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

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody. John Walls here, as we continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. And today we're going to go talk about the edge. What's out there on the edge, and how do we make sense of it? How do we use that data, and put it to work, and how do we keep it secure? Big questions, a lot of questions, and at the end of the day, what's the value prop for you, the customer, to make it all work? With me to talk about that is the Executive Vice President and GM of HPE GreenLake, Keith White. Keith, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> John, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity, and excited to have a conversation today. >> Yeah, good. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, about the edge. There was a time, not so long ago, that it was kind of the Wild, Wild West out there, right? And we were trying to corral this fantastic reservoir of data that was streaming in from every which point, to the point now where we've realized how to refine that, how to develop that, how to reduce that complexity, to make that actionable. Talk about that journey a little bit, about where we were with edge technology maybe five, six years ago, and how we've migrated to the point we are now, where GreenLake is doing the great work that it is. >> You know, it's really a great question, John, cause I think there's a lot of different definitions of the edge, and what does "the edge" actually mean. And you're right, you know, there's been a pretty big transformation over the last few years, especially as we think about things like IoT, and just being able to engage with edge scenarios. But today what you're seeing is a lot of digital transformations happening with companies around three big megatrends. Cloud, meaning hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, data, and how you analyze that data to make decisions. And of course the edge, like we're talking through. And you know, frankly, with the edge, this is where we see the connectivity and security requirements really connect, because that edge information is so important, so critical to stay secure, but also it's creating that tremendous amount of data, as you mentioned. And so folks want to pull that into their cloud environment, and then make decisions and analyze that data, and plug it into the systems that they have overall. And you know, you're seeing companies like Auckland Transport, right? They basically do an AI-enhanced video feed to optimize their transport routes. And as you think about supply chain and the big challenges that we're seeing today, or you think about public transportation, and, you know, really providing information with respect to customers, but how do you take and get all that information pulled together, to then make decisions from these various edge points throughout? Or a company like ABB, who's been building the factory of the future, and doing, basically, you know, robotics-as-a-service, if you will, in order to really get that precision required at the edge in order to manufacture what they need to. So, massive uses around the edge, massive data getting created, and HPE GreenLake's a great spot for folks to help, you know, really take and leverage that data, to make those those decisions that are required. >> You know, one example in terms of case studies, or in terms of your client base that you talk about, you know, the automotive sector. >> Yeah. >> And I think about what's going on in terms of, with that technology, and I can't even imagine the kind of mechanics that are happening, right? In real time, at 60, 70 miles an hour, through all kinds of environmental conditions. So maybe just touch base, too, about what you're doing that's in terms of automotive, and what's going to be- >> No, it's great, John, yeah. >> (indistinct) then? >> Yeah, no, it's an awesome question, because, you know, we're working closely with a lot of the car manufacturers, as well as their sort of subsidiaries, if you will. So you look at autonomous driving, which is a great example. All that data has to come in and get analyzed. And if you look at a company like Volvo, they use a third party called Zenseact, who basically uses our high-performance compute to deliver it as a service through HPE GreenLake. They get all this massive parallel computing, modeling and simulations happening, with all this data coming in. And so what we've done with GreenLake is we give them that ability to easily scale up, to grow capacity, to get access to that hundreds of petabytes of data that you just mentioned. And then, you know, really basically take and make analytics and AI models and machine learning capabilities out of that, in order to really direct and fuel their mission to develop that next-generation software to support that autonomous driving capability. And so you're seeing that with a ton of different car manufacturers, as well as a lot of different other scenarios as well. So you're spot on. Automotive is a key place for that. >> You know, and too, the similarities here, the common thread, I think, threads, actually, plural, are very common. We think about access, right? We think about security, we think about control, we think about data, we think about analytics, so I mean, all these things are factoring in, in this extraordinarily dynamic environment. So is there a batting order, or a pecking order, in terms of addressing those areas of concern, or what kind of, I guess, learning curve have we had on that front? >> Well, I think you're, I think the key is, as I mentioned earlier, so you have this connectivity piece, and you've got to be able to connect and be available as required. That might be through SD-WAN, that might be Wi-Fi, that might be through a network access point, et cetera. But the key is that security piece of it as well. Customers need to know that that data and that edge device is very, very secure. And then you've got to have that connectivity back into your environment. And so what we've learned with HPE GreenLake, which, really what that does, is that brings that cloud experience, that public cloud experience, to customers in their data center, on-premise, in their colo, or at the edge, like we're talking about now, because there's a lot of need to keep that data secure, private, to make sure that it's not out in the public cloud and accessible, or those types of scenarios. So as I think about that piece of it, then it turns into, okay, how do we take all that data and do the analytics and the AI modeling that we talked about before? So it's a really interesting flow that has to happen. But what's happening is, people are really transforming their business, transforming their business models, as we just talked about. Factory of the future, you know, transportation needs. We're seeing it in different environments as well. Automotive, as you mentioned. But it's exciting, it's an exciting time, with all of this opportunity to really change not only how a business can run, but how we as consumers interact and engage with that. >> And then ultimately for the company, the value prop's got to be there. And you've already cited a number of areas. Is there one key metric that you look at, or one key deliverable that you look at here, in terms of what the ultimate value proposition is for a customer? >> You bet. I think the biggest thing is, you know, our customers and their satisfaction. And so, to date, you know, we have well over 60,000 customers on the platform. We have a retention rate of 96%, so a very, very small number that haven't stayed on the platform itself. And that means that they're satisfied. And what we're seeing also is a continued growth in usage for new environments, new workloads, new solutions that a customer is trying to drive as well. And so those are some of the key metrics we look at, with respect to our customer satisfaction, with their retention rate, with their usage capabilities, and then how we're growing that piece. And the interesting thing, John, is what we've learned is that HPE, as a company, traditionally was very hardware focused, it was a hardware vendor, transacting, responding to RFPs for compute, storage, and networking. With GreenLake now moving into the cloud services realm, we're now having conversations with customers as their partner. How do we solve this problem? How do we transform our business? How do we accelerate our growth? And that's been very exciting for us as a company, to really make that significant transformation and shift to being part of our customer's environments in a partnership type way. >> Yeah. And now you're talking about ecosystem, right? And what you're developing, not only in your partners, but also maybe what lessons you're learning in one respect you can apply to others. What's happening in that respect, in terms of the kind of universe that you're developing, and how applicable, maybe, one experience is to another client's needs? >> Yeah, no, it's a great question, because in essence, what happens is, we're sort of the tip of the spear, and we're partnering with customers to really go in deep, and understand how to utilize that. We can take that learning, and then push that out to our ecosystem, so that they can scale and they can work with more customers with respect to that piece of it. The second is, is that we're really driving into these more solution-oriented partners, right? The ISVs, the system integrators, the managed service providers, the colos, and even the hyperscalers, as we've talked about, and why we're here with our friends at AWS, is, customers are requiring a hybrid environment. They want to leverage tools up in the public cloud, but they also want the on-prem capabilities, and they need those to work together. And so this ecosystem becomes very dynamic with respect to, hey, what are we learning, and how do we solve our customer's problems together? I always talk about the ecosystem being 1 + 1 = 3 for our customers. It has to be that way, and frankly, our customers are expecting that. And that's why we're excited to be here today with our, as I said, our friends at AWS. >> And how does open play in all this too, right? Because, I mean, that provides, I assume, the kind of flexibility that people are looking for, you know, they, you know, having that open environment and making an opportunity available to them is a pretty big attractive element. >> It's huge, right? Yeah, as you know, people don't want to get locked in to a single technology. They don't want to get locked in to a single cloud. They don't want to have to, they want to be able to utilize the best of the best. And so maybe there's some tools in the public cloud that can really help from an analytics standpoint, but we can store and we can process it locally in our data center, at the edge, or in a colo. And so that best of both worlds is there, but it has to be an open platform. I have to be able to choose my container, my virtual machine, my AI tools, my, you know, capabilities, my ISV application, so that I have that flexibility. And so it's been fantastic for us to move into this open platform environment, to be able to have customers leverage the best and what's going to work best for them, and then partnering with those folks closely to, again, deliver those solutions that are required. >> You know, this is, I mean, it appears, as I'm hearing you talk about this, in terms of the partnerships you're creating, the ecosystem that you're developing, how that's evolving, lessons that you've learned, the attention you've paid to security and data analytics. I get the feeling that you've got a lot of momentum, right? A lot of things are happening here. You've got big mo on your side right now. (Keith laughs) Would you characterize it that way? >> Yeah, you know, there's a ton of momentum. I think what we're finding is, customers are requiring that cloud experience on-prem. You know, they're getting it from AWS and some of the other hyperscalers, but they want that same capability on-prem. And so what we've seen is just a dramatic increase with respect to usage, customers. We're adding hundreds of customers every quarter. We're growing in the triple digits, three of the last four quarters. And so, yeah, we're seeing tremendous momentum, but as I said, what's been most important is that relationship with the customer. We've really flipped it to becoming that partner with them. And again, bringing that ecosystem to bear, so that we can have the best of all worlds. And it's been fantastic to see, and frankly, the momentum's been tremendous. And we're in a quiet period right now, but you'll see what our earnings are here in the next couple weeks, and we can talk more details on that, but in the past, as we talked about, we've grown, you know, triple digits three of the last four quarters, and, you know, well over $3 billion, well over $8 billion of total contract value that we've implemented to date. And, you know, the momentum is there, but, again, most importantly is, we're solving our customers' problems together, and we're helping them accelerate their business and their transformation. >> I know you mentioned earnings, the report's a few weeks away. I saw your smile, that big old, you know, grin, so I have a feeling the news is pretty good from the HPE GreenLake side. >> It is. We're excited about it. And you know, again, this really is just a testament to the transformation we've made as a company in order to move towards those cloud services. And you know, you'll hear us talk about it as the core of what we're doing as a company, holistically, again, because this is what customers are requiring, this is what our ecosystem is moving towards. And it's been really fun, it's been a great, great ride. >> Excellent. Keith, appreciate the time, and keep up the good work, and I'm going to look for that earnings report here in a few weeks. >> Awesome. Thanks so much, John. Take good care. Appreciate it. >> You bet, you too. Keith White joining us here, talking about HPE GreenLake, and defining what they're doing in terms of bringing the edge back into the primary systems for a lot of companies. So, good work there. We'll continue our coverage here in theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent. And I'm John Walls. (lively music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, wonderful cloud community, and welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson, and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant gentlemen today. Please welcome Keith from Cockroach Labs and Jeff from AMD. Thank you both for tuning in, coming in from the East coast. How you doing? >> Not too bad. A little cold, but we're going >> Doing great. >> Love that and I love the enthusiasm Keith, you're definitely bringing the heat in the green room before we got on, so I'm going to open this up with you. Cockroach Labs puts out a pretty infamous and useful cloud report each year. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the approach and the data that you report on? >> Yeah, so Cockroach Labs builds a distributed SQL database that we are able to run across multiple cloud regions, multiple sites, multiple data centers. Frequently is running a hybrid kind of a use case and it's important for our customers to be able to compare the performance of configurations when they don't have exact the same hardware available to them in every single location. So since we were already doing this internally for ourselves and for our customers, we decided to turn it into something we shared with the greater community. And it's been a great experience for us. A lot of people come and ask us every year, "Hey, when's the new cloud report coming out?" Because they want to read it. It's been a great win for us. >> How many different things are you looking at? I mean, when you're comparing configurations I imagine there's a lot of different complex variables there. Just how much are you taking into consideration when you publish this report? >> Yeah, so we look at micro benchmarks around CPU network and storage. And then our flagship benchmark is we use the database itself where we have the most expertise to create a real world benchmark on across all of these instances. This year I think we tested over 150 different discrete configurations and it's a bit of a labor of love for us because we then not only do we consume it for best practices for our own as a service offering, but we share it with our customers. We use it internally to make all kinds of different decisions. >> Yeah, 150 different comparisons is not a small number. And Jeff, I know that AMD's position in this cloud report is really important. Where do you fit into all of this and what does it mean for you? >> Right, so what it means for us and for our customers is, there's a good breath and depth of testing that has gone of from the lab. And you look at this cloud report and it helps them traverse this landscape of, why to go on instance A, B, or C on certain workloads. And it really is very meaningful because they now have the real data across all those dimensional kinds of tests. So this definitely helps not only the customers but also for ourselves. So we can now look at ourselves more independently for feedback loops and say, "Hey, here's where we're doing well, here's where we're doing okay, here's where we need to improve on." All those things are important for us. So love seeing the lab present out such a great report as I've seen, very comprehensive, so I very much appreciate it. >> And specifically I love that you're both fans of each other, obviously, specifically digging in there, what does it mean that AMD had the best performance ratio tested on AWS instances? >> Yeah, so when we're looking at instances, we're not just looking at how fast something is, we're also looking at how much it costs to get that level of performance because CockroachDB as a distributed system has the opportunity to scale up and out. And so rather than necessarily wanting the fastest single instance performance, which is an important metric for certain use cases for sure, the comparison of price for performance when you can add notes to get more performance can be a much more economical thing for a lot of our customers. And so AMD has had a great showing on the price performance ratio for I think two years now. And it makes it hard to justify other instance types in a lot of circumstances simply because it's cheaper to get, for each transaction per second that you need, it's cheaper to use an AMD instance than it would be a competitive instance from another vendor. >> I mean, everyone I think no matter their sector wants to do things faster and cheaper and you're able to achieve both, it's easy to see why it's a choice that many folks would like to make. So what do these results mean for CIOs and CTOs? I can imagine there's a lot of value here in the FinOps world. >> Yep. Oh, I'll start a few of 'em. So from the C-suite when they're really looking at the problem statement, think of it as less granular, but higher level. So they're really looking at CapEx, OpEx, sustainability, security, sort of ecosystem on there. And then as Keith pointed out, hey, there's this TCO conversation that has to happen. In other words, as they're moving from sort of this lift and shift from their on-prem into the cloud, what does that mean to them for spend? So now if you're looking at the consistency around sort of the performance and the total cost of running this to their insights, to the conclusions, less time, more money in their pocket and maybe a reduction for their own customers so they can provide better for the customer side. What you're actually seeing is that's the challenge that they're facing in that landscape that they're driving towards that they need guidance and help with towards that. And we find AMD lends itself well to that scale out architecture that connects so well with how cloud microservices are run today. >> It's not surprising to hear that. Keith, what other tips and tricks do you have for CIOs and CTOs trying to reduce FinOps and continue to excel as they're building out? >> Yeah, so there were a couple of other insights that we learned this year. One of those two insights that I'd like to mention is that it's not always obvious what size and shape infrastructure you need to acquire to maximize your cost productions, right? So we found that smaller instance types were by and large had a better TCO than larger instances even across the exact same configurations, we kept everything else the same. Smaller instances had a better price performance ratio than the larger instances. The other thing that we discovered this year that was really interesting, we did a bit of a cost analysis on networking. And largely because we're distributed system, we can scan span across availability zones, we can span across regions, right? And one of the things we discovered this year is the amount of cost for transferring data between availability zones and the amount of cost for transferring data across regions at least in the United States was the same. So you could potentially get more resiliency by spanning your infrastructure across regions, then you would necessarily just spanning across availability zones. So you could be across multiple regions at the same cost as you were across availability zones, which for something like CockroachDB, we were designed to support those workloads is a really big and important thing for us. Now you have to be very particular about where you're purchasing your infrastructure and where those regions are. Because those data transfer rates change depending on what the source and the target is. But at least within the United States, we found that there was a strong correlation to being more survivable if you were in a multi-region deployment and the cost stayed pretty flat. >> That's interesting. So it's interesting to see what the correlation is between things and when you think there may be relationship between variables and when there maybe isn't. So on that note, since it seems like you're both always learning, I can imagine, what are you excited to test or learn about looking forward? Jeff, let's start with you actually. >> For sort of future testing. One of those things is certainly those more scale out sort of workloads with respect to showing scale. Meaning as I'm increasing the working set, as I'm increasing the number of connections, variability is another big thing of showing that minimization from run to run because performance is interesting but consistency is better. And as the lower side is from the instant sizes as I was talking about earlier, a (indistinct) architecture lends itself so well to it because they have the local caching and the CCDs that you can now put a number of vCPUs that will benefit from that delivery of the local caching and drive better performance at the lower side for that scale out sort of architecture, which is so consistent with the microservices. So I would be looking for more of those dimensional testings variability across a variety of workloads that you can go from memory intense workloads to database persistence store as well as a blend of the two, Kafka, et cetera. So there's a great breath and depth of testing that I am looking for and to more connect with sort of the CTOs and CIOs, the higher level that really show them that that CapEx, OpEx, sustainability and provide a bit more around that side of it because those are are the big things that they're focused on as well as security, the fact that based on working sets et cetera, AMD has the ability with confidential compute around those kind of offerings that can start to drive to those outcomes and help from what the CTOs and CIOs are looking for from compliance as well. So set them out (indistinct). >> So you're excited about a lot. No, that's great. That means you're very excited about the future. >> It's a journey that continues as Keith knows, there's always something new. >> Yeah, absolutely. What about you Keith? What is the most excited on the journey? >> Yeah, there are a couple of things I'd like to see us test next year. One of those is to test a multi-region CockroachDB config. We have a lot of customers running in that configuration and production but we haven't scaled that testing up to the same breadth that we we do with our single region testing which is what we've based the cloud report on for the past four years. The other thing that I'd really love to see us do,, I'm a Kubernetes SME, at least that's kind of my technical background. I would love to see us get to a spot where we're comparing the performance of raw EC2 instances to using that same infrastructure running CockroachDB via EKS and kind of see what the differences are there. The vast majority of CockroachDB customers are running at least a portion of their infrastructure in Kubernetes. So I feel like that would be a real great value add to the report for the next time that we go around but go about publishing it. >> If I don't mind adding to that just to volley it back for a moment. And also as I was saying about the ScaleOut and how it leverages our AMD architecture so well with EKS specifically around the spin up, spin down. So you think of a whole development life cycle. As they grow and shrink the resources over time, time of those spin ups to spin downs are expensive. So that has to be as reduced as much as possible. And I think they'll see a lot of benefits in AMD's architecture with EKS running on it as well. >> The future is bright. There's a lot of hype about many of the technologies that you both just mentioned, so I'm very curious to see what the next cloud report looks like. Thank you Keith, and the team for the labor of love that you put into that every year. And Jeff, I hope that you continue to be as well positioned as everyone's innovation journey continues. Keith and Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. As you know, this is a continuation of our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you for our next fascinating segment. (upbeat music)

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

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John Forer host of the cube with Dave Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days, we're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware is our 12th year covering VMware's user conference. Formerly known as world. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future multi-cloud vSphere eight and a variety of new next generation cloud. We're here on day three, breaking out. This is day three more, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on the Q Keith Norby with NetApp, the worldwide product partner solutions executive at NetApp Keith. Great to see you industry to veteran cube alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's >>Good to see you >>Again. Yeah. I wanted to bring you back for a couple reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with DM VMware as that's evolving and, and is changing and, and with Broadcom and, and the new next generation, but also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. You're like an analyst who've been in the industry for a long time. Been commentating on the cube. VMware's in an interesting spot right now because I, I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it a little bit too multicloud, not enough cloud native, but I see the waves, right? I get it. Virtualization kicked ass tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud. And now this next gen is a, you know, clear cloud native multi-cloud environment. I, I get that. I can see, I can, I can get there, but is it ready? And the timing. Right. And do they have all the peace parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. >>Yeah. And, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this, is that not just a NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem and videos here, as an example, who, who is thinking, you know, the Kings of AI are gonna be sitting at a V VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's, it's, that's not overcomplicated. There is a set of primary principles that, you know, organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's, you know, operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, you know, that's part of the landscape, >>You know, I gotta ask you, you know, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and gonna happen. You know, it's interesting 12 years covering world and now explore NetApp has always been such a great company. We've been, I've been following that company, you know, since, you know, 1997, you know, days. And, and certainly with the past decade of the cloud or so the moves you guys may have been really good, but NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at world or now explore? >>Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days, we're talking to ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of, you know, the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there, but yeah, it, it, it was great seeing a day, one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just being AWS, but be in all the hyperscalers as first party services and having a, a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance and cloud data management and cloud cloud backup, and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and, and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on, on the previous cube session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about, we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You >>Know, I, I can say because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 20 11, 20 12, the then CEO Georgian's and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's that's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed EMC kind of was deer in the headlights at that point. They were poo pooing, AWS. Oh yeah, no, it'll never work either of which will never work. It's just a, a fluke. Yeah. For developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. >>Yeah. It, it, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first party service, but that's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you wanna talk about the technology capabilities in, in this offering, the funny part is, is the intro conversation is how much money you save. So it unlocks all the, the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you, when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they were hell held back. The number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization, after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're gonna go in >>Unleash those. All right. So what are, what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update it's been a while, since we had a cube update with you guys, what are you guys showing of the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? >>Well, for us, it's, it's, it's, it's always, you know, a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities within our partner ecosystem. The way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. You know, one is on the hybrid cloud opportunity, people taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud, just like we're delivering here at this VMware world show. Also the AI and modern data analytics opportunity, and then public cloud, because really in a lot of these situations at apps, you know, the, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys, the data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And, and that's exactly who we target this in is, is NetApp. I think, focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our instant cluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant, we, as we can in data management and you know, whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's >>Where we're there. You know, I, I was talking with David Nicholson, cuz we have, you know, we joked together. I say the holy Trinity, he goes with the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, gotta know what his, his denomination is, but storage, networking, and compute. Obviously the, the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now, and I wanna get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the it ops is not it anymore. It's basically security and data I'm I'm oversimplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call it work in, in the CSD pipeline, but the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful. You got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move, compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops. Yeah. And AI. So like storage is back. They never left, but it's, it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyper-convergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this and how is NetApp modernized to, to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and of obviously enable and, and enable in great security and or defense ability. >>Yeah. And that's why no one architecture is gonna solve every problem. That's why, when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer. And there's also the fin ops buyer because all of 'em have to work together. What we're, what we're focusing on. Isn't just storing data. But it's also things around how you discover govern data. You know, how you protect data, even things like in the ed workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do within Invidia, or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, you know, what we've put together is, is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. >>Talk about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night I did, I did a fly by a NetApp event. It was Nvidia insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the frontline on the front lines, you got partners and you got, you know, big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like Nvidia, what are you actually selling? What's what's getting, I guess what's being put together, not selling, I'm obviously selling gear and what, but like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer. Where does, what does and video fit in? What are you guys? And what's the winning formula. Take us through the highlights. >>Yeah. And so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not have, be, be trapped in one cloud or anyone OnPrem. So having a little more E elasticity, but if you extend that out, like you, like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to, to go drive AI within Nvidia, you know, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals cuz no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start it with the, a with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring 'em on prem. Once the data sets get to a, a big enough scenario and then they wanna build it into a multi-cloud over time. And that's where Nvidia has really led the charge. So someone like an insight or other partners could be Kindra or, or Accenture, or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that. And we provide not just data storage, but are really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say it like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI, as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got >>It. And where's the, the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrids, a steady state right now multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next, but hybrid and cloud, what's the key key configuration for NetApp what's the hot products? >>Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric, as you know, and it's built from there up into, into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to compliment to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacency to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the finops space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud, to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models. Once you're working with NetApp and allow it to re re redeploy it in the place that you wanna spend it, you know, so it's, it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. >>Yeah. I was on the walking around the hallway yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and, and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story >>There? Yeah, it's funny because that's, that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show at every other show is security for us. It's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned, you know, insight and there's others, you know, CDW ahead here, and the GSI hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you gotta work this with ecosystem, as we said, you know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players. Because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block remediate and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we've tried to do is really be as, as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's a lead story in the hybrid clouds. >>Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug cuz you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that our customers or potential customers, what's the NetApp story for this year? >>Well, the net, the nets right for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for, for the, the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite of the spectrum, if you're coming at us from an AWS show or the cloud op the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew net from the on-prem, you're gonna see us massively relevant in that, in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure, so, or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we were relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective, to be able to solve those problems, but by the way, do it with partners cuz the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves. And we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies. And that's why we, we leverage it that way. >>Great, great stuff. Now I gotta ask you what what's going on in your world with partners. How's it going? What's the vibe what's that just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners? Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the, the high order bit news items or, or trends going on at the, on the front lines with your partners? >>Well, I think listen, the, the, the challenges pitfalls, the, the objections, the, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs, you see these cloud native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm, you know, to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them, just consulting partners alone. Like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP. And a lot of them don't, you know, don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You gotta put together an offering that says we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's, it's a combination of these partners across the, the different >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And I, and I, I'm gonna, I wanna get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out, out in the limb and, and put NetApp in a, in a position on official position. But I've been saying on the cube that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean like you you'd think when someone gets bought out or, or intention bought out, that'd be like this, this dark cloud that would hang over the, the company and this condition is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I gotta tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer, the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing. It was packed the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings, it's all, all growth. So, so I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom, because no matter what happens that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. Yeah. It's not going away cuz they have such great customer base. So, you know, assume that broad Tom is gonna do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels they'll keep all the customers. So, but still that wave is coming. Yeah. It's independent of VMware. Yeah. That's the whole point. So what happens next? >>Well, I think, you know, we, >>We, you guys are gonna get mop up in business. Amazon's gonna get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it all gonna, >>Yeah. I think, you know, we've, we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them and we have a great relationship with VMware. It's it's best. It's almost ever been now and together. I think that will all just rationalize and, and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year, and I think, you know, what you'll see is probably, you know, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from, but ultimately the, these, these, these solutions that they have to come forward with, you know, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that with VMware trying to do VMware cloud and AWS, they realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us that made total sense. I think you're gonna see more of those things that are very common sense, ways to solve the, the barriers to, you know, modernization, adoption and maturity. That's just gonna be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. >>It's gonna be very interesting. We interviewed AJ Patel yesterday. He heads up he's SVP G of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots kind of where we're going with this. Yeah. So I assume there's a nice middleware layer of developing everybody wins yeah. In this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens at Broadcom from this show, my assessment's all steam all steam ahead. No, one's holding back at this point. >>Yeah. It's funny. The, the most mature partners we talk to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story and the upper story is all about that, that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side, they wanna make that as, as nascent as possible, like infrastructure's code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application, middleware space, you know, and work on that, on that side of the house, you know, you're not gonna be >>Relevant. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, most people, people take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was yeah. In the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity solved. You got hardware, essentially cloud and you got applications, right. So it's all, all kind of the same, but not >>Yeah. In a lot of cases, it could be conceived as even like pipelining, you know, it's it's, you have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a, a much different architecture. The, the whole deal is how you're relevant there. How you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving securities, you mentioned all those things are relevant and that's where, that's where you have to place >>Your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage compute, networking never goes away. It's just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to say, deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you for the, see you again, man, day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story. Right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay. More cube coverage. After this short break day three, Walter Wall coverage. I'm John furier host Dave ante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.

(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explore 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set. Get a load of this Nature Fresh Farms produce. Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms, and Alison Biers is back, as well, director of marketing at Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringin' some food. >> Well, thank you, yeah. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farm's perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? >> As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So, we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 3 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So, the peppers that we have in front of you, the tomatoes, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture to irrigation and nutrients. So, we do all that. >> So, should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? >> I'd like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell good. >> Connect the dots for us. So, let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? >> So, one of the things that we've been able to do, and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So, analyze the data realtime at the Edge. So, making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take 8 to 10 hours to run. Now they run- >> So, extraction, transformation and load. >> Yep, yep. >> Okay. So, we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA and you don't find it the first time. >> Okay. >> But you get a pass 'cause you're an actual and real person. >> I'll give you that one. >> I already had a claim laid on that. I'm sorry, so continue. >> Yeah, yeah. So, it allowed now the growers to make multiple decisions and then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now, AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So, it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. >> That's awesome. Alison, talk to us about from Dell's perspective how is it helping Nature Fresh to simplify the Edge which there's a lot of complexity there? You talked about the size of the organization but how do you help simplify it? >> I think Nature Fresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So, they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so, one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the Edge is really critical. >> I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here. Because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers. It's not an abstraction. These are actual actual people. Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. >> Physically. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? >> So, we actually have, we have a core data center at the center of Nature Fresh set up basically where everything ends up. We have our Edge. So, we have computers, we're at the Edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at, not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there, 'cause that is our first Edge. And people think that's static for us. The Edge isn't static. 'Cause the Edge now moves. We have a plant that grows. Then we pick it. And then we have to store it and then we have to ship it. So, our Edge actually does move from area to area to area. So, statically one thing isn't the same all the time. It's a hard thing to say how it all starts but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. >> Okay, then are those, 'cause we think of things in terms of like internet of things and these sensors. >> Oh yeah. >> Things are being gathered. So, you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. What's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? >> So, what we do is we actually store everything at the Edge, and we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. >> Got it. >> And then that way, at the core, it does the long term analysis. 'Cause again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So, it aggregates it all down. So, that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information. And to give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually have estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. >> At any moment. >> Yeah. >> That's how many plants they're tracking. And so, that realtime information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them. And you were telling me about how the life of a plant, you're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So, if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site. Right? >> Yeah. Our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So, it's what we did. And it allowed us to mold how we do things. >> Alison, question for you, this sounds like a dynamic Edge the way that you described it, Keith, and you described it so eloquently. How does the partnership that Dell has with Nature Fresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its Edge solutions based on what you're seeing here and this need for realtime data analytics. >> Well, we spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive realtime data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers experience their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security. How to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing. And at the same time, they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So, people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So, I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their Edge so that they can be the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So, everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so, I think from a partnership perspective, too, that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. >> So, it sounds like, Keith, there was an appetite there as Alison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective, how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, "This is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user, consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers." >> So, it's actually really neat. Our owner, Pete Quiring, when he first started out he really wanted to embrace technology. And this is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting. And he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies. But he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount, and the number of growers he needed for a range was getting exponentially higher. So, he was one of the first ones that said, "I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range." >> It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> From one single computer. >> Operationalize it. It's really cool. >> So, it was neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation. It wasn't there. And he basically said, this is the way to go. And unfortunately, he thought, "I'll sell it to somebody. I'll grow it, I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it." And then guess what happened? He didn't sell it. He says, "Ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase two." And then his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says, "I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now." And that's what he is just grown. But he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back, and I know we talked about before, is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages. Where before, you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do, 'cause they'd have to manually change all these things. Now, from a single computer they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. >> You mentioned temperature and water. And this is kind of out of the blue question, but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you? Or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? You have any insight into that. >> Yeah, everything has, the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is. And we recycle all of our water. So, what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize- >> Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? >> Yep, 200 acres. >> 200 acres of greenhouse. >> Yep, at 200 acres of greenhouse entirely enclosed. >> Okay, okay. >> There is not a single portion of our greenhouse that's actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true. That's just a nice to make it look better. >> Spray it for the photo. >> Yeah, yeah. They spray it for the photo. But actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out. And then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn-off of natural gas, the CO2, and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. >> So, this is starting to remind me of "The Martian", if you read the book or if you seen the movie. >> Oh yeah. >> But planting the potatoes inside the hab, in the habitat. >> Yeah, and you cut 'em in half and the little ones grow with that next ones. But yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's what we do. >> That's amazing. >> And all that information at their fingertips. Really, I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at, which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So, one of the places I think we deliver some value is in validating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. >> Yeah, 'cause I'm not a security expert. I don't always understand the true depth of security, but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that. And we need a secure way to let those communicate. And we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. >> What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years, we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if, we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? >> So, like I said, I agree 100%. It's not matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So, one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use Dell solution, the PowerProtect Data Manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail. And it actually did twofold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that. But we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection. And it allows us to now look at how long will it take us to get back up. And we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. >> Wow. >> We've actually done a few simulations now. So, we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. >> Which is a very different metric than simply saying, "Oh, the data's available." >> Yeah. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. >> Even that hour is stressful to our growers. >> Sure. >> It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer when it's super hot, they'll be very stressed out within an hour. And then you got nice calm weather day, it's not as bad. But the weather can change in how they have to close the vents. And you're not just closing one vent, you're closing 32, 64, 100 acres of vents. And you're changing irrigation cycle. You need that automation to do it for you. >> How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. >> Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. >> This is serious. You're proud of this, aren't you? >> Oh yeah. You know what? There's not single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. >> And see, it's real. It's real. Isn't it great? Isn't it great to be a part of? My background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency. And this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. >> Yeah, so true. >> Not to get philosophical on ya. >> Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access. One of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore, it's essential. >> Yeah. >> So true. >> And so, the story that you're telling here, the impact to the growers, enabling them to focus what you were saying, Alison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, VxRail enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. >> Yeah, and allowing even at a reduced labor number for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. We still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. But again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. >> Well, and you guys haven't stopped. Right? >> Yeah. >> You're continuing to figure out, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. I think this example is great, 'cause it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the Edge is in this context. And it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more though a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it? And that, I think, is what you all are really focused on. >> Yeah, yeah, information is key. >> It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? what are some of the things you guys got cooking? >> Yeah, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I know we talked about security but to do it in really a zero trust fashion. And to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion. Because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields, or in your greenhouse in this sense, helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. >> So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize say the production of olive oil? I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. >> Yeah, you do. >> There you go. >> It obviously doesn't just apply to food production. >> Yeah, it really goes across the board. Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable, and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. >> Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap out this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. >> Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. And automation within the greenhouse is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we were quite ready for it, but now it's right there. So, I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand, do it in an automated fashion. >> And at scale, right? >> Yeah. >> That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level, and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. >> Yeah, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh, Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way. And we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. >> Sounds great. >> Sounds great. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, our pleasure, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So, stick around. (light upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

>> Announcer: TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022, theCube's continuous wall to wall coverage, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Keith Basil is here as the General Manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE. Keith, welcome to theCube, man good to see you. >> Great to be here, it's my first time here and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best. >> Thanks you. >> Thank you very much. >> Big fans of SUSE you know, we've had Melissa on several times. >> Yes. >> Let's start with kind of what you guys are doing here at Discover. >> Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner HPE, as you know SUSE's products and services are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering. So that's very exciting for us. >> Yeah. Now tell us about your background. It's quite interesting you've kind of been in the mix in some really cool places. Tell us a little bit about yourself. >> Probably the most relevant was I used to work at Red Hat, I was a Product Manager working in security for OpenStack and OpenShift working with DOD customers in the intelligence community. Left Red Hat to go to Rancher, started out there as VP of Edge Solutions and then transitioned over to VP of Product for all of Rancher. And then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher and as of November 1st, of 2020, I think it was. >> Dave: 2020. >> Yeah, yeah time is flying. I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher for Cloud Native Infrastructure. And I was working on the edge strategy for SUSE and about four months ago we internally built three business units, one for the Linux business, one for enterprise container management, basically the Rancher business, and then the newly minted business unit was the Edge business. And I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit and I happily accepted it. >> Very cool. I mean the market dynamics since the 2018 have changed dramatically, IBM bought Red Hat. A lot of customers said, "Hmm let's see what other alternatives are out there." SUSE popped its head up. You know, Melissa's been quite, you know forthcoming about that. And then you acquire Rancher in 2020, IPO in 2021. That kind of gives you another tailwind. So there's a new market when you go from 2018 to 2022, it's a completely changed dynamic. >> Yes and I'm going to answer your question from the Rancher perspective first, because as we were at Rancher, we had experimented with different flavors of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes or Kubernetes offerings. And we had, as I said, different flavors, we weren't really operating system people for example. And so post-acquisition, you know, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, the philosophies together where you had a cloud native side in the form of Rancher, very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher with K3s for example. And then you had, you know, really strong enterprise roots around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux. And what we found out was SUSE had been building a version of Linux called SLE Micro, and it was perfectly designed for Edge. And so what we've done over that time period since the acquisition is that we've brought those two things together. And now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies to manage all the way down to the operating system. And it is a winning strategy for our customers. And we're really excited about that. >> And what does that product look like? Is that a managed service? How are customers consuming that? >> It could be a managed service, it's something that our managed service providers could embrace and offer to their customers. But we have some customers who are very sophisticated who want to do the whole thing themselves. And so they stand up Rancher, you know at a centralized location at cloud GreenLake for example which is why this is very relevant. And then that control plane if you will, manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3s at these Edge locations. And so that's what the complete stack looks like. And so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario we can now roll a new operating system, new kernel, CVE updates, build that as an OCI container image registry format, right? Put that into a registry and then have that thing cascade down through all the downstream clusters and up through a rolling window upgrade of the operating system underneath Kubernetes. And it is a tremendous amount of value when you talk to customers that have this massive scale. >> What's the impact of that, just take us through what happens next. Is it faster? Is it more performant? Is it more reliable? Is it processing data at the Edge? What's the impact of the customer? >> Yes, the answer is yes to that. So let's actually talk about one customer that we we highlighted in our keynote, which is Home Depot. So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right? It is the technology everybody's after. So by being in demand, the skills needed, the people shortage is real and people are commanding very high, you know, salaries. And so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line. And so using our software and our solution and our approach it allows people to scale their existing teams to preserve those precious human resources and that human capital. So that now you can take a team of seven people and manage let's say 3000 downstream stores. >> Yeah it's like the old SRE model for DevOps. >> Correct. >> It's not servers they're managing one to many. >> Yes. >> One to many clusters. >> Correct so you've got the cluster, the life cycle of the cluster. You already have the application life cycle with the classic DevOps. And now what we've built and added to the stack is going down one step further, clicking down if you will to managing the life cycle of the operating system. So you have the SUSE enterprise build chain, all the value, the goodness, compliance, security. Again, all of that comes with that build process. And now we're hooking that into a cloud native flow that ends up downstream in our customers. >> So what I'm hearing is your Edge strategy is not some kind of bespoke, "Hey, I'm going after Edge." It connects to the entire value chain. >> Yes, yeah it's a great point. We want to reuse the existing philosophies that are being used today. We don't want to create something net new, cause that's really the point in leverage that we get by having these teams, you know, do these things at scale. Another point I'm going to make here is that we've defined the Edge into three segments. One is the near Edge, which is the realm of the-- >> I was going to ask about this, great. >> The telecommunications companies. So those use cases and profiles look very different. They're almost data center lite, right? So you've had regional locations, central offices where they're standing up gear classic to you machines, right? So things you find from HPE, for example. And then once you get on the other side of the access device right? The cable modem, the router, whatever it is you get into what we call the far Edge. And this is where the majority of the use cases reside. This is where the diversity of use cases presents itself as well. >> Also security challenges. >> Security challenges. Yes and we can talk about that following in a moment. And then finally, if you look at that far Edge as a box, right? Think of it as a layer two domain, a network. Inside that location, on that network you'll have industrial IOT devices. Those devices are too small to run a full blown operating system such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack but they do have software on them, right? So we need to be able to discover those devices and manage those devices and pull data from those devices and do it in a cloud native way. So that's what we called the tiny Edge. And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft. Kate and Edrick are are leading a project upstream called Akri, A-K-R-I, and we are very much heavily involved in Akri because it will discover the industrial IOT devices and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster running at that location. >> And Home Depot would fit into the near edge is that correct? >> Yes. >> Yeah okay. >> So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home, is a far Edge location and they have over 2,600 of these locations. >> So far Edge? You would put far Edge? >> Keith: Far Edge yes. >> Far edge, okay. >> John: Near edge is like Metro. Think of Metro. >> And Teleco, communication, service providers MSOs, multi-service operators. Those guys are-- >> Near Edge. >> The near edge, yes. >> Don't you think, John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI, in that tiny Edge. We think there's going to be a lot of AI influencing. >> Keith: Oh absolutely. >> Real time. And it actually is going to need some kind of lighter weight you know, platform. How do you fit into that? >> So going on this, like this model I just described if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo keynote that I did, we actually on stage stood up that exact stack. So we had a single Intel nook running SLE Micro as we mentioned earlier, running K3s and we plugged into that device, a USB camera which was automatically detected and it loaded Akri and gave us a driver to plug it into a container. Now, to answer your question, that is the point in time where we bring in the ML and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition, because that camera when you showed the SUSE plush doll, it actually recognized it and put a QR code up on the screen. So that's where it all comes together. So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo. >> Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event Amazon and AWS put on called re:Mars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. >> Okay. >> Kind of but basically for me was an industrial edge show. Cause The space is the ultimate like glam to edge is like, you're doing stuff in space that's pretty edgy so to speak, pun intended. But the industrial side of the Edge is going to, we think, accelerate with machine learning. >> Keith: Absolutely. >> And with these kinds of new portable I won't say flash compute or just like connected power sources software. The industrial is going to move really fast. We've been kind of in a snails pace at the Edge, in my opinion. What's your reaction to that? Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration of growth at the Edge industrial, basically physical, the physical world. >> Yes, first I agree with your assessment okay, wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy to go after the tiny Edge space and be a leader in the industrial IOT space from an open source perspective. So yes. So a few things to answer your question we do have K3s in space. We have a customer partner called Hypergiant where they've launched satellites with K3s running in space same model, that's a far Edge location, probably the farthest Edge location we have. >> John: Deep Edge, deep space. >> Here at HPE Discover, we have a business unit called SUSE RGS, Rancher Government Services, which focuses on the US government and DOD and IC, right? So little bit of the world that I used to work in my past career. Brandon Gulla the CTO of of that unit gave a great presentation about what we call the tactical Edge. And so the same technology that we're using on the commercial and the manufacturing side. >> Like the Jedi contract, the tactical military Edge I think. >> Yes so imagine some of these military grade industrial IOT devices in a disconnected environment. The same software stack and technology would apply to that use case as well. >> So basically the tactical Edge is life? We're humans, we're at the Edge? >> Or it's maintenance, right? So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft, Humvees, submarines and doing predictive analysis on the maintenance for those items, those assets. >> All these different Edges, they underscore the diversity that you were just talking Keith and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging, a lot of arm based stuff. Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny Edge. Keith Basil, thanks so much. >> Sure. >> For coming on theCube. >> John: Great to have you. >> Grateful to be here. >> Awesome story. Okay and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. This is day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live at HPE Discover '22. Dave, it's great to be here. This is the first Discover in three years and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends. >> Yeah. You know, I tweeted out this, I think I've been to 14 Discovers between the U.S. and Europe, and I've never seen a Discover with so much energy. People are not only psyched to get back together, that's for sure, but I think HPE's got a little spring in its step and it's feeling more confident than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to. >> I think so, too. I think there's definitely a spring in the step and we're going to be unpacking some of that spring next with one of our alumni who joins us, Keith White's here, the executive vice president and general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services. Welcome back. >> Great. You all thanks for having me. It's fantastic that you're here and you're right, the energy is crazy at this show. It's been a lot of pent up demand, but I think what you heard from Antonio today is our strategy's changing dramatically and it's really embracing our customers and our partners. So it's great. >> Embracing the customers and the partners, the ecosystem expansion is so critical, especially the last couple of years with the acceleration of digital transformation. So much challenge in every industry, but lots of momentum on the GreenLake side, I was looking at the Q2 numbers, triple digit growth in orders, 65,000 customers over 70 services, eight new services announced just this morning. Talk to us about the momentum of GreenLake. >> The momentum's been fantastic. I mean, I'll tell you, the fact that customers are really now reaccelerating their digital transformation, you probably heard a lot, but there was a delay as we went through the pandemic. So now it's reaccelerating, but everyone's going to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Data is the new currency. And obviously, everyone's trying to push out to the Edge and GreenLake is that edge to cloud platform. So we're just seeing tons of momentum, not just from the customers, but partners, we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it and offer their solutions to our customers as well. So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers that you may not be aware of is we have over a 96% retention rate. So once a customer's on GreenLake, they stay on it because they're seeing the value, which has been fantastic. >> The value is absolutely critically important. We saw three great big name customers. The Home Depot was on stage this morning, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses. So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present. >> Yeah. It is. And we're hearing it from a lot of customers. And I think you guys talk a lot about, hey, there's the cloud, data and Edge, these big mega trends that are happening out there. And you look at a company like Barclays, they're actually reinventing their entire private cloud infrastructure, running over a hundred thousand workloads on HPE GreenLake. Or you look at a company like Zenseact, who's basically they do autonomous driving software. So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities. They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data to then make driving safer and so you're seeing it on the data front. And then on the Edge, you look at anyone like a Patrick Terminal, for example. They run a whole terminal shipyard. They're getting data in from exporters, importers, regulators, the works and they have to real-time, analyze that data and say, where should this thing go? Especially with today's supply chain challenges, they have to be so efficient, that it's just fantastic. >> It was interesting to hear Fidelma, Keith, this morning on stage. It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity on the platform itself and that it's obviously her job is, okay, here's the platform, now, you guys got to go build on top of it. Both inside of HPE, but also externally, so your ecosystem partners. So, you mentioned the financial services companies like Barclays. We see those companies moving into the digital world by offering some of their services in building their own clouds. >> Keith: That's right. >> What's your vision for GreenLake in terms of being that platform, to assist them in doing that and the data component there? >> I think that was one of the most exciting things about not just showcasing the platform, but also the announcement of our private cloud enterprise, Cloud Service. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're creating that framework for what most companies are doing, which is they're becoming cloud service providers for their internal business units. And they're having to do showback type scenarios, chargeback type scenarios, deliver cloud services and solutions inside the organization so that open platform, you're spot on. For our ecosystem, it's fantastic, but for our customers, they get to leverage it as well for their own internal IT work that's happening. >> So you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about private cloud, what's your vision? You know, we use this term Supercloud. This in a layer that goes across clouds. What's your thought about that? Because you have an advantage at the Edge with Aruba. Everybody talks about the Edge, but they talk about it more in the context of near Edge. >> That's right. >> We talked to Verizon and they're going far Edge, you guys are participating in that, as well as some of your partners in Red Hat and others. What's your vision for that? What I call Supercloud, is that part of the strategy? Is that more longer term or you think that's pipe dream by Dave? >> No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave, 'cause it has to be part of the strategy. What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example. They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal with Google cloud for their internal cars and they run HPE GreenLake. So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds. How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that? And Chris Lund, who is the VP of information technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today, where he said, hey, I can deliver these services to my business unit. And they don't know, am I running on the public cloud? Am I running on our HPE GreenLake cloud? Like it doesn't matter to the end user, we've simplified that so much. So I think your Supercloud idea is super thoughtful, not to use the super term too much, that I'm super excited about because it's really clear of what our customers are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud, it's about the solution and the business outcome that gets to work. >> Well, and I think it is different. I mean, it's not like the last 10 years where it was like, hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds and I'm replicating as much as I can, the cloud experience on-prem. I think you guys are there now and then to us, the next layer is that ecosystem enablement. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving and what role does Green Lake play there? >> Yeah. This has been really exciting. We had Tarkan Maner who runs Nutanix and Karl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well. And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say, one plus one has to equal three for our customers. So when you bring these together, it has to be that scenario, but we are joking that one plus one plus one equals five now because everything has a partner component to it. It's not about the platform, it's not about the specific cloud service, it's actually about the solution that gets delivered. And that's done with an ISV, it's done with a Colo, it's done even with the Hyperscalers. We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution. It happens with managed service providers, delivering managed services out to their folks as well. So that platform being fully partner enabled and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that, and so we have to jointly go to market to our customers for their business needs, their business outcomes. >> Some of the expansion of the ecosystem. we just had Red Hat on in the last hour talking about- >> We're so excited to partner with them. >> Right, what's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible and Rel, but talk about the customer influence in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem. We know we've got to meet customers where they are, they're driving it, but we know that HPE has a big presence in the enterprise and some pretty big customer names. How are they from a demand perspective? >> Well, this is where I think the uniqueness of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach with our customers. Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor that provided hardware components for, and we talked a lot about hardware costs and blah, blah, blah. Now, we're actually a partner with those customers. What's the business outcome you're requiring? What's the SLA that we offer you for what you're trying to accomplish? And to do that, we have to have it done with partners. And so even on the storage front, Qumulo or Cohesity. On the backup and recovery disaster recovery, yes, we have our own products, but we also partner with great companies like Veeam because it's customer choice, it's an open platform. And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic. Because, hey, from a container platform standpoint, OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers, 90% of the fortune 500 that they engage with, with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift and implement that container capabilities on-prem. So it's fantastic. >> We were talking after the keynote, Keith Townsend came on, myself and Lisa. And he was like, okay, what about startups? 'Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud. And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal customer profile necessarily for HPE. Although we saw Evil Geniuses up on stage, but I threw out and I'd love to get your thoughts on this that within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs, they're trying to build their own clouds or Superclouds as I use the term, is that really the target for the developer audience? We've talked a lot about OpenShift with their other platforms, who says as a partner- >> We just announced another extension with Rancher and- >> Yeah. I saw that. And you have to have optionality for developers. Is that the way we should think about the target audience from a developer standpoint? >> I think it will be as we go forward. And so what Fidelma presented on stage was the new developer platform, because we have come to realize, we have to engage with the developers. They're the ones building the apps. They're the ones that are delivering the solutions for the most part. So yeah, I think at the enterprise space, we have a really strong capability. I think when you get into the sort of mid-market SMB standpoint, what we're doing is we're going directly to the managed service and cloud service providers and directly to our Disty and VARS to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake, powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers because that's what the customer wants. I think on the developer side of the house, we have to speak their language, we have to provide their capabilities because they're going to start articulating apps that are going to use both the public cloud and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake. And so that's got to work very well. And so you've heard us talk about API based and all of that sort of scenario. So it's an exciting time for us, again, moving HPE strategy into something very different than where we were before. >> Well, Keith, that speaks to ecosystem. So I don't know if you were at Microsoft, when the sweaty Steve Ballmer was working with the developers, developers. That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that. But that really is the sort of what you just described is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake. That's critical. >> Yeah. And this is one of the things I learned. So, being at Microsoft for as long as I was and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint, it was all about the partner and I mean, in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered has some sort of partner component to it. Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service, might be in a Colo, might be with our hybrid cloud, with our Hyperscalers, but everything has a partner component to it. And so one of the things I learned with Azure is, you have to sell through and with your ecosystem and go to that customer with a joint solution. And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful for what our customers are trying to accomplish. >> When we think about the data gravity and the value of data that put massive potential that it has, even Antonio talked about it this morning, being data rich but insights poor for a long time. >> Yeah. >> Every company in today's day and age has to be a data company to be competitive, there's no more option for that. How does GreenLake empower companies? GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies to really live being data companies so that they can meet their customers where they are. >> I think it's a really great point because like we said, data's the new currency. Data's the new gold that's out there and people have to get their arms around their data estate. So then they can make these business decisions, these business insights and garner that. And Dave, you mentioned earlier, the Edge is bringing a ton of new data in, and my Zenseact example is a good one. But with GreenLake, you now have a platform that can do data and data management and really sort of establish and secure the data for you. There's no data latency, there's no data egress charges. And which is what we typically run into with the public cloud. But we also support a wide range of databases, open source, as well as the commercial ones, the sequels and those types of scenarios. But what really comes to life is when you have to do analytics on that and you're doing AI and machine learning. And this is one of the benefits I think that people don't realize with HPE is, the investments we've made with Cray, for example, we have and you saw on stage today, the largest supercomputer in the world. That depth that we have as a company, that then comes down into AI and analytics for what we can do with high performance compute, data simulations, data modeling, analytics, like that is something that we, as a company, have really deep, deep capabilities on. So it's exciting to see what we can bring to customers all for that spectrum of data. >> I was excited to see Frontier, they actually achieve, we hosted an event, co-produced event with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale day. >> Yeah. >> But we weren't quite at Exascale, we were like right on the cusp. So to see it actually break through was awesome. So HPC is clearly a differentiator for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And you talk about the egress. What are some of the other differentiators? Why should people choose GreenLake? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is, that it's truly is a edge to cloud platform. And so you talk about Aruba and our capabilities with a network attached and network as a service capabilities, like that's fairly unique. You don't see that with the other companies. You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities. But what's interesting now is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services that you saw on stage, private cloud, AI and machine learning, high performance computing, VDI, SAP. And now we're actually getting into these industry solutions. So we talked last year about electronic medical records, this year, we've talked about 5g. Now, we're talking about customer loyalty applications. So we're really trying to move from these sort of baseline capabilities and yes, containers and VMs and bare metal, all that stuff is important, but what's really important is the services that you run on top of that, 'cause that's the outcomes that our customers are looking at. >> Should we expect you to be accelerating? I mean, look at what you did with Azure. You look at what AWS does in terms of the feature acceleration. Should we expect HPE to replicate? Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence, we're starting to see that. Should we expect that actually to go faster? >> I think you couched it really well because it's not as much about the quantity, but the quality and the uses. And so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot? Where do we have a superpower? And where are the areas that we have that superpower and how can we bring those solutions to our customers? 'Cause I think, sometimes, you get over your skis a bit, trying to do too much, or people get caught up in the big numbers, versus the, hey, what's the real meat behind it. What's the tangible outcome that we can deliver to customers? And we see just a massive TAM. I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion in the next three years, TAM and the Azure service on-prem space. And so we think that there's nothing but upside with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions and the cloud services that we bring. So yeah, we'll continue to innovate, absolutely, amen, but we're not in a, hey we got to get to 250 this and 300 that, we want to keep it as focused as we can. >> Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud is still compute. I mean, not withstanding, Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS, but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service. Still, well, I would say over 50%. And so there's a lot of the services that don't make any revenue and there's that long tail, if I hear your strategy, you're not necessarily going after that. You're focusing on the quality of those high value services and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest. >> This is where I think the, I mean, I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem because this is where their sweet spot is. They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases, a service or VDI, or even with SAP, like they're the experts on that piece of it. So we're enabling that together to our customers. And so I don't want to give you the impression that we're not going to innovate. Amen. We absolutely are, but we want to keep it within that, that again, our swim lane, where we can really add true value based on our expertise and our capabilities so that we can confidently go to customers and say, hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver this business value or this capability for you. >> The partners might be more comfortable with that than, we only have one eye sleep with one eye open in the public cloud, like, okay, what are they going to, which value of mine are they grab next? >> You're spot on. And again, this is where I think, the power of what an Edge to cloud platform like HPE GreenLake can do for our customers, because it is that sort of, I mentioned it, one plus one equals three kind of scenario for our customers so. >> So we can leave your customers, last question, Keith. I know we're only on day one of the main summit, the partner growth summit was yesterday. What's the feedback been from the customers and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction that HPE is going? >> Well, I think the fantastic thing has been to hear from our customers. So I mentioned in my keynote recently, we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital, and they're implementing HPE GreenLake in a variety of different ways, from a private cloud standpoint to a data center consolidation. They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that. They're seeing us take on management for them so they can take their limited resources and go focus them on innovation and value added scenarios. So the flexibility and cost that we're providing, and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life in a real customer scenario because what Texas Children is trying to do is improve patient care for women and children like who can argue with that. >> Nobody. >> So, yeah. It's great. >> Awesome. Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about all of the momentum with HPE Greenlake. >> Always. >> You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Always. Thank you you for the time. Yeah. Great to see you as well. >> Likewise. >> Thanks. >> For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, day one coverage from the show floor at HPE Discover '22. We'll be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

thecube presents dell technologies world brought to you by dell good afternoon everyone welcome back to thecube's third day of coverage live from the show floor at dell technologies world 2022 lisa martin here with dave vellante we've been having lots of great conversations the last day and a half one of the things we love to do is really hear from the voice of dell's customers and we're going to do that next please welcome jonathan suckler the senior director of product marketing for dell and keith bradley the vp of i.t at nature fresh farms guys welcome hey great to be here thank you great thank you for letting us be here of course thanks for joining us so jonathan we're going to start with you we've been hearing a lot about we've been talking about ai for decades we've been hearing a lot about ai at the show it's it's so it's pervasive right it's in our refrigerators and our thermostats and our cars and that hockey puck thing that's in the kitchen that plays music when you're cooking right what's going on what is do you think from dell's perspective is fueling the adoption of ai now you know there's it i think that there's this huge interest in ai right now and you and you you're definitely pointed out a lot of the great success stories around ai but the the real benefit of is that you know with with with artificial intelligence applied to a lot of business problems you can solve them in ways that are that are much quicker than you would expect you know and you can solve them in ways you wouldn't have expected uh uh you know then than than you do what's really surprising though is as a as many as many people are interested in in using it and and all of the benefits that come from it though is that we really don't see the adoption being as quick as we would like to right i mean i want to say that like 80 percent of companies out there want to use ai they're testing ai you know they're they're they're planning uh projects around ai applications but when you ask them what's in production it really is still it's an innovator's game like you know companies like like nature fresh farms with uh what they're doing is truly at the tip of the spear what are some of the challenges jonathan that you're seeing from an adoption perspective of 80 say we want to actually be able to leverage this emerging technology in production the challenges are i think the pers it's a perceived challenge issue right i think there's like three big issues that people perceive as being uh barriers to adoption um the first one is pretty obvious it's cost right they they see artificial intelligence you they hear about all of the uh you know specialized hardware and and the software and the new and the people and the talent you've got to acquire to uh as being a barrier to that and they don't see the benefit or they they balance that against the benefit i think there's an issue also with uh complexity right because at the same time that you know you're building these these infrastructures around what you need to do for an artificial intelligence-enabled application there's this expectation that it needs to be separate and different and special and that becomes an issue from a management perspective right uh and i think finally uh it's uh it's change right i mean you you're you're bringing in new talent new new skill sets you're bringing in new technology and i think a lot of companies still today you know look at that as being like well what if if i do this am i really going to see the benefit if i am i stuck going down a path that i that i'm going to change later on and i think that's really the issue uh you know those but they're all perceived issues they're they're in in reality they're really not that true i mean keith has this done that nature fresh farms has done some incredible stuff right with with ai in an area that i i would never have guessed being a ripe for that kind of innovation you know so lisa keith knows that i love you know fresh tomatoes i live in the northeast where it's cold six months a year so we plant our tomatoes at memorial day weekend yeah right and then maybe you're lucky if you get tomatoes late august september and then you're done however you and i met a couple years ago you sent me all these vegetables i think i was popping the tomatoes like candy and then i interviewed you you were live in the giant greenhouse and it's just amazing what you guys have going to jonathan's point you're using ai to really create you know sustainable continuing flow of awesome vegetables tell us more about nature fresh so at nature fresh farms we're a 200 acre greenhouse just shy of 200 acres growing bell peppers and tomatoes and one of the biggest use cases for us in our ai is everything we do we need to be proactive so we need that ai to not be reactive to climate change to what happens to the weather to be proactive so it changes before the plant reacts because every time the plant will doesn't do as great we've lost production from it so we're always using our ai to help increase the yield per square meter inside of our greenhouses so everything from the growth the length the weight of the plant we monitor everything we want to know every aspect of that plant's life it's almost like doing an ekg on a plant 24 by 7 and wanting to know everything out of it how old is is the company nature fresh farms started in 1999 so we're just hitting 23 years now so we started off as a 16 acre little greenhouse our owner kind of got into it saying i think this is going to be new and he was one of the first ones to say i want to be all computers i want to do it culturally this is this was not an upsell or a hard sell for you from the vp of i.t perspective no no he's always been one saying that technology will change the greenhouse industry and that by adding technology the expertise is in the growers and letting technology help them do more because when we first started in the greenhouse industry you'd need a grower for every range so every 16 acre range would need a very senior grower now we have one grower that does 64 or almost 100 acres of greenhouse he'll have junior growers but he's able to do so much more so where do you specifically apply the ai can you talk about that uh so we talk specifically we apply the ai in almost all areas anything from picking the plant to the climate of the plant we'll do all those areas even on the packing line we actually have uh one robot well not a robot story a machine that looks at a box of tomatoes and basically tells us which one doesn't match the proper red because how you see red how you guys see red is slightly different so it'll tell us that this red tomato doesn't match so change out the right one so when it goes down the line into the consumers they're all exactly the same so it looks unified it looks beautiful like that how about that you're sending out red tomatoes yeah yeah that's what we do now what is dell's role in all this so dell's role has helped us grow what we do we started off with power scale and vxrail and stuff like that so everything's hosted on that and they have been a great partner at finding that solution to them i've been able to go to them and say hey i'm running into a storage problem i'm running into a compute problem they've been able to find a validated solution for us to use and to put out there and help us grow and then the next part that was really great that we've really now done is it's scalable as we're growing we've been able to community add more compute and more storage but not have to take things down to do it and that's what we really wanted to do yeah no i i think and i think what you're talking about there is really the one of the big issues that i was talking about earlier which is around complexity and cost right you know one of the answers to doing artificial intelligence in the enterprise is making sure that you can maintain and have an infrastructure that scales that's part of everything else and and to do that you've got to virtualize it and you know with power uh with a dell vxrail and power scale which it's all running vmware uh with with the uh with the containers and the vms on top of that actually managing you know and running those applications it takes a lot of the complexity of of worrying about where you're going to how you're going to manage that infrastructure and who's going to do it who's going to back it up how are you going to how you're going to you know keep costs down so it really really helps i think yeah yep and we just love it because we're able to take that solution make it better and make it do more and more every day and it's it's allowed our growers to see exponential time where they did it years ago it used to be overnight to get results sometimes from our system doing it now we're seeing it in real time and that's where i it really got to that point now where we're being reactive proactive to the to the plant the weather to stuff we know exactly what needs to happen before happens and that makes the plant grow more and that's what we're always aiming to do you know if you don't mind one of the things that i you were telling me about i think is really fascinating so is this idea that you know you need to have a data scientist you need a whole new staff to manage these applications these these technologies but you were talking about your growers are actually yeah they're actually data scientists that way right that's what we like to call them we call them grower scientists right now green sciences data scientists yeah because they've researched this data they know what the plant does and it's it's been a neat transition we talked about that how they went from being out in the greenhouse so much to being in front of the computer now but now with the help of ai they're more able to get back out into the greenhouse to now watch the plants see what's going on and be a part of the growth again and they said it's been great but they're the ones that are looking at these numbers every day every second if it's not remotely from home it's remote on the greenhouse they're launching everything because yeah think about they're watching 64 acres of land and making sure that does everything it needs to do so lisa this is a really good example of sort of distributed data at work right about this whole notion of data mesh where you have domain experts actually own the data you know they know they can bring context to the data it's not somebody who's just oh it's just data i don't really know what to do with it it's somebody who actually knows what it what it means that to me is a future use case that's going to explode yep it's like me i i look at their data and they always tease me because i'll look at it and i'll go yeah i have no idea but it's giving you numbers so are they right or not and it's a it's always a joke in the in the plant that i like ah you don't got question marks so it's working and then i'll go to them and say is this right and then they'll say yep we're on we're getting what we need i love the idea that you know we've we've heard of this term citizens citizen scientists or citizen data scientists and you have a grower data scientist yeah and i think that eliminates you talk again those problems like or challenges i mentioned earlier that kind of eliminates the complexity issue you know the uncertainty issue the fear of change when you've got your own uh teams who are who know what they need to do and they have the data to do it it just changes the game right yeah and the other two we found is i've always believed in it myself if you love what you do yeah you commit so much more to it and our growers they love what they do so their passion just exudes into the data and then it comes right back into the product well the technology is an enabler of their passion really i'm curious keith how the obviously the events of the last two years have been quite challenging how has ai been a facilitator of what seems like a competitive differentiation for your company uh it actually really accelerated it because we really had to invest in it that's when we started the the big journey to the vx rail the power protect data management we really had to invest in and then we heavily invested in the ai we've always had some lingerie in the background and it's always been there and we've been using it for years and years now but it really brought it right to the forefront though we have to do this better and we had to really push everything and as we grew it became more and more apparent that we were taking that road that investment was paying off for us now yeah how do i buy ai from you so you know it's interesting like i said we want to make it easy for for customers to implement an ai solution at dell and it's not so much that you go out and you buy an ai right or something like that what you're doing is is you're you're making your infrastructure ready for the applications that you need to run right and so at dell we have this uh these predefined uh architectures that we call validated designs they're validated uh to work in you know in a co in any a common environment we take the you know we take the guesswork out of uh how to put these systems together uh and in the case of artificial intelligence you know we we validate with our partners like uh uh vmware and like nvidia to make sure that the technologies work together so that they fit into the existing infrastructure they already have and uh you know in a way it's i think of it as virtualized ai but i think even more importantly it's it's ai for for any company it's not not for the not for the special scientists and you know not for the not for the uh the researcher at the university it's it's for you know it's for nature fresh farms with vxrail it's software defined you're able to bring in a gpu you've got the flexibility to do that for example yeah whereas with the traditional you know the old days you wouldn't be able to do that you'd be you'd have a lot of time on your hands and a lot of compute power you spent a lot of money doing what you need to do yeah oh yeah we'd be spending all the time working at it growing it and doing more and it just made our life easier not to manage the life the managed life cycle of the ai systems that we have is so much easier now because it's all predefined it's all it's all ready to go upgrade process all that is built into it yeah so life cycle is much easier from the i.t side so keith talk to talk to those folks in the audience who might have those those perceived challenges or limitations that jonathan was talking about because you're making it sound like this has been such an enabler of a business that's 23 years old we're taking growers who are experts at growing and they're playing and loving playing with data and ai how do you how do you advise folks to really eliminate some of those preconceived challenges that are out there i would say you have to sit there and just dive in you have to actually start to do it but you have to think about not where you the first two steps say where we want to be five steps from now and then say talk to a partner like dell with us and say this is where we want to get to this is and then figure out a way how to get there and committing to that path you can't get frustrated the first few times ai is very flustering sometimes the first few pass don't work and just saying going back to the drawing board each time we'll do it we've had a couple experiments where it didn't work and we didn't get the results we wanted and we had to just say let's change our thought process and how do we optimize this ai and then all of a sudden we started getting the right results but that it's it's like uh falling over the first time you fall over as a child it's gonna hurt but each time he gets a little less each time failure is progress yeah that's right that's right fail fast yeah failure can be a good f word yeah if you but you have to be open-minded yep oh yes every minute every minute you have to be open-minded and you have to you have to think outside the box too and that's the biggest part of things it's just not accepting things and just saying we have to do it but you have to have the culture that will embrace that and it sounds like the growers these are people that are expert and growing how it sounds like it wasn't an uphill battle to get them to come on board and become these citizen growers data scientists well you know it was funny because with the technology it kind of gave them that work-life balance that they didn't have before their life was inside the greenhouse because the plants grow 24 by 7. so now all of a sudden they just kept growing they could they could go home they kept doing their thing they could go home at five o'clock and because of the vdi solutions and stuff like that and the ai that's helping them grow they can kind of turn off and instead of having to come in sunday morning and that the the one joke we used to have is that on sundays if you're in church and there's clouds had come rolling out all the growers would stand up and leave because they had to go to their church they had to go back to their farm now the system does that automatically for them so they're able to get their work life home balance back so it was different for them it was a jump for them anybody that's not used to technology and jumping into it is hard but once they started to see the benefits and what more yield they can get and the home work life balance it was amazing there's no i can't underestimate the work-life balance enough i think it's challenge it's a very challenging thing for people in any industry to achieve we've we've seen that in the last two years with you know do i live at work do i work from home so achieving that is kudos to you and for del for enabling that because that's that's big that that affects everybody guys thank you so much for joining us talking about ai what you're doing at nature fresh the future what's possible yeah and how you buy ai from dell no i think it's great i think you know nature fresh farms is a great euro you've been a great like a great partner for sure but also this great kind of beacon to show people how it can be done and i think it's just a thank you very much we really enjoyed it excellent well thanks for thanks for bringing the beacon on the show we appreciate it we want to thank you for watching for our guests i'm lisa martin for dave vellante i'm lisa martin i should say you're watching thecube day three of our coverage live from the show floor of dell tech world 2022 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

(electronica music) >> Hello everybody. This is Dave Volante and we are covering HPE's big GreenLake announcements. We've got wall-to-wall coverage, a ton of content. We've been watching GreenLake since the beginning. And of one of the things we said early on was let's watch and see how frequently, what the cadence of innovations that HPE brings to the market. Because that's what a cloud company does. So, we're here to welcome you. Keith White is here as the Senior Vice President General Manager of GreenLake cloud services. He runs the commercial business. Keith, thanks for coming on. Help me kick off. >> Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. >> So you guys got some momentum orders, 40% growth a year to year on year. You got a lot of momentum, customer growth. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 46%. >> Kyle, thank you for that clarification. And in 46. Big different from 40 to 46. >> No, I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the momentum happen in the marketplace, right? We have a scenario where we're bringing the cloud experience to the customer on their premises. They get to have it automated. Self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center. They can have it at the edge. They can have it at the colo, and, we can manage it all for them. And so they're really getting that true cloud experience and we're seeing it manifest itself in a variety of different customer scenarios. You know, we talked about at Discover, a lot of work that we're doing on the hybrid cloud side of the house, and a lot of work that we're doing on the edge side of things with our partners. But you know, it's exciting to see the explosion of data and how now we're providing this data capability for our customers. >> What are the big trends you're hearing from customers? And how is that informing what you're doing with Green? I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways, Keith, what happened last year, you guys were, were in a better position maybe than most. But what are you hearing and how is that informing your go forward? >> Yeah, I think it's really three things with customers, right? First off, Hey, we're trying to accelerate our digital transformation and it's all becoming about the data. So help us monetize the data, help us protect that data. Help us analyze it to make decisions. And so, you know, number one, it's all about data. Number two is wow, this pandemic, you know, we need to look for cost savings. So, we still need to move our business forward. We've got to accelerate our business, but help me find some cost savings with respect to what I can do. And third, what we're hearing is, hey, we're in a situation, where there's a lot of different capabilities happening with our workforce. They're working from home. They're working hybrid. Help us make sure that we can stay connected to those folks, but also in a secure way, making sure that they have all the tools and resources they need. So those are sort of three of the big themes that we're seeing that GreenLake really helps manifest itself, with the data we're doing now. With all the hybrid cloud capabilities. With the cost savings that we get with respect to our platform, as well as with solutions such as VDI or workforce enablements that we've, we create from a solution standpoint. . >> So, what's the customer reaction, I mean, I mean, everybody now, who's has a big on-premise state, has an as a service capability. A customer saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, how do you make it not me too? In the customer conversations? >> Yeah. I think it turns into, you know, you have to bring the holistic solution to the customer. So yes, there's technology there and we're hearing from, you know, some of the competitors out there. Yeah, we're doing as a service as well, but maybe it's a little bit of storage here. Maybe it's a little bit of networking there. Customers need that end to end solution. And so as you've seen us announce over time, we've got the building blocks, of course, compute storage and networking, but everything runs in a virtual machine. Everything runs in a container or everything runs on the bare metal itself. And that package that we've created for customers means that they can do whatever solution, or whatever workload they want So, if you're a hospital and you're running Epic for your electronic medical records, you can go that route. If you're upgrading SAP and you're using virtual machines at a very large scale, you can use this, use a GreenLake for that as well. So, as you go down the list, there's just so many opportunities with respect to bring those solutions to our customers. And then you bring in our point-next capabilities to support that. You bring in our advisory and professional services, along with our ecosystem to help enable that. You bring in our HPE financial services to help fund that digital transformation. And you've got the complete package. And that's why customers are saying, hey, you guys are now partners of us. You're not just a hardware provider, you're a partner you're helping us solve our business problems and helping us accelerate our business. >> So what should people expect today? You guys got some announcements. What should people look for? >> Well, I think this is, as we've talked about, you know, now we're sort of providing much more capabilities around the data side of the house. Because data is so such, it's the gold, if you will, of a customer's environment. So first off we want to do analytics. So we want an open platform that provides really a unified set of analytics capabilities. And this is where we have a real strong, sweet spot with respect to some of the, the software that we've built around Esperal. But also with the hardware capabilities. As you know, we have all the way up to the Cray supercomputers that, that are doing all of the analytics for whether this or, or financial data that. So, I think that's one of the key things. The second is you got to protect that data. And, and so if it's going to be on prem, I want to know that it's protected and secured. So how do I back it up? How do I have a disaster recovery plan? How do I watch out for ransomware attacks, as well? So we're providing some capabilities there. And then I'd say, lastly, because of all the experience we have with our customers now implementing these hybrid solutions, they're saying, hey, help me with this edge to cloud framework and how do I go and implement that on my own? And so we've taken all the experience and we've bucketed that into our edge to cloud adoption framework to provide that capability for our customers. So we, you know, we're really excited about, again, talking about solutions, talking about accelerating your business, not just talking about technology. >> I said up the top, Keith, that one of the ways I was evaluating you as the pace and the cadence of the innovations. And, and is that, is that fair? How do you guys think about that internally? Are you, you know, you're pushing yourself to go faster, I'm sure you are, but what's that conversation like? >> I think it's a great question because in essence, we're now pivoting the company holistically to being a cloud services and a software company. And that's really exciting and we're seeing that happen internally. But this pace of innovation is really built on what customers are asking us for us. So now that we've grown over 1200 customers worldwide. You know, over $5 billion of total contract value. You know, signing some, some large deals in a variety of solutions and workloads and verticals, et cetera. What we're now seeing is, hey, this is what we need. Help me with my internal IT out to my business groups. Help me with my edge strategy as I build the factory of the future, or, you know, help me with my data and analytics that I'm trying to accomplish for my, you know, diagnosis of, of x-rays and, and capabilities such as Carestream, if you will. So it's, it's exciting to see them come to us and say, this is the capabilities that we're requiring, and we've got our foot on the gas to provide that innovation. And we're miles ahead of the competition. >> All right, we've got an exciting day ahead. We got all kinds of technology discussions, solution discussions. We got, we got, we're going to hear from the analyst community. Really bringing you the, the full package of announcements here. Keith, thanks for helping me set this up. >> Always. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. >> I look forward today. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Tons of content coming your way. You're watching The Cubes coverage of HP's big GreenLake announcement. Right back. (electronica music)

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.

(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)