like really high performance you know technologies and we can actually run distributor sequel on this raw data very very fast my god and this is why I brought up your background on Facebook I think there's a parallel there from the ground this ground up kind of philosophy if you think of sequel as like a Google search results search you know keyword it's the keyword for machines in most database worlds that is the standard so you can just use that as your interface Christ and then you using the cloud goodness to optimize for more of the results crafty index is that right correct yes you can ask your question if your app if you know how to see you sequel you know how to use Roxette if you can frame your the question that you're asking in order to answer an API request it could be a micro service that you're building it could be a recommendation engine that you're that you're building or you could you could have recommendations you know trying to personalize it on top of real time data any of those kinds of applications where it's a it's a service that you're building an application you're building if you can represent ask a question in sequel we will make sure it's fast all right let's get into the how you guys see the application development market because the developers will other winners here end of the day so when we were covering the Hadoop ecosystem you know from the cloud era days and now the important work at the Claire merger that kind of consolidates that kind of open source pool the big complaint that we used to hear from practitioners was its time consuming Talent but we used to kind of get down and dirty the questions and ask people how they're using Hadoop and we had two answers we stood up Hadoop we were running Hadoop in our company and then that was one answer the other answer was we're using Hadoop for blank there was not a lot of those responses in other words there has to be a reason why you're using it not just standing it up and then the Hadoop had the problem of the world grew really fast who's gonna run it yeah management of it Nukem noose new things came in so became complex overnight it kind of had took on cat hair on it basically as we would say so how do you guys see your solution being used so how do you solve that what we're running Roxette oh okay that's great for what what did developers use Roxette for so there are two big personas that that we currently have as users right there are developers and data scientists people who program on data right - you know on one hand developers want to build applications that are making either an existing application better it could be a micro service that you know I want to personalize the recommendations they generated online I mean offline but it's served online but whether it is somebody you know asking shopping for cars on San Francisco was the shopping you know was the shopping for cars in Colorado we can't show the same recommendations based on how do we basically personalize it so personalization IOT these kinds of applications developers love that because often what what you need to do is you need to combine real-time streams coming in semi structured format with structured data and you have no no sequel type of systems that are very good at semi structured data but they don't give you joins they don't give you a full sequel and then traditional sequel systems are a little bit cumbersome if you think about it I new elasticsearch but you can do joins and much more complex correct exactly built for the cloud and with full feature sequel and joins that's how that's the best way to think about it and that's how developers you said on the other side because its sequel now all of a sudden did you know data scientist also loved it they had they want to run a lot of experiments they are the sitting on a lot of data they want to play with it run experiments test hypotheses before they say all right I got something here I found a pattern that I don't know I know I had before which is why when you go and try to stand up traditional database infrastructure they don't know how what indexes to build how do i optimize it so that I can ask you know interrogatory and all that complexity away from those people right from basically provisioning a sandbox if you will almost like a perpetual sandbox of data correct except it's server less so like you don't you never think about you know how many SSDs do I need how many RAM do I need how many hosts do I need what configure your programmable data yes exactly so you start so DevOps for data is finally the interview I've been waiting for I've been saying it for years when's is gonna be a data DevOps so this is kind of what you're thinking right exactly so you know you give us literally you you log in to rocks at you give us read permissions to battle your data sitting in any cloud and more and more data sources we're adding support every day and we will automatically cloudburst will automatically interested we will schematize the data and we will give you very very fast sequel over rest so if you know how to use REST API and if you know how to use sequel you'd literally need don't need to think about anything about Hardware anything about standing up any servers shards you know reindex and restarting none of that you just go from here is a bunch of data here are my questions here is the app I want to build you know like you should be bottleneck by your career and imagination not by what can my data employers give me through a use case real quick island anyway the Jarius more the structural and architectural questions around the marketplace take me through a use case I'm a developer what's the low-hanging fruit use case how would I engage with you guys yeah do I just you just ingest I just point data at you how do you see your market developing from the customer standpoint cool I'll take one concrete example from a from a developer right from somebody we're working with right now so they have right now offline recommendations right or every night they generate like if you're looking for this car or or this particular item in e-commerce these are the other things are related well they show the same thing if you're looking at let's say a car this is the five cars that are closely related this car and they show that no matter who's browsing well you might have clicked on blue cars the 17 out of 18 clicks you should be showing blue cars to them right you may be logging in from San Francisco I may be logging in from like Colorado we may be looking for different kinds of cars with different you know four-wheel drives and other options and whatnot there's so much information that's available that you can you're actually by personalizing it you're adding creating more value to your customer we make it very easy you know live stream all the click stream beta to rock set and you can join that with all the assets that you have whether it's product data user data past transaction history and now if you can represent the joins or whatever personalization that you want to find in real time as a sequel statement you can build that personalization engine on top of Roxanne this is one one category you're putting sequel code into the kind of the workflow of the code saying okay when someone gets down to these kinds of interactions this is the sequel query because it's a blue car kind of go down right so like tell me all the recent cars that this person liked what color is this and I want to like okay here's a set of candidate recommendations I have how do I start it what are the four five what are the top five I want to show and then on the data science use case there's a you know somebody building a market intelligence application they get a lot of third-party data sets it's periodic dumps of huge blocks of JSON they want to combine that with you know data that they have internally within the enterprise to see you know which customers are engaging with them who are the persons churning out what are they doing and they in the in the market and trying to bring they bring it all together how do you do that when you how do you join a sequel table with a with a JSON third party dumb and especially for coming and like in the real-time or periodic in a week or week month or one month literally you can you know what took this particular firm that we're working with this is an investment firm trying to do market intelligence it used age to run ad hoc scripts to turn all of this data into a useful Excel report and that used to take them three to four weeks and you know two people working on one person working part time they did the same thing in two days and Rock said I want to get to back to microservices in a minute and hold that thought I won't go to Jerry if you want to get to the business model question that landscape because micro services were all the world's going to Inc so competition business model I'll see you gets are funded so they said love the thing about monetization to my stay on the core value proposition in light of the red hat being bought by by IBM had a tweet out there kind of critical of the transactions just in terms of you know people talk about IBM's betting the company on RedHat Mike my tweet was don't get your reaction will and tie it to the visible here is that it seems like they're going to macro services not micro services and that the world is the stack is changing so when IBM sell out their stack you have old-school stack thinkers and then you have new-school stack thinkers where cloud completely changes the nature of the stack in this case this venture kind of is an indication that if you think differently the stack is not just a full stack this way it's this way in this way yeah as we've been saying on the queue for a couple of years so you get the old guard trying to get a position and open source all these things but the stacks changing these guys have the cloud out there as a tailwind which is a good thing how do you see the business model evolving do you guys talk about that in terms of you can hey just try to find your groove swing get customers don't worry about the monetization how many charging so how's that how do you guys talk about the business model is it specific and you guys have clear visibility on that what's the story on that I mean I think yeah I always tell Bank had this kind of three hurdles you know you have something worthwhile one well someone listen to your pitch right people are busy you like hey John you get pitched a hundred times a day by startups right will you take 30 seconds listen to it that's hurdle one her will to is we spend time hands on keyboards playing around with the code and step threes will they write you a check and I as a as a enter price offered investor in a former operator we don't overly folks in the revenue model now I think writing a check the biz model just means you're creating value and I think people write you checking screening value but you know the feedback I always give Venkat and the founders work but don't overthink pricing if the first 10 customers just create value like solve their problems make them love the product get them using it and then the monetization the actual specifics the business model you know we'll figure out down the line I mean it's a cloud service it's you know service tactically to many servers in that sentence but it's um it's to your point spore on the cloud the one that economists are good so if it works it's gonna be profitable yeah it's born the cloud multi-cloud right across whatever cloud I wanna be in it's it's the way application architects going right you don't you don't care about VMs you don't care about containers you just care about hey here's my data I just want to query it and in the past you us developer he had to make compromises if I wanted joins in sequel queries I had to use like postgrads if I won like document database and he's like Mongo if I wanted index how to use like elastic and so either one I had to pick one or two I had to use all three you know and and neither world was great and then all three of those products have different business models and with rocks head you actually don't need to make choices right yes this is classic Greylock investment you got sequoia same way go out get a position in the market don't overthink the revenue model you'll funded for grow the company let's scale a little bit and figure out that blitzscale moment I believe there's probably the ethos that you guys have here one thing I would add in the business model discussion is that we're not optimized to sell latte machines who are selling coffee by the cup right so like that's really what I mean we want to put it in the hands of as many people as possible and make sure we are useful to them right and I think that is what we're obsessed about where's the search is a good proxy I mean that's they did well that way and rocks it's free to get started right so right now they go to rocks calm get started for free and just start and play around with it yeah yeah I mean I think you guys hit the nail on the head on this whole kind of data addressability I've been talking about it for years making it part of the development process programming data whatever buzzword comes out of it I think the trend is it looks a lot like that depo DevOps ethos of automation scale you get to value quickly not over thinking it the value proposition and let it organically become part of the operation yeah I think we we the internal KPIs we track are like how many users and applications are using us on a daily and weekly basis this is what we obsess about I think we say like this is what excellence looks like and we pursue that the logos in the revenue would would you know would be a second-order effect yeah and it's could you build that core kernels this classic classic build up so I asked about the multi cloud you mention that earlier I want to get your thoughts on kubernetes obviously there's a lot of great projects going on and CN CF around is do and this new state problem that you're solving in rest you know stateless has been an easy solution VP is but API 2.0 is about state right so that's kind of happening now what's your view on kubernetes why is it going to be impactful if someone asked you you know at a party hey thank you why is what's all this kubernetes what party going yeah I mean all we do is talk about kubernetes and no operating systems yeah hand out candy last night know we're huge fans of communities and docker in fact in the entire rock set you know back-end is built on top of that so we run an AWS but with the inside that like we run or you know their entire infrastructure in one kubernetes cluster and you know that is something that I think is here to stay I think this is the the the programmability of it I think the DevOps automation that comes with kubernetes I think all of that is just like this is what people are going to start taking why is it why is it important in your mind the orchestration because of the statement what's the let's see why is it so important it's a lot of people are jazzed about it I've been you know what's what's the key thing I think I think it makes your entire infrastructure program all right I think it turns you know every aspect of you know for example yeah I'll take it I'll take a concrete example we wanted to build this infrastructure so that when somebody points that like it's a 10 terabytes of data we want to very quickly Auto scale that out and be able to grow this this cluster as quickly as possible and it's like this fluidity of the hardware that I'm talking about and it needs to happen or two levels it's one you know micro service that is ingesting all the data that needs to sort of burst out and also at the second level we need to be able to grow more more nodes that we we add to this cluster and so the programmability nature of this like just imagine without an abstraction like kubernetes and docker and containers and pods imagine doing this right you are building a you know a lots and lots of metrics and monitoring and you're trying to build the state machine of like what is my desired state in terms of server utilization and what is the observed state and everything is so ad hoc and very complicated and kubernetes makes this whole thing programmable so I think it's now a lot of the automation that we do in terms of called bursting and whatnot when I say clock you know it's something we do take advantage of that with respect to stateful services I think it's still early days so our our position on my partner it's a lot harder so our position on that is continue to use communities and continue to make things as stateless as possible and send your real-time streams to a service like Roxette not necessarily that pick something like that very separate state and keep it in a backhand that is very much suited to your micro service and the business logic that needs to live there continue should continue to live there but if you can take a very hard to scale stateful service split it into two and have some kind of an indexing system Roxette is one that you know we are proud of building and have your stateless communal application logic and continue to have that you know maybe use kubernetes scale it in lambdas you know for all we care but you can take something that is very hard to you know manage and scale today break it into the stateful part in the stateless part and the serval is back in like like Roxette will will sort of hopefully give you a huge boost in being able to go from you know an experiment to okay I'm gonna roll it out to a smaller you know set of audience to like I want to do a worldwide you know you can do all of that without having to worry about and think about the alternative if you did it the old way yeah yeah and that's like talent you'd need it would be a wired that's spaghetti everywhere so Jerry this is a kubernetes is really kind of a benefit off your your investment in docker you must be proud and that the industry has gone to a whole nother level because containers really enable all this correct yeah so that this is where this is an example where I think clouds gonna go to a whole nother level that no one's seen before these kinds of opportunities that you're investing in so I got to ask you directly as you're looking at them as a as a knowledgeable cloud guy as well as an investor cloud changes things how does that change how is cloud native and these kinds of new opportunities that have built from the ground up change a company's network network security application era formants because certainly this is a game changer so those are the three areas I see a lot of impact compute check storage check networking early days you know it's it's it's funny it gosh seems so long ago yet so briefly when you know I first talked five years ago when I first met mayor of Essen or docker and it was from beginning people like okay yes stateless applications but stateful container stateless apps and then for the next three or four years we saw a bunch of companies like how do I handle state in a docker based application and lots of stars have tried and is the wrong approach the right approach is what these guys have cracked just suffered the state from the application those are app stateless containers store your state on an indexing layer like rock set that's hopefully one of the better ways saw the problem but as you kind of under one problem and solve it with something like rock set to your point awesome like networking issue because all of a sudden like I think service mesh and like it's do and costs or kind of the technologies people talk about because as these micro services come up and down they're pretty dynamic and partially as a developer I don't want to care about that yeah right that's the value like a Roxanna service but still as they operate of the cloud or the IT person other side of the proverbial curtain I probably care security I matters because also India's flowing from multiple locations multiple destinations using all these API and then you have kind of compliance like you know GDP are making security and privacy super important right now so that's an area that we think a lot about as investors so can I program that into Roxette what about to build that in my nap app natively leveraging the Roxette abstraction checking what's the key learning feature it's just a I'd say I'm a prime agent Ariane gdpr hey you know what I got a website and social network out in London and Europe and I got this gdpr nightmare I don't we don't have a great answer for GDP are we are we're not a controller of the data right we're just a processor so I think for GDP are I think there is still the controller still has to do a lot of work to be compliant with GDP are I think the way we look at it is like we never forget that this ultimately is going to be adding value to enterprises so from day one we you can't store data and Roxette without encrypting it like it's just the on you know on by default the only way and all transit is all or HTTPS and SSL and so we never freaked out that we're building for enterprises and so we've baked in for enterprise customers if they can bring in their own custom encryption key and so everything will be encrypted the key never leaves their AWS account if it's a you know kms key support private VP ceilings like we have a plethora of you know security features so that the the control of the data is still with the data controller with this which is our customer but we will be the the processor and a lot of the time we can process it using their encryption keys if I'm gonna build a GDP our sleeves no security solution I would probably build on Roxette and some of the early developers take around rocks at our security companies that are trying to track we're all ideas coming and going so there the processor and then one of the companies we hope to enable with Roxette is another generation security and privacy companies that in the past had a hard time tracking all this data so I can build on top of rocks crack okay so you can built you can build security a gbbr solution on top rock set because rock set gives you the power to process all the data index all the data and then so one of the early developers you know stolen stealth is they looking at the data flows coming and go he's using them and they'll apply the context right they'll say oh this is your credit card the Social Security is your birthday excetera your favorite colors and they'll apply that but I think to your point it's game-changing like not just Roxette but all the stuff in cloud and as an investor we see a whole generation of new companies either a to make things better or B to solve this new category problems like pricing the cloud and I think the future is pretty bright for both great founders and investors because there's just a bunch of great new companies and it's building up from the ground up this is the thing I brought my mother's red hat IBM thing is that's not the answer at the root level I feel like right now I'd be on I I think's fastenings but it's almost like you're almost doubling down to your your comment on the old stack right it's almost a double down the old stack versus an aggressive bet on kind of what a cloud native stack will look like you know I wish both companies are great people I was doing the best and stuff do well with I think I'd like to do great with OpenStack but again their product company as the people that happen to contribute to open source I think was a great move for both companies but it doesn't mean that that's not we can't do well without a new stack doing well and I think you're gonna see this world where we have to your point oh these old stacks but then a category of new stack companies that are being born in the cloud they're just fun to watch it all it's all big all big investments that would be blitzscaling criteria all start out organically on a wave in a market that has problems yeah and that's growing so I think cloud native ground-up kind of clean sheet of paper that's the new you know I say you're just got a pic pick up you got to pick the right way if I'm oh it's gotta pick a big wave big wave is not a bad wave to be on right now and it's at the data way that's part of the cloud cracked and it's it's been growing bigger it's it's arguably bigger than IBM is bigger than Red Hat is bigger than most of the companies out there and I think that's the right way to bet on it so you're gonna pick the next way that's kind of cloud native-born the cloud infrastructure that is still early days and companies are writing that way we're gonna do well and so I'm pretty excited there's a lot of opportunities certainly this whole idea that you know this change is coming societal change you know what's going on mission based companies from whether it's the NGO to full scale or all the applications that the clouds can enable from data privacy your wearables or cars or health thing we're seeing it every single day I'm pretty sad if you took amazon's revenue and then edit edit and it's not revenue the whole ready you look at there a dybbuk loud revenue so there's like 20 billion run which you know Microsoft had bundles in a lot of their office stuff as well if you took amazon's customers to dinner in the marketplace and took their revenue there clearly would be never for sure if item binds by a long shot so they don't count that revenue and that's a big factor if you look at whoever can build these enabling markets right now there's gonna be a few few big ones I think coming on they're gonna do well so I think this is a good opportunity of gradual ations thank you thank you at 21 million dollars final question before we go what are you gonna spend it on we're gonna spend it on our go-to-market strategy and hiding amazing people as many as we can get good good answer didn't say launch party that I'm saying right yeah okay we're here Rex at SIA and Joe's Jerry Chen cube cube royalty number two all-time on our Keeble um nine list partner and Greylock guy states were coming in I'm Jeffrey thanks for watching this special cube conversation [Music]

(electronic music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2018, happy to be welcoming one of the users at this show, Jerry Flick, who's with Belmond. He's the Divisional Director of I.T. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, and welcome to the Boston area. You're from Charleston, South Carolina. >> I live in Charleston now, yeah. But I'm familiar with the area. I'm from the Northeast, but I love being here. Boston's a great town. >> Yeah, we had a lovely weather. It's in the low '70s, you know, the Sox should have a nice game here, so. Have you been to this event before? >> I have, this is my third year. >> Okay, excellent. You've been to more of 'em than me. >> Okay. >> So, let's start with Belmond. Tell us a little bit about the organization, for those that don't know. >> Absolutely, so Belmond is a worldwide luxury hotel experience, hospitality industry. So we have hotels, we have restaurants, there's train excursions, river cruises, and really, the focus on Belmond is providing a superior level of service to the guests that take part in our experiences. >> Well Jerry, the great thing I love talking about users is, their lives are pretty stable. There's not these things like Airbnb, and you know, other technologies left that are just saying oh yeah, we'll spin up an app and just put your company that's been around for decades out of business, right? It's nice and stable. >> Yeah, that sounds like a little sarcasm, but. (laughs) >> I've been known to be a little sarcastic. So yeah, Jerry, tell us how long has Belmond been in business? You said it's worldwide, how many employees, and how does Belmond deal with the digital transformation? >> Oh, absolutely. >> That's, you know, coming down? >> Well, they took the name five years ago. They used to be Orient Express prior to that, and many people know the Orient Express from the Agatha Christie novels. >> My wife loved the new movie, so. >> Yes, so did mine actually. But what they do is, we have over 50 properties worldwide. I joined about seven months ago, and one of the initiatives they have now is to double the amount of properties and experiences they have by 2020. So, as part of what I do in the division I manage, I have North America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I have about eight properties under my belt, and we have to make sure that we coordinate with corporate for our company policies, our I.T. structure, which is kind of complicated because you're dealing with multiple countries, and different technologies that people like, different flavors, so it certainly presents its own challenges. >> All right, so Jerry, when you say you've got those properties, and really the I.T., what does that mean? What's under your purview from an I.T. perspective? >> Sure, so each property has either an I.T. director or a manager, and then depending on the size of the property they have different I.T. personnel that handle everything from the infrastructure, the servers, as well as through user support and even interfacing with the clients. Guest wifi is a big thing, so people want to come to our properties and make sure that they can get on the internet well, they can watch T.V., and they can do that, and that all comes down to what we have to provide them. >> Yeah, I love that. Yeah, help connect us a little bit, you know, the role of I.T. and the pressures put on you, versus wow, we've got lots of challenges from the business side these days. I'm sure cost pressure are there, you need to able to know when things are available, know that the client is getting great service when they're at your facilities. >> Yeah, actually they like to use the term, we need to be cost neutral. >> Okay. >> So everything that we do, of course I.T. is a cost within itself, but when the clients come in, and again, they expect that high quality of service, that internet connectivity, and really just whatever it is that the technology can drive to make their experience better, they look to us. But from a standpoint of support, we're 24/7. We have to keep the systems running, we have to make sure that everything from property management is going, and that we keep them moving, we keep business running. >> Yeah, so in my career in I.T., I've gotten to get under the covers sometimes in hospitality. When you've got hundreds or thousands of rooms, just even the basic phone system, let alone the internet and everything, there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of gear, maintaining. People talk about their data centers, but boy, you've got so many properties to deal with. What are some of the challenges there, and you know, bring us inside that infrastructure as to, how you have to build and architect it to fit that cost neutral mandate that you have. >> Yeah, we definitely want to be innovative, so for example with our Charleston facility, we recently deployed a Nutanix cluster on a Dell XC series, and we did that through Winslow Technology. And some of the things that we look to that for is, we don't have a lot of data, we don't have big data. And recently, we had to implement a GDPR policy, because we are worldwide, so that really kind of limits, you know, we're going to have even less data within our system. So having an implementation of Nutanix is really a great way to provision the service we need. We do have a mix of Cloud systems, as well as on-prem, so definitely a hybrid Cloud model would be something that I would like to see moving forward, as well as within the division, try to synchronize everything. Make everybody synergized, so that we can try to be like a flagship to the brand, and really set the standard for what is the best in technology. >> Yeah, so a lot of conversation in the keynote this morning about hybrid cloud. Want to get your reaction as to what you heard, as well as, you know, the big question is, how do you figure out what to put where? >> Yeah, that's a good question, and I've had a lot of sessions with Rick. I think he's really in tune with what's going on, so, pretty much the whole Winslow staff. You can reach out to them, and if you don't specialize in something, you know, you're not going to know everything in I.T., especially when you're dealing with as you mentioned, what's underneath. But to be able to reach out to a partner like that and say hey, do you have a subject matter expert in this? It really gives you a good idea of where the industry's going, and that's my goal is to make sure we stay ahead of that, so that we can provide the business what's a cost neutral way to make it better, and continue to provide that superior service. >> Okay. You said that you've deployed the OEM Nutanix solution with Dell. Can you give us a little bit of insight, you know, what applications sit there? What kind of scale do you go to with that? Is it something that mostly just runs, and you don't need to touch it, or is it something that's growing over time? >> Yeah, I mean, we recently did it within the last month. So what we did, fortunately we were able to just build it, and not initially have to migrate anything over. But for our use, property management, we have an Opera property management system, and that's going to be key to keeping that running, and we are looking to keep that on-prem. Everything else, like our point of sale service, they do need a cached systems within the infrastructure. And then we're looking to upgrade our phone system which depending on if we do that Cloud based or not, having a Nutanix cluster in play like that, and really just the reactions I'm getting from my team that's working with it, they've used other systems. They've used the huge SAN systems of the past, and to be able to spin up a Windows server in less than six minutes, you know, they really love it. We're using the Acropolis Hypervisor, and the simplivity of it, it's easy to use. The buttons, it's real, it's just very simple. It's not as layered as a lot of the systems, so I think as we move forward the performance of it, we're really going to see a quick turnaround, and it's going to make the employees happy working with it, as well. >> Awesome, Jerry. Last thing I want to ask you, you've been to this show for three years. What bring you up besides, you know, the beautiful Boston weather. You mentioned talking to Rick and the team, maybe checking out the Red Sox. What's the value of coming to events like this? >> Well, you know, and again, Winslow's a unique company. They're smaller, and they have a certain niche in an area, but you know, I've worked with several of the account reps, I've worked with the engineers, and they really have a good foothold on technology, but their process of getting to know the customers, and being able to really anticipate what they need, as well as they're not going to oversell you. They're not going to sell you something you don't need, and even if they present something and you're not interested, there's no pressure there. So, they really make it easy to work with them. And so, aside from being here in Boston and loving it, I do enjoy being with the Winslow team, and being treated so nicely by them. >> All right. Jerry, pleasure meeting you. Thanks so much, and congrats on the progress with Belmond. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, always love talking to the users, and we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)