(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, wonderful Cloud community and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant John Furrier. John, how you doing this afternoon? >> Doing great, feeling good. We've got day three here, another day tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage we're already over a hundred something videos, live getting up. >> You're holding up well. >> And then Cloud show is just popping. It's back to pre-pandemic levels. The audience is here, what recession? But there is one coming but apparently doesn't seem to be an unnoticed with the Cloud community. >> I think, we'll be talking a little bit about that in our next interview in the state of the union. Not just our union, but the the general global economy and the climate there with some fabulous guests from Software One. Please welcome Neil and Bernd, welcome to the show, guys. How you doing? >> Great, thank you. >> Really good. >> Yeah, like you said, just getting over the jet lag. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty good today, yeah, (laughing loudly) glad we did it today. >> I love that Neil, set your smiling and I can feel your energy. Tell us a little bit about Software One and what you all do. >> Yeah, so Software One we're a software and Cloud solutions provider. We're in 90 countries. We have 65,000 customers. >> Savannah: Just a few. >> Yeah, and we really focus on being close to the customers and helping customers through their software and Cloud journey. So we transact, we sell software in Cloud, 10,000 different ISVs. And then on top of that we a lot of services around the spend optimization FinOps we'll talk about as well, and lots of other areas. But yeah, we're really a large scale partner in this space. >> That's awesome. FinOps, cost optimization, pretty much all we've been talking about here on the give. It's very much a hot topic. I'm actually excited about this and Bernd I'm going to throw this one to you first. We haven't actually done a proper definition of what FinOps is at the show yet. What is FinOps? >> Well, largely speaking it's Cloud cost optimization but for us it's a lot more than for others. That's our superpower. We do it all. We do the technology side but we also do the licensing side. So, we have a differentiated offering. If you would look at the six Rs of application migration we do it all, not even an Accenture as it all. And that is our differentiation. >> You know, yesterday Adams left was on the Keynote. He's like waving his hands around. It's like, "Hey, we got if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." I'm like, wait a minute. In 2008 when the last recession, Amazon wasn't a factor. They were small. Now they're massive, they're huge. They're a big part of the economic equation. What does belt tightening mean? Like what does that mean? Like do customers just go to the marketplace? Do they go, do you guys, so a lot of moving parts now on how they're buying software and they're fine tuning their Cloud too. It's not just eliminate budget, it's fine tune the machine if you will... >> 'make a smarter Cloud. >> Explain this phenomenon, how people are tackling this cost optimization, Cloud optimization. 'Cause they're not going to stop building. >> No. >> This is right sizing and tuning and cutting. >> Yeah, we see, of course with so many customers in so many countries, we have a lot of different views on maturity and we see customers taking the FinOps journey at different paces. But fundamentally what we see is that it's more of an afterthought and coming in at a panic stage rather than building it and engaging with it from the beginning and doing it continuously. And really that's the huge opportunity and AWS is a big believer in this of continued optimization of the Cloud is a confident Cloud. A confident Cloud means you'll do more with it. If you lose confidence in that bill in what how much it's costing you, you're going to retract. And so it's really about making sure all customers know exactly what's in there, how it's optimized, restocking, reformatting applications, getting more out of the microservices and getting more value out the Cloud and that will help them tighten that belt. >> So the euphoric enthusiasm of previous years of building water just fallen the pipes leaving the lights on when you go to bed. I mean that's kind of the mentality. People were not literally I won't say they weren't not paying attention but there was some just keep going we're all good now it's like whoa, whoa. We turn that service off and no one's using it or do automation. So there's a lot more of that mindset emerging. We're hearing that for the first time price performance being mindful of what's on and off common sense basically. >> Yeah, but it's not just that the lights are on and the faucets are open it's also the air condition is running. So the FinOps foundation is estimating that about a third of Cloud spend is waste and that's where FinOps comes in. We can help customers be more efficient in the Cloud and lower their Cloud spend while doing the same or more. >> So, let's dig in a little bit there. How do you apply FinOps when migrating to the Cloud? >> Well, you start with the business case and you're not just looking at infrastructure costs like most people do you ought look at software licensing costs. For example, if you run SQL on-premise you have an enterprise agreement. But if you move it to the Cloud you may actually take a different more favorable licensing agreement and save a lot of money. And these things are hidden. They're not to be seen but they need to be part of the business case. >> When you look at the modernization trend we had an analyst on our session with David Vellante and Zs (indistinct) from ZK Consulting. He had an interesting comment. He said, "Spend more in Cloud to save more." Which is a mindset that doesn't come across right. Wait a minute, spend more, save more. You can do bet right now with the Clouds kind of the the thesis of FinOps, you don't have to cut. Just kind of cut the waste out but still spend and build if you're smart, there's a lot more of that going on. What does that mean? >> I mean, yeah I've got a good example of this is, we're the largest Microsoft provider in the world. And when of course when you move Microsoft workloads to the Cloud, you don't... Maybe you don't want a server, you can go serverless, right? So you may not win a server. Bernd said SQL, right? So, it's not just about putting applications in the Cloud and workloads in the Cloud. It's about modernizing them and then really taking advantage of what you can really do in the Cloud. And I think that's where the customers are still pretty immature. They're still on that journey of throwing stuff in there and then realizing actually they can take way more advantage of what services are in there to reduce the amount and get even more in there. >> Yeah, and so the... You want to say, something? >> How much, just building on the stereotypical image of Cloud customer is the marketing person with a credit card, right? And there are many of them and they all buy their own Cloud and companies have a hard time consolidating the spend pulling it together, even within a country. But across countries across the globe, it's really, really hard. If you pull it all together, you get a better discount. You spend more to save more. >> Yeah, and also there's a human piece. We had an intern two summers ago playing with our Cloud. We're on a Cloud with our media plus stack left a service was playing around doing some tinkering and like, where's this bill? What is this extra $20,000 came from. It just, we left a service on... >> It's a really good point actually. It's something that we see almost every day right now which is customers also not understanding what they've put in the Cloud and what the implications of spikes are. And also therefore having really robust monitoring and processes and having a partner that can look after that for them. Otherwise we've got customers where they've been really shocked about not doing things the right way because they've empowered the business but also not with the maturity that the business needs to have that responsibility. >> And that's a great point. New people coming in and or people being platooned through new jobs are getting used to the Cloud. That's a great point. I got that brings up my security question 'cause this comes up a lot. So that's what's a lot of spend of people dialing up more security. Obviously people try everything with security, every tool, every platform, and throw everything at the problem. How does that impact the FinOps equation? 'Cause Dev SecOps is now part of everything. Okay, moving security at the CICD pipeline, that's cool. Check Cloud native applications, microservices event-based services check. But now you've got more security. How does that factor into the cost side? What you guys look at that can you share your thoughts on how your customers are managing their security posture without getting kind of over the barrel, if you will? >> Since we are at AWS re:Invent, right? We can talk about the well architected framework of AWS and there's six components to it. And there's reliability, there's security cost, performance quality, operational quality and sustainability. And so when we think about migrating apps to the Cloud or modernizing them in the Cloud security is always a table stakes. >> And it has to be, yeah, go ahead. >> I really like what AWS is doing with us on that. We partner very closely on that area. And to give you a parallel example of Microsoft I don't feel very good about that at the moment. We see a lot of customers right now that get hacked and normally it's... >> 'yeah that's such a topic. >> You mean on Azure? >> Yeah, and what happens is that they normally it's a crypto mining script that the customer comes in they come in as the customer get hacked and then they... We saw an incident the other day where we had 2,100 security incidents in a minute where it all like exploded on the customer side. And so that's also really important is that the customer's understanding that security element also who they're letting in and out of their organization and also the responsibility they have if things go bad. And that's also not aware, like when they get hacked, are they responsible for that? Are they not responsible? Is the provider... >> 'shared responsibility? >> Yeah. >> 'well that security data lake the open cybersecurity schema framework. That's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out to your point. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Yeah, it is fascinating and it does require a lot of collaboration. What other trends, what other big challenges are you seeing? You're obviously working with customers at incredible scale. What are some of the other problems you're helping them tackle? >> I think we work with customers from SMB all the way up to enterprise and public sector. But what we see is more in the enterprise space. So we see a lot of customers willing to commit a lot to the Cloud based on all the themes that we've set but not commit financially for all the PNLs that they run in all the business units of all the different companies that they may own in different countries. So it's like, how can I commit but not be responsible on the hook for the bill that comes in. And we see this all the time right now and we are working closely with AWS on this. And we see the ability for customers to commit centrally but decentralized billing, decentralized optimization and decentralized FinOps. So that's that educational layer within the business units who owns the PNL where they get that fitness and they own what they're spending but the company is alone can commit to AWS. And I think that's a big trend that we are seeing is centralized commitment but decentralized ownership in that model. >> And that's where the marketplaces kind of fit in as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah. Do you want to add some more on that? >> I mean the marketplace, if you're going to cut your bill you go to the marketplace right there you want single dashboard or your marketplace what's the customer going to do when they're going to tighten their belts? What do they do? What's their workflow, marketplace? What's the process? >> Well, on marketplaces, the larger companies will have a private marketplace with dedicated pricing managed service they can call off. But that's for the software of the shelf. They still have the data centers they still have all the legacy and they need to do the which ones are we going to keep which ones are we going to retire, we repurchase, we license, rehouse, relocate, all of those things. >> That's your wheelhouse. >> It's a three, yes is our wheelhouse. It's a three to five year process for most companies. >> This could be a tailwind for you guys. This is like a good time. >> I mean FinOps is super cool and super hot right now. >> Not that you're biased? (all laughing loudly) >> But look, it's great to see it because well we are the magic quadrant leader in software asset management, which is a pedigree of ours. But we always had to convince customers to do that because they're always worried, oh what you're going to find do I have an audit? Do I have to give Oracles some more money or SAP some more money? So there's always like, you know... >> 'don't, (indistinct). >> How compliant do I really want? >> Is anyone paying attention to this? >> Well FinOps it's all upside. Like it's all upside. And so it's completely flipped. And now we speak to most customers that are building FinOps internally and then they're like, hold on a minute I'm a bank. Why do I have hundred people doing FinOps? And so that's the trend that we've seen because they just get more and more value out of it all the time. >> Well also the key mindset is that the consumption based model of Cloud you mentioned Oracle 'cause they're stuck in that whoa, whoa, whoa, how many servers license and they're stuck in that extortion. And now they got Cloud once you're on a variable, what's the downside? >> Exactly and then you can look at all the applications, see where you can go serverless see where you can go native services all that sort of stuff is all upside. >> And for the major workloads like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft defined that customers save in the millions. >> Well just on that point, those VMware, SAP, these workloads they're being rolled and encapsulated into containers and Kubernetes run times moved into the Cloud, they're being refactored. So that's a whole nother ballgame. >> Yes. Lift and shift usually doesn't save you any money. So that's relocation with containers may save you money but in some cases you have to... >> 'it's more in the Cloud now than ever before. >> Yeah >> Yeah, yeah. >> Before we take him to the challenge portion we have a little quiz for you, or not a quiz, but a little prop for you in a second. I want to talk about your role. You have a very important role at the FinOps Foundation and why don't you tell me more about that? You, why don't you go. >> All right, so yeah I mean we are a founding member of the Finops organization. You can tell I'm super passionate about it as well. >> I wanted to keep that club like a poster boy for FinOps right now. It's great, I love the energy. >> You have some VA down that is going to go up on the table and dance, (all laughing loudly) >> We're ready for it. We're waiting for that performance here on theCUBE this week. I promise I would keep everyone up an alert... >> 'and it's on the post. And our value to the foundation is first of all the feedback we get from all our customers, right? We can bring that back as an organization to that also as one of the founding members. We're one of the only ones that really deliver services and platforms. So we'll work with Cloud health, Cloud ability our own platform as well, and we'll do that. And we have over 200 practitioners completely dedicated to FinOps as well. So, it's a great foundation, they're doing an amazing job and we're super proud to be part of that. >> Yeah, I love that you're contributing to the community as well as supporting it, looking after your customers. All right, so our new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent 'cause we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel hot take sizzle of thought leadership on the number one takeaway most important theme of the show this year Bernd do you want to go first? >> Of the re:Invent show or whatever? >> You can interpret that however you want. We've gotten some unique interpretations throughout the week, so we're probing. >> Everybody's looking for the superpower to do more with less in the Cloud. That will be the theme of 2023. >> Perfect, I love that. 10 seconds, your mic very efficient. You're clearly providing an efficient solution based on that answer. >> I won't that much. That's... (laughing loudly) >> It's the quiz. And what about you Neil? Give us your, (indistinct) >> I'm going to steal your comment. It's exactly what I was thinking earlier. Tech is super resilient and tech is there for customers when they want to invest and modernize and do fun stuff and they're also there for when they want to save money. So we are always like a constant and you see that here. It's like this is... It's always happening here, always happening. >> It is always happening. It really can feel the energy. I hope that the show is just as energetic and fun for you guys. As the last few minutes here on theCUBE has been thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about FinOps, Cloud confidence and all things AWS re:Invent. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier, my name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, friends. Welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 in Sin City. We are so excited to be here with tens of thousands of people. This is our third day of coverage, really the second full day of the show, but we started Monday night. You're going to get wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. You probably know that because you've been watching. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Paul Gill. Paul, this is great. We have had such great conversations. We've been talking a lot about data. Every company is a data company, has to be a data company. We've been talking about developers, the developer experience, and how that's so influential in business decisions for businesses in every industry. >> And it's a key element of what's going on here on the floor at re:Invent is developers, the theme of developers just permeates the show. Lots and lots of boots here devoted to DevOps and Agile approaches. And certainly that is one of the things that the Cloud enables is your team to rethink the way they develop software, and that's what we're going to talk about next. >> That is what we're going to talk about next. We have two guests from Split. split.io is the URL if you want to check it out. Chris Demars joins us Developer advocate. Chris, great to have you and PaaS, VP of Engineering guys thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us Pierre, we'll start with you. For the audience that might not know Split what does the company do? What's the value in it for customers? What are you all about? >> Sure. So in very simple terms, for those who are familiar, we do feature flags, feature management and experimentation. And essentially that two essential feature of the Agile transformation as you were mentioning and elements that really helps getting as much art we can from the team in term of productivity and in term of impact. And we basically help with those elements. And so that's a very short... >> 'Excellent, very nice. Chris, you were saying before we went live you do a lot of speaking at conferences, you're often in front of large audiences. As the developer advocate, what are some of the key requirements you're hearing from the developer community that organizations need to be encompassing? >> I think community is key. Like community is at the forefront of developer advocacy and developer relations. Like you want to go where the developers are and developers want to hear those stories in those personalized pieces of the puzzle. And when you're able to talk about modern Web and software technology and loop in product with that and still keep talking about those things and bring that to them, like that is on top of the list when it comes to developer advocacy and being embedded within the developer community. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Tell us about feature flags, because I would assume that for our viewers who are not developers, who are not familiar with Agile technologies, the Agile approaches that might be, may be a new term, what are feature flags? How do you use them? >> Sure, I can start with that. So feature flag is a tool that you embed in your code that allows you to control the activation of your code essentially. And that's allows you to really validate things in a much better and solve way and also attach measurement to it. So, when you're writing your new feature, you just put essentially an if statement around it, if my feature flag is on, then I actually do all those things with soft, then I don't do any of those things and then within our platform, then you can control the activation. Do you want to turn it on for yourself just to try it out? Do you want your QA team to start validating it? Do you want 5% of your users 10%? And start seeing how they interacting with the product. That's what feature flag is. >> It's an amazing piece of any part of the stack, right? 'Cause I'm a Web accessibility and an UI specialist and being able to control the UI with a feature flag and being able to turn on and off those features based on percentage, locale, all of those things. It's very, very powerful. >> What are some of the scenarios which you would use feature flags? You have been testing? >> Yeah, yeah. We actually, you can imagine we use it for pretty much everything. So, as Chris was saying, in the front-end, everything you want to change, you basically can validate and attach measurements. So you can do AB testing, so you can see the impact, you can see if there is a change in performance. We use it also for a lot of backend services and changes and a lot of even infrastructure changes where we can control the traffic and where it goes. So we can validate that things are operating the way that they should before we fully done the market I think. >> 'It can be as small as, you know having a checkout button here and then writing an AB test and running an experiment and moving that checkout button somewhere else because then you can get conversion rates and see which one performed better to a certain amount of people and whatever performed better, that's the feature you would go with. >> Chris, talk about the value of the impact in feature flags for the developer from a developer experience perspective, a productivity perspective. >> So I think that having that feature and being able to write that UI, let's say that you have a checkout button, right? And there's specific content there's verbiage on that checkout button. And then let's say that another team within the organization wants to change that because the conversion is different. You can make those changes, still have it in production and then have it tested. So you don't have to cut specific branches or like test URLs to give to QA, you can do all of that behind that flag. And then once everything is good to go, push it out there and then based on those metrics and that data, see which one performs better and then that's the one that you would go with. >> One of the things with feature flag and it goes to like our main theme of 'What a Release, What a Relief' is that it gives autonomy to the teams and to the developers, enable them to move independently from others. So the deployment can go but their code is not activated until they decide to. And so, they are not impeding anybody else. It makes releases a lot safer, a lot simpler and it gives a lot more speed to everybody because when you do releases with five teams, 10 teams, pushing the code at the same time, you have such a high-risk of breaking something that it's you know... So it's a huge effort and it requires a lot of attention from a lot of people. If anything happens, all those teams needs to investigate. When you decouple all those things, the deployments are essentially not doing anything per se until every individual team activate those things independently. So if anything goes wrong, only them are affected and they don't have to depend on anybody else to get their thing out. So it really helps them making their life a lot safer and gives them a lot more speed because they have autonomy. >> So, why come to re:Invent? What do you get with this audience that you don't get elsewhere? >> Why to re:Invent? I think like re:Invent in the Cloud and AWS is a lot about getting speed to companies to build better product and faster. And essentially like the tool we provide and the technology and the platform we provide is really at the heart of that in itself. And so that's why we feel we have really great conversation with all the people on the floor. >> 'the people who have the right mindset for adopting... >> For me, it's very much community and networking, I love developer community and just community in general is my lifeblood. That's why I travel so much and I talk about these things and I'm with people and if it's not about the products, the story and the story is what gets people. That's why I love being here and being with my team and it's amazing. >> And what is that story? If you had an elevator pitch to give, what would you tell me? >> Hoo, if you were in a late release or deploy at night. I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, it doesn't matter what you're doing. We don't want be up until two, three in the morning doing those things, right? Our product helps alleviate those stresses. And you talking about accessibility, what I do, you know, a big piece of that are hidden impairments like anxiety will stress and anxiety go hand in hand and you want to alleviate that all across the board for everybody involved. >> As you see organizations shift Agile technologies and to parallel development and continuous release cycles, what are some of the biggest barriers they encounter in changing that mindset? >> Ooh, what do you think? >> It depends on where they are in the organization. The Agile transformation is a journey and it's also a change of mindset, it's a change of process. So depending on where they are then they might have some areas where they need a little bit more effort in those directions. What we see is that feature flag just the control of the layout. It's usually something that's fairly easily adopted. Thinking about measurement and attaching measurement to it is often something that requires a little bit more thinking. Like engineers are not really used to thinking about AB testing. It feels like more of a product management thing but AB testing is important also for performance informations like errors and all those things. There is a lot of risk management to be done. We do that through monitoring with APMs, but with feature flag and with Split, you can do that at a feature level and it really gives a great insight. And that's usually something that takes a little bit more digestion from the developers to really get their mind around it and get to it. But there's a lot of value to it. >> I'm looking at the split I/O website and I like the tagline shorten time from code to customer. As customers in any industry, as consumers, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want anytime 24 by 7 and it's going to be a relevant experience. So it sounds to me like from a speed perspective, there's a lot of business impact that Split can help organizations make from getting releases faster, getting cut faster time-to-market, delivering what customers expect because we all expect real-time these days. Nobody wants to wait. >> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that has to do with the going back to the decoupling of things that, you know... Not having to go through so many teams to have it tested and getting away from all the meetings about meetings to review the metrics, right? We all love meetings about meetings. >> No. (laughs loudly) >> Right, exactly, exactly. So being able to take that away and being able to push all of that stuff into production, getting it tested while it's in production and then being able to turn those features on, it's already there without having to do another deployment. And I think, like that's really powerful to me at least. >> Does your solution have value at the security level as well? >> Yes. So that's one of the particularity on the way we do things is like the way you control the feature flag, you have kind of two ways of doing it. Either the piece of code, the SDKs that we provide, the library we provide, you that you put in your code could come back to our platform and check. The way we do it is we send the rules back to the SDK so the whole evaluation is local. The evaluation is extremely fast and it's very secure because it's all happening within your environment. You never have to share any information, no PI whatsoever, contrary it to some of the other tools that you might find on the market. >> So the theme of the booth is 'What a Release, What a Relief'. What are some of the things that you're hearing as you're engaging folks on the show floor this week? >> Oh, what is Aura Photography and can I take a picture of. (everyone laughs loudly) I think just a lot of the stresses of... They're like the release cycle and you know, having to go through so many teams. I feel like that's a common theme that I've heard of. >> Yeah, we see a number of teams organization that still have like really big deployments with like a lot of teams basically coming together, pushing the code together, and there's a lot of pain in it. It's like, it's a huge effort by huge teams. You get 10, 20 people that have to have watch over it at always weird hours, and I think there is a lot of pain to that and that resonate a lot with people. And when we talk about monitoring at the future level, that also helps a lot. Like I was part of organizations before where we had a dedicated staff engineer to just monitor and fix performance on a daily basis because it's such a huge problem and it affects so much the performance of the company. And so essentially, you have this person that tries to look at is a performance being degraded today with the deployment of yesterday and what went out yesterday and you have so many things that went out. It's so hard to control. With what we provide, we tell you exactly which feature flag is responsible for the degradation. And so, you don't need that person to focus on that anymore. And you can focus on delivering value a lot better. >> I think it also might take away the need for extensive release notebooks and playbooks, right? 'Cause when you do bring all those teams together, it's certain people that are in that meeting and there's a PDF saying, all right, we check this off the list, we check this off the list. I think that might alleviate some of that overhead as well. >> Streamlining processes, process efficiencies, workforce productivity improvements, big impact. >> And that gets code quicker to the user. >> You talk about decoupling deploy from release. What do you mean by that? What's the value? >> So the deployment in my definition is essentially getting the code out to production. The release is activating the code in production. And often people do both of those things at the same time, right? But there's a huge risk when you do that because if anything goes wrong, now you need to revert everything which is not a short operation often and takes a lot of effort. And so now, if you can basically push your code to production but separate the activation of it, the release of it, then it goes a lot faster. It's a lot. You have a lot of autonomy and decoupling and if anything goes wrong, it's the click of a button and it's off. So like there's a lot of safety that comes with it and we know that any outages as a high cost for all the companies. So it's like, if you can reduce the outage to like five seconds... >> Right. >> It's a lot better than basically several hours. >> Can you talk about the value out of Split versus DIY and where are most of your customers in this process? Do they have a bunch of tools, a bunch of processes, a bunch of teams, and you're really helping them consolidate streamline? >> The one thing I hear a lot is we rolled our own AB testing and feature flagging system, but some of the issues I've seen and I've heard are that they don't have all those metrics or they have to work with a specific data team to get those metrics. And then you go back to having those meetings about meetings... >> Lisa: Dependencies. >> Right, you have a data team that's putting together a report that is then presented to you and then that's got to be presented to a stakeholder and then that stakeholder makes a decision whether to turn on feature A or feature B, right? Our product from my understanding is we have those metrics already built in and you can have that at your disposal. >> Yeah, the other thing I would add to that is like we see a number of people, they start on the feature flag journey just because they have a high risk thing that they need to put out. So they do the minimal thing to basically control it somehow, but it works only in one part of the stacks. They can't basically leverage it anywhere else and it's very limited in capability so that it just serve the purpose that was needed at that time. They don't have a dedicated team to manage it. So it just there, but it's very constrained and it's not supported effectively. The other thing is like for those companies is like they have a question to ask themselves. It's like do they want to invest resources in managing that kind of tool or is it not so core to their business that they want essentially to have vendor deal with it at a much lower price and they would have to invest resources for them to support it, and... >> Sounds like feature flags are kind of a team building. Have you have a team building dimension to them? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It takes a team for sure. >> Yeah, and then once you add like AB testing and the feature flag, it's the collaboration between product management and engineering. It can go even further. Like two executives like to basically, you know, view the impact, understand the impact. So it goes from the control to the risk management to the product and to the impact and measuring the flow of delivery and the communication around it. >> Here we are at re:Invent, so many thousands of people as I mentioned, we're on the second full-day of the event. What have you heard from AWS that really excites you about being in their ecosystem? Any news in particular that jumps out at you that really speaks to improving that developer experience as if we've heard a lot of focus on the developer? >> Chris: Yeah, I haven't heard much, have you? >> So, I arrived yesterday, I haven't followed yet all the announcement, I'm just like, >> there's so many- >> on the news, yeah, yeah. >> So I'm on the booth at the same time. >> I stopped counting at 15 during the Keynote this morning. >> Many of them just can't keep up, there's so much happening at one time's so much. >> This event is a can of content, can of news re:Invent. It is hard. But yesterday they were spent so much time talking about data and how... And I always think every company today has to be a data company, have to be a software company, we were just talking with Capital One and they think of themselves as a technology company that does banking. And sometimes, I'll talk with retailers that think of themselves as technology companies that do retail and they love that but that's what companies like Split have to enable these days. It's companies to become technology companies, deliver code faster to customer because the customer's demanding it. We're not going to want less stuff slower. >> Yeah, I mean it's so essential I think for me like I joined Split because of that premises. Like every company now is a software company and every company has really to compete in innovation. You know all those banks, Capital One like we see it a lot in the financial industry where our message resonates extremely strongly is really in a high-competitive environment and they have to be innovative and innovation comes when people have speed and autonomy. And if you basically provide that to teams and the tools to basically get some signals and some quick feedback loop, that's how you get innovation. Like you can't decide what to build but you can basically provide the tools to enable them to think about. >> Right, you can experiment more flexibly right, faster. >> And developers have to be empowered, right? >> Yes. >> I think that's the probably one of the number one messages I've heard at all the shows we've done this year. How influential the developer is in the direction of the business. >> Autonomy and empowerment are two main factors 'cause I'm a front end developer at heart and I want to work on cool stuff and we're doing cool stuff. Like we are doing cool stuff. We can't talk about all of it, right? But I think we're doing a lot of cool things at Split and I'm really stoked to be a part of the team and grow developer relations, grow developer advocacy and be along for the journey. >> Yeah, I love that. Last question for both of you, same question. If you had a bumper sticker and you were going to put it on a fancy shiny new car, car of your choice about Split, what would it say? Pierre I'll start with you then Chris. >> Bumper sticker. >> On the spot question. >> On the question, (everyone laughs happily) I mean the easy answer is probably written on my t-shirt. Like, you know, 'What a Release, What a Relief'. I think that the first step for teams is like, you can have a message that's very like even further, you know, the Agile transformation is a journey and I basically tell people, you need to first crawl, walk and run and I think the 'What a Release, What a Relief' is a good step to like getting to the working. And I think like that would be the first bumper sticker before I get to the further one about AP testing and innovative. >> Love it. Chris, what would your bumper sticker say? >> It would say Split software, feature flags for the masses. Hard stop. >> Mic drop. >> Done. >> Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining Paul and me on the program. It's been outstanding introducing Split to our audience, what you do, how you're impacting the developer experience and ultimately, the business and the end customer on the backend who just wants things to work. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and Paul Gillin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, which you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're live from the show floor here at AWS re:Invent on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson joined by my VIP co-host John Furrier. John, what's your hot take? >> We get wall-to-wall coverage day three of theCUBE (laughing loudly) shows popping, another day tomorrow. >> How many interviews have we done so far? >> I think we're over a hundred I think, (laughing loudly) we might be pushing a hundred. >> We've had a really fantastic line up of guests on theCUBE so far. We are in the meat of the sandwich right now. We've got a full line up of programming all day long and tomorrow. We are lucky to be joined by two fantastic gentlemen on our next segment. Brad, who's a familiar face. We just got to see you in that last one. Thank you for being here, you still doing good? >> Still good. >> Okay, great, glad nothing's changed in the last 14 minutes. >> 'no, we're good. >> Would've been tragic. And welcome, Mark, the CEO of Cloud Saver. Mark, how you doing this morning? >> I'm doing great, thanks so much. >> Savannah: How's the show going for ya'? >> It's going amazing. The turnout's just fantastic. It's record turnouts here. It's been lots of activity, it's great to be part of. >> So I suspect most people know about AMD, but Mark, I'm going to let you give us just a little intro to Cloud Saver so the audience is prepped... >> 'yeah, absolutely. So at Cloud Saver we help companies manage their Cloud spin. And the way that we do it is a little bit unique. Most people try and solve Cloud cost management just through a software only solution but we have a different perspective. There's so many complexities and nuances to managing your Cloud spin, that we don't think that software's enough. So our solution is a full managed service so we can plan our own proprietary technology with a full service delivery team, so that we come in and provide project management, Cloud engineering, FinOps analysts, and we come in and basically do all the cost authorization for the company. And so it's been a fantastic solution for us and something that's really resonated well within our customer base. >> I love your slogan. "Clean up the Cloud with the Cloud Saver Tag Manager'. >> Mark: That's right. >> So yesterday in the Keynote, Adams Lesky said, "Hey if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." So, big focus right now on right sizing. >> That's right. >> I won't say repatriation 'cause that's not kind of of happening, but like people are looking at it like they're not going to, it's not the glory days where you leave all your lights on in your house and you go to bed, you don't worry about the electricity bill. Now people are like, "Okay, what am I doing? Why am I doing it?" A lot more policy, a lot more focus. What are you guys seeing as the low hanging fruit, best practices, the use cases that people are implementing right now? >> Yeah, if you think about where things are at now from a Cloud cost management perspective, there's a lot of frustration in the marketplace because everybody sees their cost continually going up. And what typically happens is they'll say, okay we need to figure out what's going on with this cost and figure out where we can make some changes. And so they go out and get a cost visibility tool and then they're a little bit disappointed because all that visibility tool is completely dependent upon properly tagging your resources. So what a lot of people don't understand is that a lot of their pain that they're experiencing, the root cause is actually they've got a data problem which is why we built a entire solution to help companies clean up their Cloud, clean up their tags. It really is a foundational piece to help them understand how to manage their costs. >> I just.. >> Data is back in the data problem again >> Shocking, right? Not a theme we've heard on the show. Not a theme we've heard on the show at all. I mean, I think with tags it matters more than people realize and it can get very messy very quick. I know that this partnership is relatively new, six months, you told us before this show. Brad what does this partnership mean for AMD customers? >> Yeah, it's critical, they have a fantastic approach to this kind of a full service approach to cost optimization, compete optimization. AMD we're very, extremely focused on providing most cost efficient, most performance, and most energy efficient products on the market. And as Adam talked about, come to the Cloud to tighten your belt. I'll follow up. When you come to the Cloud, your choice matters, right? Your choice matters on what you use and what the downstream impact and cost is. And it also matters in sustainability and other other factors with our products. >> You know, yesterday Zeyess Karvellos one of our analysts on theCUBE, he used his own independent shop. We were talking about this focus and he actually made a comment I want to get your both reaction to, he said "Spend more in the Cloud, save more." Meaning there are ways to spend more on the Cloud and save more at the same time. >> Right. >> It's not just cut and eliminate, it's right side. I don't know what the right word is. Can you guys.. >> No, I think what you're saying is, is that there are areas where you need to spend more so you can be more efficient and get value that way, but there's also plenty of areas where you're spending money unnecessarily. Either you have resources that nobody's using. Let's find those and pull them to the front and center and turn them off, right? Or if you've over provisioned certain areas let's pull those back. So I think having the right balance of where you spend your money to get the value makes total sense. >> John: Yeah >> I like that holistic approach too. I like that you're not just looking at one thing. I mean, people, you're kind of, I'm thinking of you as like the McKinsey or like the dream team that just comes in tidies everything up. Makes sure that people are being, getting that total cost optimization. It's exciting. So who, I imagine, I mean obviously the entire organization benefits, but who benefits most? What types of roles? Who's using you? >> Right, so, Cloud cost management really benefits the entire organization, especially when times get tougher and everybody's looking to tighten their belt with cost. You know.. >> Wait every time when you say that, I'm like conscious, (laughing loudly) of my abdomen. we're in Vegas, there's great food, (laughing loudly) and we got, (laughing loudly) thanks a lot Adam, thanks a lot. (all laughing loudly). >> No, but it really does benefit everybody across the organization and it also helps people to keep cost management kind of front and center, right? No company allows people to have a complete blank check to go out there for infrastructure and as a way to make sure you've got proper checks and balances in place so that you're responsibly managing your IT organization. >> Yeah, and going back to the spend comment, spend more, you know, to save money. You know, look, we're going to be facing a very difficult situation in 23. I think there's going to be a lot of headwinds for a lot of companies. And the way to look at this is it's if you can provide yourself additional operating capital to work, there's other aspects to working with the business. Time to market, right? You're talking about addressing your top line. There's other ways to use applications and the services from AWS to help enable your business to grow even faster in '23 right? So '23 is a time to build, not necessarily a time to hang back and hope everything turns out okay. >> Yeah we can't go over it, (chuckles) We can't go under it, we got to go through it... >> Got to make it work >> Got to make our way through it. I think it's, yeah, it's so important. So as the partnership grows, what's next for you two companies? Brad will go to you first. >> Yeah sure you know, we're very excited to partner with Cloud Saver. It's fantastic company, have great team. And for us it's AMB is entering into the partnership space of this now. So now we've got a great position with AWS. We love their products, and now we're going to try to enable as many partners as we can in some specific areas. And for us cost optimization is priority number one. So you'll see a lot of programs that come out in '23 around this area. We're going to dedicate a lot of sales resources to help as many enterprise customers as we can, working with our close partners like Cloud Saver. >> Next ecosystem developing for you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely, and you know AMD's they're still fairly new in the Cloud space, right? And this is a journey that takes a long time, and this is the next leg in our growth in the environment. >> Well, certainly the trend is more horsepower, more under the hood, more capabilities, customized >> Oh that's coming. >> Workloads. You're starting to see the specialized instances, you can see what's happening and soon it's going to be like a, it's own like computer in the Cloud >> Right. >> More horsepower. >> You think about this, I mean more than 400 instance types, more than 400 types of services out there in that range. And you think about all the potential interactions and applications. It's incredibly complex, right? >> Yeah that decision matrix just went like this in my brain when you said that. That is wild. And everyone wants to do more, faster, easier but also with the comfort of that cost savings, in terms of your customers priorities, I mean, you're talking to a lot of different people across a lot of different industries both of you are, I'm sure is cost optimization the number one priority as we're going into 2023? >> Yeah. Matter of fact, I have a chance to obviously speak with AWS leadership on a regular basis. Every single, they keep telling me for the past two months, every single CEO they're speaking to right now, it's the very first things out of the mouth. It's top of mind for every major corporation right now. And I think the message is also the same. It's like, great, let's help you do that but at the same time, is it not a bad time to re:Invest with some of those additional savings, right? And I think that's where the value of else comes into play. >> Yeah, and I think what you guys are demonstrating to also is another tell sign of this what I call NextGen Cloud evolution, which is as the end-to-end messaging and positioning expands and as you see more solutions. You know, let's face it, it's going to be more complex. So the complexity will be abstracted away by new opportunities like what you guys are doing, what you're enabling. So you're starting to see kind of platforms emerging across the board as well as more ISVs. So ISVs, people building software, starting to see now more symbiotic relationship, for developers and entrepreneurship. >> Yeah, so the complexity of the Cloud is certainly something that's not going to get any less as time goes on, right? And I think as companies realize that, they see it, they acknowledge it and I think they're going to lean on partners to help them navigate those waters. So that's where I think the combination of AMD and Cloud Saver, we can really partner very well because I think we're both very passionate about creating customer value, and I think there's a tremendous number of ways that we can collaborate together to bring that to the customers. >> And you know what's interesting too you guys are both hitting on this is that this next partner channel whatever you want to call it is very joint engineering and development. It's not just relationships and selling, there's integration and the new products that can come out is a phenomenal, we're going to watch. I think I predict that the ecosystem's going to explode big time in terms of value, just new things, joint engineering, API... >> 'it's so collaborative too. >> Yeah, it's going to be... >> 'well, the innovation in the marketplace right now is absolutely on fire. I mean, it's so exciting to see all the new technologies have on board. And to be able to see that kind of permeate throughout the marketplace is something that's just really fun and excited to be part of. >> Oh, when you think about the doom and gloom that we hear every day and you look around right now, everybody's building, right? And... >> this and smiling. >> And smiling, right? >> Paul: Today, (laughing loudly) >> Until Thursday when the legs start to get out. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, what recession? I mean, it's so crowded here. And again, this is the point that the Amazon is now a big player in this economy in 2008 that last recession, they weren't a factor. Now you got be tightening new solutions. I think you're going to see, I think more agility. I think Amazon and the ecosystem might propel us out the recession faster if you get the tailwind that might be a big thing we're watching. >> I agree. Cloud computing is inevitable. >> Yeah. >> It's inevitable. >> Yeah, it's no longer a conversation, it's a commitment. And I think we all certainly agree with that. So, Brad is versed in this challenge because we did it in our last segment. But Mark, we have a new tradition I should say, at re:Invent here, where we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel, your sizzle your thought leadership hot take on the most important story or theme of the show this year. >> For the show as a whole. Wow, well, I think innovation is absolutely front and center today. I think, of the new technologies that we're seeing out there are absolutely phenomenal. I think they're taking the whole Cloud computing to the next level, and I think it's going to have a dramatic impact on how people develop applications and run workloads in the Cloud. >> Well done. What do you think John? I think you nailed it. >> Nailed it. Yeah, want to go for round two? >> Sure. >> Sure, I'll give a shot, (laughing loudly) So... >> 'get it, Brad. >> So, when in public Cloud choice matters? >> It matters. Think about the instance types you use think about the configurations you use and think about the applications you're layering in there and why they're there, right? Optimize those environments. Take advantage of all the tools you have. >> Yeah, you're going to start tuning your Cloud now. I mean, as it gets bigger and better, stronger you're going to start to see just fine tuning more craft, I guess. >> Mark: Yeah. >> In there, great stuff. >> Paul, and in these interesting times, I'm not committed to calling it a recession yet. I still have a chart of hope. I think that the services and the value that you provide to your customers are going to be one of those painkillers that will survive through this. I mean we're seeing a little bit of the trimming of the fat, of extraneous spending in the tech sector as a whole. But I can't imagine folks not wanting to leverage AMD and Cloud Saver, it's exciting, yeah. >> Saving money never goes out of style right? (laughing loudly) >> Saving money is always sexy. I love that, yeah, (laughing loudly) It's actually really... That's a great line goes on. Mark, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it, Brad. It's been a fabulous thing. You're just going to stay here all day, right? >> I'll just hang out, yeah. >> All right. >> I'm yours. >> I love that. And thank you all for tuning to us live here from the show floor at AWS re:Invent in fabulous sunny Las Vegas Nevada with John Furrier, I'm Savannah Peterson you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage. I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got two sets here, three sets total. Another one in the executive center. It's our 10th year covering AWS Reinvent. I remember 2013 like it was yesterday. You know, now it's a massive of people buying out restaurants. 35,000 people now it's 55,000, soon to be 70,000 back. Great event. Continuing to set the standard in the industry. We had an amazing guest here, Leah Bibo, vice President of Product Marketing. She's in charge of the messaging, the product, overseeing how these products gonna market. Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me on the Cube today. >>Absolutely. It's great to be here. It's also my 10 reinvent, so it's, it's been a wild ride. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You and I were talking before we came on camera, how much we love products and yes, this is a product-centric company, has been from day one and you know, over the years watching the announcements, the tsunami of announcements, just all the innovation that's come out from AWS over the years has been staggering to say the least. Everyone always jokes about, oh my God, 5,000 new announcements, over 200 services you're managing and you're marketing them. It's pretty crazy right now. And Adam, as he comes on, as I called them, the solutions CEO on my piece I wrote on Friday, we're in an era where solutions, the products are enabling more solutions. Unpack the messaging around this cuz this is really big moment for aws. >>Absolutely. Well, I'll say first of all that we are a customer focused company that happens to be really good at innovating incredible products and services for our customers. So today the, the energy in the room and what Adam talked about, I think is focused on a few great things for customers that are really important for transformation. So we talked a lot about best price performance for workloads and we talked about extreme workloads, but if you think about the work that we've been doing to innovate on the silicon side, we're really talking about with Graviton all your workloads and getting really great price performance for all of them. You know, we came out with graviton three 25% faster than graviton two, also 60% more energy efficient. We talked about something that is emerging that I think is gonna be really big, which is simulation and really the ability to model these complex worlds and all the little interactions, which I think, you know, in the future as we have more complex environments like 3D simulation is gonna be a bigger part of every, every business's >>Business. You know, just as an aside, we were talking on the analyst segment that speeds and feeds are back and the old days and the data center days was like, we don't wanna talk about speeds and feeds about solutions and you know, the outcomes when you get the cloud, it was like, okay, get the workloads over there, but people want faster and lower cost performance workloads gotta be running at at high performance. And, and there's a real discussion around those. Let's unpack security data performance. What, what does that mean for customers? Because again, I get the workloads run fast. That's great. What else is behind the curtain, so to speak from a customer standpoint? >>Absolutely. Well I think if you're gonna move all your workloads to the cloud, you know, security is a really big area that's important. It's important to every one of our enterprise companies customers. Actually it's important to all of our customers and we've been working, you know, since the beginning of AWS to really create and build the most secure global infrastructure. And you know, as our customers have moved mission critical workloads, we've built out a lot more capabilities and now we have a whole portfolio of security services. And what we announced today is kind of game changing. The service called Security Lake, which brings together, you know, an ecosystem of security data in a format that's open. So you can share data between all of these sources and it's gonna give folks the opportunity to really be able to analyze data, find threats faster, and just kind of know their security posture. And I think, you know, as we talked about today, you don't wanna think about the cloud as unfathomable, the unfathomable, you really need to know that security. And I think that like a lot of things we discussed, security is a data opportunity, right? And I think we, we had a section on on data, but really if you look at the keynote across security, across solutions, across the purpose built things we made, it's all, it all comes down to data and it's really the, the transformational element that our customers >>Are. I mean the data secured is very integral part good call out there. And I, I wanna just double down on that real quick because I remember in 2014 I interviewed Steven Schmidt when he was the CSOs and back then in 2014, if you remember the conversation was this, the clouds not secure, gotta be on premises. Now in today's keynote, Adam says, and he laid out the whole global security footprint. There's a lot going on that Amazon has now become more secure than on-prem. He actually made that statement. So, and then plus you got thousands of security partners, third party partners, you got the open cyber security framework which you guys co-found with all the other, so you got securities not as a team sport, this is what they, they said yes, yes. What does that mean for customers? Because now this is a big deal. >>Well I think for customers, I mean it means nothing but goodness, right? But all of these thousands of security partners have really innovated and created solutions that our customers are using. But they all have different types of data in different silos. And to really get a full picture bringing all that data together is really important. And it's not easy today. You know, log data from different sources, data from detection services and really what customers want is an easier way to get it all together. Which is why we have the open OCS F and really analyze using the tools of their choice. And whether that's AWS tools for analytics or it's tools from our partners, customers need to be able to make that choice so that they can feel like their applications and their workloads are the most secure on aws. >>You know, I've been very impressed with guard duty and I've been following Merit Bear's blogs on online. She's in the security team, she's amazing. Shout out to her. She's been pushing guard duty for a long time now there's big news around guard duty. So you got EKS protection, you know, at Coan this was the biggest cloud native issue, the runtime of Kubernetes and inside the container and outside the container detection of threats, right? As a real software supply chain concern. How are you guys marketing that? This is a huge announcement. EKS protection I know is very nuanced but it's pretty big deal. >>It is a big deal. It is a big deal. And guard duty has been kind of like a quiet service that maybe you don't hear a lot about, but has been really, really popular with our customers. Adam mentioned that 85% of, you know, our top 2000 customers are using guard duty today. And it was a big moment. We launched EKS protection, you know, a little bit earlier and the customer uptake on that has been really incredible. And it is because you can protect your Kubernetes cluster, which is really important because so many customers are, you know, part of their migration to the cloud is containers. Yeah. And so we're pretty excited that now we can answer that question of what's going on inside the container. And so you have both, yeah, right. You know that your Kubernetes pluses are good and you know what's going on inside the container and it's just more threats that you can detect and protect >>Yourself from. You know, as an aside, I'm sure you're watching this, but you know, we go to a lot of events, you know, the C I C D pipeline as developers are getting higher velocity coding, it has moved in because of DevOps on the cloud into the C I C D pipeline. So you're seeing that developer takes some of those IT roles in the coding workflow, hence the, the shift left and or container security, which you guys now, now and are driving towards. But the security and the data teams are emerging as a very key element inside the organizational structure. When I sat down with Adam, one of the things he was very adamant about in my conversation was not just digital transformation, business transformation, structural organizational moves are making where it's not a department anymore, it is the company, a technology is the company when you transform. Absolutely. So digital is the process, business is the outcome. This is a really huge message. What's your reaction to that? What's, what can you share extra cuz that's, this is a big part of the thing. He hit it right outta the gate on the front end of the keynote. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean I think, you know, companies have been migrating to the cloud for a while, but I think that this time that we're going through has really accelerated that migration And as part of that, you know, digital transformation has become real for a lot of companies. And it is true what Adam said there is technology transformation involved, there's data transformation involved, but it, it is transforming businesses. And I think if you look at some of the things that Adam talked about, you know, aws, supply chain, security Lake, aws clean rooms, and Omic, aws, omic, you know, those are all examples of data and the ability to work with data transforming different lines of business within a company, transforming horizontal processes like contact centers and like supply chain and also, you know, going into vertical specific solutions. So what it means is that as technology becomes more pervasive, as data becomes more pervasive, businesses are transforming and that means that a lot more people are going to use the cloud and interact with the cloud and they might not want to or be able to kind of use our building blocks. And so what's really exciting that what we're able to do is make cloud more accessible to lines of business folks to analysts, to security folks. So >>It's, yeah, and that's, and that's why I was calling my this this new trend I see as Amazon Classic, my words, not your words, I call the, hey there was classic cloud and then you got the next gen clown, the new next generation. And I was talking with Adrian Cockcroft, former aws, so he's now retired, he's gonna come on later today. He and I were talking, he use this thing of you got a bag of Legos aka primitives or a toy that's been assembled for you glued together, ones out of the box, but they're not mutually exclusive. You can build a durable application and foundation with the building blocks more durable. You can manage it, refine it, but you got the solution that breaks. You don't have as much flexibility but you gotta replace it. That's okay too. So like this is now kind of a new portfolio approach to the cloud. It's very interesting and I think, I think, I think that's what I took away from the keynote is that you can have both. >>Yes, absolutely. You can do both. I mean, we're gonna go full throttle on releasing innovations and pushing the envelope on compute and storage and databases and our core services because they matter. And having, you know, the choice to choose from a wide range of options. I mean that's what, that's what customers need. You know, if you're gonna run hpc, you're gonna run machine learning and you're gonna run your SAP applications or your Windows applications, you need choice of what you know, specific type of instance and compute capabilities. You need to get the price performance. It's, it's definitely not a one size fits all. It's a 600 instance type. Size fits all maybe. >>Exactly. And you got a lot of instance and we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, I love the themes. I love this keynote themes you had like at first space, but I get the whole data, then you look at it, you can look at it differently. Really good metaphor, the ocean one I love with the security because he mentioned you can have the confidence to explore go deep snorkeling versus scuba and knowing how much oxygen you have. I mean, so really cool metaphor made me think very provocative. So again, this is kind of why people go to AWS because you now have these, these abilities to do things differently, depend on the context of what products you're working with. Yes. Explain why that was the core theme. Was there any rationale behind that? Was it just how you guys saw it? I mean that was pretty clever. >>Well, I think that, you know, we're, we're talking about environments and I think in this world, you know, there's uncertainty in a lot of places and we really feel like all of us need to be prepared for different types of environments. And so we wanted to explore what that could look like. And I think, you know, we're fascinated by space and the vastness and it is very much like the world of data. I don't know about you, but I actually scuba dive. So I love the depths of the ocean. I loved working on that part. There's extremes, extreme workloads like hpc, extreme workloads like machine learning with the growing models and there's an imagination, which is also one of my favorite areas to explore. >>Yeah. And you use the Antarctica one for about the whole environment and extreme conditions. That's good in the performance. And I love that piece of it. And I want to get into the, some of the things I love the speeds and fee. I think the, the big innovation with the silicon we've been covering as, you know, like a blanket. The, he's got the GRAVITON three 25% faster than GRAVITON two, the C seven GN network intense workloads. This is kind of a big deal. I mean this is one of those things where it might not get picked up in the major press, but the network use cases are significant. Nira has been successful. Share your thoughts on these kinds of innovations because they look kind of small, but they're not, they're >>Big, they're not small for sure, especially at the scale that our customers are, are, are running their applications. Like every little optimization that you can get really makes a huge difference. And I think it's exciting. I mean you hit on, you kind of hit on it when we've been working on silicon for a while now we know that, you know, if we're gonna keep pushing the element, the envelope in these areas, we had to, we had to go down to the silicon. And I think that Nitro has really been what's kind of been a breakthrough for us. You know, reinventing that virtualization layer, offloading security and storage and networking to special purpose chips. And I think that it's not just in the area of network optimization, right? You saw training optimized instances and inference optimized instances and HPC optimized instances. So yeah, we are kind of looking at all the extremes of, of what customers want to do. >>I know you can't talk about the future, but I can almost connect the dots as you're talking. It's like, hmm, specialized instances, specialized chips, maybe programmability of workload, smart intelligence, generative AI, weaving in there. A lot of kind of cool things I can see around the corner around generative AI automation. Hey, go to this instance with that go here. This is kind of what I see kind of coming around the corner. >>And we have some of that with our instance optimizers, our cost optimizer products where, you know, we wanna help customers find the best instance for their workload, get the best utilization they possibly can, you know, cut costs, but still have the great performance. So I don't, I don't know about your future, John, it sounds great, but we have, you know, we're taking steps in that direction today. >>Still look in this code that's gonna be on this code. Okay. Any, okay, I wanna give you one final question. Well, well two questions. One was a comment Adam made, I'd love to get your reaction if you want to tighten your bell, come to the cloud. I thought that was a very interesting nuance. A lot of economic pressure. Cloud is an opportunity to get agile, time to value faster. We had Zs carve cube analyst who's with us earlier said, the more you spend on the cloud, the more you save. That was his line, which I thought was very smart. Spending more doesn't mean you're gonna lose money, means you can save money too. So a lot of cost optimization discussions. Absolutely. Hey, your belt come to the cloud. What does he mean by that? >>Well I think that in, in times where, you know, there's uncertainty and economic conditions, it is, it's really, you know, you sometimes wanna pull back kind of, you know, batten down the hatches. But the cloud really, and we saw this with C you know, if you, if you move to the cloud, not only can you cut costs, but you put yourself in this position where you can continue to innovate and you can be agile and you can be prepared for whatever environment you're in so that you know when things go back or you have a customer needs that and innovation that goes off like you, you can accelerate back up really, really quickly. And I think we talked about Airbnb, that example of how, you know, in, in that really tough time of covid when travel industry wasn't happening so much, you know, they were able to scale back and save money. And then at the same time when, you know, Airbnb's kind of once again travel came back, they were in a position to really, really quickly change with the, the customer needs. >>You know, Lee, it's always great talking with you. You got a lot of energy, you're so smart and we both love products and you're leading the product marketing. We have an Instagram challenge here on the cube. I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Oh my gosh. It's called Instagram. We called a bumper sticker section. We used to call it what's the bumper sticker for reinvent. But we kind of modernized that. If you were gonna do an Instagram reel right now, what would be the Instagram reel for reinvent Keynote day one. As we look for, we got Verner, we'll probably talk about productivity with developers. What's the Instagram reel for reinvent? >>Wow. That means I have to get short with it, right? I am, I'm not always, that's still wrong answer. Yeah, well I think, you know, this is really big day one, so it's excitement, it's, we're glad to be here. We have a lot coming for you. We're super excited. And if you think about it, it's price, performance, it's data, it's security and it's solutions for purpose-built use cases. >>Great job. Congratulations. I love the message. I love how you guys had the theme. I thought it was great. And it's great to see Amazon continue to innovate with, with the, with the, with the innovation on the product side. But as we get into transformation, starting to see these solutions and the ecosystem is thriving and looking forward to hearing the, the new partner, chief Aruba tomorrow. Absolutely. See what she's got a new plan apparently unveiling. So exciting. Everyone's pretty excited. Thanks for coming >>On. Great. Great. Thanks for having >>Me. All right. Leah, here in the cube. You are the cube, the leader in tech coverage. I'm John Fur, your host. More live coverage after the short break. We'll be right back here. Day two of the cube, day one of reinvent. Lot of great action. Three, four days of wall to wall coverage. We'll be right back.

>>Good morning fellow nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent. We are live from the show floor here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with my fabulous co-host John Furrier. Day two keynotes are rolling. >>Yeah. What do you thinking this? This is the day where everything comes, so the core gets popped off the bottle, all the announcements start flowing out tomorrow. You hear machine learning from swee lot more in depth around AI probably. And then developers with Verner Vos, the CTO who wrote the seminal paper in in early two thousands around web service that becames. So again, just another great year of next level cloud. Big discussion of data in the keynote bulk of the time was talking about data and business intelligence, business transformation easier. Is that what people want? They want the easy button and we're gonna talk a lot about that in this segment. I'm really looking forward to this interview. >>Easy button. We all want the >>Easy, we want the easy button. >>I love that you brought up champagne. It really feels like a champagne moment for the AWS community as a whole. Being here on the floor feels a bit like the before times. I don't want to jinx it. Our next guest, Scott Castle, from Si Sense. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you feeling? How's the show for you going so far? Oh, >>This is exciting. It's really great to see the changes that are coming in aws. It's great to see the, the excitement and the activity around how we can do so much more with data, with compute, with visualization, with reporting. It's fun. >>It is very fun. I just got a note. I think you have the coolest last name of anyone we've had on the show so far, castle. Oh, thank you. I'm here for it. I'm sure no one's ever said that before, but I'm so just in case our audience isn't familiar, tell us about >>Soy Sense is an embedded analytics platform. So we're used to take the queries and the analysis that you can power off of Aurora and Redshift and everything else and bring it to the end user in the applications they already know how to use. So it's all about embedding insights into tools. >>Embedded has been a, a real theme. Nobody wants to, it's I, I keep using the analogy of multiple tabs. Nobody wants to have to leave where they are. They want it all to come in there. Yep. Now this space is older than I think everyone at this table bis been around since 1958. Yep. How do you see Siente playing a role in the evolution there of we're in a different generation of analytics? >>Yeah, I mean, BI started, as you said, 58 with Peter Lu's paper that he wrote for IBM kind of get became popular in the late eighties and early nineties. And that was Gen one bi, that was Cognos and Business Objects and Lotus 1 23 think like green and black screen days. And the way things worked back then is if you ran a business and you wanted to get insights about that business, you went to it with a big check in your hand and said, Hey, can I have a report? And they'd come back and here's a report. And it wasn't quite right. You'd go back and cycle, cycle, cycle and eventually you'd get something. And it wasn't great. It wasn't all that accurate, but it's what we had. And then that whole thing changed in about two, 2004 when self-service BI became a thing. And the whole idea was instead of going to it with a big check in your hand, how about you make your own charts? >>And that was totally transformative. Everybody started doing this and it was great. And it was all built on semantic modeling and having very fast databases and data warehouses. Here's the problem, the tools to get to those insights needed to serve both business users like you and me and also power users who could do a lot more complex analysis and transformation. And as the tools got more complicated, the barrier to entry for everyday users got higher and higher and higher to the point where now you look, look at Gartner and Forester and IDC this year. They're all reporting in the same statistic. Between 10 and 20% of knowledge workers have learned business intelligence and everybody else is just waiting in line for a data analyst or a BI analyst to get a report for them. And that's why the focus on embedded is suddenly showing up so strong because little startups have been putting analytics into their products. People are seeing, oh my, this doesn't have to be hard. It can be easy, it can be intuitive, it can be native. Well why don't I have that for my whole business? So suddenly there's a lot of focus on how do we embed analytics seamlessly? How do we embed the investments people make in machine learning in data science? How do we bring those back to the users who can actually operationalize that? Yeah. And that's what Tysons does. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Savannah, you know, data processing used to be what the IT department used to be called back in the day data processing. Now data processing is what everyone wants to do. There's a ton of data we got, we saw the keynote this morning at Adam Lesky. There was almost a standing of vision, big applause for his announcement around ML powered forecasting with Quick Site Cube. My point is people want automation. They want to have this embedded semantic layer in where they are not having all the process of ETL or all the muck that goes on with aligning the data. All this like a lot of stuff that goes on. How do you make it easier? >>Well, to be honest, I, I would argue that they don't want that. I think they, they think they want that, cuz that feels easier. But what users actually want is they want the insight, right? When they are about to make a decision. If you have a, you have an ML powered forecast, Andy Sense has had that built in for years, now you have an ML powered forecast. You don't need it two weeks before or a week after in a report somewhere. You need it when you're about to decide do I hire more salespeople or do I put a hundred grand into a marketing program? It's putting that insight at the point of decision that's important. And you don't wanna be waiting to dig through a lot of infrastructure to find it. You just want it when you need it. What's >>The alternative from a time standpoint? So real time insight, which is what you're saying. Yep. What's the alternative? If they don't have that, what's >>The alternative? Is what we are currently seeing in the market. You hire a bunch of BI analysts and data analysts to do the work for you and you hire enough that your business users can ask questions and get answers in a timely fashion. And by the way, if you're paying attention, there's not enough data analysts in the whole world to do that. Good luck. I am >>Time to get it. I really empathize with when I, I used to work for a 3D printing startup and I can, I have just, I mean, I would call it PTSD flashbacks of standing behind our BI guy with my list of queries and things that I wanted to learn more about our e-commerce platform in our, in our marketplace and community. And it would take weeks and I mean this was only in 2012. We're not talking 1958 here. We're talking, we're talking, well, a decade in, in startup years is, is a hundred years in the rest of the world life. But I think it's really interesting. So talk to us a little bit about infused and composable analytics. Sure. And how does this relate to embedded? Yeah. >>So embedded analytics for a long time was I want to take a dashboard I built in a BI environment. I wanna lift it and shift it into some other application so it's close to the user and that is the right direction to go. But going back to that statistic about how, hey, 10 to 20% of users know how to do something with that dashboard. Well how do you reach the rest of users? Yeah. When you think about breaking that up and making it more personalized so that instead of getting a dashboard embedded in a tool, you get individual insights, you get data visualizations, you get controls, maybe it's not even actually a visualization at all. Maybe it's just a query result that influences the ordering of a list. So like if you're a csm, you have a list of accounts in your book of business, you wanna rank those by who's priorities the most likely to churn. >>Yeah. You get that. How do you get that most likely to churn? You get it from your BI system. So how, but then the question is, how do I insert that back into the application that CSM is using? So that's what we talk about when we talk about Infusion. And SI started the infusion term about two years ago and now it's being used everywhere. We see it in marketing from Click and Tableau and from Looker just recently did a whole launch on infusion. The idea is you break this up into very small digestible pieces. You put those pieces into user experiences where they're relevant and when you need them. And to do that, you need a set of APIs, SDKs, to program it. But you also need a lot of very solid building blocks so that you're not building this from scratch, you're, you're assembling it from big pieces. >>And so what we do aty sense is we've got machine learning built in. We have an LQ built in. We have a whole bunch of AI powered features, including a knowledge graph that helps users find what else they need to know. And we, we provide those to our customers as building blocks so that they can put those into their own products, make them look and feel native and get that experience. In fact, one of the things that was most interesting this last couple of couple of quarters is that we built a technology demo. We integrated SI sensee with Office 365 with Google apps for business with Slack and MS teams. We literally just threw an Nlq box into Excel and now users can go in and say, Hey, which of my sales people in the northwest region are on track to meet their quota? And they just get the table back in Excel. They can build charts of it and PowerPoint. And then when they go to their q do their QBR next week or week after that, they just hit refresh to get live data. It makes it so much more digestible. And that's the whole point of infusion. It's bigger than just, yeah. The iframe based embedding or the JavaScript embedding we used to talk about four or five years >>Ago. APIs are very key. You brought that up. That's gonna be more of the integration piece. How does embedable and composable work as more people start getting on board? It's kind of like a Yeah. A flywheel. Yes. What, how do you guys see that progression? Cause everyone's copying you. We see that, but this is a, this means it's standard. People want this. Yeah. What's next? What's the, what's that next flywheel benefit that you guys coming out with >>Composability, fundamentally, if you read the Gartner analysis, right, they, when they talk about composable, they're talking about building pre-built analytics pieces in different business units for, for different purposes. And being able to plug those together. Think of like containers and services that can, that can talk to each other. You have a composition platform that can pull it into a presentation layer. Well, the presentation layer is where I focus. And so the, so for us, composable means I'm gonna have formulas and queries and widgets and charts and everything else that my, that my end users are gonna wanna say almost minority report style. If I'm not dating myself with that, I can put this card here, I can put that chart here. I can set these filters here and I get my own personalized view. But based on all the investments my organization's made in data and governance and quality so that all that infrastructure is supporting me without me worrying much about it. >>Well that's productivity on the user side. Talk about the software angle development. Yeah. Is your low code, no code? Is there coding involved? APIs are certainly the connective tissue. What's the impact to Yeah, the >>Developer. Oh. So if you were working on a traditional legacy BI platform, it's virtually impossible because this is an architectural thing that you have to be able to do. Every single tool that can make a chart has an API to embed that chart somewhere. But that's not the point. You need the life cycle automation to create models, to modify models, to create new dashboards and charts and queries on the fly. And be able to manage the whole life cycle of that. So that in your composable application, when you say, well I want chart and I want it to go here and I want it to do this and I want it to be filtered this way you can interact with the underlying platform. And most importantly, when you want to use big pieces like, Hey, I wanna forecast revenue for the next six months. You don't want it popping down into Python and writing that yourself. >>You wanna be able to say, okay, here's my forecasting algorithm. Here are the inputs, here's the dimensions, and then go and just put it somewhere for me. And so that's what you get withy sense. And there aren't any other analytics platforms that were built to do that. We were built that way because of our architecture. We're an API first product. But more importantly, most of the legacy BI tools are legacy. They're coming from that desktop single user, self-service, BI environment. And it's a small use case for them to go embedding. And so composable is kind of out of reach without a complete rebuild. Right? But with SI senses, because our bread and butter has always been embedding, it's all architected to be API first. It's integrated for software developers with gi, but it also has all those low code and no code capabilities for business users to do the minority report style thing. And it's assemble endless components into a workable digital workspace application. >>Talk about the strategy with aws. You're here at the ecosystem, you're in the ecosystem, you're leading product and they have a strategy. We know their strategy, they have some stuff, but then the ecosystem goes faster and ends up making a better product in most of the cases. If you compare, I know they'll take me to school on that, but I, that's pretty much what we report on. Mongo's doing a great job. They have databases. So you kind of see this balance. How are you guys playing in the ecosystem? What's the, what's the feedback? What's it like? What's going on? >>AWS is actually really our best partner. And the reason why is because AWS has been clear for many, many years. They build componentry, they build services, they build infrastructure, they build Redshift, they build all these different things, but they need, they need vendors to pull it all together into something usable. And fundamentally, that's what Cient does. I mean, we didn't invent sequel, right? We didn't invent jackal or dle. These are not, these are underlying analytics technologies, but we're taking the bricks out of the briefcase. We're assembling it into something that users can actually deploy for their use cases. And so for us, AWS is perfect because they focus on the hard bits. The the underlying technologies we assemble those make them usable for customers. And we get the distribution. And of course AWS loves that. Cause it drives more compute and it drives more, more consumption. >>How much do they pay you to say that >>Keynote, >>That was a wonderful pitch. That's >>Absolutely, we always say, hey, they got a lot of, they got a lot of great goodness in the cloud, but they're not always the best at the solutions and that they're trying to bring out, and you guys are making these solutions for customers. Yeah. That resonates with what they got with Amazon. For >>Example, we, last year we did a, a technology demo with Comprehend where we put comprehend inside of a semantic model and we would compile it and then send it back to Redshift. And it takes comprehend, which is a very cool service, but you kind of gotta be a coder to use it. >>I've been hear a lot of hype about the semantic layer. What is, what is going on with that >>Semantec layer is what connects the actual data, the tables in your database with how they're connected and what they mean so that a user like you or me who's saying I wanna bar chart with revenue over time can just work with revenue and time. And the semantic layer translates between what we did and what the database knows >>About. So it speaks English and then they converts it to data language. It's >>Exactly >>Right. >>Yeah. It's facilitating the exchange of information. And, and I love this. So I like that you actually talked about it in the beginning, the knowledge map and helping people figure out what they might not know. Yeah. I, I am not a bi analyst by trade and I, I don't always know what's possible to know. Yeah. And I think it's really great that you're doing that education piece. I'm sure, especially working with AWS companies, depending on their scale, that's gotta be a big part of it. How much is the community play a role in your product development? >>It's huge because I'll tell you, one of the challenges in embedding is someone who sees an amazing experience in outreach or in seismic. And to say, I want that. And I want it to be exactly the way my product is built, but I don't wanna learn a lot. And so you, what you want do is you want to have a community of people who have already built things who can help lead the way. And our community, we launched a new version of the SES community in early 2022 and we've seen a 450% growth in the c in that community. And we've gone from an average of one response, >>450%. I just wanna put a little exclamation point on that. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. We, >>We've tripled our organic activity. So now if you post this Tysons community, it used to be, you'd get one response maybe from us, maybe from from a customer. Now it's up to three. And it's continuing to trend up. So we're, it's >>Amazing how much people are willing to help each other. If you just get in the platform, >>Do it. It's great. I mean, business is so >>Competitive. I think it's time for the, it's time. I think it's time. Instagram challenge. The reels on John. So we have a new thing. We're gonna run by you. Okay. We just call it the bumper sticker for reinvent. Instead of calling it the Instagram reels. If we're gonna do an Instagram reel for 30 seconds, what would be your take on what's going on this year at Reinvent? What you guys are doing? What's the most important story that you would share with folks on Instagram? >>You know, I think it's really what, what's been interesting to me is the, the story with Redshift composable, sorry. No, composable, Redshift Serverless. Yeah. One of the things I've been >>Seeing, we know you're thinking about composable a lot. Yes. Right? It's, it's just, it's in there, it's in your mouth. Yeah. >>So the fact that Redshift Serverless is now kind becoming the defacto standard, it changes something for, for my customers. Cuz one of the challenges with Redshift that I've seen in, in production is if as people use it more, you gotta get more boxes. You have to manage that. The fact that serverless is now available, it's, it's the default means it now people are just seeing Redshift as a very fast, very responsive repository. And that plays right into the story I'm telling cuz I'm telling them it's not that hard to put some analysis on top of things. So for me it's, it's a, maybe it's a narrow Instagram reel, but it's an >>Important one. Yeah. And that makes it better for you because you get to embed that. Yeah. And you get access to better data. Faster data. Yeah. Higher quality, relevant, updated. >>Yep. Awesome. As it goes into that 80% of knowledge workers, they have a consumer great expectation of experience. They're expecting that five ms response time. They're not waiting 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 seconds. They're not trained on theola expectations. And so it's, it matters a lot. >>Final question for you. Five years out from now, if things progress the way they're going with more innovation around data, this front end being very usable, semantic layer kicks in, you got the Lambda and you got serverless kind of coming in, helping out along the way. What's the experience gonna look like for a user? What's it in your mind's eye? What's that user look like? What's their experience? >>I, I think it shifts almost every role in a business towards being a quantitative one. Talking about, Hey, this is what I saw. This is my hypothesis and this is what came out of it. So here's what we should do next. I, I'm really excited to see that sort of scientific method move into more functions in the business. Cuz for decades it's been the domain of a few people like me doing strategy, but now I'm seeing it in CSMs, in support people and sales engineers and line engineers. That's gonna be a big shift. Awesome. >>Thank >>You Scott. Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic session. We wish you the best at si sense. John, always pleasure to share the, the stage with you. Thank you to everybody who's attuning in, tell us your thoughts. We're always eager to hear what, what features have got you most excited. And as you know, we will be live here from Las Vegas at reinvent from the show floor 10 to six all week except for Friday. We'll give you Friday off with John Furrier. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the the, the leader in high tech coverage.

(gentle music) >> Good morning from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tons of thousands of people today. Really kicks off the event. Big keynote that I think is probably just wrapping up. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, this is going to be an action packed week on theCUBE no doubt. We talked with so many different companies. Every company's a software company these days but we're also seeing a lot of companies leaving software that can help them operate more efficiently in the background. >> Yeah, well some things haven't changed at Reinvent. A lot of people here, you know, back to 2019 highs and I think we exceeded those two hour keynotes. Peter DeSantis last night talking about new Graviton instances and then Adam Selipsky doing the typical two hour keynote. But what was different he was a lot more poetic than we used to hear from Andy Jassy, right? He was talking about the universe as an analogy for data. >> I loved that. >> Talked about ocean exploration as for the security piece and then exploring into the Antarctic for, you know, better chips, you know? So yeah, I think he did a good job there. I think a lot of people might not love it but I thought it was very well done. >> I thought so too. We're having kicking off a great day of live content for you all day today. We've got Eleanor Dorfman joining us, the sales leader at Retool. Eleanor, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So let's talk a little bit about Retool. I was looking on your LinkedIn page. I love the tagline, build custom internal tools best. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Talk to us a little bit about the company you recently raised, series C two. Give us the backstory. >> Yeah, so the company was founded in 2017 by two co-founders who are best friends from college. They actually set out to build a FinTech company, a payments company. And as they were building that, they needed to build a ton of custom operations software that goes with that. If you're going to be managing people's money, you need to be able to do refunds. You need to be able to look up accounts, you need to be able to detect fraud, you need to do know your customer operations. And as they were building the sort of operations software that supports the business, they realized that there were patterns to all of it and that the same components were used at and again. And had the insight that that was actually probably a better direction to go in than recreating Venmo, which was I think the original idea. And that actually this is a problem every company has because every company needs operations engineering and operations software to run their business. And so they pivoted and started building Retool which is a platform for building custom operations software or internal tools. >> Dave: Good pivot. >> In hindsight, actually probably in the moment as well, was a good pivot. >> But you know, when you talk about some of those things, refunds, fraud, you know, KYC, you know, you think of operations software, you think of it as just internal, but all those things are customer facing. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Right so, are we seeing as sort of this new era? Is that a trend that you guys, your founders saw that hey, these internal operations can be pointed at customers to support what, a better customer service, maybe even generate revenue, subscriptions? >> I think it's a direction we're actually heading now but we're just starting to scratch the surface of that. The focus for the last five years has very much been on this operations software and sort of changing the economics of developing it and making it easy and fast to productize workflows that were previously being done in spreadsheets or hacky workarounds and make it easier for companies to prioritize those so they can run their business more efficiently. >> And where are you having your customer conversations these days? Thinking of operations software in the background, but to Dave's point, it ends up being part of the customer experience. So where are you having your customer conversations, target audience, who's that persona? >> Mainly developers. So we're working almost exclusively with developer teams who have backlogs and backlogs of internal tools requests to build that sales teams are building manual forecasts. Support teams are in 19 different tools. Their supply chain teams are using seven different spreadsheets to do demand forecasting or freight forwarding or things like that. But they've never been able to be prioritized to the top of the list because customer facing software, revenue generating software, always takes prioritization. And in this economic environment, which is challenging for many companies right now, it's important to be able to do more with less and maximize the productivity especially of high value employees like engineers and developers. >> So what would you say the biggest business outcomes are? If the developer is really the focus, productivity is the- >> Productivity. It's for both, I would say. Developer productivity and being able to maximize your sort of R and D and maximize the productivity of your engineers and take away some of the very boring parts of the job. But, so I would say developer productivity, but then also the tools and the software that they're building are very powerful for end users. So I would say efficiency and productivity across your business. >> Across the business. >> I mean historically, you know, operations is where we focused IT and code. How much of the code out there is dedicated to sort of operations versus that customer facing? >> So I think it would actually be, it's kind of surprising. We have run a few surveys on this sort of, we call them the state of engineering time, and focusing on what developers are spending their time on. And a third of all code that is being written today is actually for this internal operations software. >> Interesting. And do you guys have news at the show? Are you announcing anything interesting or? >> Yeah, so our focus historically, you sort of gave away with one of your early questions, but our focus has always been on this operations, this building web applications on building UIs on top of databases and APIs and doing that incredibly fast and being able to do it all in one place and integrate with as any data source that you need. We abstract away access authentication deployment and you build applications for your internal teams. But recently, we've launched two new products. We're actually supporting more external use cases and more customer facing use cases as well as automating CRON jobs, ETL jobs alerting with the new retail workflows product. So we're expanding the scope of operations software from web applications to also internal operations like CRON jobs and ETL jobs. >> Explain that. Explain the scourge of CRON jobs to the audience. >> Yeah, so operations software businesses run on operations software. It's interesting, zooming out, it's actually something you said earlier as well. Every company has become a software company. So when you think about software, you tend to think about here. Very cool software that people are selling. And software that you use as a consumer. But Coca-Cola for example, has hundreds of software engineers that are building tools to make the business run for forecasting, for demand gen, for their warehouse distribution and monitoring inventory. And there's two types of that. There's the applications that they build and then the operations that have to run behind that. Maybe a workflow that is detecting how many bottles of Coca-Cola are in every warehouse and sending a notification to the right person when they're out or when they, a refill is very strong, but you know when you need a refill. So it does that, it takes those tasks, those jobs that run in the background and enables you to customize them and build them very rapidly in a code first way. >> So some of the notes that you guys provided say that there's over 500 million software apps that are going to be built in the next few years alone. That's tremendous. How much of that is operation software? >> I mean I think at least a third of that, if not more. To the point where every company is being forced to maximize their resources today and operational efficiency is the way to do that. And so it can become a competitive advantage when you can take the things that humans are doing in spreadsheets with 19 open tabs and automate that. That saves hours a day. That's a significant, significant driver of efficiency and productivity for a business >> It does, and there's direct correlation to the customer experience. The use experience. >> Almost certainly. When you think about building support tooling, I was web chat, chatting on the with Gogo wifi support on my flight over here and they asked for my order number and I sent it and they looked up my account and that's a custom piece of software they were using to look up the account, create a new account for me, and restore my second wifi purchase. And so when you think about it, you're actually, even just as a consumer, interacting with this custom software on the day time. And that's because that's what companies use to have a good customer experience and have an efficient business. >> And what's the relationship with AWS? You guys started, I think you said 2017, so you obviously started in the cloud, but I'm particularly interested in from a seller perspective, what that's like. Working with Amazon, how's that affected your business? >> Yeah, I mean so we're built on AWS, so we're customers and big fans. And obviously like from a selling perspective, we have a ton of integrations with AWS so we're able to integrate directly into all the different AWS products that people are using for databases, for data warehouses, for deployment configurations, for monitoring, for security, for observability, we can basically fit into your existing AWS stack in order to make it as seamless integration with your software so that building in Retool is just as seamless as building it on your own, just much, much faster. >> So in your world, I know you wanted to but, in your world is it more analytics? is it more transactional, sort of? Is it both? >> It's all of the above. And I think what's, over Thanksgiving, I was asked a lot to explain what Retool did with people who were like, we just got our first iPhone. And so I tried to explain with an example because I have yet to stumble on the perfect metaphor. But the example I typically use is DoorDash is a customer of ours. And for about three years, and three years ago, they had a problem. They had no way of turning off delivery in certain zip codes during storms. Which as someone who has had orders canceled during a storm, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. And the way it worked is that they had operation team members manually submitting requests to engineers to say there's a storm in this zip code and an engineer would run a manual task. This didn't scale with Doordash as they were opening in new countries all over the world that have very different weather patterns. And so they looked, they had one, they were sort of confronted with a choice. They could buy a piece of software out of the box. There is not a startup that does this yet. They could build it by hand, which would mean scoping the requirements designing a UI, building authentication, building access controls, putting it into a, putting it into a sprint, assigning an engineer. This would've taken months and months. And then it would take just as long to iterate on it or they could use Retool. So they used Retool, they built this app, it saved, I think they were saying up to two years of engineering time for this one application because of how quickly it was. And since then they've built, I think 50 or 60 more automating away other tasks like that that were one out of spreadsheets or in Jira or in Slack notifications or an email saying, "Hey, could you please do this thing? There's a storm." And so now they use us for dozens and dozens of operations like that. >> A lot of automation and of course a lot of customer delight on the other end of the spectrum as you were talking about. It is frustrating when you don't get that order but it's also the company needs to be able to have the the tools in place to automate to be able to react quickly. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Because the consumers are, as we know, quite demanding. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned the tagline in the beginning, build custom internal tools fast. You just gave us a great example of DoorDash. Huge business outcomes they're achieving but how fast are we talking? How fast can the average developer build these internal tools? >> Well, we've been doing a fun thing at our booth where we ask people what a problem is and build a tool for them while we're there. So for something lightweight, you can build it in 10 minutes. For something a little more complex, it can take up to a few weeks depending on what the requirements are. But we all have people who will be on a call with us introducing them to our software for the first time and they'll start telling us about their problems and in the background we'll be building it and then at the end we're like, is this what you meant? And they're like, we'd like to add that to our cart. And obviously, it's a platform so you can't do that. But we've been able to build applications on a call before while people are telling us what they need. >> So fast is fast. >> I would say very fast, yeah. >> Now how do you price? >> Right now, we have a couple different plans. We actually have a motion where you can sign up on our website and get started. So we have a free plan, we've got plans for startups, and then we've got plans all the way up to the enterprise. >> Right. And that's a subscription pricing kind of thing? >> Subscription model, yes. >> So I get a subscription to the platform and then what? Is there also a consumption component? >> Exactly. So there's a consumption component as well. So there's access to the platform and then you can build as many applications as you need. Or build as many workflows. >> When you're having customer conversations with prospects, what do you define as Retool's superpowers? You're the sales leader. What are some of those key superpowers that you think really differentiate Retool? >> I do think, well, the sales team first and foremost, but that's not a fair answer. I would say that people are a bit differentiator though. We have a lot of very talented people who are have a ton of domain expertise and care a ton about the customer outcomes, which I do actually think is a little more rare than it should be. But we're one of the only products out there that's built with a developer first mindset, a varied code first mindset, built to integrate with your software development life cycle but also built with the security and robustness that enterprise companies require. So it's able to take an enterprise grade software with a developer first approach while still having a ton of agility and nimbleness which is what people are really craving as the earth keeps moving around them. So I would say that's something that really sets us apart from the field. >> And then talk about some of the what developers are saying, some of the feedback, some of the responses, and maybe even, I know we're just on day one of the show, but any feedback from the booth so far? >> We've had a few people swing by our booth and show us their Retool apps, which is incredibly cool. That's my absolute favorite thing is encountering a Retool application in the wild which happens a lot more than I would've thought, which I shouldn't say, but is incredibly rewarding. But people love it. It's the reason I joined is I'd never heard someone have a product that customers talked about the way they talk about Retool because Retool enables them to do things. For some folks who use it, it enables them to do something they previously couldn't do. So it gives them super powers in their job and to triple their impact. And then for others, it just makes things so fast. And it's a very delightful experience. It's very much built by developers, for developers. And so it's built with a developer's first mindset. And so I think it's quite fun to build in Retool. Even I can build and Retool, though not well. And then it's extremely impactful and people are able to really impact their business and delight their coworkers which I think can be really meaningful. >> Absolutely. Delighting the coworkers directly relates to delighting the customers. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Those customer experience, employee experience, they're like this. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> They go hand in hand and the employee experience has to be outstanding to be able to delight those customers, to reduce churn, to increase revenue- >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> And for brand reputation. >> And it also, I think there is something as someone who is customer facing, when my coworkers and developers I work with build tools that enable me to do my job better and feel better about my own performance and my ability to impact the customer experience, it's just this incredibly virtuous cycle. >> So Retool.com is where folks can go to learn more and also try that subscription that you said was free for up to five users. >> Yes, exactly. >> All right. I guess my last question, well couple questions for you. What are some of the things that excited you that you heard from Adam Selipsky this morning? Anything from the keynote that stood out in terms of- >> Dave: Did you listen to the keynote? >> I did not. I had customer calls this morning. >> Okay, so they're bringing- >> East coast time, east coast time. >> One of the things that will excite you I think is they're connecting, making it easier to connect their databases. >> Eleanor: That would very much exciting. >> Aurora and Redshift, right? Okay. And they're making it easier to share data. I dunno if it goes across regions, but they're doing better integration. >> Amazing. >> Right? And you guys are integrating with those tools, right? Those data platforms. So that to me was a big thing for you guys. >> It is also and what a big thing Retool does is you can build a UI layer for your application on top of every single data source. And you hear, it's funny, you hear people talk about the 360 degree review of the customer so much. This is another, it's not our primary value proposition, but it is certainly another way to get there is if you have data from their desk tickets from in Redshift, you have data from Stripe, from their payments, you have data from Twilio from their text messages, you have data from DataDog where they're having your observability where you can notice analytics issues. You can actually just use Retool to build an app that sits on top of that so that you can give your support team, your sales team, your account management team, customer service team, all of the data that they need on their customers. And then you can build workflows so that you can do automated customer engagement reports. I did a Slack every week that shows what our top customers are doing with the product and that's built using all of our automation software as well. >> The integration is so important, as you just articulated, because every, you know, we say every company's a software company these days. Every company's a data company. But also, the data democratization that needs to happen to be able for lines of business so that data moves out of certain locked in functions and enables lines of business to use it. To get that visibility that you were just talking about is really going to be a competitive advantage for those that survive and thrive and grow in this market. >> It's able to, I think it's first it's visibility, but then it's action. And I think that's what Retool does very uniquely as well is it can take and unite the data from all the places, takes it out of the black box, puts it in front of the teams, and then enables them to act on it safely and securely. So not only can you see who might be fraudulent, you can flag them as fraud. Not only can you see who's actually in danger, you can click a button and send them an email and set up a meeting. You can set up an approval workflow to bring in an exec for engagement. You can update a password for someone in one place where you can see that they're having issues and not have to go somewhere else to update the password. So I think that's the key is that Retool can unlock the data visibility and then the action that you need to serve your customers. >> That's a great point. It's all about the actions, the insights that those actions can be acted upon. Last question for you. If you had a billboard that you could put any message that you want on Retool, what would it say? What's the big aha? This is why Retool is so great. >> I mean, I think the big thing about Retool is it's changing the economics of software development. It takes something that previously would've been below the line and that wouldn't get prioritized because it wasn't customer facing and makes it possible. And so I would say one of two billboards if I could be a little bit greedy, one would be Retool changed the economics of software development and one would be build operations software at the speed of thought. >> I love that. You're granted two billboards. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Those are both outstanding. Eleanor, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for talking to us about Retool. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Operations software and the massive impact that automating it can make for developers, businesses alike, all the way to the top line. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live, emerging, and enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE here live in Detroit for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our seventh consecutive KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Since inception, theCube's been there every year. And of course, theCUBE continues to grow. So does the community as well as our host roster. I'm here with my co-host, Lisa Martin. Lisa, great to see you. And our new theCube host, Savannah Peterson. Savannah, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Welcome. >> Welcome to the team. >> Thanks, team. It's so wonderful to be here. I met you all last KubeCon and to be sitting on this stage in your company is honestly an honor. >> Well, great to have you. Lisa and I have done a lot of shows together and it's great to have more cadence around. You know, more fluid around the content, and also the people. And I would like you to take a minute to tell people your background. You know the community here. What's the roots? You know the Cloud Native world pretty well. >> I know it as well as someone my age can. As we know, the tools and the tech is always changing. So hello, everyone. I'm Savannah Peterson. You can find me on the internet @SavIsSavvy. Would love to hear from you during the show. Big fan of this space and very passionate about DevOps. I've been working in the Silicon Valley and the Silicon Alley for a long time, helping companies scale internationally as a community builder as well as a international public speaker. And honestly, this is just such a fun evolution for my career and I'm grateful to be here with you both. >> We're looking forward to having you on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Lisa? >> Yes. >> KubeCon. Amazing again this year. Just keeps growing bigger and bigger. >> Yes. >> Keynote review, you were in there. >> Yup. >> I had a chance to peek in a little bit, but you were there and got most of the news. What was the action? >> You know, the action was really a big focus around the maintainers, what they're doing, giving them the props and the kudos and the support that they deserve. Not just physically, but mentally as well. That was a really big focus. It was also a big focus on mentoring and really encouraging more people- >> Love that. >> I did, too. I thought that was fantastic to get involved to help others. And then they showed some folks that had great experiences, really kind of growing up within the community. Probably half of the keynote focus this morning was on that. And then looking at some of the other projects that have graduated from CNCF, some of these successful projects, what they're doing, what folks are doing. Cruise, one of the ones that was featured. You've probably seen their driverless cars around San Francisco. So it was great to see that, the successes that they've had and where that's going. >> Yeah. Lisa, we've done how many shows? Hundreds of shows together. When you see a show like this grow and continue to mature, what's your observation? You've seen many shows we've hosted together. What jumps out this year? Is it just that level of maturization? What's your take on this? >> The maturization of the community and the collaboration of the community. I think those two things jumped out at me even more than last year. Last year, obviously a little bit smaller event in North America. It was Los Angeles. This year you got a much stronger sense of the community, the support that they have for each other. There were a lot of standing ovations particularly when the community came out and talked about what they were doing in Ukraine to support fellow community members in Ukraine and also to support other Ukrainians in terms of getting in to tech. Lot of standing ovations. Lot of- >> Savannah: Love that, yeah. >> Real authenticity around the community. >> Yeah, Savannah, we talked on our intro prior to the event about how inclusive this community is. They are really all in on inclusivity. And the Ukraine highlight, this community is together and they're open. They're open to everybody. >> Absolutely. >> And they're also focused on growing the educational knowledge. >> Yeah, I think there's a real celebration of curiosity within this community that we don't find in certain other sectors. And we saw it at dinner last night. I mean, I was struck just like you Lisa walking in today. The energy in that room is palpably different from last year. I saw on Twitter this morning, people are very excited. Many people, their first KubeCon. And I'm sure we're going to be feeding off of that, that kind of energy and that... Just a general enthusiasm and excitement to be here in Detroit all week. It's a treat. >> Yeah, I even saw Stu Miniman earlier, former theCube host. He's at Red Hat. We were talking on the way in and he made an observation I thought was interesting I'll bring up because this show, it's a lot "What is this show? What isn't this show?" And I think this show is about developers. What it isn't is not a business show. It's not about business. It's not about industry kind of posturing or marketing. All the heavy hitters on the dev side are here and you don't see the big execs. I mean, you got the CEOs of startups here but not the CEOs of the big public companies. We see the doers. So, I mean, I think my take is this show's about creating products for builders and creating products that people can consume. And I think that is the Cloud Native lanes that are starting to form. You're either creating something for builders to build stuff with or you're creating stuff that could be consumed. And that seems for applications. So the whole app side and services seem to be huge. >> They also did a great job this morning of showcasing some of the big companies that we all know and love. Spotify. Obviously, I don't think a day goes by where I don't turn on Spotify. And what it's done- >> Me neither. >> What it's done for the community... Same with Intuit, I'm a user of both. Intuit was given an End User Award this morning during the keynote for their contributions, what they're doing. But it was nice to see some just everyday companies, Cloud Native companies that we all know and love, and to understand their contributions to the community and how those contributions are affecting all of us as end users. >> Yeah, and I think those companies like Intuit... Argo's been popular, Arlo now new, seeing those services, and even enterprises are contributing. You know, Lyft is always here, popular with Envoy. The community isn't just vendors and that's the interesting thing. >> I think that's why it works. To me, this event is really about the celebration of developer relations. I mean, every DevRel from every single one of these companies is here. Like you said, in lieu of the executive, that's essentially who we're attracting. And if you look out over the show floor here, I mean, we've probably got, I don't know, three to four extra vendors that we had last year. It totally is a different tone. This community doesn't like to be sold to. This community likes to be collaborative. They like to learn and they like to help. And I think we see that within the ecosystem inside the room today. >> It's not a top down sales pitch. It's really consensus. >> No. >> Do it out in the open transparency. Don't sell me stuff. And I think the other thing I like about this community is that we're starting to see that... And then we've said this in theCube before. We'll say it again. Maybe be more controversial. Digital transformation is about the developer, right? And I think the power is going to shift in every company to the developer because if you take digital transformation to completion, everything happens the way it's happening, the company is the application. It's not IT who serves the organization- >> I love thinking about it like that. That's a great point, John. >> The old phase was IT was a department that served the business. Well, the business is IT now. So that means developer community is going to grow like crazy and they're going to be in the front lines driving all the change. In my opinion, you going to see this developer community grow like crazy and then the business side on industry will match up with that. I think that's what's going to happen. >> So, the developers are becoming the influencers? >> Developers are the power source for all companies. They're in charge. They're going to dictate terms to how businesses will run because that's going to be natural 'cause digital transformation's about the app and the business is the app. So that mean it has to be coded. So I think you're going to see a lot of innovation around app server-like experiences where the the apps are just being developed faster than the infrastructures enabling that completely invisible. And I think you're going to see this kind of architecture-less, I'll put it out there that term architecture-less, environment where you don't need an architecture. It's just you code away. >> Yeah, yeah. We saw GitHub's mentioned in the keynote this morning. And I mean, low code, no code. I think your fingers right on the pulse there. >> Yeah. What did you guys see? Anything else you see? >> I think just the overall... To your point, Savannah, the energy. Definitely higher than last year. When I saw those standing ovations, people really come in together around the sense of community and what they've accomplished especially in the last two plus years of being remote. They did a great job of involving a lot of folks, some of whom are going to be on the program with us this week that did remote parts of the keynote. One of our guests on today from Vitess was talking about the successes and the graduation of their program so that the sense of community, but also not just the sense of it, the actual demonstration of it was also quite palpable this morning, and I think that's something that I'm excited for us to hear about with our guests on the program this week. >> Yeah, and I think the big story coming out so far as the show starts is the developers are in charge. They're going to set the pace for all the ops, data ops, security ops, all operations. And then the co-located events that were held Monday and Tuesday prior to kickoff today. You saw WebAssembly's come out of the woodwork as it got a lot of attention. Two startups got funded heavily on Series A. You're starting to see that project really work well. That's going to be an additional to the container market. So, interesting to see how Docker reacts to that. Red Hat's doing great. ServiceMeshCon was phenomenal. I saw Solo.iOS got massive traction with those guys. So like Service Mesh, WebAssembly, you can start to see the dots connecting. You're starting to see this layer below Kubernetes and then a layer above Kubernetes developing. So I think it's going to be great for applications and great for the infrastructure. I think we'll see how it comes out and all these companies we have on here are all about faster, more integrated, some very, very interesting to see. So far, so good. >> You guys talked about in your highlight session last week or so. Excited to hear about the end users, the customer stories. That's what I'm interested in understanding as well. It's why it resonates with me when I see brands that I recognize. Well, I use it every day. How are they using containers and Kubernetes? How are they actually not just using it to deploy their app, their technologies, that we all expect are going to be up 24/7, but how are they also contributing to the development of it? So I'm really excited to hear those end users. >> We're going to have Lockheed Martin. And we wrote a story on SiliconANGLE, the Red Hat, Lockheed Martin, real innovation on the edge. You're starting to see educate with the edge. It's really the industrial edge coming to be big. It'd be very interesting to see. >> Absolutely, we got Ford Motor Company coming on as well. I always loved stories, Savannah, that are history of companies. Ford's been around since 1903. How is a company that- >> Well, we're in the home of Ford- as well here. >> We are. How they evolved digitally? What are they doing to enable the developers to be those influencers that John says? It's going to be them. >> They're a great example of a company that's always been on the forefront, too. I mean, they had a head of VRs 25 years ago when most people didn't even know what VR was going to stand for. So, I can't wait for that one. You tease the Docker interview coming up very well, John. I'm excited for that one. One last thing I want to bring up that I think is really refreshing and it's reflected right here on this stage is you talked about the inclusion. I think there's a real commitment to diversity here. You can see the diversity stats on CNCF's website. It's right there on KubeCon. At the bottom, there's a link in every email I've gotten highlighting that. We've got two women on this stage all week which is very exciting. And the opening keynote was a woman. So quite frankly, I am happy as a female in this industry to see a bit more representation. And I do appreciate just on the note of being inclusive, it's not just about gender or age, it's also about the way that CNCF thinks about your experience since we're in this kind of pandemic transitional period. They've got little pins. Last year, we had bracelets depending on your level of comfort. Equivocally like a stoplight which is... I just think it's really nice and sensitive and that attention to detail makes people feel comfortable. Which is why we have the community energy that we have. >> Yeah, and being 12 years in the business... With theCUBE, we've been 12 years in the business, seven years with KubeCon and Cloud Native, I really appreciate the Linux Foundation including me as I get older. (Lisa and Savannah laugh) >> Savannah: That's a good point. >> Ageism were, "Hey!" Thank you. >> There was a lot of representation. You talked about females and so often we go to shows and there's very few females. Some companies are excellent at it. But from an optics perspective, to me it stands out. There was great representation across. There was disabled people on stage, people of color, women, men of all ages. It was very well-orchestrated. >> On the demographic- >> And sincere. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And the demographics, too. On the age side, it's lower too. You're starting to see younger... I mean, high school, college representation. I saw a lot of college students last night. I saw on the agenda sessions targeting universities. I mean, I'm telling you this is reaching down. Open source now is so great. It's growing so fast. It's continuing to thunder away. And with success, it's just getting better and better. In fact, we were talking last night about at some point we might not have to write code. Just glue it together. And that's why I think the supply chain and security thing is an issue. But this is why it's so great. Anyone can code and I think there's a lot of learning to have. So, I think we'll continue to do our job to extract the signal from the noise. So, thanks for the kickoff. Good commentary. Thank you. All right. >> Of course. >> Let's get started. Day one of three days of live coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin, and Savannah Peterson. Be back with more coverage starting right now. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Good morning, everyone from Chicago Live. The Cube is live at Ansible Fast 2022. Lisa Martin and John Ferer are here for two days of multiple coverage on the cube. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event. John, since 2019. Yeah, great to be perfect. One of the nuggets dropped this morning and I know you was Opss code. >>Yeah, we're gonna hear about that OPSIS code here in this segment. We're gonna get in, but the leader of the, the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat. So look forward >>To this. Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni. Welcome back to the program. Thank you. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and an engaged audience and then robust community? >>It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever gonna come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic. So it's fa I just couldn't be happier. >>So opsis code nugget drop this morning. Yep. We wanna dissect that with you as, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning. As Ansible is pushing into the cloud and and into the edge, what does OPSIS code mean for end users and how is it gonna help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynote level up their automation? >>Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure. There's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing. The complexity is only increasing this idea of a couple years ago where we're gonna do shift everything left onto the developer. It's nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day two basis. So we see this opportunity as opsis code, just like we did infrastructures code, just like we did configuration as code. We see the next frontier as operations code. >>Yeah, and this is really a big trend as you know with cube reporting a lot on the cloud native velocity of the modern application developer these days, they're under, they're, it's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going faster. They want self-service, they want it built in secure, They need guardrails, they need, they need faster ops. So that seems to be the pressure point. Is ops as code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, Yeah, there's complexity. So you know, the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around ops. How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities? These are big. How does, how does ops code fit into that? >>Yeah, so look, we, we see Ansible as this common automation back plane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're a GCP or whether you're AWS or whether you're, you know, a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor with a plc, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage or database or cloud or edge. They can just do their >>Job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Keynote, and it comes across every time I, we have an event and in person it's more amplified. Cause you see it, the loyalty of the customer base. You have great community. It's very not corporate like here. It's very no big flashy news. But there's some news, hard news, It's very community driven. Check the box there. So continuing on the roots, I wanna get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned multicloud looks good on paper, which every CX I wanna be multiple clouds. I want choice now. Now you talk to the people running things like, whoa, hold on, boss. Yeah, the bottoms up is big part of the selection process of how people select and buying consume technology with open source, you don't need to like do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. Yeah. This is gonna be a big part of how the future of buying product is and implementing it. So I think it's gonna be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native with O in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? >>So here, here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day to day job. It's how it helped, makes 'em successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one pro or their number one problem is attracting you talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top down, you know, old fashioned systems management. You're gonna use this tool whether you like it or not. But that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up addressing the top down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement. And that's what we focus on here at this event. Are the practitioners, >>Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap, retention, attraction talent? Would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? >>Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are, you know, maybe not sea level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attract, you know, pretty much everywhere I go, I was in Europe this summer, conversation was always the same. We got two problems. Tracking people. We can't find people, people we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And, and then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation, you know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. >>It's interesting, the people who are gonna be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are gonna have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when it was, you know, they run everything. They power the business now the business is digital. You gotta be hybrid. So we see hybrids a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's gonna be continually be hybrid and that's gonna extend out on the edge. What is the ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's, what's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? >>There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge, industrial edge, you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are gonna expand out into ot. But some of the requirements of ot of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that. And it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment as network and those number of endpoints that need to be managed. Ansible is, you know, >>It's way use case for Ansible because Ansible built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it. Manual versus automation. Hey, automation every time. Yes. This is at large scale. I mean the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean go even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here, where we are today. Scope the size of the scale that's happening here. >>You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers it's in. It's, it's, you know what we would've never thought, you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage when you start talking about network devices. Yeah, yeah. Home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world, >>The world's spun in your front, your front door right now. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think of about the proliferation of, of devices online, especially the last two years, when, to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the, the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently and so many times to be successful? >>Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility to, you can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask. And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users, to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. >>What are some of the, there were some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry that you think really shows the value and, and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would think that, you know, if you wound the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about was per provisioning, provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure, vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database into cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine I not, I've not been on one, but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushing on things. And they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real. You know, the actual businesses, >>The common set of services, this is, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud. Yeah. You start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I gotta make it work. I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together. I have containers and orchestration behind it and kind of seeing the same kind of pattern. Yeah. Evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm an open source. I love the open source. I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there. You got trusted signatures. That's a supply chain. We've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the, the, the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? >>Yeah, we're gonna talk about a couple of things smaller around event driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands free automation and, and, and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of, of automation, an event will take place. I've detected an outta space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book. That rule book will kick off in automation close that remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that. So that's kind of one big area. And we're gonna talk tomorrow. We've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM research that I'm gonna, >>We'll have you on 10 30 Martha Calendars. >>But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside, experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. >>Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skill gap, tying that together is you seeing heard in the keynote today around Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case answer. I mean it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie, expand your scope grow, you got a lot of openings. People are hire now, Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing, it's, it's a complete, Explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah. >>So when you start to connect what I call the technology domains, so the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on aws. And the security ops team use it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, Okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay, so it's not just the language, it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's gotta be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can, you can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right >>Now. Automation gone wild, it sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I >>May, I may regret saying that. >>Sounds >>Like great. Especially on live tv. Great, >>Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild episode one. Here we are >>Talk about Ansible as is really being the, the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay. You, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's, it's positioned to really be the catalyst that's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people wanna get to. >>Yeah. I mean for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? So we talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible, where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales, is sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation saying, Look, it's not gonna take my job, it's gonna help me do my job better. >>Exactly. That automation argument always went, went to me crazy. Oh yeah, automating is gonna take my job away. You know, bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before. More atm. So the, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts. Yeah. This is kind of where the, where the automation helps. What's real quick, final minute we have left. Where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Yeah. Where do you see the value job? Cause it's still tons of openings for people's skills, >>You know? So we see the shift from, particularly in operations from, here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the air and I go, configuration change that. That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day, but the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, you know, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. >>Yeah. Architects too, they turned into architects that turned into the multiple jobs scope. It's like multi-tool player. It's like >>A, you know, Yeah, yeah. The five tool player, >>Five tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But, but kind of that's what's >>Happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge. Yeah. And the talent challenge that organizations have as well. >>And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I have to get the end of the day. That's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of Tom. All right, excellent. Look forward to it. Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years and we look forward to talking to you >>Tomorrow. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around. John and I welcome back another Cube alumni next.

(soft music) >> Welcome back everyone, is Supercloud 22 live in the Palo Alto office. Our stage performance we're streaming virtually it's our pilot event, our inaugural event, Supercloud 22. I'm John fury, with my coach Dave Vellante. Got a featured Keynote conversation with Kit Colbert. Who's the CTO of VMware, got to delay it all out. Break it down, Kit, great to see you. Thanks for joining us for Supercloud 22 our inaugural event. >> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So we had great distinguished panels coming up through. We heard Victoria earlier to the Keynote. There's a shift happening. The shift has happened that's called cloud. You just published a white paper that kind of brings out these new challenges around the complexity of how companies want to run their business. >> Yep. >> It's not born in the cloud, it's cloud everywhere. Seems to be the theme. What's your take on Supercloud? what's the roadmap for multicloud? >> Yeah, well, the reason that we got interested in this was just talking to our customers and the reality is everybody is using multiple clouds today, multiple public clouds, they got things on-prem, they got stuff at the edge. And so their applications are essentially distributed everywhere. And the challenges they start running into there is that there's just a lot of heterogeneity there. There's like different APIs, different capabilities, inconsistencies, incompatibility, in terms of workload, placement, data, migration, security, as we just heard about, et cetera. And so I think everyone's struggling with trying to figure out how do I drive consistency across all that diversity and what sort of consistency do I want? And one of the things that became really interesting in our conversations with customers is that there is no one size fits all that different folks are in different places. And the types of consistency that they want to prioritize will be different based on their individual business requirements. And so this started forming a picture for us saying, okay, what we need are a set of capabilities of multi-cloud cross cloud services that deliver that consistency across all the different environments where applications may be running. And that is what formed the early thinking and sort of the paper that we wrote on it, as well as some of the work and that I think eventually leads to this vision of Supercloud, right? 'Cause I think you guys have the right idea, which is, hey, how does all this stuff come together? And what does that bigger picture look like? And so I think between the sort of the native services that are there individually for each cloud that offer great value by the way, and people definitely should be taking advantage of in addition to another set of services, which are multi-cloud that go across clouds and provide that consistency, looking at that together. That's my picture where super cloud is. >> So the paper's called, the era of multi-cloud services arrive, VMware executive outlook for IT, leaders and decision makers, I'm sure you can get on your website. >> Yep. >> And in there, you talked about, well, first of all, I think you would agree that multicloud has fundamentally been a symptom of multi-vendor or M&A, I mean, you talked about that in the paper, right? >> Yeah. >> It was never really a strategy. It was just like, hey, we woke up in the 2020s and here we are with multiple clouds, right? >> Yeah, it was one of those situations where most folks that we talked to didn't plan to be multi-cloud now that's changed a little bit in the past year or two. >> Sure. >> But certainly in the earlier days of cloud, people would go all in saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on one, one of the major hyperscalers and go for it there. And that's great and offers a lot of advantages, right? There is internal consistency there. There's usually pretty good integration between their services so on and so forth. The problem though that you start facing is that to your point, acquisitions, you acquire companies using a different cloud. Okay, now I got two different clouds or sometimes you have the phenomenon of shadow IT, still happening where some random line of business is going to go off and use a different cloud for whatever reason. The other thing that we've seen is that over time that you may have standardized on one, but then over time technology changes, another cloud makes major advancements in the state of the art, or let's say in machine learning and you say, hey, I want to go to this other cloud for that. So what we start to see is that people now are choosing public clouds based on best of breed service capabilities, and that they're going to make those decisions that fairly fine grained manner, right? Sometimes down to the team, the line of business, et cetera. And so this is where customers and companies find themselves. Now it's like, oh boy, now have all these clouds. And what's happened is that they kind of dealt with it in an ad hoc manner. They would spin up individual operations teams, security teams, et cetera, that specialized in each of the clouds. They had knowledge about how to do that. But now people found that, okay, I'm duplicating all this. There's not really consistency in my approach here. Is there a better way? And I think this is, again, the advent of a lot of the thinking of multi-cloud services and Supercloud. >> And I think one of the things too, in listening to you talk is that the old model used to be, solve complexity with more complexity. Okay, and customers don't want that from what we're observing. And what you're saying is they've seen the benefits of DevOps, DevSecOps. So they know the value. >> Yep. >> 'Cause they've been on, say one native cloud. Now they say, okay, I'm on premise and we heard from Victoria said, there's a lot of private cloud going on, but essentially makes that another cloud, out by default as well. So hybrid is multicloud. >> Hybrid is a subset, yeah. Hybrid is like, we kind of had this evolution of thinking, right? Where you kind of had all the sort of different locations. And then I think hybrid was attempt to say, okay, let's try to connect one location or a set of locations on premises with a public cloud and have some level of consistency there. But really what we look at here with multicloud or Supercloud is that that's really a generalization of that. And we're not talking about one or two locations on prem in one cloud. We're talking about everything now. And moreover, I think hybrid cloud tended to focus a lot on sort of core infrastructure and management. This looks across the board, we're talking about security, we're talking about application development, talking about end user experience. Things like Zero Trust. We're talking about infrastructure, data. So it goes much, much broader, I think than when we talked about hybrid cloud a few years ago. >> So in your paper you've essentially, Kit, laid out an early framework. >> Yep. >> Let's call it for what we call Supercloud, what you call cross cloud services. So what do you see as the technical enablers that are, the salient aspects of again multi-cloud or Supercloud? >> Yep. Well, so for me it comes down to, so, okay, taking a step back. So we have this problem, right? Where you have a lot of diversity across different clouds and customers are looking for some levels of consistency. But as I said, rarely do I see two customers that want exactly the same types of consistency. And so what we're trying to do is step back. And first of all, establish a taxonomy and by that I mean, one of the different types of consistency that you might want. And so there's things around infrastructure consistency, security consistency, software supply chain security is probably the top of mind one that I hear from customers. Application and application services of things like databases, messaging streaming services, AIML services, et cetera, and user capabilities and then of course, data as well. And so in the paper we say, okay, here's these kind of five areas of consistency. And that's the first piece, the second one then turns more to an architectural question of what exactly is a multi-cloud service. What does that mean for a cloud service to be multi-cloud and what are the properties there? So essentially we said, okay, we see three different types of those. There's one where that service could run on a single cloud, but could support multiple clouds. So think about for instance, a service that does cost analysis. Now it may have maybe executing on AWS let's say, but it could do cost analysis for Azure or Google or AWS or anybody, right? So that's the first type. The second type is a bit more advanced where now you're saying, I can actually instantiate that same service into multiple clouds. And we see that oftentimes with things like databases that have a lot of performance latency, et cetera, requirements, and that you can't be accessing that database remotely, that doesn't, from a different cloud, that's going to be too slow. You have it on the same cloud that you're in. And so again, you see various vendors out there, implementing that, where that database can be instantiated wherever you'd like. And then the third one would be going even further. And this is where we really get into some of the much more difficult use cases where customers want a workload to be on prem. And sometimes, especially for those that are very regulatory compliant, they may need even in an air gap or disconnected environment. So there, can you take that same service, but now run it without your operators, being able to manage it 24/7. So those are the three categories. So are a single cloud supporting, single cloud instance supporting multiple clouds, multi-cloud instance, multi-cloud instance disconnected. >> So you're abstracting you as the the R&D arm you're abstracting that complexity. How do you handle this problem where you've got one cloud maybe has a better service than the other clouds? Do you have to devolve to the lowest common denominator or? How do you mask that? >> Well, so that's a really good question and we've debated it and there's been a lot of thought on it. Our current point of view is that we really want to leave it, up to the company themselves to make that decision. Again, cause we see different use cases. So for instance, I talk to customers in the defense sector and they are like, hey, if a foreign adversary is attacking one of these public cloud that we're in, we got to be able to evacuate our applications from there, sometimes in minutes, right? In order to maintain our operational capabilities. And so there, there does need to be at least common denominator approach just because of that requirement. I see other folks, you look at the financial banking industries they're also regulated. I think for them, it's oftentimes 90 days to get out of the cloud, so they can do a little bit of re-architecture. You got times rolled the sleeves and change some things. So maybe it's not quite as strict. Whereas other companies say, you know what? I want to take advantage of these best of breed services native to the clouds. So we don't try to prescribe a certain approach there, but we say, you got to align it with what your business requirements are. >> How about the APIs layer? So one of the things we've said is that we felt like a super pass was a requirement of the Supercloud because it's a purpose built pass that helps you with that objective, whatever that is. And you say in the paper for developers each cloud provider has unique infrastructure interfaces and APIs that add work and slow the pace of their releases for operators. Each additional cloud increases the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization and cost management. So are you building a super pass? What's your philosophy? Victoria said, we want to have our cake, we want to eat at two and we want to lose weight. So how do you do that? >> Yeah, so I think it's, so first things first, what the paper is trying to present in the end is really sort of an architectural point of view on how to approach this, right? And then, yeah, we at VMware, we've got a lot of solutions, towards some of those things, but we also realize we can't do everything ourselves, right? The space is too large. So it's very much a partner strategy there. Now that being said, on things like on the past side, we are doing a lot for instance around Tanzu, which is our modern apps portfolio products. And the focus there really is to, yes, provide some of that consistency across different clouds, enabling customers to take advantage of either cross cloud paths type services or cloud native or native cloud services, I should say. And so we really give customers that choice. And I think that's for us where it's at, because again, we don't see it as a one size fits for all. >> So there's your cake at edit to too. So you're saying the developer experience can be identical across clouds. >> Yep. >> Unless the developers don't want it to be. >> Yeah, and maybe the team makes that decision. Look there's a lot of reasons why you may want to make that or may not. The reality is that these native cloud services do add a lot of value and oftentimes are very easy to consume, to get started with, to get going. And so trade off you got to think about, and I don't think there's a right answer. >> So Kit, I got to ask on you. You said you can't do it alone. >> Yeah. >> VMware, I know for a fact, you guys have been working on this for many, many years. >> Yep. >> (indistinct) remember, I interviewed him in 2016 when he did the deal with AWS with Andy Jassy that really moved the needle. Things got really great from there with VMware. So would you be open to a consortium to oversee cause you guys have a lot of investment in this as a company, but I also don't hear you trying to do the lock in thing. So yeah, would you guys be open to a consortium to kind of try to figure out what these buildings blocks look like? Or is it a bag of Legos what people want? >> Absolutely, and you know what we offer in the paper is really just a starting point. It's pretty simple, we're trying to define a few basic of the taxonomy and some outlines sketches if you will, of what that architectural picture might look like. But it's very much that like just a starting point, and this is not something we can do alone. This is something that we really need the entire industry to rally around. Cause again, I think what's important here are standards. >> Yeah. >> That there's got to be, this sort of decomposition of functionality, breakdown in the different, sort of logical layers of functionality. What do those APIs or interfaces look like? How do we ensure interoperability? Because we do want people to be able to get the best of breed, to be able to bring together different vendor solutions to enable that. >> And I was watching, it was had a Silicon a day just last week, talking about their advances in Silicon. What's you guys position on that because you're seeing the (indistinct) as players, almost getting more niche and more better at the hardware matters more, Silicon speed, latency GPUs, So that seems to me be an enabler opportunity for the ecosystem to innovate at the past and SAS relationship. Where do you guys see? Where are you guys strong and where do you need work to do on? If you had to say there was some white space at VMware like say, hey, we own this area. We we're solid here. Here's some white spaces that VMware could use some help with. >> Yeah, well I think the infrastructure space, you just mentioned is clearly one that we've been focused on for a long time. We're expanding into the modern app space, expanding into security. We've been strong and end user for a while. So a lot of the different multi-cloud capabilities we've actually been to your point developing for a while. And I think that's exactly, again, what went into this like what we started noticing was all of our different product teams were reacting to the same thing and we weren't necessarily talking about it together yet. >> Like what? >> Well, this whole challenge of multiple clouds of dealing with that heterogeneity of wanting choice and flexibility into where to place a workload or where to place a virtual desktop or whatever it might be. And so each of the teams was responding individually to that customer feedback. And so I think what we recognized was like, hey, let's up level this, and what's the bigger picture. And what's the sort of common architecture across all of it, right? So I think that's what the really interesting aspect here was is that this is very much driven by what we're hearing directly from customers. >> You kind of implied just recently that the paper was pretty straightforward, pretty basic, early days, but it's well thought out. And one of the things you talked about was the type of multi-cloud services. >> Yep. >> You had data plan and user services, security infrastructure, which is your wheelhouse and application services. >> Yep. >> And you sort of went to detail defining those where is management and all that. So these are the ones you're going after. What about management? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question we debated this for a long time. Does management actually get a separate sort of layer that we could add a six one perhaps, or is it sort of baked in to the different ones? And we kind of went with the ladder where it sort of baked in there's infrastructure management, there's modern app management, there's management and users. It's kind of management for each security obviously. So we see a lot of different management plans, control plans across each of those different layers. Now does there need to be a separate one that has its own layer? Arguably yes, I mean, I think there are good arguments for that, and this is exactly why we put this out there though, is to like get people to read it, people to give give us feedback. And going back to the consortium idea, let's come together as a group of practitioners across the industry to really figure out an industry viewpoint on this. >> So what are the trade offs there? So what would be the benefit of having that separate layer? I presume it's simpler to do it the way you've done it, but what would be the benefit of having a separate. >> Yeah, I think it was probably more about simplicity to start with, like you could imagine like 20 different layers. and maybe that's where it's going to go, but also I think it's how do you define the layer? And for us it was more around sort of some of these functional aspects as an infrastructure versus application level versus end user and management is more of a commonality across those. But again, I could see our arguments be made. >> Logical place to start. >> Yeah. >> The other thing you said in here multi-cloud application services can route request for a particular service such as a database and deploy the service on the correct individual cloud, using the most appropriate technology for the use case, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yep. >> That to me, sounds like a metadata problem. And so can you talk about how you you've approach that? You mentioned AWS RDS, great examples as your sequel on Oracle Database, et cetera, et cetera and multiple endpoint. How do you approach that? >> Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of different approaches there. And so again, so the idea is that, and I know there's been reference to sort of like the operating system for Supercloud. What does that look like, right? But I think it totally, we don't actually use that term, but I do like the concept of an operating system. 'Cause a lot of things you just talk about there, these are things operating systems. Do you got to have a scheduler? And so you look across many different clouds and you got to figure out, okay, where do I actually want in this case, let's say a database instance to go and be provisioned. And then really it's up to, I think the vendor or in this case, the multi-cloud service creator to define how they want to want to do that. They could leverage the native cloud services or they could build their own technology. Which a lot of the vendors are doing. And so the point though, is that really you get this night from a end user standpoint, it goes back to your complexity, simplicity question, you get the simplicity of a single API that the implementation you don't really need to deal with. 'Cause you're like, I'm getting a service and I need the database and has certain properties and I want it here versus there versus wherever. But it's up to that multi-cloud service to figure out a lot of those implementation specifics. >> So are you the Supercloud OS? >> I think it is VMware's goal to become the Supercloud OS for sure. But like any good operating system, as we said, like it's all about applications, right? So you have a platform point of view, but you got to partner widely. >> And you got to get the hardware relationship. >> Yes. >> The Silicon chips. >> Yep. >> Right. >> Yeah, and actually that was a good point. I want to go back to that one. 'Cause you mentioned that earlier, the innovation that we're seeing, things like arm processors and like graviton and a lot of these things happening. And so I think that's another really interesting area where you're seeing tremendous innovation there in the public cloud. One of the challenges though for public cloud is actually at scale and that it takes longer to release newer hardware at that scale. So in some cases, if you want bleeding edge stuff, you can't go with public cloud 'cause it's just not there yet, right? So that's again, another interesting thing where you... >> Well, some will say that they launch 5,000 new services, every year at AWS. >> No, but I'm talking, >> They have some bleeding edge stuff. >> Well, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, let me clarify, let me clarify. I'm not talking about the software, I'm talking about the hardware side. >> Okay, got it, okay. >> Like the Silicon? >> Yeah, like the latest and greatest GPU, FBGA. >> Why can't they? >> 'Cause cause they do like tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. >> Oh just because it's just so many. >> It's a scale. Yeah, that's the point, right? >> Right. >> And it's fundamental to the model in terms of how big they are. And so that's why we do see some customers who need, who have very specialized hardware requirements, need to do it in the private cloud, right on prem or possibly a colo. >> Or edge. >> Or edge. >> Edge is a great example of... >> But we often see, again, people like the latest bleeding edge GPUs, whatever they are, even something a bit more experimental that they're going to go on on prem for that. >> Yeah. >> And so look, do not want to disparage the public cloud, please don't take that away. It's just an artifact when it gets to heart, like software they can scale and they do (indistinct). >> Well it's context of the OS conversation, OS has to right to hardware and enable applications. >> Where I was getting caught up in that is Kit, is they're all developing their own Silicon and they're developing it, most of it's arm based and they're developing at a much, much faster cycle. They can go from design to tape out much faster than Intel historically has. And you're seeing it. >> Intel just posted along. >> Yeah, I think if you look at the overall system, you're absolutely right. >> Yeah, but it's the deployment because of the scale 'cause at one availability zone and another and another region and that's. >> Well, yeah, but so counter point to what I just said would be, hey, like they have very well controlled environments, very well controled system. So they don't need to support a million different configuration settings or whatever they've got theirs that they use, right? So from a system standpoint and so forth. Yeah, I agree that there's a lot they can do there. I was speaking specifically, to different types of hardware accelerators being a bit of a (indistinct). >> If it's not in the 5,000 services that they offer, you can't get it, whereas on-prem you can say, I want that, here it is. >> I'm not saying that on-prem is necessarily fundamentally better in any way. I'm just saying for this particular area >> It's use case driven. >> It is use, and that's the whole point of all this, right? Like and I know a lot of people in their heads associate VMware with on-prem, but we are not dogmatic at all. And you know, as you guys know, but many people may not like we partner with all the public cloud hyperscalers. And so our point of view is very much, much more nuance saying, look, we're happy to run workloads wherever you want to. In fact, that's what we hear from customers. They want to run them everywhere, but it's about finding the right tool for the right job. And that's what really what this multi-cloud approach. >> Yeah, and I think the structural change of the virtualization hypervisor this new shift to V2 Supercloud, this something happening fundamentally that's use case driven, it's not about dogma, whatever. I mean, cloud's great. But native clouds have the pros and cons. >> And I would say that Supercloud, prerequisite for Supercloud has got to be running in a public cloud. But I'd say it also has to be inclusive of on-prem data. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And you're not going to just move all that data into prem, maybe in the fullness of time, but I don't personally believe that, but you look at what Goldman Sachs has done with AWS they've got their on-prem data and they're connecting to the AWS cloud. >> Yep. >> What Walmart's doing with Azure and that's going to happen in a lot of different industries. >> Yeah. >> Well I think security will drive that too. We had that conversation because no one wants to increase the surface area. Number one, they want complexity to be reduced and they want economic benefits. That's the super cloud kind of (indistinct). >> It's a security but it's also differentiatable advantage that you actually have on prem that you don't necessarily. >> Right, well, we're going to debate this now, Kit, thank you for coming on and giving that Keynote, we're going to have a panel to debate and discuss the blockers that enablers to Supercloud. And there are some enablers and potentially blockers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> So we'll get, into that, okay, up next, the panel to discuss, blockers and enablers are Supercloud after this quick break. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco, VMware Explorer 2022, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've been having some great conversations today. Lots of news coming out about VMware and its partner ecosystem. We're going to have another conversation about that next. Please welcome two guests to the program, Chance Bingen, technical marketing engineer at NetApp and Jason Massae, staff technical marketing architect, storage and vVols at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks. >> Glad to be here. >> It's nice to be back in person. >> It is. It's very nice. Oh my gosh. >> And we're hearing there about 7,000 to 10,000 people here, when I was in the Keynote, this morning it was definitely standing room only. >> Yeah, yeah. You've definitely seen the numbers ticked up at the last minute. It was good to see that. It's good, I think a lot of people have really wanted to get back, get that one on one that face to face. There's nothing like being able to, you know, talk to, the experts, talk to the vendors, you know, see your comrades. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we've seen people that I haven't seen for years, even on my own team, so really good to be back into it. >> It is and it was lots of news coming out this morning during the Keynote. My goodness. But Jason, talk to me, the NetApp and VMware folks had been in tight partnership for a long time. Talk to me about, get both of your perspective from a technical perspective about the depth of the partnership. >> Yeah, so actually NetApp was one of the original design partners for vVols. And with that, now with some of the stuff we're doing with more current stuff with virtual volumes is, NetApp is back and we've got some pretty neat stuff that we've been working on with vVols. And NetApp's got some pretty neat stuff that they've been working on to enable the customers with more features, more functionality with the virtual volume functionality. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Give us a quick primer on what is a vVol? What is a virtual volume? How does it fit into the, into this stack of stuff that we do in IT? >> Yeah. So the easiest way to kind of think of what a vVol is or a virtual volume is you can think of it kind of like an RDM, those row device map, which is kind of a four letter word. We don't really like those, but the idea is that object, that virtual volume is native on the array and presented directly to the VM. But now what we do is we're presenting all of the storage array features up to vSphere and we're managing those storage features via policy based management. But instead of applying storage capabilities at a data store level, we're now applying them at a VM or an application level. So you can have one data store and multiple VMs, and every VM can have a different storage capability managed by a policy that the VI admin gets to manage now. So he doesn't have to go to the storage admin to say, I need a new line, or I need a new volume. He can just go in and create a policy or change a policy. And now that storage capability is applied to the VM or the application. >> Yeah. One thing I'd like to add to that is you can mentioned the word capabilities. >> So we look at the actual data protocols, whether they're file based or block based, you know, I-scuzzy, fiber channel, whatever the case might be. Those protocols have defined sets of capabilities and attributes and things they can expose. What vVols along with the VASA protocol brings to the table is the ability to expose things that are just impossible to expose via the data protocols themselves. So that the, actual nature of the array, what kind of array is it? What's it capable of doing? What is the nature of, you know, encryption? You know, is this going to be a secure, encrypted data store? Is it going to be something else? It just allows you to do so much more with the advanced capabilities that modern storage arrays have than you could ever do if you were just using the data protocols by themselves. >> Right? Yeah. Kind of under that same context. If you think about before with traditional storage, the vSphere or the array really doesn't understand what's going on underlying storage, but with vVols the array and vSphere completely understand at a disc level even, how that VM should be treated. So that helps the storage admin. Storage admin can now go in and see a specific disc of a VM and see the performance on the array. They can go in the array and see, oh, this disc on this VM has got performance issues or needs to be encrypted, or here's the size of that disc. And you couldn't easily see that with your traditional storage. So there's really a lot of benefits and it frees up a lot of time for the storage administrator and enables the VI admin to be able to do a lot of the storage management. >> So there have been, there been a lot of movements over the last decade in the realm of software defined storage. Where essentially all of the things that you are talking about are completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. In this case, you're leveraging the horsepower, if you will and the intelligence of a storage array that has a lot of horsepower and intelligence, and you're accessing those features. You mentioned encryption, whether if you're doing a snapshot or something like that, what's interesting here is it kind of maps to what we're looking at now, which is the trend in the direction of things like DPUs. >> If you go back in history long enough, we had the, you know, the TOE, NIC, TCP offload, you know, the idea of, hey, you know what, what if we had a smart device with its own brain power and we leveraged it. Well, you guys have been doing that from a vVols all perspective with NetApp filers, for lack of better term. For how long now, when did, when were they originally? >> 6.0 it was so it's been what? 11, 12 years. Something like that. >> It's been a while. So yeah, but it's been a decade or so. >> Mm-hmm >> So what's on the frontier. What's the latest there in terms of, in terms of cool stuff that's coming out. >> So actually today, in one of the things that we worked with NetApp that was part of the design partnership was, you know, the NVMe over Fabric protocol has become very popular to extend that functionality of all flash to the, an external array. And now we announce today, in including with that NVMe over Fabrics, you can now do vVols with NVMe over Fabrics. And again, that was something that we worked with NetApp to be a design partner for them. >> That's right. We're very excited about it. We've always been, you know, NVMe been something we've been very proud of for a while. Delivering the first end to end NVMe stack from inside the host, through the fabric, to the array, with the arrays front ports, all the way to the disc on the backend. So we're very excited about that. >> So target market joint NetApp, VMware customers, I presume. >> Really it's, the key here that I like to make sure customers understand is to see that vVols are on the leading edge of VMware's storage design. Some tend to think that maybe vVols wasn't the primary focus, but actually now it is the primary focus. Now I always like to give the caveat that VMFS and NFS are not going away. Those are still very much stuff that we work on. It's just that most of the engineering focus is on virtual volumes or vVols. >> Yeah. Similarly, when you talk about and you're sort of alluding to vSAN when we start talking about VMFS and things like that. >> Yeah. >> Architecturally, we've been talking to folks about the recent announcements with capabilities within AWS. You know, NetApp in AWS for VMware environments. Breaking out of the stranglehold that the, oh, you want more storage, you must buy more CPU and memory, building block process entails. The reality is no matter what you do with vSAN, you're going to have certain constraints that go away when now you have the option to leverage storage from the NetApp filers. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how does, how do vVols play in the cloud strategy moving forward? >> Well, so one of the things that we do with, vVols currently is mostly On-prem. But when you have the storage architecture, that vVols gives you as far as individual objects, it makes it much easier to migrate up into the cloud because you're not trying to migrate individual VMs that are on another type of system, whatever it might be, those objects are already their own entity. Right, so cloud, Tanzu, those type of things, those vVol objects are already their own entity. So it makes it very easy to migrate them on and off prem. >> So Chance talk to us a little bit about this from NetApp's perspective. You're in customer conversations, who are you talking to? Is this primarily an engineering conversation? Has this gone up the stack in terms of customers are finding themselves in this default multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, so interestingly, when I talk to customers these days they are almost all either on a journey to a hybrid multi-cloud or they're in some kind of phase of transforming themselves into their own hyperscaler, right? They're be adopting a cloud service provider model and vVols is a perfect fit for that kind of model, because you have the ability to offer different tiers of service, different qualities of service with VM granular controls or VMDK granular controls, even. And even if you look at First Class Disc, right? Which is something that came out largely to support Tanzu, I think which fantastic use case for vVols as well there, but that gives you the ability to offer something like Amazon EBS, right? You can offer Amazon EBS in a native VMware stack using First Class Discs and vVols. And you're able to apply things like quality of service with that granular control that allows you to guarantee that customer the disc that they bought and paid for. They're going to get the IOPS that they're paying for because you're applying those QoS policies directly to that object on the array. And instead of having to worry about is the array going to be able to handle it? Are you going to have one VM that consumes all your IO, you know? You don't have to worry about that with vVols because you've got that integration with the array's native quality controls. >> And Chance what's in this for me as a customer? I'm hearing productivity, I'm hearing cost savings, control efficiency. Talk to me about the benefits in it for the folks that you're talking to. >> Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times it comes down to, you know I mentioned like the cloud service provider model, right? When you're looking to build a robust service catalog and you're able, you want to be able to meet all these like, we mentioned Tanzu, right? Containers as a service, you're able to provide the persistent volumes for your Kubernetes containers that are again, these native objects on the array and you have these fine grain controls, but it's handled at massive scale because it's all handled by storage policies, Kubernetes storage classes, which are natively mapped to VM storage policies through Tanzu. So it just, it gives you the ability to offer all of these services in a, again a rich and robust contents catalog. >> So what are you doing? So you mentioned a couple of things in terms of using array based quality of service. So give me an example of how you're avoiding issues of contention and over subscription in an environment where I'm an administrator and I've got this virtual volume that's servicing this VM or this app on this VM. What kind of visibility do I have down into the actual resources because look at the end of that chain there's a physical resource. And that physical resource represents, what? IOPS and bandwidth and latency and throughput and all of this bundle of things. So how do you avoid colliding with others who are trying to carve vVols out of this world? >> You mean like a noisy neighbor type of thing? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So that's actually one of the big benefits that you get with vVols is that because those vial objects are native on the array, they're not sharing a loan or a volume. They're not sharing a resource. The only resource they're actually sharing is the array itself. So you don't get that typical noisy neighbor where this one's using all the resources of that volume because really you're looking out at the all encompassing array. And so a storage administrator and the VI admin have a lot more insight. The VI admin can now go to the storage admin if there's say a debugging issue, they want to find a problem. The storage admin now can see those individual objects and say, oh, well this VM, it's not really this, it's not all the discs. It's just disc number two or disc number three or they can actually see at a single disc level on the array, the performance, the latency, you know, the QS, all that stuff. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And that really is what, it frees up at the storage admin's time because the debugging is so much more simple. And it also allows the storage admin a lot more insight. Right? They know those, what's the problem. If you were typically looking at a loaner volume, they don't really know what's going on inside that and neither does the array. But with vVols, the array knows what each disc and how it's supposed to be treated based on the policies that the customer defines. So if one VM is supposed to have a certain QS and another VM isn't. The array knows that that VM, if it goes above it, it's going to be like, nope, you can't have those resources. You weren't granted those resources, but this one was. So you have much more control. And again, it's at an application or a VM level. >> And it's still, it's fairly dynamically configurable. I spoke to a customer just the other day. They are a cloud service provider. And what they do is their customers are able to go in and change their quality of service. So they go into that service portal and they say, okay, I'm paying for gold and I want platinum and they'll go in. They know that they've got a certain time where they need more IO capacity. So they'll go in, they'll pay the fee, increase that capability. And then when they don't need it anymore, they'll downgrade again. >> Okay, so that assumes some ability at the array level to do some sort of resource sharing and balancing to be able to go out and get, say more IO. Because again, fundamentally, if you have a virtual volume, that's drawing its resources from five storage devices, whether those are SSD based or NVMe or spinning disc that represents a finite it amount of resource. The assumption is if you're saying that the array is the pool that you need to worry about, that assumes the array has the ability to go beyond here, based on a policy. >> So that's how it works. It does... >> Well, essentially. I mean, you can't outrun physics. So if the array can't go faster, but the idea is that you understand the performance profile of your array and then you create your service tiers appropriately. >> Okay. >> Yeah. And one of the big benefits is like Chance was saying, if you want to change a profile that used to be a Storage vMotion to a different data store. Now it's just a policy change. The storage admin doesn't have to do anything. The VI admin just changes the policy. And then the array understands, oh, I now need to treat that different. And that's exactly what Chance was talking about in that cloud provider situation, where today I'm using a 100,000 IOPS. I need to use 200,000 tomorrow for special, whatever it is, but I only need to use it for tomorrow. So they don't have to move anything. They just change the policy for that time. And then they change it back. They don't have to do anything on the array itself. They don't have to change anything physically on the VM. It's just a policy change. And that's really where you get that dynamic control of the storage capability. >> So as business dynamics are changing and I'm thinking of like black Friday or Prime day, being able to dial things up and dial it down, they have the ability to do that with a policy. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> So huge time savings there. >> Oh, it's huge. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And it simplifies because now, I don't have to have multiple data stores. You can have one data store, all your VMs in there. You can limit test and dev and you can maximize business critical applications. Again, all via policy. So you've simplified your infrastructure. You've gone to more of a programmatic approach of managing your storage capabilities. But you're now managing at the VM level. >> So we mentioned that the cloud chaos (indistinct) that was mentioned this morning during the Keynote and we're saying a lot of customers are still in this cloud chaos phase. They want to get to Cloud Smart. How is this going to be one of those tools that helps customers pull the levers, dial the knobs, to be able to get to eventually, Cloud Smart. >> I could go on for this for hours. (Lisa Laughs) (Chance chuckles) This is really what simplifies storage. Because typically when you use traditional storage, you're going to have to figure out that this data store has this capability or another example, as you mentioned was Tanzu. If you're managing persistent volumes and you're not using something like vVols, if you want to get a certain storage capability, you have to either tag it or you have to create that data store with that capability. All of that goes away when you use vVols. So now that chaos of multiple data stores, multiple lines or multiple volumes, all that stuff goes away. So now you're simplifying your infrastructure, you have a programmatic approach to managing your storage and you can use it for all of your different types of workloads. So cloud, Kubernetes, persistent volumes, all that type of stuff. And again, all being managed via a simple and again, programmatic approach. So you could automate this. You know today, like you said, black Friday. Okay, Black, Friday's coming up. I want to change the policy. You could automate that. So you don't even have to go in and physically make the change of the policy now. You just say on Fridays, change it to this policy on Sunday night, change it back. >> Yep. >> Again, that's not something you can do with traditional storage. >> Okay. >> And I think from a simplification standpoint as well, you know, I was telling you about that other customer a couple days ago, they were running into the inability to grow beyond the bounds of VMFS file systems for very, very large VMs. And so what I talked to them about was look, if you go to vVols, you're not bound by file systems anymore. You have the capacity of the array and you can have VM discs up to 62 terabytes, you know, as many as you want. And it doesn't matter what they fit in because we can fit them all. So it's, to be able to, and that's some of our largest customers, the reason they go with vVols is to be able to grow beyond the bounds of traditional storage, anything like path limits, you know. That's something you have to contend with. >> Path limits, line limits, all that stuff. Typically just disappears with vVols. >> All those limits go away. Guys- >> They go away. >> Amazing. Congratulations on the work that you guys have done. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE talking about the value in it for customers and obviously the technical depths of the NetApp, VMware relationship. Guys, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Our pleasure. For my 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. (upbeat music)

(gentle music intro) >> Okay, we're back. We're live here at theCUBE and at VMworld, VMware Explore, formally VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall coverage, we've got Vittorio Viarengo, the vice president of Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you, and thanks for coming on theCUBE right after your keynote. I can't get that off my tongue, VMworld. 12 years of CUBE coverage. This is the first year of VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. Raghu said in his keynote, he explained the VMworld community now with multi-clouds that you're in charge of at VMworld, VMware, is now the Explore brand's going to explore the multi-cloud, that's a big part of Raghu's vision and VMware. You're driving it and you are on the stage just now. What's, what's going on? >> Yeah, what I said at my keynote note is that our customers have been the explorer of IT, new IT frontier, always challenging the status quo. And we've been, our legendary engineering team, been behind the scenes, providing them with the tools of the technology to be successful in that journey to the private cloud. And Kelsey said it. What we built was the foundation for the cloud. And now it's time to start a new journey in the multi-cloud. >> Now, one of the things that we heard today clearly was: multi-cloud's a reality. Cloud chaos, Kit Colbert was talking about that and we've been saying, you know, people are chaotic. We believe that. Andy Grove once said, "Reign in the chaos. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos." That's the opportunity. The complexity of cross-cloud is being solved. You guys have a vision, take us through how you see that happening. A lot of people want to see this cross-cloud abstraction happen. What's the story from your standpoint, how you see that evolving? >> I think that IT history repeats itself, right? Every starts nice and neat. "Oh, I'm going to buy a bunch of HP servers and my life is going to be good, and oh, this store." >> Spin up an EC2. >> Yeah. Eventually everything goes like this in IT because every vendor do what they do, they innovate. And so that could create complexity. And in the cloud is the complexity on steroid because you have six major cloud, all the local clouds, the cloud pro- local cloud providers, and each of these cloud brings their own way of doing management security. And I think now it's time. Every customer that I talk to, they want more simplicity. You know, how do I go fast but be able to manage the complexity? So that's where cross-cloud services- Last year, we launched a vision, with a sprinkle of software behind it, of building a set of cloud-native services that allow our customers to build, run, manage, secure, and access any application consistently across any cloud. >> Yeah, so you're a year in now, it's not like, I mean, you know, when you come together in a physical event like this, it resonates more, you got the attention. When you're watching the virtual events, you get doing a lot of different things. So it's not like you just stumbled upon this last week. Okay, so what have you learned in the last year in terms of post that launch. >> What we learned is what we have been building for the last five years, right? Because we started, we saw multi-cloud happening before anybody else, I would argue. With our announcement with AWS five, six years ago, right? And then our first journey to multi-cloud was let's bring vSphere on all the clouds. And that's a great purpose to help our customers accelerate their journey of their "legacy" application. Their application actually deliver business to the cloud. But then around two, three years ago, I think Raghu realized that to add value, we needed- customers were already in the cloud, we needed to embrace the native cloud. And that's where Tanzu came in as a way to build application. Tanzu manage, way to secure manage application. And now with Aria, we now have more differentiated software to actually manage this application across- >> Yeah, and Aria is the management plane. That's the rebrand. It's not a new product per se. It's a collection of the VMware stuff, right? Isn't it like- >> No, it's, it's a... >> It's a new product? >> There is a new innovation there because basically they, the engineering team built this graph and Raghu compared it to the graph that Google builds up around about the web. So we go out and crawl all your assets across any cloud and we'll build you this model that now allows you to see what are your assets, how you can manage them, what are the performance and all that, so. No, it's more than a brand. It's, it's a new innovation and integration of a technology that we had. >> And that's a critical component of cross-cloud. So I want to get back to what you said about Raghu and what he's been focused on. You know, I remember interviewing him in 2016 with Andy Jassy at AWS, and that helped clear up the cloud game. But even before that Raghu and I had talked, Dave, on theCUBE, I think it was like 2014? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelson was just getting on board as the CEO of VMware. Hybrid was very much on the conversation then. Even then it was early. Hybrid was early, you guys are seeing multi-cloud early. >> It was private cloud. >> Totally give you props on that. So VMware gets total props on that, being right on that. Where are we in that journey? 'Cause super cloud, as we're talking about, you were contributing to that initiative in the open with our open source project. What is multi-cloud? Where is it in the status of the customer? I think everyone will agree, multi-cloud is an outcome that's going to happen. It's happening. Everyone has multiple clouds and they configure things differently. Where are we on the progress bar in your mind? >> I think I want to answer that question and go back to your question, which I didn't address, you know, what we are learning from customers. I think that most customers are at the very, very beginning. They're either in the denial stage, like yesterday talked to a customer, I said, "Are you multi-cloud, are you on your multi-cloud journey?" And he said, "Oh we are on-prem and a little bit of Azure." I said, "Oh really? So the bus- "Oh no, well the business unit is using AWS, right? And we are required company that is using-" I said, "Okay, so you are... that customer is in cloud first stage." >> Like you said, we've seen this movie before. It comes around, right? >> Yeah. >> Somebody's going to have to clean that up at some point. >> Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of- the majority customers are either in denial or in the cloud chaos. And some customers are pushing the envelope like SMP. SMP Global, we heard this morning. Somebody has done all the journey in the private cloud with us, and now I said, and I talked to him a few months ago, he told me, "I had to get in front of my developers. Enough of this, you know, wild west. I had to lay down the tracks and galleries for them to build multi-cloud in a way that was, give them choice, but for me, as an operator and a security person, being able to manage it and secure it." And so I think most customers are in that chaos phase right now. Very early. >> So at our Supercloud22 event, we were riffing and I was asking you about, are you going to hide the complexity, yes. But you're also going to give access to the, to the developers if they want access to the primitives. And I said to you, "It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too." And you said, "And want to lose weight." And I never followed up with you, so I want to follow up now. By "lose weight," I presume you mean be essentially that platform of choice, right? So you're going to, you're going to simplify, but you're going to give access to the developers for those primitives, if in fact they want one. And you're going to be the super cloud, my word of choice. So my question to you is why, first of all, is that correct, your "lose weight"? And why VMware? >> When I say you, you want a cake, eat it and lose weight, I, and I'm going to sound a little arrogant, it's hard to be humble when you're good. But now I work for a company, I work for a company that does that. Has done it over and over and over again. We have done stuff, I... Sometimes when I go before customers, I say, "And our technology does this." Then the customer gets on stage and I go, "Oh my God, oh my God." And then the customers say, "Yeah, plus I realize that I could also do this." So that's, you know, that's the kind of company that we are. And I think that we were so busy being successful with on-prem and that, you know, that we kind of... the cloud happened. Under our eyes. But now with the multi-cloud, I think there is opportunity for VMware to do it all over again. And we are the right company to do it for two reasons. One, we have the right DNA. We have those engineers that know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and the right partnership because everybody partners with us. >> But, you know, a lot of companies like, oh, they missed cloud, they missed mobile. They missed that, whatever it was. VMware was very much aware of this. You made an effort to do kind of your own cloud initiative, backed off from- and everybody was like, this is a disaster waiting to happen and of course it was. And so then you realize that, you learn from your mistakes, and then you embraced the AWS deal. And that changed everything, it changed... It cleared it up for your customers. I'm not hearing anybody saying that the cross-cloud services strategy, what we call multi, uh, super cloud is wrong. Nobody's saying that's like a failed, you know, strategy. Now the execution obviously is very important. So that's why I'm saying it's different this time around. It's not like you don't have your pulse on it. I mean, you tried before, okay, the strategy wasn't right, it backfired, okay, and then you embraced it. But now people are generally in agreement that there's either a problem or there's going to be a problem. And so you kind of just addressed why VMware, because you've always been in the catbird seat to solve those problems. >> But it is a testament to the pragmatism of the company. Right? You try- In technology, you cannot always get it right, right? When you don't get it right, say, "Okay, that didn't work. What is the next?" And I think now we're onto something. It's a very ambitious vision for sure. But I think if you look at the companies out there that have the muscles and the DNA and the resources to do it, I think VMware is one. >> One of the risks to the success, what's been, you know you watch the Twitter chatter is, "Oh, can VMware actually attract the developers?" John chimed in and said, >> Yeah. >> It's not just the devs. I mean, just devs. But also when you think of DevOps, the ops, right? When you think about securing and having that consistent platform. So when you think about the critical factors for you to execute, you have to have that pass platform, no question. Well, how do you think about, okay, where are the gaps that we really have to get right? >> I think that for us to go and get the developers on board, it's too late. And it's too late for most companies. Developers go with the open source, they go with the path of least resistance. So our way into that, and as Kelsey Hightower said, building new application, more applications, is a team sport. And part of that team is the Ops team. And there we have an entry, I think. Because that's what- >> I think it possible. I think you, I think you're hitting it. And my dev comment, by the way, I've been kind of snarky on Twitter about this, but I say, "Oh, Dev's got it easy. They're sitting in the beach with sunglasses on, you know, having focaccia. >> Doing whatever they want. >> Happy doing whatever they want. No, it's better life for the developer now. Open source is the software industry, that's going great. Shift left in CI/CD pipeline. Developers are faster than ever, they're innovating. It's all self-service, it's all DevOps. It's looking good for the developers right now. And that's why everyone's focused on that. They're driving the change. The Ops team, that was traditional IT Ops, is now DevOps with developers. So the seed change of data and security, which is core, we're hearing a lot of those. And if you look at all the big successes, Snowflake, Databricks, MinIO, who was on earlier with the S3 cloud storage anywhere, this is the new connective tissue that VMware can connect to and extend the operational platform of IT and connect developers. You don't need to win them all over. You just connect to them. >> You just have to embrace the tools that they're using. >> Exactly. >> You just got to connect to them. >> You know, you bring up an interesting point. Snowflake has to win the developers, 'cause they're basically saying, "Hey, we're building an application development platform on top of our proprietary system." You're not saying that. You're saying we're embracing the open source tools that developers are using, so use them. >> Well, we gave it a single pane of glass to manage your application everywhere. And going back to your point about not hiding the underlying primitives, we manage that application, right? That application could be moving around, but nobody prevents that application to use that API underneath. I mean, that's, that can always do that. >> Right, right. >> And, and one of the reason why we had Kelsey Hightower and my keynote and the main keynote was that I think he shows that the template, the blueprint for our customers, our operators, if you want to have- even propel your career forward, look at what he did, right? VI admin, going up the stack storage and everything else, and then eventually embrace Kubernetes, became an expert. Really took the time to understand how modern application were- are built. And now he's a luminary in the industry. So we don't have, all have to become luminary, but you can- our customers right here, doing the labs upstairs, they can propel the career forward in this. >> So summarize what you guys are announcing around cross cloud-services. Obviously Aria, another version, 1.3 of Tanzu. Lay out the sort of news. >> Yeah, so we- With Tanzu, we have one step forward with our developer experience so that, speaking of meeting where they are, with application templates, with ability to plug into their idea of choice. So a lot of innovation there. Then on the IR side, I think that's the name of the game in multi-cloud, is having that object model allows you to manage anything across anything. And then, we talk about cross-cloud services being a vision last year, I, when I launched it, I thought security and networking up there as a cloud, but it was still down here as ploy technology. And now with NSX, the latest version, we brought that control plane in the cloud as a cloud native cross-cloud service. So, lot of meat around the three pillars, development, the management, and security. >> And then the complementary component of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and the whole DPU thing, 'cause that's, 'cause that's cloud, right? I mean, we saw what AWS did with Nitro. >> Yeah. >> Five, seven years ago. >> That's the consumption model cloud. >> That's the future of computing architecture. >> And the licensing model underneath. >> Oh yeah, explain that. Right, the universal licensing model. >> Yeah, so basically what we did when we launch cloud universal was, okay, you can buy our software using credit that you have on AWS. And I said, okay, that's kind of hybrid cloud, it's not multi-cloud, right? But then we brought in Google and now the latest was Microsoft. Now you can buy our software for credits and investment that our customers already have with these great partners of ours and use it to consume as a subscription. >> So that kind of changes your go-to-market and you're not just chasing an ELA renewal now. You're sort of thinking, you're probably talking to different people within the organizations as well, right? So if I can use credits for whatever, Google, for Azure, for on-prem, for AWS, right? Those are different factions necessarily in the organization. >> So not just the technology's multi-cloud, but also the consumption model is truly multi-cloud. >> Okay, Vittorio, what's next? What's the game plan? What do you have going on? It's getting good traction here again, like Dave said, no one's poo-pooing cross-cloud services. It is kind of a timing market forces. We were just talking before you came on. Oh, customers don't- may not think they have a problem, whether they're the frog boiling water or not, they will have the problem coming up or they don't think they have a problem, but they have chaos reigning. So what's next? What are you doing? Is it going to be new tech, new market? What is the plan? >> So I think for, if I take my bombastic kind of marketing side of me hat off and I look at the technology, I think the customers in these scales wants to be told what to do. And so I think what we need to do going forward is articulate these cross-cloud services use cases. Like okay, what does mean to have an application that uses a service over here, a service over there, and then show the value of getting this component from one company? Because cross-cloud services at your event, how many vendors were there? 20? 30? >> Yeah. >> So the market is there. I mean, these are all revenue-generating companies, right, but they provide a piece of the puzzle. Our ambition is to provide a platform approach. And so we need to articulate better, what are the advantages of getting these components management, security, from- >> And Kit, Kit was saying, it's a hybrid kind of scenario. I was kind of saying, oh, putting my little business school scenario hat on, oh yeah, you go hardcore competitive, best product wins, kill or be killed, compete and win. Or you go open and you create a keiretsu, create a consortium, and get support, standardize or defacto standardize a bunch of it, and then let everyone monetize or participate. >> Yeah, we cannot do it alone. >> What's the approach? What's the approach you guys want to take? >> So I think whatever possible, first of all, we're not going to do it alone. Right, so the ecosystem is going to play a part and if the ecosystem can come together around the consortium or a standard that makes sense for customers? Absolutely. >> Well, and you say, nobody's poo-pooing it, and I stand by that. But they are saying, and I think it is true, it's hard, right? It's a very challenging, ambitious goal that you have. But yeah, you've got a track record of- >> I mean the old playbook, >> Exactly! >> The old playbooks are out. I mean, I always say, the old kill and be highly competitive strategy. Proprietary is dead. And then if you look at the old way of winning was, okay, you know, we're going to lock customers in- >> What do you mean proprietary is dead? Proprietary's not dead. >> No, I mean like, I'm talking- Okay, I'm talking about how people sell. Enterprise companies love to create, simplify, create value with chaos like okay, complexity with more complexity. So that's over, you think that's how people are marketing? >> No, no, it's true. But I mean, we see a lot of proprietary out there. >> Like what? >> It's still happening. Snowflake. (laughing) >> Tell that to the entire open store software industry. >> Right, well, but that's not your play. I mean, you have to have some kind of proprietary advantage. >> The enterprise playbook used to be solve complexity with complexity, lock the customers in. Cloud changed all that with open. You're a seasoned marketer, you're also an executive. You have an interesting new wave. How do you market to the enterprise in this new open way? How do you win? >> For us, I think we have that relationship with the C-level and we have delivered for them over and over again. So our challenge from a marketing perspective is to educate these executives about all that. And the fact that we didn't have this user conference in person didn't help, right? And then show that value to the operator so that they can help us just like we did in the past. I mean, our sales motion in the past was we made these people- I told them today, you were the heroes. When you virtualized, when you brought down 1000 servers to 80, you were the hero, right? So we need to empower them with the technology and the know-how to be heroes again in multi-cloud. And I think the business will take care of itself. >> Okay final question from me, and Dave might have another one of his, everybody wanted to know this year at VMworld, VMware Explore, which is the new name, what would it look like? What would the vibe be? Would people show up? Would it be vibrant? Would cross-cloud hunt? Would super cloud be relevant? I got to say looking at the floor last night, looking at the keynotes, looking at the perspective, it seems to look like, oh, people are on board. What is your take on this? You've been talking to customers, you're talking to people in the hallways. You've been brief talking to all the analysts. What is the vibe about this year's Explore? >> I think, you've been covering us for a long time, this is a religious following we have. And we don't take it for granted. I told the audience today, this to us is a family reunion and we couldn't be, so we got a sense of like, that's what I feels like the family is back together. >> And there's a wave coming too. It's not like business is dying. It's like a whole 'nother. Another wave is coming. >> It's funny you mention about the heroes. 'Cause I go back, I don't really have my last question, but it's just the last thought is, I remember the first time I saw a demo of VMware and I went, "Holy crap, wow. This is totally game changing." I was blown away. Right, like you said, 80 servers down to just a couple of handfuls. This is going to change everything. And that's where it all started. You know, I mean, I know it started in workstations, but that's when it really became transformational. >> Yeah, so I think we have an opportunity to do it over again with the family that is here today, of which you guys consider family as well. >> All right, favorite part of the keynote and then we'll wrap up. What was your favorite part of the keynote today? >> I think the excitement from the developer people that were up there. Kelsey- >> The guy who came after Kelsey, what was his name? I didn't catch it, but he was really good. >> Yeah, I mean, it's, what it's all about, right? People that are passionate about solving hard problems and then cannot wait to share it with the community, with the family. >> Yeah. I love the one line, "You kids have it easy today. We walk to school barefoot in the snow back in the day." >> Uphill, both ways. >> Broke the ice to wash our face. >> Vittorio, great to see you, great friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni, vice president of cross-cloud serves at VMware. A critical new area that's harvesting the fruits coming off the tree as VMware invested in cloud native many years ago. It's all coming to the market, let's see how it develops. Congratulations, good luck, and we'll be back with more coverage here at VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us after the short break. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas, baby. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE. We are live at Caesar's Forum covering Snowflake Summit 22. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage on theCUBE you won't want to miss. We've got an exciting customer story to talk to you about next with Novartis and Snowflake. Please welcome two guests to theCUBE. Loïc Giraud, Global head digital delivery, Novartis. I hope I got the name right. >> Yes. Hi, thank you. >> I did my best. >> Absolutely. >> Lisa: (laughs) Jesse Cugliotta also joins us. Global Industry Lead, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Snowflake. Welcome with theCUBE, gentlemen. >> Thank you for having us. Good morning. >> So it was great to hear Novartis is a household word now, especially with what's gone on in the last two years. I had a chance to see the Keynote yesterday, heard Novartis mention in terms of a massive outcome that Snowflake is delivering that we're going to get to. But Loic talk to us about Novartis global 500 organization. You rank among the world's top companies investing in R&D, the massive portfolio and you're reaching nearly 800 million patients worldwide. That's huge, but there's been a lot of change in the healthcare and life sciences industry, especially recently. Talk to us about the industry landscape. What are you seeing? >> As you described, Novartis is one of the top life science company in the world. We are number three. We operate in 150 countries, and we have almost 120,000 employees. Our purpose is actually to reimagine medicine for the use of data science and technology and to extend people's life. And we really mean it. I think, as you mentioned, we treat eight or 9 million patient per year with our drugs. We expect to treat more than a billion patients in near time soon. Over the last few years, especially during COVID, our digital transformation help us to accelerate the drug discovery and then the commiseration of our drug to markets. As it was mentioned in the Keynote yesterday, we have actually been able to reduce our time to market. It used to take us up to 12 years and cost around 1.2 billion to discover and commercialize drug. And now we've actually use of technology like Snowflake, we have been able to reduce by two to three years, which ultimately is a benefit for our patients. >> Absolutely. Well, we're talking about life and death situations. Talk about... You mentioned Novartis wants to reimagine medicine. What does that look like? Where is data in that and how is Snowflake an enabler of reimagining medicine? >> So data is core for our asset, is a core of enterprise process. So if you look at our enterprise, we are using data from the research, for drug development, in manufacturing process, and how do we market and sell our product through HCPs and distribute it to reach our patients. If you build through our digital transformation we have created this integrated data ecosystem, where Snowflake is a core component. And through that ecosystem, we are able to identify compounds and cohorts, perform clinical trials, and engage HCPs and HGOs so that can prescribe drugs to serve our patient needs. >> Jesse, let's bring you into the conversation. Snowflake recently launched its healthcare and life sciences data cloud. I believe that was back in March. >> It was. >> Just a couple of months ago. Talk to us about the vertical focus. Talk to us about what this healthcare and life sciences data cloud is aiming to help customers like Novartis achieve. >> Well, as you mentioned there, Snowflake has made a real pivot to kind of focus on the various different industries that we serve in a new way. I think historically, we've been engaged in really, all of the industries across the major sectors where we participate today. But historically we've been often engaging with the office of IT. And there was a recognition as a company that we really need to be able to better speak the language of our customers in with our respective industries. So the entire organization has really made a pivot to start to build that capability internally. That's part of the team that I support here at Snowflake. And with respect to healthcare and life sciences, that means being able to solve some of the challenges that Loic was just speaking about. In particular, we're seeing the industry evolve in a number of ways. You bring up clinical research in the time that it takes to actually bring a drug to market. This is a big one that's really changed a lot over the last couple of years. Some of the reasons are obvious and other ones are somewhat opportunistic. When we looked at what it takes to get a drug to market, there's several stages of clinical research that have to be participated in, and this can often take years. What we saw in the last couple of years, is that all of a sudden, patients didn't want to physically participate in those anymore, because there was fear of potential infection and being in a healthcare facility. So the entire industry realized that it needed to change in terms of way that it would engage with patients in that context. And we're now seeing this concept of decentralized clinical research. And with that, becomes the need to potentially involve many different types of organizations beyond the traditional pharma, their research partners, but we're starting to see organizations like retail pharmacies, like big box retailers, who have either healthcare delivery or pharmaceutical arms actually get involved in the process. And of course, one of the core things that happens here is that everyone needs a better way to collaborate and share data amongst one another. So bringing this back to your original question, this concept of being able to do exactly that is core to the healthcare and the life sciences data cloud. To be able to collaborate and share data amongst those different types of organizations. >> Collaboration and data sharing. It seems to me to be a differentiator for Snowflake, in terms of being able to deliver secure, governed powerful analytics and data sharing to customers, partners to the ecosystem. You mentioned an example of the ecosystem there and how impactful to patients' lives, that collaboration and data sharing can be. >> That's absolutely right. It's something that if you think about all of the major challenges that the industry has had historically, whether it is high costs, whether it are health inequities, whether it is physicians practicing defensive medicine or repeat testing, what's core to each one of these things is kind of the inability to adequate collaborate and share data amongst all of the different players. So the industry has been waiting for the capability or some sort of solution to be able to do this, I think for a long, long time. And this is probably one of the most exciting parts of the conversations that we have with our customers, is when they realize that this is possible. And not only that it's possible within our platform, but that most of the organizations that they work with today are also Snowflake customers. So they realize that everyone's already here. It's just a matter of who else can we work with and how do we get started? >> Join the party. >> Exactly. >> Loic talk to us about Novartis's data journey. I know you guys have been, I believe using Snowflake since 2017 pre pandemic. But you had a largely on-premises infrastructure. Talk to us about the decision of Novartis to go to the cloud, do it securely and why you chose to partner with Snowflake. >> So when we started our journey in 2018, I think the ambition that our CEO, was to transform all enterprise processes for the use of digital tech. And at the core of this digital tech is data foundation. So we started with a large program called Formula One, which aim to integrate all our internal and external data asset into an integrated platform. And for that, I think we've built this multicloud and best upgrade platform, where Snowflake is a core component. And we've been able to integrate almost 1,000 data asset, internal and external for the platform to be able to accelerate the use of data to create insight for our users. In that transformation, we've realized that Snowflake could be a core component because of the scalability and the performance with large dataset. And moreover, when Snowflake started to actually open collaboration for their marketplace, we've been able to integrate new data set that are publicly available at the place that we could not do on ourself, on our own. So that is a core component of what we are trying to do. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great example of really what we're talking about here is that, he's mentioning that they're going out to our marketplace to be able to integrate data more easily with some of the vendors there. And that is kind of this concept of the healthcare and life sciences data cloud realized, where all of a sudden, acquiring and bringing data in and making it ready for analysis becomes much faster, much easier. We continually see more and more vendors coming to us saying, I get it now, I want in. Who else can I work with in this space? So I think that's a perfect example of how this starts to become real for folks. >> Well, it sounds like the marketplace has been an enabler, Loic, of the expansion of use cases. You've grown this beyond drug development. I read that you're developing new products and services for healthcare providers to personalize treatments for patients, which we all are demanding patients. We want that personalized care. But talk about the marketplace as a facilitator of those expanding use cases that Snowflake is powering. >> Yes. That's right. I mean we have currently almost 65 use cases in production and we are in advanced progress for over 200 use cases and they go across all our business sector. So if you look at drug development, we are monitoring our clinical trials using Snowflake. If you look at our omnichannel marketing, we are looking at personalization of information with our HCPs and HGOs using snowflake. If you look at our manufacturing process, we are looking at yet management, freight optimization, inventory, insight. So almost across all the industry sectors that we have, I think we are using the platforms to be able to deliver faster information to our users. >> And that's what we all want. Faster information. I think in the pandemic we learned that access to real time data in every industry wasn't a nice to have. That was a- >> Necessity. >> Absolute necessity. >> Yeah. >> And made the difference for companies that survived and thrived and those that didn't. That's something that we learned. But we also learned that the volume of data just continues to proliferate. Loic, you've been in the industry a couple of decades. What do you see? And you've got, obviously this great foundation now with Snowflake. You've got 65 use cases you said in production. What's the future of the data culture in healthcare and life sciences from your perspective? >> So my perspective. It is time now we give the access to our business technologies to be able to be self-sufficient using digital product. We need to consumerize digital technology so they can be self-sufficient. The amount of problems that we have to solve, and we can now solve with new technology has never been there. And I think where in the past, where in the next few years that you will see an accelerated generation of insight and an accelerated process of medicine by empowering the business technologies to use a technology that like Snowflake and over progress. >> What are your thoughts Loic, of some of the, obviously a lot of news coming out yesterday from Snowflake, we mentioned standing room only in the Keynote. This I believe is north of 10,000 attendees. People are ready to engage in person with Snowflake, but some of the news coming out, what is your perspective? You've been a partner of theirs for a while. What do you see from Snowflake in terms of the news, the volume of customers it's adding, all that good stuff? >> I must say I was blown away yesterday when Frank was talking about the ramp up of customers using Snowflake. But also, and I think in Benoit and Christian, and they talk about the innovation. When you look at native application or you look at hybrid tables, we saw a thing there. And the expansion of the marketplace by monetization application, that is something that is going to accelerate the expansion, not only on the company, but the integration and the utilization of customers. And to Jesse's point, I think that it is key that people collaborate using the platform. I think we want to collaborate with suppliers and providers and they want to collaborate with us. But we want to have a neutral environment where we can do that. And Snowflake can be that environment. >> And do it securely, right? Security is absolutely- >> Of course. I mean that's really table stake for this industry. And I think the point that you just made Loic, is very important, is that, the biggest question that we're often asked by our customers is who else is a customer within this industry that I can collaborate with? I think as Loic here will attest to, one of the challenges within life sciences in particular is that it is a highly regulated industry. It is a highly competitive industry, and folks are very sensitive about referenceability. So about things like logo usage. So to give some ideas here, people often have no idea that we're working with 28 of the top 50 global pharma today, working with seven of the top 12 global medical device companies today. The largest CROs, the largest distributors. So when I say that the party is here, they really are. And that's why we're so excited to have events like these, 'cause people can physically introduce themselves to one another and meet, and actually start to engage in some of these more collaborative discussions that they've been waiting for. >> Jesse, what's been some of the feedback that you've heard the last couple of days on the healthcare and life sciences data cloud? You've obviously finally gotten back to engaging with customers in person. But what are some of the things, feed on this street have said that you've thought, we made the absolute right decision on this pivot? >> Yeah, well I think some of it speaks to the the point I was just speaking about, is that they had no idea that so many of their peers were actually working with Snowflake already and that how mature their implementations have actually been. The other thing that folks are realizing is that, a lot of the technologies that serve this ecosystem, whether they're in the health tech space, whether they're clinical management or commercial engagement or supply chain planning technologies, those companies are also now pivoting to Snowflake, where they're either building a part or the entirety of their platform on top of ours. So it offers this great way to start to collaborate with the ecosystem through some of those capabilities that we spoke about. And that's driving new use cases in commercial, in supply chain, in pharmacovigilance, in clinical operations. >> Well, I think you just sum up beautifully why the theme of this conference is the world of data collaboration. >> Yes, absolutely. >> The potential there, that Snowflake is unleashing to the world is I think is what's captivating to me. That you just scratch on the surface about connecting and facilitating this collaboration and this data sharing in a secure way across industries. Loic, last question for you. Take us home with what is next for Novartis. You've done a tremendous amount of digitalization. 65 use cases in production with Snowflake. What's next for the company? >> See, I think that in next year's to come, open collaboration with the ecosystem, but also personalization. If you look at digital medicine and access to patient's informations, I think this is probably the next revolution that we are entering into. >> Excellent. And of course those demanding patients aren't going to want anything slower or less information. Guys, thank you for joining me on the program talking about the Novartis-Snowflake collaboration. The partnership, the outcomes that you're achieving and how this is really dramatically impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having us. This was fun. >> My pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is live from Las Vegas, day two of our coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. I'll be right back with my next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music)

>>The cube is back at Vemo 2022. I was happy to be live. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson and Dave Russell three Daves. Dave is the vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Great to see you again, my friend. Thanks for coming >>On. Uh, it's always a pleasure. And Dave, I can remember your name. I can't remember >>Your name as well. <laugh> so wow. How many years has it been now? I mean, add on COVID is four years now. >>Yeah, well, three, three solid three. Yeah, Fallon blue. Uh, last year, Miami little secret. We're gonna go there again next year. >>Okay, so you joined Veeam >>Three. Oh, me four. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Four is four, right? Okay. Wow. >>Um, time flies, man. >>Interesting. What your background, former analyst analyze your time at Veeam and the market and the changes in the customer base. What, what have you seen? What are the big takeaways? Learnings? >>Yeah. You know, what's amazing to me is we've done a lot more research now, ourselves, right? So things that we intuitively thought, things that we experienced by talking to customers, and of course our partners, we can now actually prove. So what I love is that we take the exact same product and we go down market up market. We go across geographies, we go different verticals and we can sell that same exact product to all constituencies because the differences between them are not that great. If it was the three Dave company or the 3m company, what you're looking for is reliable recovery, ease of use those things just transcend. And I think there used to be a time when we thought enterprise means something very different than mid-market than does SMB. And certainly your go to market plans are that way, but not the product plans. >>So the ransomware study, we had Jay buff on earlier, we were talking about it and we just barely scratched the surface. But how were you able to get people to converse with you in such detail? Was it, are you using phone surveys? Are you, are, are you doing web surveys? Are you doing a combination? Deep >>Dives? Yeah. So it was web based and it was anonymous on both ends, meaning no one knew VE was asking the questions. And also we made the promise that none of your data is ever gonna get out, not even to say a large petroleum company, right. Everything is completely anonymized. And we were able to screen people out very effectively, a lot of screener questions to make sure we're dealing with the right person. And then we do some data integrity checking on the back end. But it's amazing if you give people an opportunity, they're actually very willing to tell you about their experience as long as there's no sort of ramification about putting the company or themselves at risk. >>So when I was at IDC, we did a lot of surveys, tons of surveys. I'm sure you did a lot of surveys at Gartner. And we would look at vendor surveys like, eh, well, this kind of the questions are rigged or it's really self-serving. I don't sense that in your surveys, you you've, you've always, you've still got that independent analyst gene. Is that, I mean, it's gotta be, is it by design? Is it just happen that ransomware is a topic that just sort of lends itself to that. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy there. >>Yeah. Well, two part answer really, because it's definitely by design. We, we really want the information. I mean, we're using this to fuel or inform our understanding of the market, what we should build next, what we should message next. So we really want the right data. So we gotta ask the right questions. So Jason, our colleague, Julie, myself, we work really hard on trying to make sure we're not leading the witness down a certain path. We're not trying to prove our own thesis. We're trying to understand what the market really is thinking. And when it comes to ransomware, we wanna know what we don't know, meaning we found a few surprises along the way. A lot of it was confirmational, but that's okay too. As long as you can back that up, cuz then it's not just Avenger's opinion. Of course, a vendor that says that they can help you do something has data that says, they think you uni have a problem with this, but now we can actually point to it and have a more interesting kind of partnership conversation about if you are like 1000 other enterprises globally, this may be what you're seeing. >>And there are no wrong answers there. Meaning even if they say that is absolutely not what we're seeing. Great. Let's have that conversation that's specific to you. But if you're not sure where to start, we've got a whole pool of data to help guide that conversation. >>Yeah. Shout out to Julie Webb does a great job. She's a real pro and yes. And, and really makes sure that, like you say, you want the real, real answers. So what were some of the things that you were excited about or to learn about? Um, in the survey again, we, we touched just barely touched on it in 15 minutes with Jason, but what, what's your take? Well, >>Two that I'd love to point out. I mean, unfortunately Jason probably mentioned this one, you know, only 19% answered when we said, did you pay the ransom? And only 19% said, no, I didn't pay the ransom. And I was a hundred percent successful in my recovery. You know, we're in Vegas, one out of five odds. That's not good. Right? That's a go out of business spot. That's not the kind of 80 20 you want to hear. That's not exactly exactly. Now more concerning to me is 5% said no ransom was asked for. And you know, my phrase on that is that's, that's an arson event. It's not an extortion event. Right. I just came to do harm. That's really troubling. Now there's a huge percentage there that said we paid the ransom about 24% said we paid the ransom and we still couldn't restore the data. So if you add up that 24 in that five, that 29%, that was really scary to me. >>Yeah. So you had the 19%. Okay. That's scary enough. But then you had the wrecking ball, right? Ah, we're just gonna, it's like the mayhem commercial. Yes. Yeah. See ya. Right. Okay. So <laugh>, that's, that's wild. So we've heard a lot about, um, ransomware. The thing that interests me is, and we've had a big dose of ransomware as analysts in these last, you know, 12, 18 months and more. But, but, but it's really escalated. Yeah. Seems like, and by the way, you're sharing this data, which is amazing. Right. So I actually want to dig in and steal some of the, the data. I think that's cool. Right? Definitely. You gave us a URL this morning. Um, so, but you, your philosophy is to share the data. So everybody sees it, your customers, your prospects, your competitors, but your philosophy is to why, why are you sharing that data? Why don't you just keep it to yourself and do it quietly with customers? >>Yeah. You know, I think this is such a significant event. No one vendor's gonna solve it all. Realistically, we may be tied for number one in market share statistically speaking, but we have 12.5%. Right. So we're not gonna be able to do greater good if we're keeping that to ourselves. And it's really a notion of this awareness level, just having the conversation and having that more open, even if it's not us, I think is gonna be beneficial. It speaks to the value of backup and why backup is still relevant this day and age. >>I dunno if you're comfortable answering this, but I'll ask anyway, when you were a Gartner analyst, did you get asked about ransomware a lot? >>No. >>Very rarely or never. >>Almost never. Yeah. And that was four years ago. Literally. Like it >>Was a thing back then, right? I mean it wasn't of course prominent, but it was, it was, I guess it wasn't that >>20 16, 20 17, you know, it's, it's interesting because at a couple of levels you have the, um, the willingness of participants to share their stories, which is a classic example of people coming together to fight a common fo. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the best of times, that's what happens. And now you're sharing that information out. One of the reasons why some would argue we've gotten to this place is because day zero exploits have been stockpiled and they haven't been shared. So you go to, you know, you go, you go through the lineage that gets you to not pet cat as an example. Yes. And where did it come from? Hey, it was something that we knew about. Uh, but we didn't share it. Right. We waited until it happened because maybe we thought we could use it in, in some way. It's, it's an, it's an interesting philosophical question. I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, if that's, uh, the third, it's the one, the third rail you don't want to touch, but basically we're, we are, I guess we're just left to sort through whatever, whatever we have to sort through in that regard. But it is interesting left to industry's own devices. It's sharing an openness. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I almost think it's like open source code. Right? I mean, the promise there is together, we can all do something better. And I think that's true with this ransomware research and the rest of the research we do too. We we've freely put it out there. I mean, you can download the link, no problem. Right. And go see the report. We're fine with that. You know, we think it actually is very beneficial. I remember a long time ago, it was actually Sam Adams that said, uh, you know, Hey, there's a lot of craft brewers out there now, you know, is, are you as a craft brewery now? Successful? Are you worried about that? No. We want every craft brewery to be successful because it creates a better awareness. Well, an availability market, it's still Boston reference. >>What did another Boston reference? Yes. Thank you, >>Boston. And what <laugh>. >>Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we've seen these milestone, you know, watershed events in, in security. I mean, stucks net sort of yeah. Informed us what's possible with nation states, even though it's highly likely that us and Israel were, were behind that, uh, the, the solar winds hack people are still worried about. Yes. Okay. What's next. Even, even something now. And so everybody's now on high alert even, I don't know how close you guys followed it, but the, the, uh, the Okta, uh, uh, breach, which was a fairly benign incident. And technically it was, was very, very limited and very narrow in scope. But CISOs that I talked to were like, we are really paranoid that there's another shoe to drop. What do we do? So the, the awareness is way, way off the charts. It begs the question. What's next. Can you, can you envision, can you stay ahead? It's so hard to stay ahead of the bad guys, but, but how are you thinking about that? What this isn't the end of it from your standpoint? >>No, it's not. And unfortunately it's because there's money to be made, right? And the barrier to entry is relatively low. It's like hiring a Hitman. You know, you don't actually have to even carry out the bad act yourself and get your own hands dirty. And so it's not gonna end, but it it's really security is everyone's responsibility. Veeam is not really a full time security company, but we play a role in that whole ecosystem. And even if you're not in the data center as an employee of a company, you have a role to play in security. You know, don't click that link, lock the door behind you, that type of thing. So how do you stay ahead of it? I think you just continually keep putting a focus on it. It's like performance. You're never gonna be done. There's always something to tune and to work on, but that can be overwhelming. So the positive I try to tell someone is to your point, Dave, look, a lot of these vulnerabilities were known for quite some time. If you were just current on your patch levels, this could have been prevented, right? You could have closed that window. So the thing that I often say is if you can't do everything and probably none of us can do something and then repeat, do it again, try to get a little bit better every period of time. Whether that's every day, every quarter, what case may be, do what you can. >>Yeah. So ransomware obviously very lucrative. So your job is to increase the denominator. So the ROI is lower, right? And that's a, that's a constant game, right? >>Absolutely. It is a crime of opportunity. It's indiscriminate. And oftentimes non-targeted now there are state sponsored events to your point, but largely it's like the fishermen casting the net out into the ocean. No idea with certainty, what's gonna come back. So I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying our goal is to basically you wanna be the house on the neighborhood that looks the least inviting. >>We've talked about this. I mean, any, anyone can be a, a, a ransomware as to go in the dark web, ransomware's a service. Oh, I gotta, I can put a stick into a server and a way I go and I get some Bitcoin right. For it. So, so that's, so, so organizations really have to take this seriously. I think they are. Um, well you tell me, I mean, in your discussions with, with, with customers, >>It's changed. Yeah. You know, I would say 18 months ago, there was a subset of customers out there saying vendors, crying Wolf, you know, you're trying to scare us into making a purchase decision or move off of something that we're working with. Now. I think that's almost inverted. Now what we see is people are saying, look, my boss or my boss's boss's boss, and the security team are knocking on my door asking, what are we gonna do? What's our response? You know, how prepared are we? What kind of things do we have in place? What does our backup practice do to support ransomware? The good news though, going back to the awareness side is I feel like we're evangelizing this a little less as an industry. Meaning the security team is well aware of the role that proper backup and availability can play. That was not true. A handful of years ago. >>Well, that's the other thing too, is that your study showed the closer the practitioner was to the problem. Yes. The more problems there were, that's an awareness thing. Yes. That's not a, that's not, oh, just those guys had visibility. I wanna ask you cuz you've You understand from an application view, right. There's only so much Veeam can do. Um, and then the customer has to have processes in place that go beyond just the, the backup and recovery technology. So, so from an application perspective, what are you advising customers where you leave off and they really have to take over this notion of shared responsibility is really extending beyond cloud security. >>Yeah. Uh, the model that I like is interestingly enough, what we see with Caston in the Kubernetes space. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there, we're selling into two different constituencies, potentially. It's the infrastructure team that they're worried about disaster recovery. They're worried about backup, but it's the app dev DevOps team. Hey, we're worried about creating the application. So we're spending a lot of focus with the casting group to say, great, go after that shift, left crowd, talk to them about a data availability, disaster recovery, by the way you get data movement or migration for free with that. So migration, maybe what you're first interested in on day one. But by doing that, by having this kind of capability, you're actually protecting yourself from day two issues as well. >>Yeah. So Let's see. Um, what haven't we hit on in this study? There was so much data in there. Uh, is that URL, is that some, a private thing that you guys shared >>Or is it no. Absolutely. >>Can, can you share the >>URL? Yeah, absolutely. It's V E E so V two E period am so V with the period between the E and the a forward slash RW 22. So ransomware 22 is the research project. >>So go there, you download the zip file, you get all the graphics. Um, I I'm gonna dig into it, uh, maybe as early as this, this Friday or this weekend, like to sort of expose that, uh it's you guys obviously want this, I think you're right. It's it's it's awareness needs to go up to solve this problem. You know, I don't know if it's ever solvable, but the only approach is to collaborate. Right. So I, I dunno if you're gonna collaborate with your head-to-head competitors, but you're certainly happy to share the data I've seen Dave, some competitors have pivoted from data protection or even data management to security. Yes. I see. I wonder if I could run a premise by, I see that as an adjacency to your business, but not sort of throwing you into the security bucket. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. You know, certainly respect everything other competitors are doing, you know, and some are getting very, you know, making some good noise and getting picked up on that. However, we're unapologetically a backup company. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're a backup company. First. We're worried about security. We're worried about, you know, data reuse and supporting shift, left types of things, but we're not gonna apologize for being in the backup availability business, not, not at all. However, there's a role that we can play. Having said that that we're a role. We're a component. If you're in the secondary storage market, like backup or archiving. And you're trying to imply that you're going to help prevent or even head off issues on the primary storage side. That might be a little bit of a stretch. Now, hopefully that can happen that we can go get better as an industry on that. >>But fundamentally we're about ensuring that you're recoverable with reliability and speed when you need it. Whether we're no matter what the issue is, because we like to say ransomware is a disaster. Unfortunately there's other kind of disasters that happen as well. Power failures still happen. Natural issues still occur, et cetera. So all these things have to be accounted for. You know, one of our survey, um, data points basically said all the things that take down a server that you didn't plan on. It's basically humans at the top human error, someone accidentally deleted something and then malicious humans, someone actually came after you, but there's a dozen other things that happened too. So you've gotta prepare for all of that. So I guess what I would end up with saying is you remember back in the centralized data centers, especially the mainframe days, people would say, we're worried about the smoking hole or the smoking crater event. Yeah. Yeah. The probability of a plane crashing into your data bunker was relatively low. That was when it got all the discussion though, what was happening every single day is somebody accidentally deleted a file. And so you need to account on both ends of the spectrum. So we don't wanna over rotate. And we also, we don't want to signal to 450,000 beam customers around the world that we're abandoning you that were not about backup. That's still our core >>Effort. No, it's pretty straightforward. You're just telling people to back up in a way that gives them a certain amount of mitigation yes. Or protection in the event that something happens. And no, I don't remember anything about mainframe. He does though though, much older than me >>EF SMS. So I even know what it stands for. Count key data don't even get me started. So, and, and it wasn't thank you for that answer. I didn't mean to sort of a set up question, but it was more of a strategy question and I wish wish I could put on your analyst hat because I, I feel, I'll just say it. I feel as though it's a move to try to get a tailwind. Maybe it's a valuation play. I don't know. But I, I, it resonated with me three years ago when everybody was talking data management and nobody knew what that meant. Data management. I'm like Oracle. >>Right. >>And now it's starting to become a little bit more clear. Um, but Danny Allen stuff and said, it's all about the backup. I think that was one of his keynote messages. So that really resonated with me cuz he said, yeah, it starts with backup and recovery. And that's what, what matters most to these customers. So really was a strategy question. Now maybe it does have valuation impact. Maybe there's a big market there that can be consolidated. You know, uh, we, this morning in the analyst session, we heard about your new CEO's objectives of, you know, grabbing more market share. So, and that's, that's an adjacency. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out far too many security vendors. As, as we know, the backup and recovery space is getting more crowded and that is maybe causing people to sort of shift. I don't know, whatever right. Or left, I guess, shift. Right. I'm not sure, but um, it's gonna be really interesting to watch because this has now become a really hot space after, you know, it's been some really interesting momentum in certain pockets, but now it's everywhere it's coming ubiquitous. So I'll give you the last word Dave on, uh, day one, VEON 20, 22. >>Yeah. Well boy, so many things I could say to kind of land the plane on, but we're just glad to be back in person. It's been three years since we've had a live event in those three years, we've gone from 300,000 customers to 450,000 customers. The release cadence, even in the pandemic has been the greatest in the company's history in 2020, 2021, there's only about three dozen software only companies that have hit a billion dollars and we're one of them. And that, you know, that mission is why hasn't changed and that's why we wanna stay consistent. One of the things Danny always likes to say is, you know, we keep telling the same story because we're not wanting to deviate off of that story and there's more work to be done. And to honors point, you know, Hey, if you have ambitious goals, you're gonna have to look at spreading your wings out a little bit wider, but we're never gonna abandon being a backup. Well, >>It's, it's clear to me, Dave on was not brought in to keep you steady at a billion. I think he's got a site set on five and then who knows what's next? Dave Russell, thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Great to >>See always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. That's a wrap for Dave one. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson will be backed tomorrow with a full day of coverage. Check out Silicon angle.com for all the news, uh, youtube.com/silicon angle. You can get these videos. They're all, you know, flying up Wiki bond.com for some of the research in this space. We'll see you tomorrow.