(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We're in Vegas. Lovely Las Vegas. Beautiful outside, although I have only seen outside today once, but very excited to be at re:Invent. We're hearing between 50,000 and 70,000 attendees and it's insane, but people are ready to be back. This morning's keynote by CEO Adam Selipsky was full of great messages, big focus on data, customers, partners, the ecosystem. So excited. And I'm very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, David Shacochis, VP Enterprise Portfolio Strategy Product Management at Lumen. David, welcome back. >> Lisa, good to be here. The Five Timers Club. >> You are in the Five Timers Club. This is David's fifth appearance on the show. And we were talking before we went live- >> Do we do the jacket now and do we do the jacket later? >> Yeah, the jacket will come later. >> Okay. >> The Five Timers Club, like on SNL. We're going to have that for The Cube. We'll get you measured up and get that all fitted for you. >> That'd be better. >> So talk a little bit about Lumen. 'Cause last time you hear it wasn't Lumen. >> We weren't Lumen last time. So this is the first time... last time we were here on The Cube at re:Invent. This was probably 2019 or so. We were a different company. The company was called CenturyLink back then. We rebranded in 2020 to really represent our identity as a delivery of...as a solutions provider over our fiber network. So Lumen is the corporate brand, the company name. It represents basically a lot of the fiber that's been laid throughout the world and in North America and in enterprise metropolitan areas over the past 10 to 15 years. You know, companies like CenturyLink and Quest and Level 3, all those companies have really rolled up into building that core asset of the network. So Lumen is really the brand for the 21st century for the company, really focused on delivering services for the enterprise and then delivering a lot of value added services around that core network asset. >> So rebranding during the pandemic, what's been the customer feedback and sentiment? >> Yeah, I think customers have really actually appreciated it as certainly a more technology oriented brand, right? Sort of shifting away a little bit from some of the communications and telecom background of the company and the heritage. And while those assets that were built up during that period of time have been substantial, and we still build off of those assets going forward, really what a lot of the customer feedback has been is that it puts us in a posture to be a little bit more of a business solutions provider for customers, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do with that core network asset, the fiber networking a lot of the services that we launch on that in terms of public IP, you know, public internet capacity, private networking, private VPNs, VoIP and voice services. These are services that you'd expect from a company like that. But there's a lot of services inside the Lumen brand that you might surprise you, right? There's an edge computing capability that can deliver five milliseconds of latency within 95% of North American enterprise. >> Wow. >> There's a threat detection lab that goes and takes all of the traffic flowing over the public side of our network and analyzes it in a data lake and turns it into threat intelligence that we then offer off to our customers on a subscription basis. There's a production house that goes and, you know, does production networking for major sports arenas and sports events. There's a wide range of services inside of Lumen that really what the Lumen brand allows us to do is start talking about what those services can do and what networking can do for our customers in the enterprise in a more comprehensive way. >> So good changes, big brand changes for Lumen in the last couple of years. Also, I mean, during a time of such turmoil in the world, we've seen work change dramatically. You know, everybody...companies had to pivot massively quickly a couple years ago. >> Yep. >> Almost approaching three years ago, which is crazy amazing to be digital because they had to be able to survive. >> They did >> Now they're looking at being able to thrive, but now we're also in this hybrid work environment. The future of work has changed. >> Totally. >> Almost permanently. >> Yep. >> How is Lumen positioned to address some of the permanent changes to the work environments? Like the last time we were at re:Invented- >> Yeah. >> In person. This didn't exist. >> That's right. So really, it's one of the things we talk to our customers almost the most about is this idea of the future of work. And, you know, we really think about the future of work as about, you know, workers and workloads and the networks that connect them. You think about how much all of those demands are shifting and changing, right? What we were talking about, and it's very easy for all of us to conceptualize what the changing face of the worker looks like, whether those are knowledge workers or frontline workers the venues in which people are working the environments and that connectivity, predictability of those work desk environments changes so significantly. But workloads are changing and, you know we're sitting here at a trade show that does nothing but celebrate the transformation of workloads. Workloads running in ways in business logic and capturing of data and analysis of data. The changing methodologies and the changing formats of workloads, and then the changing venues for workloads. So workloads are running in places that never used to be data centers before. Workloads are running in interesting places and in different and challenging locations for what didn't used to be the data center. And so, you know, the workloads and the workloads are in a very dynamic situation. And the networks that connect them have to be dynamic, and they have to be flexible. And that's really why a lot of what Lumen invests in is working on the networks that connect workers and workloads both from a visibility and a managed services perspective to make sure that we're removing blind spots and then removing potential choke points and capacity issues, but then also being adaptable and dynamic enough to be able to go and reconfigure that network to reach all of the different places that, you know, workers and workloads are going to evolve into. What you'll find in a lot of cases, you know, the workers...a common scenario in the enterprise. A 500 person company with, you know, five offices and maybe one major facility. You know, that's now a 505 office company. >> Right. >> Right? The challenge of the network and the challenge of connecting workers and workloads is really one of the main conversations we have with our customers heading into this 21st century. >> What are some of the things that they're looking forward to in terms of embracing the future of work knowing this is probably how it's going to remain? >> Yeah, I think companies are really starting to experiment carefully and start to think about what they can do and certainly think about what they can do in the cloud with things like what the AWS platform allows them to do with some of the AWS abstractions and the AWS services allow them to start writing software for, and they're starting to really carefully, but very creatively and reach out into their you know, their base of enterprise data, their base of enterprise value to start running some experiments. We actually had a really interesting example of that in a session that Lumen shared here at re:Invent yesterday. You know, for the few hundred people that were there. You know, I think we got a lot of great feedback. It was really interesting session about the...really gets at this issue of the future of work and the changing ways that people are working. It actually was a really cool use case we worked on with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports, and AWS with the... using the Lumen network to essentially virtualize the production truck. Right? So you've all heard that, you know, the sports metaphor of, you know, the folks in the booth were sitting there started looking down and they're saying, oh great job by the guys or the gals in the truck. >> Yep. >> Right? That are, you know, that bring in that replay or great camera angle. They're always talking about the team and their production truck. Well, that production truck is literally a truck sitting outside the stadium. >> Yep. >> Full of electronics and software and gear. We were able to go and for a Major League Baseball game in...back in August, we were able to go and work with AWS, using the Lumen network, working with our partners and our customers at Fox Sports and virtualize all of that gear inside the truck. >> Wow. That's outstanding. >> Yep. So it was a live game. You know, they simulcast it, right? So, you know, we did our part of the broadcast and many hundreds of people, you know, saw that live broadcast was the first time they tried doing it. But, you know, to your point, what are enterprises doing? They're really starting to experiment, sort to push the envelope, right? They're kind of running things in new ways, you know, obviously hedging their bets, right? And sort of moving their way and sort of blue-green testing their way into the future by trying things out. But, you know, this is a massive revenue opportunity for a Major League Baseball game. You know, a premier, you know, Sunday night baseball contest between the Yankees and the Cardinals. We were able to go and take the entire truck, virtualize it down to a small rack of connectivity gear. Basically have that production network run over redundant fiber paths on the Lumen network up into AWS. And AWS is where all that software worked. The technical director of the show sitting in his office in North Carolina. >> Wow. >> The sound engineer is sitting in, you know, on his porch in Connecticut. Right? They were able to go and do the work of production anywhere while connected to AWS and then using the Lumen network, right? You know, the high powered capabilities of Lumens network underlay to be able to, you know, go and design a network topology and a worked topology that really wasn't possible before. >> Right. It's nice to hear, to your point, that customers are really embracing experimentation. >> Right. >> That's challenging to, obviously there was a big massive forcing function a couple of years ago where they didn't have a choice if they wanted to survive and eventually succeed and grow. >> Yeah. >> But the mindset of experimentation requires cultural change and that's a hard thing to do especially for I would think legacy organizations like Major League Baseball, but it sounds like they have the appetite. >> Yeah. They have the interest. >> They've been a fairly innovative organization for some time. But, you know, you're right. That idea of experimenting and that idea of trying out new things. Many people have observed, right? It's that forcing function of the pandemic that really drove a lot of organizations to go and make a lot of moves really quickly. And then they realized, oh, wait a minute. You know... I guess there's some sort of storytelling metaphor in there at some point of people realizing, oh wait, I can swim in these waters, right? I can do this. And so now they're starting to experiment and push the envelope even more using platforms like AWS, but then using a lot of the folks in the AWS partner network like Lumen, who are designing and sort of similarly inspired to deliver, you know, on demand and virtualized and dynamic capabilities within the core of our network and then within the services that our network can and the ways that our network connects to AWS. All of that experimentation now is possible because a lot of the things you need to do to try out the experiment are things you can get on demand and you can kind of pat, you can move back, you can learn. You can try new things and you can evolve. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Right. Absolutely. What are some of the things that you're excited about as, you know, here was this forcing function a couple years ago, we're coming out of that now, but the world has changed. The future of work as you are so brilliantly articulated has changed permanently. What are you excited about in terms of Lumen and AWS going forward? As we saw a lot of announcements this morning, big focus on data, vision of AWS is really that flywheel with Adams Selipsky is really, really going. What are you excited about going forward into 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we've been working with AWS for so long and have been critical partners for so long that, you know, I think a lot of it is continuation of a lot of the great work we've been doing. We've been investing in our own capabilities around the AWS partner network. You know, we're actually in a fairly unique position, you know, and we like to think that we're that unique position around the future of work where between workers, workloads and the networks that connect them. Our fingers are on a lot of those pulse points, right? Our fingers are on at really at the nexus of a lot of those dynamics. And our investment with AWS even puts us even more so in a position to go where a lot of the workloads are being transformed, right? So that's why, you know, we've invested in being one of the few network operators that is in the AWS partner network at the advanced tier that have the managed services competency, that have the migration competency and the network competency. You can count on one hand the number of network operators that have actually invested at that level with AWS. And there's an even smaller number that is, you know, based here in the United States. So, you know, I think that investment with AWS, investment in their partner programs and then investment co-innovation with AWS on things like that MLB use case really puts us in a position to keep on doing these kinds of things within the AWS partner network. And that's one of the biggest things we could possibly be excited about. >> So what does the go to market look like? Is it Lumen goes in, brings in AWS, vice versa? Both? >> Yeah, so a lot of being a member of the AWS partner network you have a lot of flexibility. You know, we have a lot of customers that are, you know, directly working with AWS. We have a lot of customers that would basically look to us to deliver the solution and, you know, and buy it all as a complete turnkey capability. So we have customers that do both. We have customers that, you know, just look to Lumen for the Lumen adjacent services and then pay, you know, pay a separate bill with AWS. So there's a lot of flexibility in the partner network in terms of what Lumen can deliver as a service, Lumen can deliver as a complete solution and then what parts of its with AWS and their platform factors into on an on-demand usage basis. >> And that would all be determined I imagine by what the customer really needs in their environment? >> Yeah, and sort of their own cloud strategy. There's a lot of customers who are all in on AWS and are really trying to driving and innovating and using some of the higher level services inside the AWS platform. And then there are customers who kind of looked at AWS as one of a few cloud platforms that they want to work with. The Lumen network is compatible and connected to all of them and our services teams are, you know, have the ability to go and let customers sort of take on whatever cloud posture they need. But if they are all in on AWS, there's, you know. Not many networks better to be on than Lumen in order to enable that. >> With that said, last question for you is if you had a bumper sticker or a billboard. Lumen's rebranded since we last saw you. What would that tagline or that phrase of impact be on that bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I'd get in a lot of trouble with our marketing team if I didn't give the actual bumper sticker for the company. But we really think of ourselves as the platform for amazing things. The fourth industrial revolution, everything going on in terms of the future of work, in terms of the future of industrial innovation, in terms of all the data that's being gathered. You know, Adam in the keynote this morning really went into a lot of detail on, you know, the depth of data and the mystery of data and how to harness it all and wrangle it all. It requires a lot of networking and a lot of connectivity. You know, for us to acquire, analyze and act on all that data and Lumen's platform for amazing things really helps forge that path forward to that fourth industrial revolution along with great partners like AWS. >> Outstanding. David, it's been such a pleasure having you back on The Cube. We'll get you fitted for that five timers club jacket. >> It sounds good. (Lisa laughs) >> I'll be back. >> Thanks so much for your insights and your time and well done with what you guys are doing at Lumen and AWS. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For David Shacochis, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube hopefully all day. This is our first full day of coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. Stick around. We'll be back tomorrow, and we know we're going to see you then. Have a great night. (upbeat music)

>>Good afternoon. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone west for VMware Explorer, 2022. We're excited to welcome a new cube guest to the program. Steve Bravo joins us the SVP of edge technology at Luman. Great to have you on the program. Thank >>You very much for having me. Appreciate it. Welcome. >>Talk to us a little bit about, we've had several conversations with Luman folks over the last day and a half, but talk to us a little bit about it from your perspective, the VMware relationship with Luman. Okay. >>So it's actually, you know, we have been partners for the last 20 years. Okay. When, when VMware was really cutting its teeth in the, the virtualized space Luman, and one of its, you know, companies that acquired through time was really a, a cutting edge user of VMware technologies. And as, as time has evolved and VMware's technologies have evolved, we have grown with VMware. So much of the software they write is embedded not only within our network, but on our edge platforms and extended out to the, the, the hyperscalers as well as in the client pre. So it's an ever growing partnership and, and one that we're continually innovating and creating better outcomes for, for really the, the enterprise space. >>Talk about those enterprise customers and some of the outcomes that you are helping to deliver. What's the joint value prop that Luman and BM bring to the enterprise. >>So really stronger together, right? If you think about the strengths that Luman has, it's really our, our, our network. We call that our central nervous system, our, our, our platform. Okay. So all of our edge technologies and compute capabilities that we're able to deploy in our edge centers, data centers globally, as well as out to prem, we lay the software technologies that VMware creates not only from a hyper virtualized sense, but also through sassy through security and also out to workspace one. So it's their entire suite, we're able to support it. So with those, we create amazing technology solutions to serve the enterprise, whether it's healthcare, whether it's manufacturing, retail space, the customers are plenty in the use cases are endless. >>You talked about your history and, and at the foundation of what you do this sort of idea of a central nervous system. Yeah. The network, if we wanted to completely geek out, we could just talk about that. Yeah. For an hour. Sure. We could, but we're not going to, we were talking just, you know, before we came live, came on, live about lumens philosophy and how you're taking that foundation, that network, that central nervous system, and you have a philosophy about what you want to achieve with it. And the other things you layer on top of it. Yeah. Tell, tell us about that. Cause I thought was >>Interesting it's so it it's really all about furthering human progress with technology. Okay. We're very lucky that we have the global network that we do, but the workloads, right? The applications that make really life kind of, you know, go round in today's world lives in, in forms and factors of compute that hang off of the network. We're very lucky that we can bring that all together. So over the years, you know, every enterprise has a different need, right? They're trying to solve a problem. We want to help them solve that problem. Right. We bring our technology, our capabilities, our experience, and, and experts to really cater to and, and be that partner that can, that can build the entire stack for them to allow them to be very, very efficient in their place of competition. So >>I wanna hear, I wanna hear a concrete example of that in action. Sure. But, but I think it's interesting, not just from a, what is happening on the outside perspective, but it's also very interesting culturally yes. From a, an organizational perspective when you wake up in the morning and you have that mindset, that that's what your mission is. Sure. That's a lot different than waking up in the morning, thinking I'm going to deploy 50 terabytes of storage. Absolutely. I'm going to install nine ports and yellow cables and blue cables in my switch. That's right. Thinking you're toiling and obscurity. So everybody, everybody illumined then is waking up with this mission in mind. Yes. Which makes the day a lot easier to get through when you're, when you're having to work hard. But give me, give a, gimme a concrete example of that in, in motion. >>Sure. So it's actually, it's, it's about those outcomes and those use cases, right. I, I explain to my kids, sometimes they're like, dad tell me, you know, like tell me what you do. And if you start talking about the cables and the compute, they, their eyes gloss over. But if I say to him, you know, remember when you were sick and it was during COVID and you couldn't go to the doctor. Right. And we were able to pop open the computer and we were able to see a doctor on the screen and they had to stick your tongue out and do all the things you got care. And we were able to deliver that based on our platform, based on our network, we helped healthcare providers, you know, go remote to see patients as COVID was happening and people were going to the hospital. So that's just a real world scenario that we did for a very large network when people were dealing with it, they needed to really expand horizontally horizontally to allow care providers, to operate in different areas. And we were able to hit it outta the park. >>That's a great explanation. Did, did your kids go, wow, dad, that's >>Awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then they're like, anything else, like, is there anything else cool. And talk about sporting stadiums, lighting up, you know, a different venue where they go and they're able to from their, you know, phone order, a soda or a pretzel and, and with the different sensors from an I two, >>Now you're talking >>Yeah. Perspective like dad, you guys did this. Yes. You know, it it's, so it resonates. And those, those use cases, if you think about the building blocks, right. Whether it's the medical scenario or, or a, a smart stadium, the building blocks are very similar. Right. And we're lucky enough that you put those building blocks together in a, in a, in a prescriptive way for a specific outcome. You're able to play with strikes and you're able to get better scale and you're able to move fast because the technology industry we're in is it's. I mean, it's, it's moving at light speeds >>As the edge become grows and grows and expands and becomes more and more amorphous, how have your customer conversations changed as there's more demand for every company to become a data company, to be a security company. Right. How have they kind of elevated up the stack to the C-suite >>We've really had to just pivot to talking about that, that outcome, that, that entity, that, that enterprise is really trying to achieve. You know, if you think about, you know, the, the two examples, another one, it could be very, you know, cost driven. It could be that we need to get to market in a much more rapid fashion at a global level. How can we stamp things out quickly? So you take those outcomes, show them how the technology's going to enable it, and then you can really open the door for the return. Right. Did you get the cost savings? Yes. Did you, did you achieve that time to market for, it could be seasonality, right. Right. People don't have to pay for the full boat anymore. If, if let's say there are an online marketplace and it it's huge around the seasons, right. Around the holiday season, there's gonna be big peaks that they have there. Right. We like to be able to have them burst and, and ebb and flow. So it's all about that outcome. And getting to that, the technology pieces, you just put 'em together to accommodate. >>What, what does your go-to market strategy look like? How do you engage with customers? You know, there are, there are finite number of seats, strategic seats at a customer table. Yeah. Are you typically going in arm and arm with partners and alliances? What does that ecosystem look like? Or do you, do you have a direct sales force that engages customers? Yep. Tell, tell me about the, how the whole thing >>Works. So we have a direct sales force. Okay. And we like to play to our strengths. So we have a great Alliance partners as well. So that arm and arm absolutely happens where we are heavily connected already at C-suites. They're able to walk in and make those types of relationships and outcomes a reality. But we find that we are, we're better with partners playing to their strengths with us. Right. If we come in and show up and we have that complete stack, the software experts as well, our assets, our platform, our network, it's really a one, two punch wrap with our service capabilities at a global level that it's unbeatable. So we show up to the very best of our abilities with our alliances. And then with those more steep relationships where we've been there, where we have the relationships, there's more of a trust factor, but it's all about building trust. And we gotta, we gotta show up appropriately to do that. >>So if it's unbeatable, why do customers choose? Luin what, what's the value prop that you talk to customers about? >>So if you think about a, a COO or CIO or CTO and all of the different things, you need to purchase to make outcomes a reality, whether it's network, whether it's compute, whether it's storage, whether it's software, right? Whether it's people, it becomes very easy. If you have a partner that can do all of that for you and it's their assets, right? So we have those assets. We have those, you know, you know, our, our employees are absolutely our greatest asset. My, in my opinion, at a global level. And then we partner with the biggest software manufacturers, like, like an AWS or a, like a VMware. And we, we loaded into our, our fabric. And now we have literally the entire stack right there. It's a single hand to shake rather than I needed to go to a network provider to go to compute provider storage, security. Like you get that holistic solution approach makes it far easier. And that's a, it's a huge differentiator. And >>You, you, you said AWS. Yeah. You work with all you work with all, all the >>Har hyperscalers. Like if you think about the cloud, the, I'll say the, the big three, right? AWS, Google, and Microsoft, everything is using the cloud and the fact that we can connect to it in dynamic ways and extend that experience all the way out to our edge and on-prem and deliver the same experience again, massive differentiator. >>So from your customer's point of view, you can be agnostic. Yes. So you, you can say, well, Azure for this AWS, for that maybe run VMware in both >>100, >>Both context. Interesting stat that was brought up to Lisa and I yesterday through the VCP P program. Yep. The, the VMware cloud provider program, if you aggregate all of that cloud stuff, that's going on, that becomes the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. Yeah. So a lot of the messaging, a lot of the stuff they're talking about now has to do with that. So you, so for example, you could be involved in deploying that software defined data center stack in a variety of hyperscale class. Yes. Where appropriate for people? >>Yeah. 100%. And whether it's in the hyperscalers or in their own data center, in one of our platforms, the, the, the, the biggest differentiators, it's gonna be the same. Right? You have that partner that can do it for you no matter where the venue is. So that's really the, the coming of hybrid cloud, very agnostic. But I always say, it's the best venue. Right? You have different applications are gonna need different things, build it to suit. And when you do that, okay. And it's, and you're not pushing one way, you're taking the, the requirements you build trust. And when you build trust, you build long lasting relationships with your clients, and that's, that's what it's about. And you then make more great outcomes, a reality, >>Right. That trust is absolutely critical. It's currency really is. Yes. Talk about, you have a, a joint innovation lab with VMware. Talk a little bit about that. What is it all about? How long have you guys been doing it? What exciting things are coming from it? So >>We, we, we launched at about 18 months ago. Some, some, some amazing thinkers, you know, on our team and their team came together and it's really to, to keep pace with the market. Okay. So platforms and software evolve at a, at a, at a certain pace, right. And it's always speeding up, but creating use cases within that lab to solve a common core set of problems for maybe a specific vertical is really what it's intended to do. So when the software's ready to kind of an incubation engine that we're testing these use cases, so we can then go deploy and begin solving immediately when market ready. So it, it, it puts us ahead of the game. It gives us those at bats. So we're very comfortable deploying. And, and I would say, you know, created that muscle memory before you're going live in a, in a client environment. >>And then you can show, see, you know, and seen is believing. So there are multiple just, I'll say different, you know, IOT use cases that we're doing right now, 5g wireless, you know, untethered headsets, things of that nature. You think about some of the VI and, and AI capabilities that are emerging, whether it's digital twin, whether it's literally T sensors with packages, tracking those types of things, the use cases are endless. But the, the cool thing about it is you're testing those building blocks that I kind of keep referring to. And you're expanding the portfolio of use cases that you can solve with them. And when you start to see patterns, you now have use cases that can solve many similar needs and outcomes. So it's a, it's a huge differentiator. We're lucky to have the, the teams, the, the collective teams together, making those outcomes a reality, some of the best technologies I've ever seen. >>So the joint innovation lab formed about 18 months ago during the pandemic. What was the compelling event or was, was that part of it, or was it customer demand that, that caused you guys to go, you know what, let's come together and actually build a joint lab. >>We saw how fast things were moving. We wanted to say, okay, as something's getting ready to roll out, let's start touching it before, before it's market ready. So when it does, we can hit market and begin generating those outcomes immediately. And it, it, it took a little doing, but it came to place very quickly, like mines, right. Thinking the right way, you get a good outcome. >>So if you think about the way that a lot of consolidation has happened, yeah. Over, over recent years, you have large cloud vendors, including VMware. If you, if you accept that definition of their partner program, spanning their software to find data center stack across clouds. And then on the other side of the chasm, you have the organizations that help people take the technology and move it into the realm of outcomes. Yes. Doing actual things with the shiny toys, right. It's one thing to develop the shiny toys. It's another thing to get value out of them. Right. You guys are in that middle space, that critical space. So are the largest global systems integrators in the world. Sure. So how do you, how do you work with, or are you strictly competitive with yeah. The, you know, the, the alphabet soup of, of, yeah. Of global systems integrators, where do you fit into that space? >>So, so again, go back to those, the assets and the capabilities that we have, right? The power users of software, we have a manage and professional services organization, and it's all about, I'll say day zero day one, think of that consultative professional services approach to literally discover, define design, analyze what that outcome is, and then build and deploy. Okay. So migration, you know, transition of workloads, all tee it up for the day, two type capabilities where we are different, those assets that we're building on are hours. Okay. You know, the Accentures, the Deloittes, they're amazing, right. They're also sourcing network, they're sourcing compute, they're sourcing edge. They're sourcing things from other third providers. We are the power users of our capabilities that makes us the best at it. So that integration, we have the, the, the ways to put the, the instructions to put those Legos together better than anybody else. >>Well, so does that mean that you are best targeting at a certain market segment? Where possibly, would you seed some market to the largest of, of global systems integrators at some point? Sure. >>So, so there are certain things that they are amazing at, right. Think about some of the, the, the biggest M applications and things like that. We're power users and power deployers of SAP. That's really, the niche is high up that will go into the app stack, right? Doing the dynamics, doing different types of Oracle suites and things of that nature, let them go there. Right. But enabling applications to live on our platforms and across our networks, we play to our strengths there, leveraging software technologies like VMware, right. And the hyperscalers that's really where I don't wanna say it's their hard boundaries, but again, it's boundaries where we have strength. We will always wanna play to our strengths and be honest, right. If you're honest about your capabilities, you will win the business that you were, that you were great at. And that's what we did. >>Yeah. I, I think there's huge opportunity in that space, frankly. I think not too long ago when asked, I think a lot of people would say, Hmm, it's all gonna be consolidation. There's gonna be five standing over here, five standing over there and they're gonna work together and everyone else is gonna have to go work for those people. What we've seen is organizations like lumen yeah. Taking their historical capabilities and finding that space. Sure. It's really, really interesting to see that >>There's one thing that I'll add too. And the, you know, the, the, the way of the world is automation and orchestration. Okay. When you own the platforms, when you own the technologies that you're able to work with, you're able to evolve those capabilities and it, it, it stays your intellectual property, right. That intellectual property gives you amazing scale too. So that's one of the things that we've been lucky enough to do is we're continually working and involving that suite of orchestration and automation, that layers on top of our platform, right. Our platform for amazing things is it's that automation, orchestration is very key to making it go round. >>Speaking of amazing things, what are some of the things on the horizon for Lumin and VMware? What can customers look forward to in the coming months? >>So yesterday we actually just launched our sassy offering. So that's amazing and great job to the product teams for >>That. I, I, I, I gave one of your colleagues grief yesterday. He didn't appreciate it. I'm sure, but it's considered a party foul to let's, let's remind people what sassy stands for. >>So, so secure a access service edge, basically, all right. Software to find networking. Plus security it's really becomes a dynamic network, right. One that can live, breathe and grow and, and VMware has amazing technology yeah. That we are leveraging that's really the under or the, the overlay network for, for our network. And then we're also even scaling that out too, to, to, to include carbon black security offerings. Okay. As well as workspace one. So those are additional evolutions, some of the, the, the further enhancements with Tansu and Kubernetes. Right, right. In the portfolio as well. So as that capability expands. So, so does, so does the efforts that we have with it. >>Fantastic. Awesome. >>Steve, thank you so much for joining David. Me, I program appreciate talking about lumen. What's going on there, how you're working better together with VMware and the, and the outcomes that you're delivering for customers. We appreciate your time. Thank >>You very much greatly. Appreciate >>It. Our pleasure. Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022, Dave. And I will be right back with our next guest. So don't change the channel.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022, formerly Vmworld. We've been covering this event since 2010. I'm with Dave Nicholson, my cohost. We've got two sets here, live for three days, breaking down all the action, what's going on in the news, what announcements, what are the partners doing, you got the VMware execs, you got the customers, and you got the partner ecosystem, which is booming. We got Darren Wolner, Senior Director of Product Management at Lumen, SASE and SD-WAN, in the midst of it all. The internet is SD-WAN, this is all rocking. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate being here. >> Well, we know the name change LUMEN from CenturyLink. You guys have been on many times on theCUBE talking about, you know, the connective tissue. You got infrastructure, platform, now SASE. Cloud's changing. We're calling it supercloud. Some people call it multicloud. But the game is still the same. You got an on-premise environment, you got edge, could be a building. And you got now cloud-native hyperscale, cloud players, now all connecting, kind of like the old branch office days, connect here. So a lot of the same kind of concepts, but done differently. Give us the quick update from Lumen. What are you guys seeing? What are some of the big trends? >> So the quick update from Lumen is that we just launched a new service called SASE that we're extremely excited about. And this new service from Lumen takes advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that you just mentioned. So we're able to take advantage of our cloud edge 60 plus nodes to help customers move their applications closer to where they're doing business. Major performance boosts. So even though all these customers want to move the workloads to the cloud to improve their efficiency, improve their performance, we are acting quickly to make sure that that experience is a positive one. So as things are evolving and changing, so is Lumen, Aad we're pushing towards that evolution to technology. >> Take a minute to explain, just kind of set the table to the situation of how you guys relate to your customers. You mentioned SASE, which is a service I want to get into. Okay, got connectivity. What are some of the use cases? Where does SASE fit in? What is the use case with the customers? Where are you seeing the most traction? >> And you need to define SASE. It's always a party foul to use an acronym without defining it immediately after the first time you used it, so. >> Okay, so I have to recover from that foul. So, absolutely. So SASE, we view SASE as a convergence of network and security. And what we're doing with SASE is that we're delivering this package of services that are cloud based, that customers can pick and choose whichever ones they want. And that's Secure Access Service Edge. And that is what we're very excited to talk about. >> I mean, basically it's connectivity, it's application security, it's edge. So it's end-to-end. So we all get the acronym. Nice play there. But when reality comes to the customer, what is the use case that you guys are seeing the most on? Lift and shift I get. Is it lift and shift and then cloud native to on-prem? What is some of the things specifically that you guys are selling into? >> Specifically what we're seeing is we're seeing that customers, they want to evolve their networks and move to cloud environments, but not everybody's ready to do it all at the same time. That's part of the reason why SASE has become so popular right now. Because we're enabling customers to pick and choose the order in which they want to move to cloud enabled services, and we're allowing them to choose one or choose them all. And from a use case perspective, as we've just gone through COVID, and everybody knows work from home has become extremely important way of doing business, and that we want to give that flexibility. >> No one would've forecasted 100% work-from-home, VPN, move it under provisioned. (men laughing) So again, shock to the system. >> It is, it is, it is. It was, but with a solution like this, we're able to provide our customers with flexibility to run their businesses any way they want. They to be premise-based, we can support them. They want to be remote, we can support them. That is a huge use case right now. >> I mean, all joking aside, the forcing function, necessity's the mother of invention, and the pandemic really kind of changed the game. How do you guys see security evolving? Because as you look at the security, you got FourNet out there. I know you guys have a relationship with them. You got VMware. There's a lot of different tools and platforms emerging. We hear every CSO we talk to is like, hey, I want to take my 35 tools down to 24, and more platforms, and much more defensibility, not just point security. How do you discuss that with customers around the security conversation? >> So we're finding that our customers want a little bit more simplicity. You had mentioned that they want to bring down their numbers to something that's a little bit more manageable. With the service that we've just launched, we have single vendor solutions, and we're looking to simplify that path for the customer. And it's about simplicity, but it's also about optionality. We want to make sure that we can say yes to our customers. And whatever path that they want to go to, from a software perspective, we're able to support them. And the flexibility of our platform allows that to happen. >> You know, networking, Dave, we always talk about the three major pillars: networking, compute, storage. They never go away. >> No. >> They'll always be around. Networking is now front and center, especially with the abstractions going on. You're starting to see supercloud discussions. You see companies buying more cloud native, like with AWS, to take that CapEx off, but now are putting all that energy into modern application development. Which now puts pressure on, okay, well about network policies? So networking is into the fold again. It's always been there, it never left, but it's becoming different. How do you see the different conversations happening with the network component, with cloud native trend that we're seeing here? >> Well, I think the network component is really table stakes. And what's happening is, as everybody is interested in moving to the cloud, services are becoming instant, right? Digitized. But you have the network that customers are still looking for that level of support from a company like Lumen, and they know that we have a vast infrastructure. So the network conversation doesn't go away. It just evolves. What's happening is customers want to understand how they can better secure those networks. And then what's also happening is people want to use any device, anywhere, anytime. So the conversation about the network is important, but when you think about security, it's starting to move away from the network. It already has. >> There's no more perimeter. >> Exactly. So we need to be able to secure our customers wherever they are, however they want to use their devices. And for us, that path was SASE. >> So go into a little more depth in terms of how this is deployed. What is this thing that is SASE? >> Absolutely. >> Is this software living on the edge on people's servers? Does it include some sort of physical components and wizardry? >> Well... (laughs) >> Peel back-- >> Is it self-service? Is it installable? Does it need professional services? >> So, there is a little bit of wizardry. And what we put together is really an awesome digital platform where customers have the ability to go into the Lumen marketplace, and in five simple steps, purchase a SASE solution based on a few discreet choices that they need to make. And once they've provisioned that, once they've purchased that service, now they have those entitlements. We've created an all new application from the ground up called the Lumen SASE Manager where they're able to go in, take their entitlements, design, build, manage their network. So the customer can go through this journey, and it's relatively quick. And they have tons of flexibility to do that. However, if a customer prefers a seller-led journey, we're still going to help them do that as well. So really the spirit of SASE for us was to give ultimate flexibility to the customer. Consume exactly what you want, consume it the way you want to, but the simplicity factor with our digital approach I think is something that we feel is pretty game changing. >> So when one of those customers, let's say you have a campaign, thank you SASE. What are those customers thanking you for? Give me an example of what a delighted customer would point to as, "I'm really glad we made the decision to do this with Lumen." Why would they be happy? >> Why would they be happy? Because the advantage of doing this with Lumen is not only that simplified digital approach, but we're selling them essentially a cookie, right? And that cookie has two layers, and it has cream filling. And what's going on is-- >> Tastes great. >> Definitely, definitely. But everybody has different tastes, and we'll get to that in a second. But the top layer is the infrastructure that Lumen provides. And we have a vast infrastructure, 450,000 route miles of fiber, 60 plus cloud edge nodes to bring compute closer to the customer. So that's a very important layer that we're providing. And then the other layer of the cookie is the management. Different customers have different needs. Not every business looks alike. So you're going to have some businesses who have invested in their security apparatus, and they may not need enough as much help from us. So we're offering customers different levels of managed service wrapper so they can buy exactly what they need, no more, no less. So let's get to the cream filling. Everybody likes the cream filling, but not everybody likes the same kind. Every time you go down the supermarket aisle and you look at your favorite cream cookie, there's different types of flavors that are introduced from time to time. So what we want to do is to be able to say yes to our customers and give them as much variety as the cream flavors as possible. And that's where the software comes in. If you have dedicated a lot of expertise to a certain platform, we want to be able to support that software platform. And I think the flexibility of the Lumen platform and the flexibility of Lumen SASE solutions allows us to give that flexibility back. >> So you putting that wizardry at the edge, so the customer's environment, whatever they have flexes with the connectivity? >> It does, yes. >> That's what you're getting at. I mean, at the end of the day, we need the network. Everybody wants more bandwidth. >> Its not going away. >> Faster, faster, faster. >> That's right. >> We need more bandwidth. >> That's right. >> But it could be smarter. But that also implements some potential overhead. So you got to understand the end to end. That's where I think the SD-WAN interesting tie-in comes in. How do you talk to customers about that piece? Is it simply you can have your cake and eat it too, and you lose weight with Lumen? I stole that line from Victoria from VMware. I want my cake and eat it too, and I want to lose weight. >> I mean, wouldn't that be a wonderful world if we could do that? Have our cake and lose weight. >> I want to make sure. Yeah. >> But when it comes to SD-WAN, especially under our SASE umbrella, what we're looking to do is go down the road of simplicity and try to work out the amount of compute that a customer needs, and the amount of storage, I'm sorry, not storage, the amount of throughput that a customer needs. And we're getting these customers to make these decisions. They know what they have. They know what they want to run. We will consult with them. Whether they go through our digital experience, whether they go through our seller-led experience, there's always off ramps and a way to talk to a human being and make choices. So we're giving the customer enough information to make an informed decision, and we're here to support them if they need more. >> So you're customer-centric. You guys are good there. I mean, that's solid. Great track record there. I guess my final two questions are: one, how do I consume? I'm the customer. How do I consume? And what's on the roadmap going forward? I mean, look at the project management. You got the keys to the kingdom on the roadmap. And you can share if you want, but maybe you can't share some things. But what's the consumption model? Where do I find it? Is it the marketplace? Is it through channel partners and service providers? And then what's on the roadmap? >> Sure, absolutely. So you can consume this on dotcom through the Lumen marketplace. You could interact with the learn and the buy experience. And then once you've gone through that experience, you're going to consume it through the SASE manager. That's how you're going to use and interact with the service. That's how you're going to consume it. And then you're going to continue to utilize the SASE manager for reporting, access to portals, so forth and so on. You need to make a change to your service, not a problem. It's simple. You go back into the SASE manager, you add more seats to your ZTNA solution. You want to add another site, you go back into the SASE manager, you could purchase another site. We'll take care of all of it. Everything is automated. >> If you're a VMware customer, what's in it for them? >> This is great for VMware. It's the automation of the complete security stack. It's the automation of the SD-WAN portion. And we think that this total package is something that's going to be very appealing to VMware fans, VMware customers, and most importantly, when a VMware customer comes to us and says, "I have a ton of experience with VMware, and I don't want to move away from it, but I can really use the management and the infrastructure that you guys have," I'm able to say yes. >> And then you got the Aria coming out, now you got the cross-cloud, going to be very interesting. Okay, what's on the roadmap? Tell us what's the secret sauce. Reveal some secrets. >> Reveal some secrets. I dunno, there's a lot of people watching. >> They're shaking their head over there, "Don't say it! Don't say it!" (laughs) >> We have a lot of exciting things on the roadmap. I will tell you this because I think it's very important. The way we are developing services today has shifted. No longer can companies afford to roll out one product a year and wait. It takes you a year to roll that product out, and it's stale by the time it comes out, and then it takes you another year to fix it. We have moved to continuous development cycles. We are keeping track of what's going on in the market, what the hot trends are, what the hot services are, and as SASE continues to evolve, we will be able to quickly evolve. So while we do have some ideas of where we want to go on the roadmap, and I'm sure they're shaking their heads over there, what I love is we now have the ability to listen to what our customers want and act quickly. >> I call it the holy trinity. Network storage, compute, get that software intelligence at the edge which is going to be really popular. You guys are in a really perfect position. Thanks for coming on, sharing on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Okay, Darren's here on theCUBE breaking it down for Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, rebranded a few years ago. Connectivity is the key. You still got to connect, network, compute, storage, and you got the data center now, the cloud hybrid, now multicloud. This is the super CUBE, covering supercloud here at VMware Explore 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

foreign welcome back to thecube's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West we're with about seven to ten thousand folks here so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the First with the new name Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff seraki the senior director of product management at Lumen as our next guest Jeff great to have you thank you for having me welcome so looked at the website I always love to see what taglines are and and lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen it's Mission Vision value prop would love to so much like a lot of the Enterprises that are out there today in the market lumens in the process of transforming we're transforming to a technology company from our Network routes but we also have roots in the I.T infrastructure business so we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things uh we believe that our purpose is if you further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution so moving in to the digital age where everything is it's all about data it's about real-time use of that data you machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous Cars Smart cities so the key tenet that we have around the fourth Industrial Revolution is data you need to acquire it and once you acquire it you need to analyze it then you need to act upon it because when you think about it data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us it's not going to stop and information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers so um so with that the I totally lost my train of thought sorry um uh the ability to to leverage that is critical um you know driving driving the revenue from that so for example like machine learning you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures like oh look this is a picture of a dog this is a picture of a kangaroo so that's what our platform enables and that's what we're building we're building it brand new sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities of Global Network one of the largest IP backbone providers so we're super excited about what we have so these days every company has to be a data company to be competitive to you know well even to survive talk a little bit about enabling lumens customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution those two seem to be hand in hand yes so with the services that we provide particularly with our partnership with VMware we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises or so whether it's a corporate office manufacturing facility a you know logistical facility so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 Edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros so you don't have to put equipment on premises that's all connected by the Lumen Network Dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer Prem to Edge data center third party data center all the way into the public Cloud so we can stitch all of that together so I know you mentioned that you know you're you're you know based on your history you're moving further up the value chain with your customers but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of lumen and when you when you refer to this Lumen Network um tell us a little more about that because that that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing yes so roots and Telecom roots and fiber and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world and with that comes not only breath but also capillarity going to the markets we have over a hundred and eighty thousand fiber fed Enterprise buildings so with that imagine if your compute's there or if it's in a one of our Edge data centers how quickly you can transmit information from that Prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire analyze and act on that data so that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that as you mentioned is that is that fiber backbone so I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week that's one of my favorite words awesome awesome word in it because and it actually it's evocative of exactly what I know you're what you're referencing but so you you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be you can communicate between between environments um you've got that you've got that down so that's a very very strong Foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to see if I was correct definitely understanding and um just with that capability it really it comes down to outside the data is the user experience and with application performance you know one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is is network but also location so you can put more bandwidth at it you can take put it on a network with less hops that's one of the advantages of our large backbone or you move the compo compute closer to the point of digital interaction which is what we're doing with our Edge platform so whether it's an edge data center on-prem yeah one thing one thing at the cube that we like to do is we we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are we have a whole series on the question of does Hardware matter and so so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that Foundation yes underneath yeah and we're I mean the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up this stack they don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds well the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute customers want to run their applications they don't want to worry about everything underneath it so that's why we're moving up so we want to be able to create that platform you worry about your applications you worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else talk a little bit about the VMware partnership I see Lumen Edge private Cloud on VCF talk a little bit about that how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer okay we've been working with for VMware for decades they're one of our best partners and our Flagship private Cloud product is based upon the cloud Foundation and it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in so it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in so they're not trying to learn something new like trying to go out and find resources that can manage kubernetes like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there probably took the wrong career path but anyways it's it's new it's emerging whereas VMware people know it there's a lot of people that know it so why spend time as an Enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform so with that VMware brings that foundation and the security of that that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they Trust trust is critical right I mean it's it's table Stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers you know here we are at the VMware explore event that called uh the center of the multi-cloud universe which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me haven't seen any superheroes yet but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume in any event talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage uh sure it's tied to the network um as much as I'm trying to say we opsificate it but it's um network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere so there is a physical behind everything but with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem Edge data center third party data center or we can also provide that service with uh vmc and AWS we can provide it in the cloud so you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is and then that's critical to our customers again that the switching costs of learning it's it's a great product VMware is a great partnership to help bring that all together so what is a delighted customer sound like you're interacting with a delighted customer they're not gonna they're not going to pick up the phone and tell you you know what I love your network what what are they going to be what are they going to tell you they're happy about a delighty customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all our virtual machines work our applications work our software Engineers they can develop against it our costs are optimized that's what they're going to care about if they start talking about oh our virtual machines or servers and that means there's probably something wrong so we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works so it's really if your application if you want to talk to me about your application that's what's top of mind for you we're doing our job now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works right yes you let them know it's like look no no one is no one is touting what you do but it really still is important it is very you want to make sure keep those folks happy yes very important talk a little bit Jeff about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw you know two and a half years ago businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital have you seen priorities shift up the c-suite stock over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations yeah I mean over the past couple years with the proliferation of public cloud you know the edicts of got to go to the cloud we got to go Cloud go to the go to the cloud so everything goes to the cloud it's great it's good for a lot of applications but not for all applications and the customer conversations were having a lot of it are okay what what comes back because with Cloud cream and costs it just yeah if you're looking at a permanent VM basis you know public Cloud works but when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support entire Enterprise that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly are you saying that we we yeah we hear the term repatriation yes used are you saying a fair fair amount of that yes we're seeing that then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business that's expensive especially if an Enterprise has their own like that's you're talking about 10 million dollars per megawatt just of capital cost there so and then if they're in a third party you still have physical space and power you have servers there you have to assume someone's optimizing those servers and even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it that's a lot of work that's a lot of resources and human capital that our private Cloud solution with VMware takes away so that they can again they can worry about their applications providing business value providing customer experience versus is there anything on this server or not does somebody need this virtual machine what are all these public Cloud spend items we have how's this out of control it allows them to focus so that's kind of how things have have evolved and changed over the years one of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey the cloud journey is going from cloud chaos which is where a lot of businesses are now to Cloud smart how does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to Cloud smart what is a cloud smart strategy from lumen's lens look like first of all you have to have a strategy as an Enterprise you'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do and part of not knowing what to do is do we even have the right people looking at this and so what Lumen what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues so maybe they do have a hybrid Cloud strategy okay have you implemented it no why not we don't have enough people okay those are resources we can bring in because not only you provide network and infrastructure but we also have managed surface capabilities managed Services capabilities we can sit on top of that we have Cloud migration practices we have centers of excellence around sap and other services so let us help dissect your problem let's take a let's look at the landscape you have out there find out where everything's buried and dig it up and then we figure out okay how do we move from one place the other you don't just lift and shift and so that those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them and our private Cloud product we have it sitting on our Edge right in those 60 metros they can spin up a private Cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there you know move it to another place or move it into the public Cloud if that's where the application needs to live I'm curious about lumen's go to market strategy customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out like what you just were referencing you know what what do we do next uh what's lumen's path to a seat at that table are you are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end user customer or are you going in partnering with others what does that look like in the real world in the real world it's Partners working together no one single entity can provide everything we have to work together and with our infrastructure layer we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific Solutions that then you know they can be Hardware Partners they can be software Partners but then we can collectively go talk to the market talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed Services capabilities that's how we can kind of glue it all together so that's the direction we're going in so be very focused we're focused on manufacturing you're focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there that's where we have a strong customer base strong customer relationships and that's how we're doing it we don't want to have an infrastructure conversation we want to outcome and application conversation that's what every customer is talking about it's all about outcomes is there Jeff a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together yeah it's a yeah we kind of use this one a lot but it's it's uh it's a really good one um and we've seen um uh clones of this and and other opportunities manufacturing smart manufacturing you need to have the equipment that takes that information again that data from all the iot devices analyze it operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now so you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute you don't necessarily want that compute you know a thousand miles away you want it as close as possible particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut your network goes down okay then your factory goes down that's millions of dollars so with that compute there we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities and that's running on Lumen private cloud based upon VMware on vcloud foundation and it's working great and it's it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand I've seen similar use cases in logistics it's yeah I mean it's phenomenal what we can do when you're in conversations with prospects what's the why what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their Edge Solutions it's really the resources we bring to bear like you know we we keep talking a lot about Network and uh trying to get away from the sniper that's my cousin the network is is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first but it's those other resources the ability to to manage I.T infrastructure which have been doing for decades a lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time and then with those areas of expertise managed Services it's providing that all together and with lumen's history the Partnerships we have I mean we have a lot of Partnerships so we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer and we like to use the term best execution venue so each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help help customers find that out and it's really I mean it's that simple we just need to sit down and have a conversation we can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer is ready so obviously some some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so what are you excited about as you continue this long-standing partnership and evolving it forward I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have not only do we have our private Cloud products uh we're leveraging them for kubernetes but also our sassy product we're partnered with VMware on that so we're really tight at the hip with these Cutting Edge Products that we're taking to Market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about so I'm just looking forward us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people threatening of the partnership excellent Jeff thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what's going on with Lumen how you're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution enabling customers to really become data companies we appreciate your time on your insights thank you for Jeff saraki and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022. you're watching thecube the leader in Live tech coverage [Music]

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the cubes Coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 The digital edition. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm welcoming back one of our Cube alumni. Paul Saville joins me the S VP of product management and services from Lumen Technologies. Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Last time I got to go to an event was aws reinvent 2019. You were there, but when you were there, you were with centurylink Centurylink. Lumen, What's the correlation? >>Yeah, well, thanks for asking that question. Yes. So we did Rand rebrand our company to loom in technologies. And there's a reason for that because, really, a few years ago, centurylink was largely a consumer telecom business. It's roughly half of its business was in the consumer space, delivering home broadband services, voice services. The other half of the business was around enterprise services and telecom services. But now our company has grown, and we've become much more than that. Now the consumer side of our business is much smaller it's. It's less than 25% of our business overall, and we brought in many more capabilities and technologies. And so we really felt like we were at a point where we and talking to our customers and doing brand analysis around the world because we're now a global, uh, company that has operations in over 100 countries around the world. Um, we felt like we needed to change that branding to represent who we are as terms of that, that large enterprise services company that does a lot more than just telecom services. And so that's why we came up with the name of Lumen Technologies. And as I said, the consumer side, the business still has a centurylink brand. But now the Enterprise Services piece of our company is called Lumen. >>So as that's transpired during this very dynamic time, just give me a little bit of perspective from your customers. How are they embracing this reading? Because we know rebrand is far more than simply rebranding product names and things like that. >>Yes, yeah, I think our customers we're really embracing it. Well, I mean, we've got great feedback from them on the new naming approach and our customers love the name. And but they also more than just the name they love, the idea of, of what we're doing and how we're positioning, how we're transforming our company to really represent what we do as being a company that delivers a platform for managing and distributing digital applications and digital assets across the world. And as you as this audience really knows, uh, enterprises values arm or and MAWR being being determined by their digital assets, whether that is content or whether it's applications. Or it could be, um, processes and things that the intellectual property that that companies own. And when we thought about our company and what it was that we really do for our customers, it really boils down to that is that customers trust us to move their their most valuable digital assets around the world to place them where they need to be when they need to be secured them in place and remove them when they don't need them there anymore. >>And that trust is absolutely critical. I want to get your perspective on something I noticed on Lumens website saying powering progress and the promise of the fourth Industrial Revolution. First of all, what is the promise of the fourth Industrial Revolution? And how is Lumen positioned to deliver progress on it? >>Yeah, So the fourth Industrial Revolution. Some of the audience may not understand what we mean by that when there's really been been. Up to now, there have been three industrial or industrial revolutions. The last one was the advent of the Internet and electron ICS And, you know, looming in its history plays a big role in the third Industrial Revolution because of the build out of the global Internet. You know, we operate one of the largest public Internet networks in the world, and but now we see that technology is pacing. Is taking a ramp up in the next phase of leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning i O. T technologies technologies that that require applications and data that need to be distributed in a much more wide basis because computers happening everywhere in the fourth Industrial Revolution. And when we say that we're enabling that and we're enabling the promise of that, we're looking at what we do as having a platform that enables enterprise customers to create capabilities that leverage Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies and distribute those around the world on a dynamic basis in a real time basis, in in in the fashion of How Cloud has evolved over the last few years. >>So how are you guys working together with AWS to enable customers to be able to leverage that technology that power the ability to get data that they need all across the globe as quickly as possible? >>Yes, so we worked with AWS and a number of ways in that front. You know, of course, AWS makes some great products that are based in the cloud. And they do all these technologies that are speaking about in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning and video analytics or things and tools that AWS is built to be run out of their out of their cloud services. But Lemon works with AWS in that distribution aspect of it, and taking those assets and those applications and making them operate on a much widely distributed basis and dropping them on customer premise locations at the deep edge in into different markets wherever it makes the most sense for customers, from a performance and economic standpoint to be running those, uh, those next generation types of applications. And so we work with in combination with a W s to build those solutions into end for customers. Lumen has a professional services I t services organization also, that helps customers put together complex solutions involving Internet of things. So we, for instance, we just deployed a factory environment that has a million square foot factory with high level of automation that's run using these types of analytics tools where we're we're putting together the integration on the factory floor back to, uh, the cloud a cloud like aws. >>So in the last, you know, nine months of the world being in such a different place with businesses overnight suddenly having to dio almost 100% remote operations, how does the technology that you just talked about? How does that facilitate a business to keep up and running to not just be able to survive and continue to pivot as they need to during this time, but also to be able to really become the drivers of tomorrow? >>Yes, you know, and from our position is having, you know, over 100,000 enterprise customers and operating in regions over the world are perspective. We've really been able to see how our customers have survived and thrived and those who have not thrived so well through this whole cove it pandemic. And, you know, one of the keys for the companies that have really kind of excelled during this time has been there how far along they were in the adoption curve of cloud technologies and things like the Fourth Industrial Revolution types of technologies. Because those companies were able to dynamically scale up re shift, their resource is they were able to act remotely and control things remotely without having to have humans on premise on site engaging. Um, you know, some of the factory things that we've seen some of the work from home situations that we've seen those companies that were not operating with the kind of flexibility and scale that the cloud environment and the the four ir environment enables have really have really struggled, while the others have really been able to step up on bond, even outperform in many ways from where they were before. >>Yeah, we've been talking for months on the Cube about this acceleration of digital transformation that this pandemic has really forced and seen those companies to your point. Those that were already poised to be agile to adopted are in a much better position. One of the companies I was talking to you recently has Webcams all over the globe, and they're providing, um, you could get it throughout your Apple TV or I think, in Amazon Fire Stick where you can have these virtual experiences going into what's going on in Paris right now, of course, helping us live vicariously since we can't travel. But that's the whole proliferation of the edge and the amount of data that's being generated and process at the edge to the cloud to the core and getting that quickly to the consumer, whether it's a business or an actual consumer, what are you guys doing to help your business is your customers leverage the edge in a in an efficient way so that this accelerated pace that we're living in is actually able to help them. Dr Value. >>Yeah, we we have seen a really uptick in terms of edge opportunities since the Kobe pandemic hit and s so I can give you a great example of one that we that we recently just publicly announced its with a interesting situation with a company called Cyber Reef. Cyber Reef Builds has security technology that they help protect school systems and kids that are now being educated at home instead of in the public schools. Physically, they're they're they're at home, and those kids need protection from the Internet because they're on the Internet all day now. And Cyber Reef provides security tools for the public school systems to help protect those Children and what they're doing and making sure that there focused on school and not, you know, getting. They're having bad actors reached them through the public Internet. They're doing that That is an edge application because they needed to place their security software control tools very close to the edge deep into these markets, with good connection into public Internet and close proximity to the eyeballs of these, uh, these schoolchildren that around in the area, and so they have deployed across the country across our footprint, their their their platform, basically on on our platform to support those deployments toe help our Children as they get educated, >>so important. And if you think about a year ago when we were all in Vegas for reinvent 2019, we wouldn't even have thought we would need something of that scale. I'm here we are with this massive need and companies like Lumet and A W s being able to enable that. Talk to me a little bit about though what you guys are doing with a W s outpost is that part of what you just talked about? >>It wasn't for that example that I just gave, but we are working a lot with AWS outpost. And so we have we see aws outpost, a za key part of our total edged portfolio of solutions that we that we deliver. We have been, uh, investing a lot in our data centers across the world, because looming has hundreds of data centers that are deeply distributed into all of these markets around the world and working with aided without the ws on certifying those locations as outpost deployment, uh, locations. We have also used that I T services organization that that can provide consultation and I t management services for our enterprise customers. Thio. We've been certifying them on outpost configurations. So we've been training our I T professionals on, uh, the AWS solution and on the outpost solution in getting those certification credentials so that we can bring joint products to market with AWS that involved outposts as part of the solution and build in the end capabilities that combine our our services and capabilities with AWS and outpost for for combined solution. >>And can that combined solution to help your customers your joint customers get faster access to their data? Because we know data volume is only going up and up and up, and businesses need to be able to gain insights in real time. Is this the technology that could help get faster insights or access data faster? >>Absolutely. You know, that's and that's one of the key value propositions of ah, a solution like an outpost. Is that because you can drop them pretty much anywhere in the world that you that you need to put compute close to the point of digital interaction? Then, uh, it makes an ideal solution for customers that, uh, that want to work in that AWS environment and also leverage all of the other tools that eight of us can bring to bear from the cloud, uh, platform that that they that they offer but yeah, the place and compute close to that. That point of digital interaction is what it's all about, and it isn't just driven by performance, and performance is a really key part of it because they wanna have that fast interaction at the edge. But there are other things there, too. I mean, sometimes there are economics that play out for many companies that just make it make more sense to act on on compute or storage that it sits, sits more centrally, too many notes that could be aggregated in a market to that one essential location. We're running across use cases where customers, uh, they want to keep that data local because of governance issues or because of privacy issues or because of some kind of a regulatory requirement that they've got that they don't. They need to know exactly where that that data resides at all times, and it needs to be localized in a certain market or country. And eso they're the types of reasons why they would want to use an outpost to really there's there numerous. >>So last question. When you're talking with customers, I imagine the conversations quite different the last nine months or so. Maybe even the level of which you're having these conversations has gone up to the C suite or maybe even to the board. What do you what's your advice to businesses in any industry that really need to move forward quickly, transform to be able to start harnessing the power that four er can deliver but are just not sure where to start. >>Yeah, so, you know, we're just my advice is that they're gonna have to embrace the future embrace that, you know, embrace change. We're Look, we we have never been in a period of time where the pace of change has been assed fast as it is now, and it's not going to slow down. And so you do have to embrace that. But when you But if you're sitting there struggling, I appreciate the dilemma that they're in because, like, Well, where do I start? What do I what do I try? The thing is that that you can you you should pick a project that you can manage and deploy it. But when you deploy it and test it, make sure that you've got really measurable results. that you have really clear KP eyes of what you're trying to achieve and what you know. Are you out for financial goals or you out for performance improvement? Are you out for I t. Greater I t agility. Build the measures around that, Then test the technology that you want to try because we find that some companies approach it and they're kind of like doing it as a science experiment. And then they go, Wow, this was This was cool. It was a good science experiment, but it didn't, but it didn't wind up. They didn't capture the the actual benefit of it. And so then they don't They can't go in and prove it in anymore. And it's kind of like it sets them back because they didn't take that extra preparation >>and businesses in any industry. Nobody has. Has the time Thio face a setback because there's gonna be somebody right behind you in the rear view mirror who's gonna be smaller, agile, more nimble to take advantage. Paul. Great advice for businesses in every industry, and thank you for talking to us about what Lumen Technologies is what you guys are doing with a W s to help customers really embrace the capabilities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We appreciate your time. >>All right. Thank you. And thank you to the Cuba. It's good to see you all again. >>Good to see you too. Glad you're safe. And hopefully next time we'll get to see you in person soon For Paul Saville. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020? Yeah.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm Yes. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube we're here with Hillary Hunter, the VP and CTO and IBM fellow of IBM cloud at IBM. Hillary, Great to see you welcome back, You're no stranger to us in the cube your dentist few times. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks so much for having me back. Great to talk more today >>I believe I B M is the premier sponsor for red hat summit this year. No, I mean I think they're somewhat interested in what's happening. >>Yeah, you know, somebody is such a great event for us because it brings together clients that, you know, we work together with red head on and gives us a chance to really talk about that overall journey to cloud and everything that we offer around cloud and cloud adoption um, and around redheads capabilities as well. So we look forward to the summit every year for sure. >>You know, the new IBM red hat relationship obviously pretty tight and successful seeing the early formations and customer attraction and just kind of the momentum, I'll never forget that Red hat something was in SAN Francisco. I sat down with Arvin at that time, uh, Red hat was not part of IBM and it was interesting. He was so tied into cloud native. It was almost as if he was dry running the acquisition, which he announced just moments later after that. But you can see the balance. The Ceo at IBM really totally sees the cloud. He sees that experience. He sees the customer impact. This has been an interesting year, especially with Covid and with the combination of red hat and IBM, this cloud priority for IT leaders is more important than ever before. What's your, what's your take on this? Because clearly you guys are all in on cloud, but not what people think, what's your, what's your view on this? >>Yeah. You know, from, from the perspective of those that are kind of data oriented IBM Institute for Business Value, did lots of studies over the last year, you know, saying that over 60% of leaders feel, you know, increased urgency to get to the cloud, um they're intending to accelerate their program to the cloud, but I think, you know, just even as consumers where each very conscious that our digital behaviors have changed a lot in the last year and we see that in our enterprise client base where um everything from, you know, a bank, we work that that that had to stand up their countries equivalent of the payroll protection program in a matter of weeks, which is just kind of unheard of to do something that robust that quickly or um, you know, retail obviously dealing with major changes, manufacturing, dealing with major changes and all consumers wanting to consume things on an app basis and such, not going into brick and mortar stores and such. And so everything has changed and months, I would say have sort of timeframes of months have been the norm instead of years for um, taking applications forward and modernizing them. And so this journey to cloud has compressed, It's accelerated. And as one client I spoke with said, uh, in the midst of last year, you know, it is existential that I get to cloud with urgency and I think That's been that has been the theme of 2020 and now also 2021. And so it is, it is the core technology for moving faster and dealing with all the change that we're all experiencing. >>That's just so right on point. But I got I want to ask you because this is the key trend enterprises are now realizing that cloud native architecture is based on open source specifically is a key architectural first principle now. >>Yeah. >>What's your, what, what would you say to the folks out there who were listening to this and watching this video, Who were out in the enterprise going, hey, that's a good call. I'm glad I did it. So I don't have any cognitive dissidence or I better get there faster. >>Yeah. You know, open source is such an important part of this conversation because I always say that open source moves at the rate and pays a global innovation, which is kind of a cute phrase that I really don't mean it in anyways, cute. It really is the case that the purpose of open sources for people globally to be contributing. And there's been innovation on everything from climate change to you know, musical applications to um things that are the fundamentals of major enterprise mission critical workloads that have happened is everyone is adopting cloud and open source faster. And so I think that, you know this choice to be on open source is a choice really, you know, to move at the pace of global innovation. It's a choice too um leverage capabilities that are portable and it's a choice to have flexibility in deployment because where everyone's I. T is deployed has also changed. And the balance of sort of where people need the cloud to kind of come to life and be has also changed as everyone's going through this period of significant change. >>That's awesome. IBM like Red has been a long supporter and has a history of supporting open source projects from Lenox to kubernetes. You guys, I think put a billion dollars in Lenox way back when it first started. Really power that movement. That's going back into the history books there. So how are you guys all collaborating today to advance the open source solutions for clients? >>Yeah, we remain very heavily invested in open source communities and invested in work jointly with Red Hat. Um you know, we enabled the technology known as um uh Rackham the short name for the Red Hat advanced cluster management software, um you know, in this last year, um and so, you know, provided that capability um to to become the basis of that that product. So we continue to, you know, move major projects into open source and we continue to encourage external innovators as well to create new capabilities. And open source are called for code initiatives for developers as an example, um have had specific programs around um uh social justice and racial issues. Um we have a new call for code out encouraging open source projects around climate change and sustainable agriculture and all those kind of topics and so everything from you know, topics with developers to core product portfolio for us. Um We have a very uh very firm commitment in an ongoing sustained contribution on an open source basis. >>I think that's important. Just to call out just to kind of take a little sidebar here. Um you guys really have a strong mission driven culture at IBM want to give you props for that. Just take a minute to say, Congratulations call for code incredible initiative. You guys do a great job. So congratulations on that. Appreciate. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Um as a sponsor of Red Hat Summit this year, I am sponsoring the zone Read at um you have you have two sessions that you're hosting, Could you talk about what's going on? >>Yeah, the the two sessions, so one that I'm hosting is around um getting what we call 2.5 x value out of your cloud journey. Um and really looking at kind of how we're working with clients from the start of the journey of considering cloud through to actually deploying and managing environments and operating model on the cloud um and where we can extract greater value and then another session um that I'm doing with Roger Primo, our senior vice President for strategy at IBM We're talking about lessons and clouded option from the Fortune 500, so we're talking there about coca cola european bottling partners, about lumen technologies um and um also about wonderman Thompson, um and what they're doing with us with clouds, so kind of two sessions, kind of one talking a sort of a chalkboard style um A little bit of an informal conversation about what is value meaning cloud or what are we trying to get out of it together? Um And then a session with roger really kind of focused on enterprise use cases and real stories of cloud adoption. >>Alright so bottom line what's going to be in the sessions, why should I attend? What's the yeah >>so you know honest honestly I think that there's kind of this um there's this great hunger I would say in the industry right now to ascertain value um and in all I. T. Decision making, that's the key question right? Um not just go to the cloud because everyone's going to the cloud or not just adopt you know open source technologies because it's you know something that someone said to do, but what value are we going to get out of it? And then how do we have an intentional conversation about cloud architecture? How do we think about managing across environments in a consistent way? Um how do we think about extracting value in that journey of application, modernization, um and how do we structure and plan that in a way? Um that results in value to the business at the end of the day, because this notion of digital transformation is really what's underlying it. You want a different business outcome at the end of the day and the decisions that you take in your cloud journey picking. Um and open hybrid, multi cloud architecture leveraging technologies like IBM cloud satellite to have a consistent control plan across your environments, um leveraging particular programs that we have around security and compliance to accelerate the journey for regulated industries etcetera. Taking intentional decisions that are relevant to your industry that enable future flexibility and then enable a broad ecosystem of content, for example, through red hat marketplace, all the capabilities and content that deploy onto open shift, et cetera. Those are core foundational decisions that then unlock that value in the cloud journey and really result in a successful cloud experience and not just I kind of tried it and I did or didn't get out of it what I was expecting. So that's really what, you know, we talk about in these in these two sessions, um and walk through um in the second session than, you know, some client use cases of, of different levels and stages in that cloud journey, some really core enterprise capabilities and then Greenfield whitespace completely new capabilities and cloud can address that full spectrum. >>That's exciting not to get all nerdy for a second here, But you know, you bring up cloud architecture, hybrid cloud architecture and correct me if I'm wrong if you're going to address it because I think this is what I'm reporting and hearing in the industry against the killer problem everyone's trying to solve is you mentioned, um, data, you mentioned control playing for data, you mentioned security. These are like horizontally scalable operating model concepts. So if you think about an operating system, this is this is the architecture that becomes the cloud model hybrid model because it's not just public cloud cloud native or being born in the cloud. Like a startup. The integration of operating at scale is a distributed computing model. So you have an operating system concept with some systems engineering. Yeah, it sounds like a computer to me, right. It sounds like a mainframe. Sounds like something like that where you're thinking about not just software but operating model is, am I getting that right? Because this is like fundamental. >>Yeah, it's so fundamental. And I think it's a great analogy, right? I think it's um you know, everyone has kind of, their different description of what cloud is, what constitutes cloud and all that kind of thing, but I think it's great to think of it as a system, it's a system for computing and what we're trying to do with cloud, what we're trying to do with kubernetes is to orchestrate a bunch of, you know, computing in a consistent way, as, you know, other functions within a single server do. Um What we're trying to do with open shift is, you know, to enable um clients to consume things in a consistent way across many different environments. Again, that's the same sort of function um conceptually as, you know, an operating system or something like that is supposed to provide is to have a platform fundamentally, I think the word platform is important, right? Have a platform that's consistent across many environments and enables people to be productive in all those environments where they need to be doing their computing. >>We were talking before we came on camera about cloud history and we were kind of riffing back and forth around, oh yeah, five years ago or six years ago was all the conversations go to the cloud now, it's like serious conscience around the maturity of cloud and how to operate that scale in the cloud, which is complex, it's complex system and you have complexity around system complexity and novelty complexity, so you have kind of all these new things happening. So I want to ask you because you're an IBM fellow and you're on the cloud side at IBM with all this red hat goodness you've got going on, Can you give us a preview of the maturity model that you see the IBM season, that red hats doing so that these architectures can be consistent across the platforms, because you've got def sec ops, you've got all these new things, you've got security and data at scale, it's not that obviously it's not easy, but it has to be easier. What's what's the preview of the maturity model? >>Yeah, you know, it really is about kind of a one plus one equals three conversation because red hats approach to provide a consistent platform across different environments in terms of Lennox and Kubernetes and the open shift platform um enables that first conversation about consistency and maturity um in many cases comes from consistency, being able to have standards and consistency and deployment across different environments leads to efficiency. Um But then IBM odds on that, you know, a set of conversations also around data governance, um consistency of data, cataloguing data management across environments, machine learning and ai right bringing in A. I. For I. T. Operations, helping you be more efficient to diagnose problems in the IT environment, other things like that. And then, you know, in addition, you know, automation ultimately right when we're talking about F. R. I. T. Ops, but also automation which begins down at the open shift level, you know with use of answerable and other things like that and extends them up into automation and monitoring of the environment and the workloads and other things like that. And so it really is a set of unlocking value through increasing amounts of insight, consistency across environments, layering that up into the data layer. Um And then overall being able to do that, you know efficiently um and and in a consistent way across the different environments, you know, where cloud needs to be deployed in order to be most effective, >>You know, David Hunt and I always talk about IBM and all the years we've been covering with the Cube, I mean we've pretty much been to every IBM events since the Cube was founded and we're on our 11th year now watching the progression, you guys have so much expertise in so many different verticals, just a history and the expertise and the knowledge and the people. They're so smart. Um I have to ask you how you evolved your portfolio with the cloud now um as it's gone through, as we are in the 2021 having these mature conversations around, you know, full integration, large scale enterprise deployments, Critical Mission Mission Critical Applications, critical infrastructure, data, cybersecurity, global scale. How are you evolve your portfolio to better support your clients in this new environment? >>Yeah, there's a lot in there and you hit a lot of the keywords already. Thank you. But but I think that you know um we have oriented our portfolio is such that all of our systems support Red hat um and open shift, um our cloud, we have redhead open shift as a managed service and kubernetes is at the core of what we're doing as a cloud provider and achieving our own operational efficiencies um from the perspective of our software portfolio, our core products are delivered in the form of what we refer to as cloud packs on open shift and therefore deploy across all these different environments where open shift is supported, um products available through Red hat marketplace, you know, which facilitates the billing and purchasing an acquisition and installation of anything within the red hat ecosystem. And I think, you know, for us this is also then become also a journey about operational efficiency. We're working with many of our clients is we're kind of chatting about before about their cloud operating model, about their transformation um and ultimately in many cases about consumption of cloud as a service. Um and so um as we, you know, extend our own cloud capabilities, you know, out into other environment through distributed cloud program, what we refer to as as IBM cloud satellite, you know, that enables consistent and secure deployment of cloud um into any environment um where someone needs, you know, cloud to be operated. Um And that operating model conversation with our clients, you know, has to do with their own open shift environments that has to do with their software from IBM, it has to do their cloud services. And we're really ultimately looking to partner with clients to find efficiency in each stage of that journey and application modernization in deployment and then in getting consistency across all their environments, leveraging everything from uh the red hat, you know, ACM capabilities for cluster management up through a i for beauty shops and automation and use of a common console across services. And so it's an exciting time because we've been able to align our portfolio, get consistency and delivery of the red half capabilities across our full portfolio and then enable clients to progress to really efficient consumption of cloud. >>That's awesome. Great stuff there. I got to ask you the question that's on probably your customers minds. They say, okay, Hillary, you got me sold me on this. I get what's going on, I just gotta go faster. How do I advance my hybrid cloud model faster? What are you gonna do for me? What do you have within the red hat world and IBM world? How are you gonna make me go faster? That's in high quality way? >>Yeah. You know, we often like to start with an assessment of the application landscape because you move faster by moving strategically, right? So assessing applications and the opportunity to move most quickly into a cloud model, um, what to containerized first, what to invest in lift and shift perspective, etcetera. So we we help people look at um what is strategic to move and where the return on investment will be the greatest. We help them also with migrations, Right? So we can help jump in with additional skills and establish a cloud center of competency and other things like that. That can help them move faster as well as move faster with us. And I think ultimately choosing the right portfolio for what is defined as cloud is so important, having uh, an open based architecture and cloud deployment choice is so important so that you don't get stuck in where you made some of your initial decisions. And so I think those are kind of the three core components to how we're helping our clients move as quickly as possible and at the rate and pace that the current climate frankly demands of everyone. >>You know, I was joking with a friend the other night about databases and how generations you have an argument about what is it database, what's it used for. And then when you kind of get to that argument, all agree. Then a new database comes along and then it's for different functions. Just the growth in the internet and computing. Same with cloud, you kind of see a parallel thing where it's like debate, what is cloud? Why does he even exist? People have different definitions. That was, you know, I mean a decade or so ago. And then now we're at almost another point where it's again another read definition of, okay, what's next for cloud? It's almost like an inflection point here again. So with that I got to ask you as a fellow and IBM VP and Cto, what is the IBM cloud because if I'm going to have a discussion with IBM at the center of it, what does it mean to me? That's what people would like to know. How do you respond to that? >>Yeah. You know, I think two things I think number one to the, to the question of accelerating people's journeys to the cloud, we are very focused within the IBM cloud business um on our industry specific programs on our work with our traditional enterprise client base and regulated industries, things like what we're doing in cloud for financial services, where we're taking cloud, um and not just doing some sort of marketing but doing technology, which contextualize is cloud to tackle the difficult problems of those industries. So financial services, telco uh et cetera. And so I think that's really about next generation cloud, right? Not cloud, just for oh, I'm consuming some sauce, and so it's going to be in the cloud. Um but SAS and I SV capabilities and an organization's own capabilities delivered in a way appropriate to their industry in in a way that enables them to consume cloud faster. And I think along those lines then kind of second thing of, you know, whereas cloud headed the conversation in the industry around confidential computing, I think is increasingly important. Um It's an area that we've invested now for several generations of technology capability, confidential computing means being able to operate even in a cloud environment where there are others around um but still have complete privacy and authority over what you're doing. And that extra degree of protection is so important right now. It's such a critical conversation um with all of our clients. Obviously those in things like, you know, digital assets, custody or healthcare records or other things like that are very concerned and focused about data privacy and protection. And these technologies are obvious to them in many cases that yes, they should take that extra step and leverage confidential computing and additional data protection. But really confidential computing we're seeing growing as a topic zero trust other models like that because everyone wants to know that not only are they moving faster because they're moving to cloud, but they're doing so in a way that is without any compromise in their total security, um and their data protection on behalf of their clients. So it's exciting times. >>So it's so exciting just to think about the possibilities because trust more than ever now, we're on a global society, whether it's cyber security or personal interactions to data signing off on code, what's the mutability of it? I mean, it's a complete interplay of all the fun things of uh of the technology kind of coming together. >>Absolutely, yeah. There is so much coming together and confidential computing and realizing it has been a decade long journey for us. Right? We brought our first products actually into cloud in 2019, but its hardware, it's software, it services. It's a lot of different things coming together. Um but we've been able to bring them together, bring them together at enterprise scale able to run entire databases and large workloads and you know um pharmaceutical record system for Germany and customer records for daimler and um you know what we're doing with banks globally etcetera and so you know it's it's wonderful to see all of that work from our research division and our developers and our cloud teams kind of come together and come to fruition and and really be real and be product sizable. So it's it's very exciting times and it's it's a conversation that I think I encourage everyone to learn a little bit more about confidential computing. >>Hillary hunter. Thank you for coming on the cube. Vice President CTO and IBM fellow which is a big distinction at IBM. Congratulations and thanks for coming on the Cuban sharing your insight. Always a pleasure to have you on an expert always. Great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >>Okay, so cubes coverage of red Hat Summit 21 of course, IBM think is right around the corner as well. So that's gonna be another great event as well. I'm john Feehery, a host of the cube bringing all the action. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>Hello and welcome to this session on experiencing secure agile hybrid cloud for your absent data. My name is Andrew labor. I'm a worldwide business unit product manager, Hc I Solutions with HP and I'm joined by my teammate Jeff Corcoran, who was go to market program Solutions or HP as well. And with that let's just dive right into it. Well, everybody has absent data. They're all over the place. They're both live on your phones, your computers and the cloud and servers are everywhere, absent data are all over the place. Well, what can we really do about that from moving forward modernization of that? Well, we have expectations for personalized, instant and engaging experiences that are the benchmark of your experience, more speed and agility or more paramount than ever. You see a world where apps and data like I mentioned our live and all over the place and that data explosion is happening at the edge where 75 of data is now created in moving us from a data center too many locations and many centers of that data. We have a digital transformation that has reached only a fraction of that. And we have modern cloud experiences for speed and agility and we want to really push that into an on premise reality where data has gravity security formats and compliance that you require. You really want that data transformation that somehow remains elusive for most outside of the public cloud. We want that true private premised on premise cloud infrastructure that translates to your hybrid cloud where you already have your apps and data live in the public cloud. And so as I mentioned, 70 of the public of the apps are outside in the public cloud and we really want that to be able to be brought into the local as well. And the on premise give you more flexibility, more agility and only H P E brings the cloud experience absent data everywhere. We define that right mix for you to move your data to the local and with that we have an approach that's any cloud anywhere and we have the expertise to help you define that right mix of cloud for your enterprise. We also create modern casual platforms for innovation where we bring your non native traditional apps that are slowing you down. We bring that into a modern enabled cloud experience together with cloud data of apps to achieve that speed and agility that I mentioned, being able to create a consistent strategy for you and your infrastructure. We also consume everything as a service everywhere. We bring the modern cloud experience to you and your apps and data self service ease being able to scale up or down depending on usage and flexibility. And we also have to pay for use and all managed for you with HP. Green Lake services the market leading infrastructure as a service platform for well over a decade. We also unify that hybrid cloud estate being able to move operations to a cloud native Cloud ops process manage for you with one unified management platform. Hp Green Lake Central. This helps you manage and unify your applications across cloud native and non cloud native workloads, drive insights and control for operational excellence and we do that by defining the right mix of cloud for you with HPD Point Next services, we're able to assess applications to determine the right mix for your business objectives. Hp Point Next services, we have cloud in technology experts on hand and ready to task for you to assess your existing IT infrastructure strategy, identify trapped capital that you might not even notice is there as well as help you assess your people and teams to identify critical gaps in your cloud journey. Finally, HP Point next services capital experts can determine the right mix of cloud strategy for you. Help you move and migrate your data into that optimized for every workload. And we do that by creating modern agile platform for innovation and we achieve the speed and agility you want report folio of software defined rack optimized HP keep Reliant and H. P. S. Energy infrastructure. Using that compose Herbal cloud compose double infrastructure platform that we support through our intellectual property and through leading partner Cloud solutions and who is that? That's BM wear with cloud foundation. I am a cloud foundation is the perfect blend for HP synergy and HP. Reliant to create that universal hybrid cloud platform, both modern and traditional applications. The Cloud foundation is characterized by many tenants such as develop Already Infrastructure, which creates that automated full stack experience. To help you get ready to do your development through a PS and infrastructure. Universal platforms, a single platform virtual machines and containers as well as application focused management. To simplify your management, being able to have multiple application resources and foundation for that hybrid cloud that I described being able to extend that same software stack to the public cloud. You connect to your flavor of choice for public cloud consume. And together with HB solutions and BMR Cloud Foundation, we create that perfect platform for a consistent hybrid cloud experience from the mid market to the large enterprise customers. We are transforming that traditional I. T. To a virtualized data center. Our goal is to help you move quickly and be agile to digitally transform software defined data center supporting that hybrid infrastructure. Hp envy m where have been working together for years and we are providing a simple experience for hybrid cloud that you can create and deliver to show value instantly and continuously achieve faster innovation, consistent operation and reducing costs. And how do we do that together? Well with HB solutions from being more cloud foundation, we've revolutionized that data centre by building a single consistent hybrid cloud experience that you can see that delivers greater agility and simplicity with five times faster automation tools for building out your infrastructure in getting time to market quicker, invalidating that solution stack. Where we have end to end fully tested and validated solutions that reduce your complexity and allow you to consolidate your VMS and your containers into one environment. Seamlessly, we also integrate management. We have unique the upper management integration and automation through firmer lifecycle management. Vis a vis L C M on the VM ware side, simplify I. T and deliver more agility to your infrastructure as well as your software defined data center. And then we also have services with HB Point Next they accelerate that time to deployment using HP Green Lake and providing as a service experience that we bring that cloud to you. And we bring that with an enhanced ballistic 360° view of security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain of our servers and concludes with safeguarded end of life Decommissioning. We power that by the recently announced Gen 10 plus servers uhh peep Reliant NHP synergy and integrate that Silicon Root of Trust technology offering protection detection and recovery from attacks industry leading encryption and firmware protection. And finally all of that is brought together. Hp one view We take HP one view as the management solution which transforms all of the compute storage networking into one software defined infrastructure Through HP one View we offer a template driven approach for deploying provisioning, updating, integrating compute storage networking All together in one infrastructure. and HP one View uses those software templates single line of code. We can deploy and manage and compose all of your physical resources, require for that application or virtual host or container infrastructure. We deliver the flexibility to compose different tiers of storage as well as types of provisioning by HP One View through direct or attach fabric using cloud foundation and HPV Premera. And now I'd like to ask my coworker Jeff to dive into some customer experiences around the hybrid cloud Jeff. Take it away. >>Thanks. Andrew. I think a great way to follow up and talk about our solutions is to really look at how one of our customers is enabling this transformation. So Wedbush Security is one of the leading financial services firms in the US, providing private and institutional clients, securities brokerage wealth management, in investment banking services. The company is headquartered in los Angeles California and has about 100 offices across the United States to meet increasingly rigorous financial regulations for more resilient operations and mitigate the threat of earthquakes in the Los Angeles area and increase operational efficiencies. Wedbush was looking for transformation is looking for a change to what the way they are currently operating. And to do this, Wedbush partnered with lumen and HP to develop a new private, cloud based data center using bloomin Private cloud on VM ware Cloud foundation. This was located in lumens Dallas hosting center using HP Keep Reliant dl 33 60 jen tens to create a hyper converged, high performance infrastructure using integrated software defined networking and security. To date, Wedbush has migrated its entire production facility to this private cloud. The virtual machines support a range of business applications, including Refinitiv, Thompson, Reuters and if I ask financial systems, they're also hosting Web Bush's in house broker management tool and Microsoft, sequel server and Mongo DB. Now, how did this impact them? They were able to impact Their financial reporting by cutting that from five hours down to 58 minutes. At the same time, they are able to reduce the time that it takes to deploy these Infrastructure resources by 50%. So this allows them to deploy a modern IT infrastructure for performance, reliability and efficiency improvement. The net impact on their business Was that it reduces the analytic costs by 27%. It increases their business agility and it developed, allows them to develop new lines of business faster and increases their compliance for the new Finra financial regulations with HP Green Lake, the cloud that comes to you. Hp Green like brings that cloud experience, self serve paper use scale up and down and manage for you by HP and our partners to absent data everywhere, whether they're in the edges co locations or data centers, enabling you to free up capital most operational and financial flexibility and free up talent to accelerate what's next for you and your business with HP Green Lake customers get cloud services that our production ready, elastic for any scale With a simple experience delivered to customer locations and as little as 14 days. Now, let's take a look at how some of our customers are experiencing the benefit of HP Green Lake as the voice of Austrian business. The Austrian economic chamber delivers advocacy and support to over 500,000 companies and trade groups, thereby helping to foster the country's robust economic growth. However, a policy of fiscal prudence Led to a mandated 30 cost reduction and the chambers it service provider needed to cut costs without compromising service levels. So to do this, they turn to HP to pair a future proof compose herbal infrastructure with a consumption based support model and HP Green Lake. Now, both the internal and regional chambers offices are getting better performance and faster access to I. T. Services enabled them to focus more than ever on boosting critical Austrian economic forces in sectors. Hp is here to help you accelerate your transformation. We just talked about Green Lake. So this enables you to deploy any workload as a service and with HP Green Lake services, you can bring that cloud like speed, agility and as a service model to where your data, data and apps live today, it enables you to transform the way you do business with one experience in one operating model across your distributed clouds for apps and data at the edge in co locations and in data centers with HP Point Next services. They have conducted over 11,000. IT. projects in over 1.4 million customer interactions each and every year. HB Point Next services 15,000 plus experts and its vast ecosystem of solution partners and channel partners are uniquely able to help you at every stage of your digital transformation journey because we address some of the biggest areas of concern that can slow you down. We bring together technology and expertise to help you drive your business forward. Lastly, with HP financial services, flexibility and investment capacity are key considerations for business to drive digital transformation initiatives. In order to forge a path forward, you need access to flexible payment options that allow you to match your IT costs to usage, from helping release capital from existing infrastructures to deferring payments and providing pre owned technology to relieve capital strain. Hp financial services unlocks the value of your entire estate from edge to cloud to end user with multi vendor solutions consistently and sustainably around the world. H P E F s helps you create the financial capacity to transform your business, Y H P E. We have the experience to get you there Over 1000 successful cloud migrations. We have the expertise to help you at any stage to accelerate adoption of any cloud or financial model to help you deploy the like cloud experience for your apps and data. We're open to any cloud strategy with deep expertise across Azure AWS and google cloud. We have unbiased expertise and I p to accelerate your right mix of clouds for your enterprise and we can tie that all together with I. T. As a service from our market leading platform of HP Green Lake. After you viewed this session, we have a lot of resources that you can now use to help you continue your digital transformation and educate yourself. You'll find links here on the slide to a lot of different products and solution areas as well as social media interactions that we have to engage with you. Thank you for joining. We hope you find the sexual useful. Have a great day.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders >>all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special production of the Cube. We're talking to the Amazon Web services, public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host stew minimum, and we're digging in on education is one of the sectors. Of course, public sector looks at non profits. It looks at the government sectors. Education, Of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with a global pandemic so happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award winning company Mohammad. He is the co founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with Lumen and joining his one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC. As it's known, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. First of all, Mohammed, congratulations. As I said in my intro, you know, such an important topic and I have two Children that are, you know, dealing with remote learning have lots of friends that were in higher education and, you know, in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector Award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition on. Of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit. You know, you are the co founder. So would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and Ellis about what differentiates the looming >>sure loom in we provide ah manage products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology. Resource is, of course, content course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use, you know, whatever device they have wherever they are, um so and have access to those applications that are required for completing that force work they could be in, you know, in at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East wherever they may be. But leveling that playing fears playing field so that they could access, um, have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're You know, What our goal is is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >>Fantastic. Damien, If if we could turn to you, then atyou NBC, maybe if you could give our audience Ah, thumbnail of you know, the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about the learning. But maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre cove it and, uh, you know what? What you were faced in and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >>Sure be happy to So where you? NBC is a mid sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the stem disciplines. And so pre cove, it very based in collaborative environments, active learning but but hands on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that. We leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in whether it's an engineering biology, any of those kinds of programs. Uh huh. As you said that the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scatter shot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and, um, and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >>Excellent. Mohammed, Were you working with you, NBC before the current move toe Go, go remote. Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >>I believe, actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to loom in looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs. But with ah the change and not having to access those labs anymore needed a remote learning solution. A remote access solution for being able to access those high compute high graphics processing or memory intensive applications through the cloud. Taking into account the fact that you know, students won't have you know, that the highest end computer laptop, you know, they probably be working on a chromebook or a lower and machine, but need that compute power on. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, you know, schools were shutting down, essentially physically started shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Coursework? >>Yeah, Dave and I like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit that time frames, you know, how fast did you go from? Oh, my gosh, We need this. We need proposals. We need to roll this out, and we need to have students. Ah, in teachers back up and running. >>Well, you know, I think the one thing from our side we had already known of element and we've been looking at that pre cove it. We knew we needed a product that that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they need it. So once we identify that, the thing that was amazing to me is is we moved from our existing system over to production illumination. It was about 2.5 weeks sort of start to finish and, you know, to get all the images to get all the technology running tested and everything up and running in 2.5 weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw was going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of code as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >>Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, you know, help us understand. How much are you using A cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, you know, in the you know, I guess if we say postcode world, you would probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say, >>Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of virtual computing solution in the cloud. But it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of scheduled times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Uh, coming out of this, we fully expect if, if we're going on extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of cove it they're not gonna want to go back to that model where they're asking, you know, they have to get permission and go in and limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now. >>Yeah, this is I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially, and so, you know, they they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >>Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there, Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great if in the future you still want to leverage the solution. But you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of you know how aws arc. It actually supports what you're doing and, you know, just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment. And however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that, >>right? I mean, so, you know, with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed. But we we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of, um, students scheduling. So if we've got, of course, that we know that is running from 10 AM to 11 AM Your prior to that core starting will scale the environment up so that it's available for those students. If it's not, you know, more of, ah, in course, lab session, um, and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have that those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. You know, physical environment. You know, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things. Uh, you know, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for a student usage, you know, off hours overnight take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running, running all the time. >>And this is one of the biggest differentiators so many times in higher ed. We struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very. We're very different from corporations and other other verticals with the bloomin solution and the capabilities in AWS. But we're really having this Taylor to our students schedules to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us. But it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of push back from the academic side because it is really Taylor to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing, marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, >>Dave and I'm curious. Once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educators side as well as student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use thing. That sounds great, but do you have to change, you know, office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that I'm just trying to understand the you know, the ripple effect of what you're doing? >>No, it's It's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we with students? If there is a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively. They're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and try to work with them to understand what the solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taking a approach of rather than said everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab. They're moving some of this team or a synchronous so that the students can serve, work at their own pace and rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking off this. But it the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing. We're always trying to do >>excellent, Mohammed. I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what what's been happening Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy and responding to things. You know, what's been the impact on your business, how as a ws been as a partner to support the needs of what you're doing. >>Well, as you can imagine, the other things that just really blown up, Um, in terms of demand and being able to again through the plant power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment, you know, as we talk about earlier this deployment was, you know, 2 2.5 weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been, um, critical and moving things forward. >>Excellent. Uh, Damien, it's a sit back to you on this. You know, obviously, if you had had, you know, more time be able to plan this out if there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give, uh, you know, as you've moved through this this rapid acceleration of the move to remote >>you Certainly. I think we would have certainly done some things differently. But we have been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of Covitz. So for us it wasn't. It wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you how you deploy and how you think. Think through that for us. We deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents you like this method or do you like some of the other, possibly some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with illumination, and they've been ableto very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time. But that's a very minor thing. These air really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier. Not fundamental differences in the what we're providing. >>Yeah, I'm Damien. What? One last question if I could, um sorry. Sorry, Mohammed. Just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, you know how much you felt that you understood what costs would be in some of the levers as to what are you using in the impact there? We've seen, you know, great maturation over the last handful of years. As toe. Yeah, you know, transparency and understanding how cloud actually is build. But I'm just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece things, seeing that, it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. Yeah, >>it wasn't. That's very true. But we also knew that it was essential so that what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We've moved to this would have to see what adoption was but be able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammed and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect. But on the weekends it was in the evenings. Nobody, nobody is logging on Saturday or Sunday morning. But boy at eight PM there's a good bit of usage so we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we have to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the If you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it. Get it out. Excellent. Mohammad, I >>want you to kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously, it's a technology space. You've been in. Ah, and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned advice you would give Teoh, you know, other companies of the universities and education No facilities out there, >>Right? And, you know, this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of that one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. It's name and saying was saying, You know, we went back kind of analyze what we were staying in after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted, based based off of that. According to that, taking and feedback from faculty members on how they were using a system in tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud being able to adjust on the fly. You're not. You don't have to be committed to every single bit there. Uh, and being able to change it on the fly is is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both. So much for joining us, Damien. Thank you for joining and moving forward. Sharing your story. I wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammed Big. Congratulations on winning. You know, super important category. Especially here in 20. Funny congratulations to you and the team. >>Thank you. >>Yeah, Thank you. Alright, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector is their partner awards program. I'm Stew men a man And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(enlightening music) >> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As we've been reporting, there's a new class of workloads emerging in the cloud. Early cloud was all about IaaS, spinning up storage, compute, and networking infrastructure to support startups, SaaS, easy experimentation, dev test, and increasingly moving business workloads into the cloud. Modern cloud workloads are combining data. They're infusing machine intelligence into application's AI. They're simplifying analytics and scaling with the cloud to deliver business insights in near real time. And at the center of this mega trend is a new class of data stores and analytic databases, what some called data warehouses, a term that I think is outdated really for today's speed of doing business. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we update our view of the emerging cloud native analytic database market. Today, we want to do three things. First, we'll update you on the basics of this market, what you really need to know in the space. The next thing we're going to do, take a look into the competitive environment, and as always, we'll dig into the ETR spending data to see which companies have the momentum in the market, and maybe, ahead of some of the others. Finally, we're going to close with some thoughts on how the competitive landscape is likely to evolve. And we want to answer the question will the cloud giants overwhelm the upstarts, or will the specialists continue to thrive? Let's take a look at some of the basics of this market. We're seeing the evolution of the enterprise data warehouse market space. It's an area that has been critical to supporting reporting and governance requirements for companies, especially post Sarbanes-Oxley, right? However, historically, as I've said many times, EDW has failed to deliver on its promises of a 360-degree view of the business and real-time customer insights. Classic enterprise data warehouses are too cumbersome, they're too complicated, they're too slow, and don't keep pace with the speed of the business. Now, EDW is about a $20 billion market, but the analytic database opportunity in the cloud, we think is much larger, why is that? It's because cloud computing unlocks the ability to rapidly combine multiple data sources, bring data science tooling into the mix, very quickly analyze data, and deliver insights to the business. More importantly, even more importantly, allow a line of business pros to access data in a self service mode. It's a new paradigm that uses the notion of DevOps as applied to the data pipeline, agile data or what we sometimes called DataOps. This is a highly competitive marketplace. In the early part of last decade, you saw Google bring BigQuery to market, Snowflake was founded, AWS did a one-time license deal to acquire the IP to ParAccel, an MPP database, on which it built Redshift. In the latter part of the decade, Microsoft threw his hat in the ring with SQL DW, which Microsoft has now evolved into Azure Synapse. They did so at the Build conference, a few weeks ago. There are other players as well like IBM. So you can see, there's a lot at stake here. The cloud vendors want your data, because they understand this is one of the key ingredients of the next decade of innovation. No longer is Moore's Law, the mainspring of growth. We've said this many times. Rather today, it's data driven, and AI to push insights and scale with the cloud. Here's the interesting dynamic that is emerging in the space. Snowflake is a cloud specialist in this field, having raised more than a billion dollars in venture, a billion four, a billion five. And it's up against the big cloud players, who are moving fast and often stealing moves from Snowflake and driving customers to their respective platforms. Here's an example that we reported on at last year's re:Invent. It's an article by Tony Baer. He wrote this on ZDNet talking about how AWS RA3 separates compute from storage, and of course, this was a founding architectural principle for Snowflake. Here's another example from the information. They were reporting on Microsoft here turning up the heat on Snowflake. And you can see the highlighted text, where the author talks about Microsoft trying to divert customers to its database. So you got this weird dynamic going on. Snowflake doesn't run on-prem, it only runs in the cloud. Runs on AWS, runs on Azure, runs on GCP. The cloud players again, they all want your data to go into their database. So they want you to put their data into their respective platforms. At the same time, they need SaaS ISVs to run in the cloud because it sells infrastructure services. So, is Snowflake, are they going to pivot to run on-prem to try to differentiate from the cloud giants? I asked Frank Slootman, Snowflake's CEO, about the on-prem opportunity, and his perspective earlier this year. Let's listen to what he said. >> Okay, we're not doing this endless hedging that people have done for 20 years, sort of keeping a leg in both worlds. Forget it, this will only work in the public cloud because this is how the utility model works, right? I think everybody is coming to this realization, right? I mean the excuses are running out at this point. We think that it'll, people will come to the public cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the private cloud. It's not that we can't run a private cloud, it just diminishes the potential and the value that we that we bring. >> Okay, so pretty definitive statements by Slootman. Now, the question I want to pose today is can Snowflake compete, given the conventional wisdom that we saw in the media articles that the cloud players are going to hurt Snowflake in this market. And if so, how will they compete? Well, let's see what the customers are saying and bring in some ETR survey data. This chart shows two of our favorite metrics from the ETR data set. That is Net Score, which is on the y-axis. Net Score, remember is a measure of spending momentum and market share, which is on the x-axis. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. And what we show here are some of the key players in the EDW and cloud native analytic database market. I'll make a couple of points, and we'll dig into this a little bit further. First thing I want to share is you can see from this data, this is the April ETR survey, which was taken at the height of the US lockdown for the pandemic. The survey captured respondents from more than 1,200 CIOs and IT buyers, asking about their spending intentions for analytic databases for the companies that we show here on this kind of x-y chart. So the higher the company is on the vertical axis, the stronger the spending momentum relative to last year, and you could see Snowflake has a 77% Net Score. It leaves all players with AWS Redshift showing very strong, as well. Now in the box in the lower right, you see a chart. Those are the exact Net Scores for all the vendors in the Shared N. A Shared N is a number of citations for that vendor within the N of the 1,269. So you can see the N's are quite large, certainly large enough to feel comfortable with some of the conclusions that we're going to make today. Microsoft, they have a huge footprint. And they somewhat skew the data with its very high market share due to its volume. And you could see where Google sits, it's at good momentum, not as much presence in the marketplace. We've also added a couple of on-prem vendors, Teradata and Oracle primarily on-prem, just for context. They're two companies that compete, they obviously have some cloud offerings, but again, most of their base is on-prem. So what I want to do now is drill into this a little bit more by looking at Snowflake within the individual clouds. So let's look at Snowflake inside of AWS. That's what this next chart shows. So it's customer spending momentum Net Score inside of AWS accounts. And we cut the data to isolate those ETR survey respondents running AWS, so there's an N there of 672 that you can see. The bars show the Net Score granularity for Snowflake and Amazon Redshift. Now, note that we show 96 Shared N responses for Snowflake and 213 for Redshift within the overall N of 672 AWS accounts. The colors show 2020 spending intentions relative to 2019. So let's read left to right here. The replacements are red. And then, the bright red, then, you see spending less by 6% or more, that's the pinkish, and then, flat spending, the gray, increasing spending by more than 6%, that's the forest green, and then, adding to the platform new, that's the lime green. Now, remember Net Score is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens. And you can see that Snowflake has more spending momentum in the AWS cloud than Amazon Redshift, by a small margin, but look at, 80% of the AWS accounts plan to spend more on Snowflake with 35%, they're adding new. Very strong, 76% of AWS customers plan to spend more in 2020 relative to 2019 on Redshift with only 12% adding the platform new. But nonetheless, both are very, very strong, and you can see here, the key point is minimal red and pink, but not a lot of people leaving, not a lot of people spending less. It's going to be critical to see in the June ETR survey, which is in the field this month, if Snowflake is able to hold on to these new accounts that it's gained in the last couple of months. Now, let's look at how Snowflake is doing inside of Azure and compare it to Microsoft. So here's the data from the ETR survey, same view of the data here except we isolate on Azure accounts. The N there is 677 Azure accounts. And we show Snowflake and Microsoft cuts for analytic databases with 83 and 393 Shared N responses respectively. So again, enough I feel to draw some conclusions from this data. Now, note the Net Scores. Snowflake again, winning with 78% versus 51% from Microsoft. 51% is strong but 78% is there's a meaningful lead for Snowflake within the Microsoft base, very interesting. And once again, you see massive new ads, 41% for Snowflake, whereas Microsoft's Net Score is being powered really by growth from existing customers, that forest green. And again, very little red for both companies. So super positive there. Okay, let's take a look now at how Snowflake's doing inside of Google accounts, GCP, Google Cloud Platform. So here's the ETR data, same view of that data, but now, we isolate on GCP accounts. There are fewer, 298 running, then, you got those running Snowflake and Google Analytic databases, largely BigQuery, but could be some others in there but the Snowflake Shared N is 49, it's smaller than on the other clouds, because the company just announced support for GCP, just about a year ago. I think it was last June, but still large enough to draw conclusions from the data. I feel pretty comfortable with that. We're not slicing and dicing it too finely. And you could see Google Shared N at 147. Look at the story. I sound like a broken record. Snowflake is again winning by a meaningful margin if you measure this Net Score or spending momentum. So 77.6% Net Score versus Google at 54%, with Snowflake at 80% in the green. Both companies, very little red. So this is pretty impressive. Snowflake has greater spending momentum than the captive cloud providers in all three of the big US-based clouds. So the big question is can Snowflake hold serve, and continue to grow, and how are they going to to be able to do that? Look, as I said before, this is a very competitive market. We reported that how Snowflake is taking share from some of the legacy on-prem data warehouse players like Teradata and IBM, and from what our data suggests, Lumen and Oracle too. I've reported how IBM is stretched thin on its research and development budget, spends about $6 billion a year, but it's got to spend it across a lot of different lines. Oracle's got more targeted spending R&D. They can target more toward database and direct more of its free cash flow to database than IBM can. But Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google, they don't have that problem. They spend a ton of dough on R&D. And here's an example of the challenge that Snowflake faces. Take a look at this partial list that I drew together of recent innovations. And we show here a set of features that Snowflake has launched in 2020, and AWS since re:Invent last year. I don't have time to go into these, but we do know this that AWS is no slouch at adding features. Amazon, as a company, spends two x more on research and development than Snowflake is worth as a company. So why do I like Snowflake's chances. Well, there are several reasons. First, every dime that Snowflake spends on R&D, go-to market, and ecosystem, goes into making its databases better for its customers. Now, I asked Frank Slootman in the middle of the lockdown how he was allocating precious capital during the pandemic. Let's listen to his response. I've said, there's no layoffs on our radar, number one. Number two, we are hiring. And number three is, we have a higher level of scrutiny on the hires that we're making. And I am very transparent. In other words, I tell people, "Look, I prioritize the roles that are closest "to the drivetrain of the business." Right, it's kind of common sense. But I wanted to make sure that this is how we're thinking about this. There are some roles that are more postponable than others. I'm hiring in engineering, without any reservation because that is the long term, strategic interest of the company. >> But you know, that's only part of the story. And so I want to spend a moment here on some other differentiation, which is multi-cloud. Now, as many of you know, I've been sort of cynical of multi-cloud up until recently. I've said that multi-cloud is a symptom, more of a symptom of multi-vendor and largely, a bunch of vendor marketing hooey today. But that's beginning to change. I see multi-cloud as increasingly viable and important to organizations, not only because CIOs are being asked to clean up the crime scene, as I've often joked, but also because it's increasingly becoming a strategy, right cloud for the right workload. So first, let me reiterate what I said at the top. New workloads are emerging in the cloud, real-time AI, insights extraction, and real-time inferencing is going to be a competitive differentiator. It's all about the data. The new innovation cocktail stems from machine intelligence applied to that data with data science tooling and simplified interfaces that enable scaling with the cloud. You got to have simplicity if you're going to scale and cloud is the best way to scale. It's really the only way to scale globally. So as such, we see cross-cloud exploitation is a real differentiator for Snowflake and others that build high quality cloud native capabilities from multiple clouds, and I want to spend a minute on this topic generally and talk about what it means for Snowflake specifically. Now, we've been pounding the table lately saying that building capabilities natively for the cloud versus putting a wrapper around your stack and making it run in the cloud is key. It's a big difference, why is this? Because cloud native means taking advantage of the primitive capabilities within respective clouds to create the highest performance, the lowest latency, the most efficient services, for that cloud, and the most secure, really exploiting that cloud. And this is enabled only by natively building in the cloud, and that's why Slootman is so dogmatic on this issue. Multi-cloud can be a differentiator for Snowflake. We can think about data lives everywhere. And you want to keep data, where it lives ideally, you don't want to have to move it, whether it's on AWS, Azure, whatever cloud is holding that data. If the answer to your query requires tapping data that lives in multiple clouds across a data network, and the app needs fast answers, then, you need low latency access to that data. So here's what I think. I think Snowflake's game is to automate by extracting, abstracting, sorry, the complexity around the data location, of course, latency is a part of that, metadata, bandwidth concerns, the time to get to query and answers. All those factors that build complexity into the data pipeline and then optimizing that to get insights, irrespective of data location. So a differentiating formula is really to not only be the best analytic database but be cloud agnostic. AWS, for example, they got a cloud agenda, as do Azure and GCP. Their number one answer to multi-cloud is put everything on our cloud. Yeah, Microsoft and Google Anthos, they would argue against that but we know that behind the scenes, that's what they want. They got offerings across clouds but Snowflake is going to make this a top priority. They can lead with that, and they must be best at it. And if Snowflake can do this, it's going to have a very successful future, in our opinion. And by all accounts, and the data that we shared, Snowflake is executing well. All right, so that's a wrap for this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Don't forget, all these breaking analysis segments are available as podcasts, just Google breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. I publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Check out etr.plus. That's where all the survey data is and reach out to me, I'm @dvellante on Twitter, or you can hit me up on my LinkedIn posts, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for watching, everyone. We'll see you next time. (enlightening music)

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue covering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi. I'm stupid women. And this is the cubes coverage of V tug. Winter warmer twenty nineteen, where we see the emergency connections between virtual ization and cloud computing happened have on the program A user at the event Con Rebates. Who is a senior integration engineer with P s lifestyle. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice to be here. >> All right, So, PS lifestyle, let's start there. Tell us a little bit about that in your role as a senior integration engineer and what that means. >> Okay, So, PS lifestyle, we're national Hair Salon were in thirty seven states, and we have, Ah, super niche angle. All of our salons are in senior assisted living communities as we focus exclusively on seniors and, you know, well, twenty mics in your life more enjoyable. >> Okay, well, that's that's excellent. We always talk about, you know, jobs of the future and where there is growth. Ueno the boo birds generation is, you know, creating lots of people, you know, in health care. And, you know, part of health is making sure you're feeling happy about how you look. So I don't need to worry too much about my hair. These days, but we do, other than just head say, the older generation >> way do some of that, like massage services. Just just Yeah, well, being >> very, very cool is, you know, definitely not something we've talked about on our program. And after nine years and thousands of interviews, it's nice to have some interesting angles talk about. So you're a senior integration engineer? My understanding from some of the prep is you're really working on cloud related activity primarily. >> Yeah. So I came on board about a year ago. I switched out of our operations, roll into a development role and P s lifestyle are looking too, uh, bring the internal systems forward. I've been doing a lot of work, a lot of writing the stylist in the field when I end up writing out their services that they perform everyday, which doesn't really scale. So yeah, they're trying. Teo, bring the services into the present. Um, get get away from having to write everything down. So we're building out like a It's not quite a point of sale. System is somewhere between point of sail on, like, an Internet s so that everyone in the field automate what they're doing? Our accounting team doesn't have tio re input everything that comes in. Andi, just make things flow smoother. >> Okay? So frigates inside a little bit, You know what cloud services are using, and there's there's coating that you're doing is is part of that also. >> So right now we're developing in a PHP framework called Larry Gill. And we're playing to both elastic being stalking a w s and s, um, and we're building. So we have off front ends our old Larry Gill in Elastic Beanstalk. Not back in. We're building a P. I's in Lumen and the micro services are in T. C s. So we could have been scaling. >> Yeah, and, you know, Cloud seems an obvious solution for, you know, a a highly distributed in environment, like as retail too often is. And you know your locations are Is that How long could you bring us? A little bit, as you've been on for a year. But how long has that car journey been going on? >> Actually, a year. Okay. Came in just as just a CZ. The company started developing. Thiss has been on the on the horizon for about two years. And as the study of ramping up. They brought on additional people such myself. Just a stuff up so that we could actually walk through it. >> Okay. And I was there, you know, eight of us, Obviously the leader in the spaces. It was there some consideration as Teo, which cloud they'd be using. There's >> no things they were already using a ws to some capacity for Like what? Press hosting. It was just a natural continuation of that with me coming on board I've been looking at Well, what if we do want redundancy? Do we do we try Multi cloud, You know that's now on option. You know, maybe we start exploring technologies like Tara forms so that we can actually duplicate environments just in case. On the very rare instance that eight of us does go down. Yeah, well, so >> is that a concern? When you know, people say, you know, a ws going down, does an availability zone sometimes have issues shore, But can't you architect around this, or, you know, >> you know, I mean, we've had issues where a w s has been unavailable to us for, like, non technical reasons. In that case is like we were we were trapped. Unfortunately, we were not in production at the time, But it's, you know, that's a little look, a lesson you learn once, and then you think, Well, all right, I need a backup, just in case something does happen. And I know it's, like, very unlikely to happen, so that that then informs, you know, what is my back up? You know how much how much dough I invest in the back of >> great? Yeah, because, you know, multi cloud is one of those things that people talk about when you dig down, It's like, Okay, we understand. Why is that something you're doing? Because, you know, I want tohave price leverage of one against the other. Is it? Is there a service that I wanted one that, you know that might not be available other? Or is it it's kind of insurance. And in your case that saying, you know, in the case that you are, Are you saying I think from an architectural standpoint, I'm not looking to run in both clouds all the time. But if I have an outage, I should be able to kind of fail over almost on spin, something up relatively fast. And another environment. >> Eggs. Exactly. So it's like way we're talking about, you know, possibly looking in Asia. Maybe that's a little overkill. Maybe we could just do with, like, a droplet on on digital Ocean Does our entire environment we develop in Dhaka. That's pretty easy just to pick up and leave, pick up and move somewhere else on DH. You know, maybe far standby environment is nowhere near as powerful, at least still running. >> Yeah, and so, so great. You know, you've got that containers is kind of the base level for free. How are you developing? You know what one of the challenges out there is, you know, digital ocean, great for developers. Work for the containers, but, uh, you know, please correct me if I'm not getting this right, you know, You know, Cloud today isn't a utility, so I can't just say, Oh, I'm running on a day of us and let me just take everything and throw it in azure throat. Indio, You know, we're like, there's usually, you know, some work and prepped to make sure that I've got what I need. >> There is there is so it's like, so right now, it's like we're focused on us so we can work with the tooling. And then, as as we start getting more comfortable, we can start looking at extending that tolling toe, be a little flexible toe with multiple providers >> and cloudy. And if some people you know, concern is Tio, you know, how do how do I make sure that my costs just don't kind of spiral out of control is you know, how does kind of the internal control, you know, is there budgeting process in place? Do you have? Do you have a good understanding around what you have today? You know, is there much growth going on and what you have? And you know what? I'll be down. >> We've been actually very surprising. That resource is that we get on our tier of VWs. It's like we're not even scratching the surface. So we keep looking at, you know, we need toe. Everyone says, Oh, you need to worry about scaling. You need to worry about this and that way Haven't even touched what we have s so we were right. Now our focus is more on just making sure things run and then start scaling us as we run into that issue. >> All right, Candy. Last thing. What will What brings you to this event? So obviously it's it's been doing more than virtual ization and canoeing cloud for about five years now. You know what? What? What? What brings you to this show? >> The community is fantastic. So I have been working with in a previous life I worked with somewhere, which is how I got it in tow. Vey tug. And the community around Socialization is just incredible, Very supportive. So it's like I try and give back, so come back. And >> so so just going to follow up on that. I know virtualization community, you know, very welcoming. And the like do you find in the cloud world similar types of communities? >> Yeah, so it's I've actually just started up, eh? Of'em will use a group and then a WS user group on both of those communities have been fantastic so far. I walk in also with PHP, as I said, and that's an entirely different community. I'm not saying it's not friendly, but it's a different style. >> Yeah, absolutely. You find different cultures and these various ecosystems. And yeah, it's very different. You know, the early VV number one, you've had people. It's like, Oh, I'm used to being about have to do a little bit of, you know, building on top of it. A Ws is definitely builders, you know, and what they're doing. And you know on that. So can we really appreciate you joining? Sharing your experiences on what's happened the cloud and the community's involved in? Yeah. Thanks for running user groups. Those air always super helpful, and it's usually done out of the passion and doing it. It's It's not like that. That's your day job, you know? All right. Candy Bates. Thanks so much for joining. Uh, I'm still Minutemen, and thanks so much >> for watching the cue.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now here your host, Dave Alon and Jeffrey >> College sixteen everybody hashtag no. Sixteen. Check out crowd chat dot net slash No. Sixteen. Gonna crowd check going on. Frank's Luminous here is the president and CEO and not so invisible Hand of service now at the helm. Frank, it's great to see you again. Always looked so nice. Job on the keynote this morning. Eleven thousand plus right, actually closer to twelve thousand. About twenty registrations tweeted out again today. M c world was ten thousand this year. So you're bigger than the M C world, at least in attendance. Imagine what it's going to be when you're a twenty four billion dollars company with. But anyway, congratulations. Thank you. Great to see you again. So yeah. So you must feel good about where you were at the financial analyst meeting yesterday. You laid out the vision you guys were on track for sixteen. Still focused on four billion dollars by twenty twenty. We know a lot can happen between now and twenty twenty, but you gotta be feeling pretty good about the tam expansion the product portfolio. The customer acceptance. Give us the update. >> Yeah, way to feel good. I laid out yesterday for the capital markets. Folk folks are framework. Phase one was R R R zero to one hundred. Uh, that was really when we were startup, Fred Laddie was CEO of the company. It was reaching escape velocity. The night came in in two thousand eleven that was faced to, and we're really focused on scale on discipline and really delivering on the promise that have been created. And the company went from one hundred million two billion dollars last year. But now you know, we're we've entered phase three and face tree is a billion to four billion and we're changing. We're changing from a single product single mark, a single channel company to one that's multi products, multi channel and multi market. And it's a transition. We're not assuming that lather rinse repeat is going to take care of it. So we're raising ourselves to another level. We're questioning what we're doing just to keep things, keep everybody on their tell us >> and your keynote this morning to talk about the states. The first greatest yaar pcrm oracle ASAP. and the second greatest state popularized the course by by sales force. Others before salesforce boost sales force Really one and you guys are laying out a vision for a service management across the enterprise, and you touch deeply into those other estates described that strategy and how it's going to affect customers going forward. >> Yeah, our deep belief is that the way we made its work is going to change under the influence ofthe technology. And what's possible? Has it been that long that we sort of got wire to our in boxes and email became our reactive reflects of way off doing things right? There was a time before e mail. Well, there will be a time after e mail as well. A lot of work is going to be defined into work flows. And then the reason is we don't need to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. Every single time we do something you know when we define work flows, we had the opportunity Teo plant for work. We have the opportunity to motto Orc, we can analyze work. We can figure out what it cost. We can figure out how well we're doing These are This is where efficiency comes from. Essentially, companies will become clouds. They will all becomes, offer companies right, and they all are going to start to manage themselves like that. So the future of rolls and enterprises and institution and jobs, it's less about being into processes that will be in terms of defining and building the process and then managed in the process. These are these are profound fundamental transformations how we >> work. And you spoke on the Kino to about kind of the different point of view within engagement model when you come from and some type of background versus some of the other interaction. Specifically contrast ing serum, Um, in the way that engagement method works. Versace somewhere. Yeah. You solved the problem. Help a person get up off the floor. I love your I followed that. I can't get up example, but then really get to the root cause. And now you know the good position you're in. As that methodology moves beyond just the chorus people, two people doing it functions in all different roles. >> This this this, this our heritage. We've always taking the service management model. It's basically an engagement model an engineering model because we need to do recalls analysis. Why are we talking in the first place and then to fix and change model? It's a holistic process if you just haven't engaged a model that's not that satisfying because we're just trying to relieve the pain of the moment. But we're not prosecuting general line cost. And even if we knew the underlying cause, we're doing nothing about it. And people keep coming back with the same problem over and over again. So it's not so much about just managing the quality, the service. It's about managing the underlying quality off the core product that we're providing, whether that probably product for that product is in service. >> So a few years ago, I said, I thought you were on a collision course with sales force, and you kind of bristled at that and say, I know we're just doing our thing, but you're Tam is now so large. I mean, you're good, becoming a very large software company. You're in rarified air, so essentially everybody's, you know, I'm gonna have you in their line of sites. That's good. In the other hand, you know, it's an interesting position to be in. So what? Your thoughts on that from >> industry landscape. It's a huge market. You know, we're not super fixated on a confrontation with this player, that player. But we have philosophical conviction that doing customer service, you know our way is the right way to do that. And with things moving to Coyote Internet Oh, thanks, it's becoming way more important. It's not enough to say, Hey, my device is not working, you know? Can I reset the device? Can I see what's going on by straight? People have to become way smarter a za function off the software technology that we have just saying Well, you know, take you call and try to figure out what's going on right? And these days, you're already when you have a conductivity problem with tea for your WiFi service and so on, they can already already tell you, you know, what the hell thiss off your device and what what the problem domain really is. We're going to go way further in that direction. I mean, somebody shows of the refrigerators busted somebody shows up at your door. That person knows nothing, right until they literally open the door and they start looking around right. That's going to change because they will already know. And they'LL have to write parts with them, right if parts are actually involved or they can fix it remotely. So that's desk for service models are moving >> well, your tent, You're celebrating your tent in tenth year anniversary now, and the interesting thing about service now is used. You started in it. You call them your peeps. Your fundamental assumption is that it is touching everything in making that bet That has been a tailwind fear. It's quite a bit different than some of the other software companies that you see going >> down. So he's not just touching everything. It is everything that >> sass cos a cloud of Takeda mean more sass Company's coming out of general business. Then there is the technology business. Do you see that trend? >> I think, by the way, salesforce. I commend them for this vision. They've always said every company becomes this offer company that is absolutely and profoundly true. We're all becoming clouds, Um, and we're literally, you know, running as hard as we can, uh, to catch that ball downfield. You know what? This is about >> you guys have built an incredibly viable business now with riel mo mentum. So as you look forward to next ten years, talk about sort of that vision that you see of service management going beyond I t into other functions of the company as well as growing the ecosystem. >> Yeah, so no, our vision and our approach is about looking at work, right? We're not managing records. Whether it's HR or financial records. It's not about the record. It's about the work. If you take a company like sales first, they're focused on the customer. We're focused on the service. The service is the unit of work. So we have a unique focus on zooming in on that unit of work and structuring, defining and managing that. So to us, everything looks like a service at every application, every task, every request. Everything we do has a beginning and an end. And as an opportunity for structuring, automating, analyzing, monitoring all those candle thanks. So our future world, you know, we'll still have email, but so much of what we do in the day to day basis will be structured in systems and by the way, our life is consumers were already living that way. He just don't notice it because that's natural. I mean, uber is a structure of workflow. Even Facebook, in many ways, is that way. Making a reservation is the structural work flow. Ordering something at Amazon structure workflow and it's lights out lightspeed sort of world is trying to go. >> And if you think about growing this company to the to the next phase lots going on, you making acquisitions, you're bringing in a new town. The ecosystem is really an interesting item here because we saw Accenture Pickup Cloud Sherpas this year. We saw fruition and CSC And so you're seeing the big guys now take notice. That's gotta make you feel great. Talk about the ecosystem a little bit, >> Yeah, it's definitely in on inflection in our world when people are not just saying put me in coach, you know I can do this, but they're starting to, you know, put out real capital on buying companies. Now. There's numbers behind service now, and we're not just on an opportunistic thing in their business, but we're an ongoing business on dare doubling down. They're not. There will be many acquisitions off a lot of our service partners and also our technology partner. So we have a hundred seventy partners here. This is really good because we don't want our customers to sort of feel like I'm dependent on service now for everything. We want them to have many choices, not just in deployment partners, but also technology integrations. No value at its offer products. They shouldn't be depending on you for everything on us. >> In terms of emanate, it's been selective. I mean, you know, you know, we see these larger legacy cos they live off of ebony because they can't innovate you guys doing a lot of innovation internally. But But take a minute to talk about Emma and the particular we're interested in how you integrate cos you don't bolt on to the platform, you essentially re platform. You rewrite talk about that a little bit? >> Yes. Are our eminent strategy has been focused on talent and technology. Tellem builds the technology. Technology without the talent is not very useful. You know, in the short time you'LL run out of gas on that so it's always the combination of the people and what they have built that you correct We don't integrate technology that we acquire, we take it apart and we re implement it on our platform. That is a core core commitment that we make to our customer base, that we are not going to saddle you with the problems you've had for the last thirty years, where you are constantly testing and retesting integrations between this assets versus that assets and have whole steps dedicated to sort of keep the patchwork operable. We take that on right. You don't have to worry about it. You turn on the service, it will work with everything else on. Our customers early on, recognized that we were different in that regard. It's very expensive. It's very time consuming. But when we go to buy an asset and a talent pool, we first look at Cannes, where you re platform it's and secondly, does the technical team that comes with it. I want to do that because if somehow there they're not bought in on that strategy, we don't want to go there >> right. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your customers. You guys have a very special relationship with your customers and David on the Q. We go to a lot of shows, and there are few people at that elicit the excitement within the room like Fred does when he comes on stage, you know, and we talk a lot about when the founder's still involved in the company. It's really important that I still remember the first time I saw the cakes and twenty thirteen like, What does it do with the cakes and still Crispo post on lengthen five cakes a day? I think he just doesn't follow him. You'LL see cakes from all OVER the WORLD What do you are hearing from your customers? As you guys go to this next phase because you've had a really special relationship, we've gone beyond just when when Fred was running it, you've taken it to a billion. Now you're going to four. What kind of feedback and engagement we haven't out in the field. Don't talk to customers all, >> you know. Yeah, I do a lot. We're very intensely customer phasing company, just just culturally, but we're incredibly dedicated to their success, the way we believe that the value of our company is sort of summed up in the aggregate in terms of how strongly a customers feel about us. Forget all the financial metro. It's how strongly customers feel about you is the ultimate value off your your franchise. The cakes. It's a celebration. One service now goals life. It is. People feel like we let him out of jail. I mean, they have. Pignon goes with the name of the product that they're replacing. Haven't >> seen the >> way, So it's it's what they go from one generation or two generations ago into, Ah, very modern, transformational, empowering, platform. Empowering thing is really important because they are now in charge, right? They're able to make changes on a daily basis. Before they could do nothing. They were dependent on bunch of people that they could never get access to, to make changes for them. It all goes away right, that that's the essence off. But what service now provides >> thiss concept of love, this customer discussion? Because I love initiatives that born in the customer, I think Siam was one of those. I think it came out of Europe. I'm not exactly sure talk about Siam what it is and how it relates to your business. >> Siam feels to us a little bit like the next installment on my tail, sort of the evolution ofthe vital because it's not just service management. It's service, integration and management. But they had a very, very precise definition and framework around what we did. What I till. It's also what we're doing. The Siam were really expanding the scope and sort of adapting it to a much broader context because we think Siam you take its narrow definition very useful, very productive. And we have lots of customers that are pursuing a Siam strategy. But we're saying what semen says, which is now we're going to reorganize our entire enterprise in terms ofthe our service assets, anything that produces the service. But it's an organization or a system or a group of people, whatever it is, as well as everybody that has toe have access to the service. And those were not just people. They're also systems. So they re conceptualize one of this to be an enterprise, very visionary and very, very transformational. You won't recognize enterprise is an institution in the future. There'll be so different that people won't no longer be on in the inside of the process. They will be on the outside of the process, right? Jobs are changing. It's gonna have profound. If one says there will be lots of jobs, well, there will be new jobs and a lot of the old jobs. You know, they're going to go by the wayside >> and, you know, you're obviously in Silicon Valley, and I know there's a lot of work being done about. This is probably not the way we're going to communicate in the future. You guys, this theme of a new way to work today in your keynote, you talked about I ot You threw that buzz word out there and you said, I know before you start rolling your eyes and you guys have a play actually, in I o t again As Jeff said, we go to a lot of these conferences. You hear the similar thing? Digital transformation. I ot your play on aisle is around wearables and really driving some platform innovation to your wrist you have the watch on is that I had guys announced a wearable today, I said, I think I just I tweeted. I think that service now just announced Well, I watch aware a bone some things that we did. And so what's that all about? >> Well, we we've been able Teo, deliver services on watch ever since. Yeah, watch came out because we're a platform. We've been able to do this literally from day one. We're just tryingto inspire our customers to figure out How do you really use a watch? Right? Warm of the struggles that Apple has where the watch is, What's the killer app? It's not replacing Fitbit. You know that that z not enough, right? What's the most killer app for a wearable? And we think you're really time and predictive business metrics. You know, at a glance, because that's where this gramophone you really have to, you know, work to device. This is at a glance, right? And we are really tryingto get to this real time predictive mode off doing things because it's just so much more productive. But as I said in the rap over the keynote right, there's a lot of sizzle people lost watches and *** bang stuff. What enables toe watch. And that's really what we think Apple needs. You know, Forest tries used what enables that watch to become a productive business device, and it's the underlying repository of data that's continually being updated. That's what makes the watch powerful. >> So how did this come about you guys? You obviously like you said you had apse for the watch Your you enable that. But it wasn't good enough for you just didn't fit the use case well enough. But he said, Hey, let's go build it. >> Yeah, there is. There is a design aspect to it. And, you know, it is you heard during the keynote whether people do typically, you know, we're just shrink down to you. I from the bigger form factor to watch. And that's always the first generation >> and my phone on a watch. And >> everybody goes like, Well, that's not it. So and then we go back to the drawing board and we really, really think through the usability off that form factor, which is so tiny >> one of things about knowledge is the content from the customers. So I want to ask you how you spend your time here. Yesterday was a financial analyst meeting. Today you're in the general session and the keynotes. You got a CEO event going on. You had a partner event going on. How do you know. Is there there three francs? >> No, it's, uh it's it's no I I couldn't be more thrilled. We have so much going on at this conference in in years to come. You know that we'LL be vertical Industry conference is going on because we see that as the next evolution next phase of our evolution is that vertical ization is happening already because we have someone e big customers and single verticals. Whether it's financials and pharma retail, those folks can get so much benefit from associating with their counterparts in the same line of business, especially when the value of moves from it to broader enterprise that becomes very pertinent. So we're worked over in the middle of figuring out how to sort of enable ourselves We've enabled ourselves as a multi product organization. That was the whole face three transition. But the vertical ization is something that sort of next in our revolution. >> I mentioned my last question for eventual Silicon Valley. Obviously you're part of of of really set of rising stars and your butchery. You know, Scott decent and saw him the other day seen Cem Riel innovations coming at the same time, hearing a lot of these Caesar. Real nervous. You don't sound nervous. You sound really hopeful. What's your What's your outlook for? >> You know, your situation. We had our financial analyst yesterday, and you know that the capital markets crowd is very nervous. All of us are trying to decide on my in or out, and some things they do both before noon. Uh, I can't run a company that way. Most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis are not with a quarterly oriented. They go on for years and years, so I can't get that excited. You know, about the second floor of the business on a very short term basis, we know were lashed to the mast. We're going to go down with the ship. Were committed, were not interrupt. We're in. We're completely in. So our mindset is that we're just We're fine to be on the ship in running us, right? In January, the capital market sold is off. And in April that came back in were the same company, right? There was no reason to be that excited either to the downside or the upside. Right? This this a marathon companies get billed over long periods of time. >> Yeah, you don't seem like you're on that ninety days shot. Claws clock. Of course, it helps when you have a great customer base together. You got a great team. Frank's Lumen. Thanks so much for first of all, for having us at knowledge, we love this event. It's one of our favorites. And thanks for coming. It's >> great beer. Thank you. >> Alright, keep right, everybody. We'Ll be back with our next guest right after this is the cue. We're alive. Service now. Knowledge. Sixteen. Right back. It's always fun to come back to the cube because