from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>>Welcome back to Boston. Everybody watching the cubes coverage, OFS reinforce 22 from Boston, Atlanta chow lobster, the SOS a ruin in my summer, Andy and Smith is here is the CMO of laminar. Andy. Good to see you. Good >>To see you. Great to be >>Here. So laminar came outta stealth last year, 2021, sort of, as we were exiting the isolation economy. Yeah. Why was laminar started >>Really about there's there's two mega trends in the industry that, that created a problem that wasn't being addressed. Right? So the two mega trends was cloud transformation. Obviously that's been going on for a while, but what most people doesn't don't realize is it really accelerated with COVID right? Being all, everybody having to be remote, et cetera, various stats I've read like increased five times, right? So cloud transformation are now you are now problem, right? That's going on? And then the other next big mega trend is data democratization. So more data in the cloud than ever before. And this is, this is just going and going and going. And the result of those two things, more data in the cloud, how am I securing that data? You know, the, the, the breach culture we're in like every day, a new, a new data breach coming up, et cetera, just one Twitter, one yesterday, et cetera. The, those two things have caused a gap with data security teams and, and that's what he >>Heard at attract. Yeah. So, you know, to your point and we track this stuff pretty carefully quarterly, and you saw, it was really interesting trend. You actually saw AWS's growth rate accelerate during the pandemic. Absolutely. You know? Absolutely. So you're talking about, you know, a couple of hundred billion dollars for the big four clouds. If you, if you include Alibaba and it's still growing at 35, you know, 40% a year, which is astounding, so, okay. So more cloud, more data. Explain why that's a, a problem for practitioners. >>Yeah, exactly. The reality is in, in the security, what, what are we doing? What all the security it's about protecting your data in the end, right? Like, like we're here at this at, at reinforce all these security vendors here really it's about protecting your data, your sensitive data. And, but what, what had been happening is all the focus was on the infrastructure, the network, et cetera, et cetera, and not as much focus, particularly on the data and, and the move to the cloud gave the developers and the data scientists, way more power. They don't longer have to ask for permission. And so they can just do what they want. And it's actually wonderful for the business. The business is moving faster, you spin up applications sooner, you get new, new insights. So all those things are really great, but because the developer has so much power, they can just copy data over here, make a backup over here, new et cetera. And, and security has no idea about all these copies of the, of the data that are out there. And they're typically not as well protected as that main production source. And that's the gap that >>Exists. Okay. So there was this shift from sort of perimeter hardening the perimeter, hardening the infrastructure and, and now your premises, it's moving to the data we saw when, when there was during the pandemic, there was definitely a shift to end point security. There was a shift to cloud security rethinking the network, but it was still a lot of, you know, kind of cha chasing the whackamole and people have talked about this is a data problem for years. Yeah. But it was, it's taken a while for, for companies, for the technology industry to, to come at it. You guys are one of the first, if not the first. Yeah. Why do you think it took so long? Is this cuz it's really hard. >>Yeah. I mean, it, it's hard. You need to focus on it. The, the traditional security has been around the network and the box, right. And those are still necessary. It's important to, you know, your use identity to cover the edge, to, to make sure people can't get into the box, but you also have to have data. So what, what happens is there's really good solutions for enterprise data security, looking at database, you know, technology, et cetera. There are good solutions for cloud infrastructure security. So the CSP of the world and the CWPP are protecting containers, you know, protecting the infrastructure. But there really wasn't much for cloud everything you build and run in the cloud. So basically your custom application, your custom applications in the IAS and PAs environments, there really wasn't anything solving that. And that's really where laminar is focused. >>Okay. So you guys use this term shadow data. We talk about shadow. It what's shadow data. >>Yeah. So what we're finding at a hundred percent of our customer environments and our POVs and talking to CISOs out there is that they have these shadow data assets and shadow data elements that they have no clue that existed. So here's the example. Everybody knows the main RDS database that is in production. And this is where, you know, our, our data is taken from. But what people don't realize is there's a copy of that. You know, in a dev environment, somebody went to run a test and they was supposed to be there for two weeks. But then that developer left forgot, left it there. They left the company, oh, now it's been there for two years that there was an original SQL database left over from a lift and shift project. They got moved to RDS, but nobody deleted that thing there, you know, it's a database connected to an application, the application left, but that database, that abandoned database is still sitting. These are all real life customer examples of shadow data that we run into. And there's, and what the problem is that main production data store is secured pretty well. It's following all your policies, et cetera. But all these shadow data resources are typically less well protected unmonitored. And that is what the attackers are after. >>So you're, you know, the old, the, the Watergate follow the money, you're following the data, >>Following the data. >>How do you follow that data if there's so much of it, it, and it's, you know, sometimes, you know, not really well understood where it is. How do you know where >>It is? Yeah. It's the beauty of partnering with somebody like AWS, right? So with each of the cloud providers, we actually take a role in your cloud account and use the APIs from the cloud provider to see all the changes in all the instances are going on. Like it is, the problem is way more complicated in the cloud because I mean, AWS has over 200 services, dozens of ways to store data, right. It's wonderful for the developer, but it's very hard for the security practitioner. And so, because we have that visibility through the cloud provider's APIs, we can see all those changes that are happening. We can then say, ah, that's a data store. Let me go analyze, make a copy, have a snapshot of that and do the analyzing of that data right inside our customer's account without pulling the data out. And we have complete visibility to everything. And then we can give that data catalog over to the customer. >>All right. I gotta ask you a couple Colombo questions. So if you know, we talk about encryption, everything's encrypted everything. If, if the data is encrypted, why then would I need laminar? >>Because I mean, we'll make sure that the data's encrypted okay. Right. Often. So it's not supposed to be and not right. Two is, we're gonna tell you what type of data is inside there. Oh, is this, is this health information? Is it personal identify information? Is it credit cards? You know, et cetera, C so we'll classify the data for you. We will also, then there's things like retention, period. How long should we, I hold onto that data, all the things about what are, who has access, what's the exposure level for that data. And so when you, when you think about data security posture, what's the posture of that data you're looking at at those data policies. It's something that has been very well defined and written down. But in the past, there was just no way to go verify that those, that, that, that policy is actually being followed. And so we're doing that verification automatically. >>So without the context, you can't answer those other questions. So you make sure it's encrypted. If it's not, or you can at least notify me that it's not, you don't do the encryption. Right. Or do you, >>We don't do it ourselves, but we can give you here. Here's the command in and the Amazon to go encrypt it >>Right. Then I can automate that. And then the classification is key because now you're telling me the context. So I can say, okay, apply this policy to that data, retain it for this long, get rid of it after X number of years, or if it's work, process, get rid of it now. Yeah. And then who should have access to that data. And so you can help at least inform how to enforce those policies. >>Exactly. And so we, we, we call it guided remediation because what we're, you know, talking to a CISO, they're like, I need 400 more alerts, like a hole in the head like that. Doesn't do me any good. If you can't tell me how to resolve the, the, the, this security gap that I have or this, then it doesn't do any good. And, and the first, first it starts with who do I need to go talk to? Right. So they have hundreds, if not thousands of developers. Oh, great. You found this issue. I, I, I don't know who to go. Like, I can't just delete it myself, but I need to go talk to somebody really, should this be deleted? We need, do we really, really need to hold onto this? So we, we help guide who the data owner is. So we give you who to talk to. You, give you all the context. Here's the data, here's the data asset that it's in. Here's our suggestion. Here's the problem. Here's our suggestion for >>Solution. And you started the company on AWS >>Started on AWS. Absolutely. >>So what's of course it's best cloud and why not start there? So what's the relationship like, I mean, how'd you get started? You said, okay, Hey, we're we got an idea for a company. We're gonna build it on AWS. We're gonna become a customer. We're gonna, you know, >>We actually, so insight partners is our main investor. Yeah. And they were very helpful in giving us access to literally hundreds of CSOs, who we had conversations with before we actually launched the company. And so we did some shifting and to, to figure out our exact use case. But by the time we came to market, it was in February this year, we actually GAed the product that, where like product market fit nailed because we'd had so many conversations that we knew the problem in the market that we needed to solve. And we knew where we needed to solve it first. And, and the, the, the relationship we AWS is great. We just got on the marketplace, just became a, a partner. So really good. Good >>Start. So I gotta ask you, so I always ask this question. So how do you actually know when you have product market fit? >>You it's about those conversations. Right. You know, so like, I I've been to lots of startups and sometimes you're you're, you, you each have a conversation and then they, they saying, oh, well kind of want this. And we kind of like that. And so it, the more conversations you have, the more, you know, you're solving a real problem. Right. And, and, and, and, and you re react to what that, what that prospect is telling you back and, or that advisor or that whoever we're talking to. And, and every single one of the CISO conversations we had was I don't have a good inventory of my data in the cloud. >>The reason I asked that, cause I always ask the startups, like, when do you scale? Cause I think startups sometimes scale too fast. They try to scale too fast, they'll hire 50 sales people. And then they, you know, churn, you know, they, they got a 50% churn, but they're trying to optimize their go to market when they got 50% of their customers are gonna leave. So it's, it's gotta be the sequential thing. So, so you got product market fit. So are, are you in the scaling phase >>Now? We are. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So now it's about how quickly can we deliver? We, we we're ramping customer base significantly. And, and you know, we've got a whole go to market team in, you know, sales and marketing in the us and, and often off to the races >>And you just run on AWS or you run another clouds. >>It's multi-cloud so AWS, Azure, GCP, et cetera. >>Okay. So then my least my next question is it sort of, you can do this within each of the individual clouds today. Do you see a day and maybe it's here today is where you can create a single experience across those clouds >>Today. It's a single experience across cloud. So our SaaS, we have our SaaS portion runs in AWS, but the actual data analysis runs in each cloud provider. So AWS, Azure, GCP and snowflake too, actually. >>Ah, okay. So I come through your whatever portal, like if I can use that term. Yep. And that's running on AWS. Yes. You're SAS, as you say, and then you go out to these other environments, GCP, Azure, AWS itself, and snowflake. Yep. And I see laminar, is that right? Or >>There's a piece running inside our customer's environment. Okay. So, so we have a customer, they, the, we have, we get a role inside of their cloud account or read only role inside of their cloud account. And we spin up serverless functions in that cloud account. That's where all the analysis happens. And that's why we don't take any data out of the environment. So it all stays there. And, and therefore we don't, we don't actually see the data outside of the environment. Like, I, I can tell you there's a metadata comes out. I can tell you, there are credit cards inside that data store, but I can't tell you exactly which credit card it is cuz I don't know. So all the important actions happens are there and just the metadata metadata comes out. So we can give you a cross cloud dashboard of all your sensitive data. >>And of course, so take the example of snowflake. They're going across clouds, they're building what we call super cloud sort of, of a layer that floats on top. You're just sort of going wherever that data goes. >>Yeah, exactly. So, so each of there's a component that lives in the customer's environment in the, in those multi-cloud environments and then a single view of the world dashboard that is our SaaS component that runs an AWS. So >>You guys are, is, am I correct? You're series a funded >>Series, a funded yeah, exactly. >>And, and already scaling to go to market. Yeah. Which is, which is early to scale. Right. I mean you've got startup experience. Right? >>Absolutely. >>How does it compare? >>Well, what was amazing here was access. I mean, really it was through the relationship with insight. It was access to the CISOs that I had never had at any of the other startups I was with. You're trying to get meetings, you're meeting with a lot of practitioners, you know, et cetera. But getting all those conversations with buyers was, was super valuable for us to say, ah, I know I'm solving a real problem that has value that they will pay for. Right. And, and, and so that, that was a year and a half probably still of all that work going on. We just, just waited to GA until we understood the market >>Better. Yeah. Insight. They're amazing. The way to talk about scaling. I mean, they've just the last 10 years that comp that, that PE firm has just gone wild in terms of just their, their philosophy, their approach, their cadence, their consistency. And now of course their portfolio. >>Yeah. And, and they started doing a little bit earlier and earlier stage. I mean, I, I always think of them as PE too, but you know, they, they did our seed round. Right. They did our a round and, and they're doing earlier stages, but particularly what they saw in Laar was exactly what we started this conversation with. They saw cloud transformation speeding up, they saw data democratization happening. They're like, we need to invest in this now because this is a now a problem to solve. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Cuz when you go back even pre 2010, you talk to, you know, look at insight, they would wait. They would invest in companies unless there was, you know, on the way to five plus million dollar ARR, they weren't doing seed deals. Totally. Like they saw, wow, these actually can be pretty lucrative and we can play and we have a point of view and yeah. So cool. Well, congratulations. I'll give you the final word. What, what should we be watching for from, from Laar as sort of, you know, milestones that you guys want to hit and, and indicators of success. >>Yeah. Now it's all about growth partnerships, you know, integrations with, with other of the players out here. Right. And so, you know, like scaling our AWS partnership is one of the key aspects for us. And so, you know, just look for, look for the name out there and, and you'll start, you'll start to see it a lot more. And, and if, if you have the need, you know, come look us up. Laar security.com. >>Awesome. Well thanks very much for coming to Cuban. Good luck. Appreciate it. All right. >>Wonderful. Thanks. You're >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave ante. We'll be back right after this short break from AWS reinvent 2022 in Boston. You're watching the cue.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE everyone Lisa Martin here. On the ground in Las Vegas at COUPA INSPIRE 2022. This is our second day of coverage here. There's been about 2,400 to 2,500 folks at the event. This year people are ready to come back. I've been happy to talk with lots Coupa folks, their partners, their customers and I've got both a customer and a partner here with me. Heidi Banks joins us, the Senior director of Global Procurement at Jabil. Heidi it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me give. >> Give the audience an overview of Jabil and what you guys do. >> So Jabil is a $30 billion manufacturing solutions partner that provides contract manufacturing services for 450 of the world's largest and most premier brands around the globe. Most people don't know our name but we're the wonderful face behind the name. >> Well you guys had, I was looking at some stats, over 260,000 employees across 100 locations. Very customer centric you guys are, as is Coupa, this good obviously synergy there but you had some objectives from a global procurement perspective. What were those? What were some of the challenges that you wanted to solve? >> So about seven years ago, Jabil went on a journey to identify what challenges we had out in the indirect procurement space. Being such a large global company, we had no idea what we were spending on indirect at the of time. After a little bit of digging, we found out that we had over 2 billion in spend that was untapped from a category management perspective. And so we knew that we needed to grow as a company and PaaS technology as a foundation, as our goal and our mission in the company is to be the most technologically advanced manufacturer solutions partner for our customers. >> Was there any sort of one thing or a compelling event seven years ago that caused you guys to go, "We need to be really getting our hands around this indirect spend?" >> So we started off by bringing in category managers and they were doing amazing job delivering savings in our contracts, but we had no way to deliver that out to the company. And the company being so big in so many different jurisdictions in countries around the world, you could negotiate the best contract in the world, but if you couldn't communicate it out to your users then it was a challenge to really capture that savings and make sure we were delivering bottom line savings to the company. >> And you guys are, we're talking about three different SAP ERP systems so a lot of technology in the environment. What were some of the core technology requirements that Jabil had when it came looking for a business plan management solution? >> Yeah, so we were looking for something that was very user friendly. Of course, Coupa takes that box very well. Also something that could drive governance and policy controls again challenging being such a global organization and making sure that things were going according to our policy into our global category managers to be sourced and negotiated for the company. We looked for one that was end to end from a business spend management platform perspective. We wanted something that was integrated and could cover three ERP systems from one pane of glass across the company. So we could get great analytics without having to search in so many different places. >> That is so key. I was talking with Rob, I was talking with Raja and they were all talking about how those silos still exist and how they're helping organizations like Jabil break those down and give them that single pane of glass, as you mentioned, to be able to see, to get that visibility into indirect spend, for example. Talk to me about the solutions that you implemented from Coupa. >> So we started off with Coupa's procure to pay system. Really our focus was to get off of our old system as quickly as we could and get everyone managing on the same policy controls approval flows. We then also had analytics, so we had Coupa AIC and brought in analytics and in the last year and a half I've also deployed strategic and tactical sourcing through Coupa as well, and spend guard from a audit control and compliance perspective. >> So then that the phrase "sweet synergy" that actually probably means a lot to you Coupa was talking about that during the keynote this morning. Your Jabil is living that sweet synergy kind of experience through Coupa >> That's right. As we source in Coupa and we can see, are there different behaviors that we need to look into maybe suppliers that are bidding at the last minute and winning or less than that desirable number of suppliers coming in or duplicate invoices and being able to really look through that and see spend patterns that we would never otherwise uncover is highly important to us from a compliance standpoint, we've gotten a great value out of that solution. >> And in terms of value, one of the things I know that was important to you when you were looking for the right technology partner, was you wanted to involve other folks within the organization across IT, other lines of business. Talk to me about how important that was to bring in that cross-functional team to help make the right decision. >> Yeah, that was one of the most critical things that we did. We needed to make sure, especially being an SAP shop right, we needed to make sure that we were standing back and really being impartial in our decision and driving a non-biased decision in that RFP process. And so we got our executives together, talked to them about the value drivers and the ROI that we could do if we had all of the right support from the right departments, so that we could avoid resistance as we tried to deploy in such a rapid way. So we brought IT, legal, users together, procurement and in advance did a balanced scorecard approach to say these were the important factors that we had whether it was IT infrastructure, whether it was capabilities to make sure that when we came out of that decision and we picked a solution, we could all look at each other and have a handshake and say it was the right decision for us as a company, and so no departments had push back at that point because of that approach that we took. >> An objective approach that you took. >> That's right. >> Let's talk about some of the outcomes look at, actually let's not, let's talk about your deployment first, 'cause you guys started with probably your most challenging sites whereas other folks might go. Let's start with the low hanging fruit and kind of work our way up. Jabil said, "Nope, we're going to flip the script on that." >> That's right. So we, we went with what we call an east to west strategy. We are heavily concentrated in our Asia markets and so we were also wanted to deliver our ROI as quickly as possible and get our spend into the system as quickly as possible. So we we went live with 12 sites, 11 mega sites in China and our corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg in order to get that spend in as quickly as possible and get our ROI delivered. So we started in China and the US then in our second phase deployed the rest of Asia and then the US and North America and then over to Europe. So we went regional from a time zone perspective but also just I say, go bold. I hear a lot of people that start small and then grow but if you want to deliver that ROI and get your money out of that system as soon as possible go big or go home. >> I like that go big, go home. It's like Mick Ebeling was talking about this morning from not impossible labs commit and then figure it out. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> You know what? That's actually brilliant advice because it's probably the opposite that a lot of us want to be we want to be able to figure this out and then go, okay we can do that. And he said no >> Yeah >> To the opposite. >> To the opposite >> Did you have to get buy-in from those cross-functional folks to say we want to start with our most challenging sites first, was that a team decision? >> That was a decision that we did just basically to get that ROI delivered. And we also had a really strong team that still partners with our Coupa admins today that were really invested in getting onto a solution where they can automate and drive control and compliance. And so not only do we involve the team in the solution selection, but also in the global design. So we brought different cross-functional departments together into one location together, we made all of our decisions on how we were going to configure Coupa So that way again all of our divisions and departments had buy-in to how we were going to move forward and then we went from there. >> Well then, and in that case everybody feels like they have a stake >> That's right >> In the issue they have a vested interest >> That's right. >> Which is critical for these types of large projects to be successful. >> That's right. So they were involved in the RFP process so they knew why we were doing it and they were then involved and the design and how we were going to set it up so that they knew that they had a vested interest in how it was going to perform in the end. And then of course there were things that we had to tweak. So we needed to have a design committee that we could come back to and make changes as we needed to, make changes throughout the projects. You don't always get every single decision right. The first time, but you need to be nimble and make changes first and get consensus across the company. >> Right. Talk to me about some of the outcomes I know I've seen a lot of stats in your case study and I always love those numbers always jump out at me. Talk to me about some of those metrics based business outcomes that Jabil is achieving so far. >> Yeah. So in the last four years we've had a heavy focus on catalog. So actually in the last few months, we've gone from 20 to 30% by using Coupa analytics and drilling really into the details and putting really great category strategies in order to drive more catalog penetration. We've got great stats around electronic invoicing especially in certain countries where people think it's not possible. >> Right. >> There's a great change management story we have for what we've achieved in our Asian markets around electronic invoicing and from an ROI perspective, we were able to deliver 3X our ROI by the end of year two which we projected would take three years to do and 7X by year four. So we had a very conservative and achievable ROI that got the buy-in and then we were able to accelerate it by being aggressive, but also with a great solution it was easy to then get that done. >> Can you talk a little bit about the change management that you were able to achieve in the Asian market change management is the difficult thing to do. People are resistant to change, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is sometimes the change comes in there's nothing you can do about it but how did you affect that change management within that culture in the Asian market? >> Yeah. So with the executive buy-in that we had because they knew that there was high potential for us to deliver an ROI. We had executive sponsorship that helped us get through some of those barriers. So if we decided not to bring certain users into the system, for example and there was pushback that they needed to have access we had executive messaging as to why from a policy governance and control standpoint we couldn't break that. So we used our executives' voice and their support to do that. But also we brought in a great system that was user are friendly and so we didn't get a lot of resistance in, in that sense. So they actually embraced the change compared to the solution we had in place before. So by making the right selection from a user centric company we also didn't get as much resistance there as well. >> That's nice the path of least resistance is good especially if you're not exactly sure if you're going to find it, but verifying that and getting that ROI is is probably a big, a big win. Talk to me a little bit about you guys liked Coupa so much you had such, you mentioned 3X ROI within, you said the first year? >> With after year two >> After year two >> Yeah. >> 3X ROI, you liked it so much you decided to become a Coupa partner. Talk to me about that. What does that mean? What are you guys doing as partner? >> Yeah, so this is a super exiting thing for us to adventure into. So we pride ourselves on our theme as built for practitioners by practitioners. We've run the system every single day. We've been running it for years. So my team members are deep in the knowledge and capabilities of Coupa it's functionality, how to manage it every day, how to get the most you out of it and we want to share that knowledge with other Coupa customers to get the most value out of their system as well. So whether that's optimization and helping them get more out of their system or whether it's roadmap or assessments in our perspective, or even doing net new implementations we're excited to venture into that area of services with Coupa as a partner. >> Or have you guys started doing that yet? >> Today is our first Coupa inspire as a partner, which is exciting. And we literally just got started in the last few months. So we are working on getting our first customer here hopefully very shortly and have had a lot of of really great conversations with customers at the show so far. >> That's one of the great things that Coupa took the risk to bring us all together because there's they have a phenomenal community of which you guys have been a part now you said I believe about seven years, but there's nothing that replaces the connections that you make in the community that is grown from doing events like this. I imagine that you've gotten to talk with a lot of prospect >> Yes. >> Prospective customers who, what, how did you do this? This seems like an impossible feat that you've gotten to share with them. This is doable, here's how we did it. >> That's right. So fortunately I've been at previous inspires as well. So I've gotten to talk to people that I haven't seen in a couple of years, which is always exciting. I've been able to talk to customers that I've done, referrals for with Coupa before that are now Coupa customers and we get to talk about that and also those perspective customers and helping them know that it is doable, it is achievable you can get consensus in a decentralized company where all the sites if you have lots, lots of sites and countries have their own autonomy, you can do it. You can do it fast. You can do it effective if you take the right approach. And so it's exciting to get here and share that opportunity and our adventure and our journey with Coupa and the journey is only just beginning. >> Right, what are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of the innovations that they've announced at the event? I know Coupa is very much symbiotic with its customers that the community very much generates a lot of the direction in which the technology goes. But what are some of the things that you've heard announced that you thought, yes, they're going they continue to go in the right direction. >> Yeah. So there's some actual foundational capabilities around things like payment agreements and group carts and things that actually we've contributed through either customer cabs or VP sessions with design, just doing collaboration together but I'm also excited to see some of their price benchmarking that they're doing so that we can know how well are we doing and from our pricing standpoint and also where they're going supply chain I'm excited to see where they're going with that. Being a big supply chain company ourselves, we're hoping that all turns out to be something that we can innovate with Coupa on and hopefully have in the future as well. >> Well, as they said, Rob said it to me just an hour ago, they're tip of the iceberg but what its seems that you've become Heidi yourself and Jabil is really kind of an influencer within the Coupa community. We appreciate you coming by theCUBE, sharing with us what you've accomplished and how you're expanding your Coupa partnership into helping other companies. >> Great. Thank you again for having me today. >> My pleasure. >> All right. >> For Heidi Banks, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of COUPA INSPIRE 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around my next guest joins me momentarily. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two of the ongoing series. We're covering exciting start startups in the AWS ecosystem to talk about open source community stuff. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I'm delighted today to have two guests from Weaveworks. Steve George, COO of Weaveworks, and Steve Waterworth, technical marketing engineer from Weaveworks. Welcome, gentlemen, how are you? >> Very well, thanks. >> Very well, thanks very much. >> So, Steve G., what's the relationship with AWS? This is the AWS Startup Showcase. How do Weaveworks and AWS interact? >> Yeah sure. So, AWS is a investor in Weaveworks. And we, actually, collaborate really closely around EKS and some specific EKS tooling. So, in the early days of Kubernetes when AWS was working on EKS, the Elastic Kubernetes Service, we started working on the command line interface for EKS itself. And due to that partnership, we've been working closely with the EKS team for a long period of time, helping them to build the CLI and make sure that users in the community find EKS really easy to use. And so that brought us together with the AWS team, working on GitOps and thinking about how to deploy applications and clusters using this GitOps approach. And we've built that into the EKS CLI, which is an open source tool, is a project on GitHub. So, everybody can get involved with that, use it, contribute to it. We love hearing user feedback about how to help teams take advantage of the elastic nature of Kubernetes as simply and easily as possible. >> Well, it's great to have you. Before we get into the specifics around what Weaveworks is doing in this area that we're about to discuss, let's talk about this concept of GitOps. Some of us may have gotten too deep into a Netflix series, and we didn't realize that we've moved on from the world of DevOps or DevSecOps and the like. Explain where GitOps fits into this evolution. >> Yeah, sure. So, really GitOps is an instantiation, a version of DevOps. And it fits within the idea that, particularly in the Kubernetes world, we have a model in Kubernetes, which tells us exactly what we want to deploy. And so what we're talking about is using Git as a way of recording what we want to be in the runtime environment, and then telling Kubernetes from the configuration that is stored in Git exactly what we want to deploy. So, in a sense, it's very much aligned with DevOps, because we know we want to bring teams together, help them to deploy their applications, their clusters, their environments. And really with GitOps, we have a specific set of tools that we can use. And obviously what's nice about Git is it's a very developer tool, or lots and lots of developers use it, the vast majority. And so what we're trying to do is bring those operational processes into the way that developers work. So, really bringing DevOps to that generation through that specific tooling. >> So Steve G., let's continue down this thread a little bit. Why is it necessary then this sort of added wrinkle? If right now in my organization we have developers, who consider themselves to be DevOps folks, and we give them Amazon gift cards each month. And we say, "Hey, it's a world of serverless, "no code, low code lights out data centers. "Go out and deploy your code. "Everything should be fine." What's the problem with that model, and how does GitOps come in and address that? >> Right. I think there's a couple of things. So, for individual developers, one of the big challenges is that, when you watch development teams, like deploying applications and running them, you watch them switching between all those different tabs, and services, and systems that they're using. So, GitOps has a real advantage to developers, because they're already sat in Git, they're already using their familiar tooling. And so by bringing operations within that developer tooling, you're giving them that familiarity. So, it's one advantage for developers. And then for operations staff, one of the things that it does is it centralizes where all of this configuration is kept. And then you can use things like templating and some other things that we're going to be talking about today to make sure that you automate and go quickly, but you also do that in a way which is reliable, and secure, and stable. So, it's really helping to bring that run fast, but don't break things kind of ethos to how we can deploy and run applications in the cloud. >> So, Steve W., let's start talking about where Weaveworks comes into the picture, and what's your perspective. >> So, yeah, Weaveworks has an engine, a set of software, that enables this to happen. So, think of it as a constant reconciliation engine. So, you've got your declared state, your desired state is declared in Git. So, this is where all your YAML for all your Kubernetes hangs out. And then you have an agent that's running inside Kubernetes, that's the Weaveworks GitOps agent. And it's constantly comparing the desired state in Git with the actual state, which is what's running in Kubernetes. So, then as a developer, you want to make a change, or an operator, you want to make a change. You push a change into Git. The reconciliation loop runs and says, "All right, what we've got in Git does not match "what we've got in Kubernetes. "Therefore, I will create story resource, whatever." But it also works the other way. So, if someone does directly access Kubernetes and make a change, then the next time that reconciliation loop runs, it's automatically reverted back to that single source of truth in Git. So, your Kubernetes cluster, you don't get any configuration drift. It's always configured as you desire it to be configured. And as Steve George has already said, from a developer or engineer point of view, it's easy to use. They're just using Git just as they always have done and continue to do. There's nothing new to learn. No change to working practices. I just push code into Git, magic happens. >> So, Steve W., little deeper dive on that. When we hear Ops, a lot of us start thinking about, specifically in terms of infrastructure, and especially since infrastructure when deployed and left out there, even though it's really idle, you're paying for it. So, anytime there's an Ops component to the discussion, cost and resource management come into play. You mentioned this idea of not letting things drift from a template. What are those templates based on? Are they based on... Is this primarily an infrastructure discussion, or are we talking about the code itself that is outside of the infrastructure discussion? >> It's predominantly around the infrastructure. So, what you're managing in Git, as far as Kubernetes is concerned, is always deployment files, and services, and horizontal pod autoscalers, all those Kubernetes entities. Typically, the source code for your application, be it in Java, Node.js, whatever it is you happen to be writing it in, that's, typically, in a separate repository. You, typically, don't combine the two. So, you've got one set of repository, basically, for building your containers, and your CLI will run off that, and ultimately push a container into a registry somewhere. Then you have a separate repo, which is your config. repo, which declares what version of the containers you're going to run, how many you're going to run, how the services are bound to those containers, et cetera. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Steve G., talk to us about this concept of trusted application delivery with GitOps, and frankly, it's what led to the sort of prior question. When you think about trusted application delivery, where is that intertwinement between what we think of as the application code versus the code that is creating the infrastructure? So, what is trusted application delivery? >> Sure, so, with GitOps, we have the ability to deploy the infrastructure components. And then we also define what the application containers are, that would go to be deployed into that environment. And so, this is a really interesting question, because some teams will associate all of the services that an application needs within an application team. And sometimes teams will deploy sort of horizontal infrastructure, which then all application teams services take advantage of. Either way, you can define that within your configuration, within your GitOps configuration. Now, when you start deploying speed, particularly when you have multiple different teams doing these sorts of deployments, one of the questions that starts to come up will be from the security team, or someone who's thinking about, well, what happens if we make a deployment, which is accidentally incorrect, or if there is a security issue in one of those dependencies, and we need to get a new version deployed as quickly as possible? And so, in the GitOps pipeline, one of the things that we can do is to put in various checkpoints to check that the policy is being followed correctly. So, are we deploying the right number of applications, the right configuration of an application? Does that application follow certain standards that the enterprise has set down? And that's what we talk about when we talk about trusted policy and trusted delivery. Because really what we're thinking about here is enabling the development teams to go as quickly as possible with their new deployments, but protecting them with automated guard rails. So, making sure that they can go fast, but they are not going to do anything which destroys the reliability of the application platform. >> Yeah, you've mentioned reliability and kind of alluded to scalability in the application environment. What about looking at this from the security perspective? There've been some recently, pretty well publicized breaches. Not a lot of senior executives in enterprises understand that a very high percentage of code that their businesses are running on is coming out of the open source community, where developers and maintainers are, to a certain degree, what they would consider to be volunteers. That can be a scary thing. So, talk about why an enterprise struggles today with security, policy, and governance. And I toss this out to Steve W. Or Steve George. Answer appropriately. >> I'll try that in a high level, and Steve W. can give more of the technical detail. I mean, I'll say that when I talk to enterprise customers, there's two areas of concern. One area of concern is that, we're in an environment with DevOps where we started this conversation of trying to help teams to go as quickly as possible. But there's many instances where teams accidentally do things, but, nonetheless, that is a security issue. They deploy something manually into an environment, they forget about it, and that's something which is wrong. So, helping with this kind of policy as code pipeline, ensuring that everything goes through a set of standards could really help teams. And that's why we call it developer guard rails, because this is about helping the development team by providing automation around the outside, that helps them to go faster and relieves them from that mental concern of have they made any mistakes or errors. So, that's one form. And then the other form is the form, where you are going, David, which is really around security dependencies within software, a whole supply chain of concern. And what we can do there, by, again, having a set of standard scanners and policy checking, which ensures that everything is checked before it goes into the environment. That really helps to make sure that there are no security issues in the runtime deployment. Steve W., anything that I missed there? >> Yeah, well, I'll just say, I'll just go a little deeper on the technology bit. So, essentially, we have a library of policies, which get you started. Of course, you can modify those policies, write your own. The library is there just to get you going. So, as a change is made, typically, via, say, a GitHub action, the policy engine then kicks in and checks all those deployment files, all those YAML for Kubernetes, and looks for things that then are outside of policy. And if that's the case, then the action will fail, and that'll show up on the pull request. So, things like, are your containers coming from trusted sources? You're not just pulling in some random container from a public registry. You're actually using a trusted registry. Things like, are containers running as route, or are they running in privileged mode, which, again, it could be a security? But it's not just about security, it can also be about coding standards. Are the containers correctly annotated? Is the deployment correctly annotated? Does it have the annotation fields that we require for our coding standards? And it can also be about reliability. Does the deployment script have the health checks defined? Does it have a suitable replica account? So, a rolling update. We'll actually do a rolling update. You can't do a rolling update with only one replica. So, you can have all these sorts of checks and guards in there. And then finally, there's an admission controller that runs inside Kubernetes. So, if someone does try and squeeze through, and do something a little naughty, and go directly to the cluster, it's not going to happen, 'cause that admission controller is going to say, "Hey, no, that's a policy violation. "I'm not letting that in." So, it really just stops. It stops developers making mistakes. I know, I know, I've done development, and I've deployed things into Kubernetes, and haven't got the conflict quite right, and then it falls flat on its face. And you're sitting there scratching your head. And with the policy checks, then that wouldn't happen. 'Cause you would try and put something in that has a slightly iffy configuration, and it would spit it straight back out at you. >> So, obviously you have some sort of policy engine that you're you're relying on. But what is the user experience like? I mean, is this a screen that is reminiscent of the matrix with non-readable characters streaming down that only another machine can understand? What does this look like to the operator? >> Yeah, sure, so, we have a console, a web console, where developers and operators can use a set of predefined policies. And so that's the starting point. And we have a set of recommendations there and policies that you can just attach to your deployments. So, set of recommendations about different AWS resources, deployment types, EKS deployment types, different sets of standards that your enterprise might be following along with. So, that's one way of doing it. And then you can take those policies and start customizing them to your needs. And by using GitOps, what we're aiming for here is to bring both the application configuration, the environment configuration. We talked about this earlier, all of this being within Git. We're adding these policies within Git as well. So, for advanced users, they'll have everything that they need together in a single unit of change, your application, your definitions of how you want to run this application service, and the policies that you want it to follow, all together in Git. And then when there is some sort of policy violation on the other end of the pipeline, people can see where this policy is being violated, how it was violated. And then for a set of those, we try and automate by showing a pull request for the user about how they can fix this policy violation. So, try and make it as simple as possible. Because in many of these sorts of violations, if you're a busy developer, there'll be minor configuration details going against the configuration, and you just want to fix those really quickly. >> So Steve W., is that what the Mega Leaks policy engine is? >> Yes, that's the Mega Leaks policy engine. So, yes, it's a SaaS-based service that holds the actual policy engine and your library of policies. So, when your GitHub action runs, it goes and essentially makes a call across with the configuration and does the check and spits out any violation errors, if there are any. >> So, folks in this community really like to try things before they deploy them. Is there an opportunity for people to get a demo of this, get their hands on it? what's the best way to do that? >> The best way to do it is have a play with it. As an engineer, I just love getting my hands dirty with these sorts of things. So, yeah, you can go to the Mega Leaks website and get a 30-day free trial. You can spin yourself up a little, test cluster, and have a play. >> So, what's coming next? We had DevOps, and then DevSecOps, and now GitOps. What's next? Are we going to go back to all infrastructure on premises all the time, back to waterfall? Back to waterfall, "Hot Tub Time Machine?" What's the prediction? >> Well, I think the thing that you set out right at the start, actually, is the prediction. The difference between infrastructure and applications is steadily going away, as we try and be more dynamic in the way that we deploy. And for us with GitOps, I think we're... When we talk about operations, there's a lots of depth to what we mean about operations. So, I think there's lots of areas to explore how to bring operations into developer tooling with GitOps. So, that's, I think, certainly where Weaveworks will be focusing. >> Well, as an old infrastructure guy myself, I see this as vindication. Because infrastructure still matters, kids. And we need sophisticated ways to make sure that the proper infrastructure is applied. People are shocked to learn that even serverless application environments involve servers. So, I tell my 14-year-old son this regularly, he doesn't believe it, but it is what it is. Steve W., any final thoughts on this whole move towards GitOps and, specifically, the Weaveworks secret sauce and superpower. >> Yeah. It's all about (indistinct)... It's all about going as quickly as possible, but without tripping up. Being able to run fast, but without tripping over your shoe laces, which you forgot to tie up. And that's what the automation brings. It allows you to go quickly, does lots of things for you, and yeah, we try and stop you shooting yourself in the foot as you're going. >> Well, it's been fantastic talking to both of you today. For the audience's sake, I'm in California, and we have a gentleman in France, and a gentlemen in the UK. It's just the wonders of modern technology never cease. Thanks, again, Steve Waterworth, Steve George from Weaveworks. Thanks for coming on theCUBE for the AWS Startup Showcase. And to the rest of us, keep it right here for more action on theCUBE, your leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>welcome. My name is Ben Bennett. I am the director of HPC Strategic programs here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It is my great pleasure and honor to be talking to Professor Mark Parsons from the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center. And we're gonna talk a little about exa scale. What? It means we're gonna talk less about the technology on Maura about the science, the requirements on the need for exa scale. Uh, rather than a deep dive into the enabling technologies. Mark. Welcome. >>I then thanks very much for inviting me to tell me >>complete pleasure. Um, so I'd like to kick off with, I suppose. Quite an interesting look back. You and I are both of a certain age 25 plus, Onda. We've seen these milestones. Uh, I suppose that the S I milestones of high performance computing's come and go, you know, from a gig a flop back in 1987 teraflop in 97 a petaflop in 2000 and eight. But we seem to be taking longer in getting to an ex a flop. Um, so I'd like your thoughts. Why is why is an extra flop taking so long? >>So I think that's a very interesting question because I started my career in parallel computing in 1989. I'm gonna join in. IPCC was set up then. You know, we're 30 years old this year in 1990 on Do you know the fastest computer we have them is 800 mega flops just under a getting flogged. So in my career, we've gone already. When we reached the better scale, we'd already gone pretty much a million times faster on, you know, the step from a tariff block to a block scale system really didn't feel particularly difficult. Um, on yet the step from A from a petaflop PETA scale system. To an extent, block is a really, really big challenge. And I think it's really actually related to what's happened with computer processes over the last decade, where, individually, you know, approached the core, Like on your laptop. Whoever hasn't got much faster, we've just got more often So the perception of more speed, but actually just being delivered by more course. And as you go down that approach, you know what happens in the supercomputing world as well. We've gone, uh, in 2010 I think we had systems that were, you know, a few 1000 cores. Our main national service in the UK for the last eight years has had 118,000 cores. But looking at the X scale we're looking at, you know, four or five million cores on taming that level of parallelism is the real challenge. And that's why it's taking an enormous and time to, uh, deliver these systems. That is not just on the hardware front. You know, vendors like HP have to deliver world beating technology and it's hard, hard. But then there's also the challenge to the users. How do they get the codes to work in the face of that much parallelism? >>If you look at what the the complexity is delivering an annex a flop. Andi, you could have bought an extra flop three or four years ago. You couldn't have housed it. You couldn't have powered it. You couldn't have afforded it on, do you? Couldn't program it. But you still you could have You could have bought one. We should have been so lucky to be unable to supply it. Um, the software, um I think from our standpoint, is is looking like where we're doing mawr enabling with our customers. You sell them a machine on, then the the need then to do collaboration specifically seems mawr and Maura around the software. Um, so it's It's gonna be relatively easy to get one x a flop using limb pack, but but that's not extra scale. So what do you think? On exa scale machine versus an X? A flop machine means to the people like yourself to your users, the scientists and industry. What is an ex? A flop versus >>an exa scale? So I think, you know, supercomputing moves forward by setting itself challenges. And when you when you look at all of the excess scale programs worldwide that are trying to deliver systems that can do an X a lot form or it's actually very arbitrary challenge. You know, we set ourselves a PETA scale challenge delivering a petaflop somebody manage that, Andi. But you know, the world moves forward by setting itself challenges e think you know, we use quite arbitrary definition of what we mean is well by an exit block. So, you know, in your in my world, um, we either way, first of all, see ah flop is a computation, so multiply or it's an ad or whatever on we tend. Thio, look at that is using very high precision numbers or 64 bit numbers on Do you know, we then say, Well, you've got to do the next block. You've got to do a billion billion of those calculations every second. No, a some of the last arbitrary target Now you know today from HPD Aiken by my assistant and will do a billion billion calculations per second. And they will either do that as a theoretical peak, which would be almost unattainable, or using benchmarks that stressed the system on demonstrate a relaxing law. But again, those benchmarks themselves attuned Thio. Just do those calculations and deliver and explore been a steady I'll way if you like. So, you know, way kind of set ourselves this this this big challenge You know, the big fence on the race course, which were clambering over. But the challenge in itself actually should be. I'm much more interesting. The water we're going to use these devices for having built um, eso. Getting into the extra scale era is not so much about doing an extra block. It's a new generation off capability that allows us to do better scientific and industrial research. And that's the interesting bit in this whole story. >>I would tend to agree with you. I think the the focus around exa scale is to look at, you know, new technologies, new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at data and to get new results. So eventually you will get yourself a nexus scale machine. Um, one hopes, sooner rather >>than later. Well, I'm sure you don't tell me one, Ben. >>It's got nothing to do with may. I can't sell you anything, Mark. But there are people outside the door over there who would love to sell you one. Yes. However, if we if you look at your you know your your exa scale machine, Um, how do you believe the workloads are going to be different on an extra scale machine versus your current PETA scale machine? >>So I think there's always a slight conceit when you buy a new national supercomputer. On that conceit is that you're buying a capability that you know on. But many people will run on the whole system. Known truth. We do have people that run on the whole of our archer system. Today's A 118,000 cores, but I would say, and I'm looking at the system. People that run over say, half of that can be counted on Europe on a single hand in a year, and they're doing very specific things. It's very costly simulation they're running on. So, you know, if you look at these systems today, two things show no one is. It's very difficult to get time on them. The Baroque application procedures All of the requirements have to be assessed by your peers and your given quite limited amount of time that you have to eke out to do science. Andi people tend to run their applications in the sweet spot where their application delivers the best performance on You know, we try to push our users over time. Thio use reasonably sized jobs. I think our average job says about 20,000 course, she's not bad, but that does mean that as we move to the exits, kill two things have to happen. One is actually I think we've got to be more relaxed about giving people access to the system, So let's give more people access, let people play, let people try out ideas they've never tried out before. And I think that will lead to a lot more innovation and computational science. But at the same time, I think we also need to be less precious. You know, we to accept these systems will have a variety of sizes of job on them. You know, we're still gonna have people that want to run four million cores or two million cores. That's absolutely fine. Absolutely. Salute those people for trying really, really difficult. But then we're gonna have a huge spectrum of views all the way down to people that want to run on 500 cores or whatever. So I think we need Thio broaden the user base in Alexa Skill system. And I know this is what's happening, for example, in Japan with the new Japanese system. >>So, Mark, if you cast your mind back to almost exactly a year ago after the HPC user forum, you were interviewed for Premier Magazine on Do you alluded in that article to the needs off scientific industrial users requiring, you know, uh on X a flop or an exa scale machine it's clear in your in your previous answer regarding, you know, the workloads. Some would say that the majority of people would be happier with, say, 10 100 petaflop machines. You know, democratization. More people access. But can you provide us examples at the type of science? The needs of industrial users that actually do require those resources to be put >>together as an exa scale machine? So I think you know, it's a very interesting area. At the end of the day, these systems air bought because they are capability systems on. I absolutely take the argument. Why shouldn't we buy 10 100 pattern block systems? But there are a number of scientific areas even today that would benefit from a nexus school system and on these the sort of scientific areas that will use as much access onto a system as much time and as much scale of the system as they can, as you can give them eso on immediate example. People doing chroma dynamics calculations in particle physics, theoretical calculations, they would just use whatever you give them. But you know, I think one of the areas that is very interesting is actually the engineering space where, you know, many people worry the engineering applications over the last decade haven't really kept up with this sort of supercomputers that we have. I'm leading a project called Asimov, funded by M. P S O. C in the UK, which is jointly with Rolls Royce, jointly funded by Rolls Royce and also working with the University of Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Warrick. We're trying to do the whole engine gas turbine simulation for the first time. So that's looking at the structure of the gas turbine, the airplane engine, the structure of it, how it's all built it together, looking at the fluid dynamics off the air and the hot gasses, the flu threat, looking at the combustion of the engine looking how fuel is spread into the combustion chamber. Looking at the electrics around, looking at the way the engine two forms is, it heats up and cools down all of that. Now Rolls Royce wants to do that for 20 years. Andi, Uh, whenever they certify, a new engine has to go through a number of physical tests, and every time they do on those tests, it could cost them as much as 25 to $30 million. These are very expensive tests, particularly when they do what's called a blade off test, which would be, you know, blade failure. They could prove that the engine contains the fragments of the blade. Sort of think, continue face really important test and all engines and pass it. What we want to do is do is use an exa scale computer to properly model a blade off test for the first time, so that in future, some simulations can become virtual rather than having thio expend all of the money that Rolls Royce would normally spend on. You know, it's a fascinating project is a really hard project to do. One of the things that I do is I am deaf to share this year. Gordon Bell Price on bond I've really enjoyed to do. That's one of the major prizes in our area, you know, gets announced supercomputing every year. So I have the pleasure of reading all the submissions each year. I what's been really interesting thing? This is my third year doing being on the committee on what's really interesting is the way that big systems like Summit, for example, in the US have pushed the user communities to try and do simulations Nowhere. Nobody's done before, you know. And we've seen this as well, with papers coming after the first use of the for Goku system in Japan, for example, people you know, these are very, very broad. So, you know, earthquake simulation, a large Eddie simulations of boats. You know, a number of things around Genome Wide Association studies, for example. So the use of these computers spans of last area off computational science. I think the really really important thing about these systems is their challenging people that do calculations they've never done before. That's what's important. >>Okay, Thank you. You talked about challenges when I nearly said when you and I had lots of hair, but that's probably much more true of May. Um, we used to talk about grand challenges we talked about, especially around the teraflop era, the ski red program driving, you know, the grand challenges of science, possibly to hide the fact that it was a bomb designing computer eso they talked about the grand challenges. Um, we don't seem to talk about that much. We talk about excess girl. We talk about data. Um Where are the grand challenges that you see that an exa scale computer can you know it can help us. Okay, >>so I think grand challenges didn't go away. Just the phrase went out of fashion. Um, that's like my hair. I think it's interesting. The I do feel the science moves forward by setting itself grand challenges and always had has done, you know, my original backgrounds in particle physics. I was very lucky to spend four years at CERN working in the early stage of the left accelerator when it first came online on. Do you know the scientists there? I think they worked on left 15 years before I came in and did my little ph d on it. Andi, I think that way of organizing science hasn't changed. We just talked less about grand challenges. I think you know what I've seen over the last few years is a renaissance in computational science, looking at things that have previously, you know, people have said have been impossible. So a couple of years ago, for example, one of the key Gordon Bell price papers was on Genome Wide Association studies on some of it. If I may be one of the winner of its, if I remember right on. But that was really, really interesting because first of all, you know, the sort of the Genome Wide Association Studies had gone out of favor in the bioinformatics by a scientist community because people thought they weren't possible to compute. But that particular paper should Yes, you could do these really, really big Continental little problems in a reasonable amount of time if you had a big enough computer. And one thing I felt all the way through my career actually is we've probably discarded Mawr simulations because they were impossible at the time that we've actually decided to do. And I sometimes think we to challenge ourselves by looking at the things we've discovered in the past and say, Oh, look, you know, we could actually do that now, Andi, I think part of the the challenge of bringing an extra service toe life is to get people to think about what they would use it for. That's a key thing. Otherwise, I always say, a computer that is unused to just be turned off. There's no point in having underutilized supercomputer. Everybody loses from that. >>So Let's let's bring ourselves slightly more up to date. We're in the middle of a global pandemic. Uh, on board one of the things in our industry has bean that I've been particularly proud about is I've seen the vendors, all the vendors, you know, offering up machine's onboard, uh, making resources available for people to fight things current disease. Um, how do you see supercomputers now and in the future? Speeding up things like vaccine discovery on help when helping doctors generally. >>So I think you're quite right that, you know, the supercomputer community around the world actually did a really good job of responding to over 19. Inasmuch as you know, speaking for the UK, we put in place a rapid access program. So anybody wanted to do covert research on the various national services we have done to the to two services Could get really quick access. Um, on that, that has worked really well in the UK You know, we didn't have an archer is an old system, Aziz. You know, we didn't have the world's largest supercomputer, but it is happily bean running lots off covert 19 simulations largely for the biomedical community. Looking at Druk modeling and molecular modeling. Largely that's just been going the US They've been doing really large uh, combinatorial parameter search problems on on Summit, for example, looking to see whether or not old drugs could be reused to solve a new problem on DSO, I think, I think actually, in some respects Kobe, 19 is being the sounds wrong. But it's actually been good for supercomputing. Inasmuch is pointed out to governments that supercomputers are important parts off any scientific, the active countries research infrastructure. >>So, um, I'll finish up and tap into your inner geek. Um, there's a lot of technologies that are being banded around to currently enable, you know, the first exa scale machine, wherever that's going to be from whomever, what are the current technologies or emerging technologies that you are interested in excited about looking forward to getting your hands on. >>So in the business case I've written for the U. K's exa scale computer, I actually characterized this is a choice between the American model in the Japanese model. Okay, both of frozen, both of condoms. Eso in America, they're very much gone down the chorus plus GPU or GPU fruit. Um, so you might have, you know, an Intel Xeon or an M D process er center or unarmed process or, for that matter on you might have, you know, 24 g. P. U s. I think the most interesting thing that I've seen is definitely this move to a single address space. So the data that you have will be accessible, but the G p u on the CPU, I think you know, that's really bean. One of the key things that stopped the uptake of GPS today and that that that one single change is going Thio, I think, uh, make things very, very interesting. But I'm not entirely convinced that the CPU GPU model because I think that it's very difficult to get all the all the performance set of the GPU. You know, it will do well in H p l, for example, high performance impact benchmark we're discussing at the beginning of this interview. But in riel scientific workloads, you know, you still find it difficult to find all the performance that has promised. So, you know, the Japanese approach, which is the core, is only approach. E think it's very attractive, inasmuch as you know They're using very high bandwidth memory, very interesting process of which they are going to have to, you know, which they could develop together over 10 year period. And this is one thing that people don't realize the Japanese program and the American Mexico program has been working for 10 years on these systems. I think the Japanese process really interesting because, um, it when you look at the performance, it really does work for their scientific work clothes, and that's that does interest me a lot. This this combination of a A process are designed to do good science, high bandwidth memory and a real understanding of how data flows around the supercomputer. I think those are the things are exciting me at the moment. Obviously, you know, there's new networking technologies, I think, in the fullness of time, not necessarily for the first systems. You know, over the next decade we're going to see much, much more activity on silicon photonics. I think that's really, really fascinating all of these things. I think in some respects the last decade has just bean quite incremental improvements. But I think we're supercomputing is going in the moment. We're a very very disruptive moment again. That goes back to start this discussion. Why is extra skill been difficult to get? Thio? Actually, because the disruptive moment in technology. >>Professor Parsons, thank you very much for your time and your insights. Thank you. Pleasure and folks. Thank you for watching. I hope you've learned something, or at least enjoyed it. With that, I would ask you to stay safe and goodbye.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. This is theCUBE virtual with VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering VMware. We're not in-person, we're virtual but all the content is flowing. Of course, we're here with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who's been on theCUBE, all 11 years. This year virtual of theCUBE as we've been covering VMware from his early days in 2010 when theCUBE started, 11 years later, Pat, it's still changing and still exciting. Great to see you, thanks for taking the time. >> Hey, you guys are great. I love the interactions that we have, the energy, the fun, the intellectual sparring and of course the audiences have loved it now for 11 years, and I look forward to the next 11 that we'll be doing together. >> It's always exciting 'cause we have great conversations, Dave, and I like to drill in and really kind of probe and unpack the content that you're delivering at the keynotes, but also throughout the entire program. It is virtual this year which highlights a lot of the cloud native changes. Just want to get your thoughts on the virtual aspect, VMworld's not in-person, which is one of the best events of the year, everyone loves it, the great community. It's virtual this year but there's a slew of content, what should people take away from this virtual VMworld? >> Well, one aspect of it is that I'm actually excited about is that we're going to be well over 100,000 people which allows us to be bigger, right? You don't have the physical constraints, you also are able to reach places like I've gone to customers and maybe they had 20 people attend in prior years. This year they're having 100. They're able to have much larger teams also like some of the more regulated industries where they can't necessarily send people to events like this, The International Audience. So just being able to spread the audience much more. A digital foundation for an unpredictable world, and man, what an unpredictable world it has been this past year. And then key messages, lots of key products announcements, technology announcements, partnership announcements, and of course in all of the VMworld is that hands-on labs, the interactions that will be delivering a virtual. You come to VMware because the content is so robust and it's being delivered by the world's smartest people. >> Yeah, we've had great conversations over the years and we've talked about hybrid cloud, I think, 2012. A lot of the stuff I look back at a lot of the videos was early on we're picking out all these waves, but there was that moment four years ago or so, maybe even four three, I can't even remember it seems like yesterday. You gave the seminal keynote and you said, this is the way the world's going to happen. And since that keynote, I'll never forget, was in Moscone and since then, you guys have been performing extremely well both on the business front as well as making technology bets and it's paying off. So what's next, you got the cloud, cloud scale, is it Space, is it Cyber? All these things are going on what is next wave that you're watching and what's coming out and what can people extract out of VMworld this year about this next wave? >> Yeah, one of the things I really am excited about and I went to my buddy Jensen, I said, boy, we're doing this work in smart mix we really like to work with you and maybe some things to better generalize the GPU. And Jensen challenged me. Now usually, I'm the one challenging other people with bigger visions. This time Jensen said, "hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. Let's do the entire AI landscape together, and let's make AI a enterprise class works load from the data center to the cloud and to the Edge. And so I'm going to bring all of my AI resources and make VMware and Tanzu the preferred infrastructure to deliver AI at scale. I need you guys to make the GPUs work like first-class citizens in the vSphere environment because I need them to be truly democratized for the enterprise, so that it's not some specialized AI Development Team, it's everybody being able to do that. And then we're going to connect the whole network together in a new and profound way with our Monterey program as well being able to use the Smart NIC, the DPU, as Jensen likes to call it. So now with CPU, GPU and DPU, all being managed through a distributed architecture of VMware. This is exciting, so this is one in particular that I think we are now re-architecting the data center, the cloud and the Edge. And this partnership is really a central point of that. >> Yeah, the NVIDIA thing's huge and I know Dave probably has some questions on that but I asked you a question because a lot of people ask me, is that just a hardware deal? Talking about SmartNICs, you talk about data processing units. It sounds like a motherboard in the cloud, if you will, but it's not just hardware. Can you talk about the aspect of the software piece? Because again, NVIDIA is known for GPUs, we all know that but we're talking about AI here so it's not just hardware. Can you just expand and share what the software aspect of all this is? >> Yeah well, NVIDIA has been investing in their AI stack and it's one of those where I say, this is Edison at work, right? The harder I work, the luckier I get. And NVIDIA was lucky that their architecture worked much better for the AI workload. But it was built on two decades of hard work in building a parallel data center architecture. And they have built a complete software stack for all the major AI workloads running on their platform. All of that is now coming to vSphere and Tanzu, that is a rich software layer across many vertical industries. And we'll talk about a variety of use cases, one of those that we highlight at VMworld is the University, California, San Francisco partnership, UCSF, one of the world's leading research hospitals. Some of the current vaccine use cases as well, the financial use cases for threat detection and trading benefits. It really is about how we bring that rich software stack. This is a decade and a half of work to the VMware platform, so that now every developer and every enterprise can take advantage of this at scale. That's a lot of software. So in many respects, yeah, there's a piece of hardware in here but the software stack is even more important. >> It's so well we're on the sort of NVIDIA, the arm piece. There's really interesting these alternative processing models, and I wonder if you could comment on the implications for AI inferencing at the Edge. It's not just as well processor implications, it's storage, it's networking, it's really a whole new fundamental paradigm, but how are you thinking about that, Pat? >> Yeah, and we've thought about there's three aspects, what we said, three problems that we're solving. One is the developer problem where we said now you develop once, right? And the developer can now say, "hey I want to have this new AI-centric app and I can develop and it can run in the data center on the cloud or at the Edge." Secondly, my Operations Team can be able to operate this just like I do all of my infrastructure, and now it's VMs containers and AI applications. And third, and this is where your question really comes to bear most significantly, is data gravity. Right, these data sets are big. Some of them need to be very low latency as well, they also have regulatory issues. And if I have to move these large regulated data sets to the cloud, boy, maybe I can't do that generally for my Apps or if I have low latency heavy apps at the Edge, huh, I can't pull it back to the cloud or to my data center. And that's where the uniform architecture and aspects of the Monterey Program where I'm able to take advantage of the network and the SmartNICs that are being built, but also being able to fully represent the data gravity issues of AI applications at scale. 'Cause in many cases, I'll need to do the processing, both the learning and the inference at the Edge as well. So that's a key part of our strategy here with NVIDIA and I do think is going to unlock a new class of apps because when you think about AI and containers, what am I using it for? Well, it's the next generation of applications. A lot of those are going to be Edge, 5G-based, so very critical. >> We've got to talk about security now too. I'm going to pivot a little bit here, John, if it's okay. Years ago, you said security is a do-over, you said that on theCUBE, it stuck with us. But there's been a lot of complacency. It's kind of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but but COVID kind of broke it. And so you see three mega trends, you've got cloud security, you'll see in Z-scaler rocket, you've got Identity Access Management and Octo which I hope there's I think a customer of yours and then you got Endpoint, you're seeing Crowdstrike explode you guys paid 2.7 billion, I think, for Carbon Black, yet Crowdstrike has this huge valuation. That's a mega opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing there? How are you bringing that all together? You've got NSX components, EUC components, you've got sort of security throughout your entire stack. How should we be thinking about that? >> Well, one of the announcements that I am most excited about at VMworld is the release of Carbon Black workload. 'Cause we said we're going to take those carbon black assets and we're going to combine it with workspace one, we're going to build it in NSX, we're going to make it part of Tanzu, and we're going to make it part of vSphere. And Carbon Black workload is literally the vSphere embodiment of Carbon Black in an agent-less way. So now you don't need to insert new agents or anything, it becomes part of the hypervisor itself. Meaning that there's no attack surface available for the bad guys to pursue. But not only is this an exciting new product capability, but we're going to make it free, right? And what I'm announcing at VMworld and everybody who uses vSphere gets Carbon Black workload for free for an unlimited number of VMs for the next six months. And as I said in the keynote, today is a bad day for cyber criminals. This is what intrinsic security is about, making it part of the platform. Don't add anything on, just click the button and start using what's built into vSphere. And we're doing that same thing with what we're doing at the networking layer, this is the last line acquisition. We're going to bring that same workload kind of characteristic into the container, that's why we did the Octarine acquisition, and we're releasing the integration of workspace one with Carbon Black client and that's going to be the differentiator, and by the way, Crowdstrike is doing well, but guess what? So are we, and right both of us are eliminating the rotting dead carcasses of the traditional AV approach. So there's a huge market for both of us to go pursue here. So a lot of great things in security, and as you said, we're just starting to see that shift of the industry occur that I promised last year in theCUBE. >> So it'd be safe to say that you're a cloud native and a security company these days? >> Yeah well, absolutely. And the bigger picture of us is that we're this critical infrastructure layer for the Edge, for the cloud, for the Telco environment and for the data center from every endpoint, every application, every cloud. >> So, Pat, I want to ask you a virtual question we got from the community. I'm going to throw it out to you because a lot of people look at Amazon and the cloud and they say, okay we didn't see it coming, we saw it coming, we saw it scale all the benefits that are coming out of cloud well documented. The question for you is, what's next after cloud? As people start to rethink especially with COVID highlighting and all the scabs out there as people look at their exposed infrastructure and their software, they want to be modern, they want the modern apps. What's next after cloud, what's your vision? >> Well, with respect to cloud, we are taking customers on the multicloud vision, right, where you truly get to say, oh, this workload I want to be able to run it with Azure, with amazon, I need to bring this one on-premise, I want to run that one hosted. I'm not sure where I'm going to run that application, so develop it and then run it at the best place. And that's what we mean by our hybrid multicloud strategy, is being able for customers to really have cloud flexibility and choice. And even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is going super well, we're seeing a real uptick, we're also happy that the Microsoft Azure VMware service is now GA. So there in Marketplace, are Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba partnerships, and the much broader set of VMware Cloud partner programs. So the future is multicloud. Furthermore, it's then how do we do that in the Telco network for the 5G build out? The Telco cloud, and how do we do that for the Edge? And I think that might be sort of the granddaddy of all of these because increasingly in a 5G world, we'll be enabling Edge use cases, we'll be pushing AI to the Edge like we talked about earlier in this conversation, we'll be enabling these high bandwidth low latency use cases at the Edge, and we'll see more and more of the smart embodiment smart city, smart street, smart factory, the autonomous driving, all of those need these type of capabilities. >> Okay. >> So there's hybrid and there's multi, you just talked about multi. So hybrid are data, are data partner ETR they do quarterly surveys. We're seeing big uptick in VMware Cloud on AWS, you guys mentioned that in your call. We're also seeing the VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation and the other elements, clearly a big uptick. So how should we think about hybrid? It looks like that's an extension of on-prem maybe not incremental, maybe a share shift, whereas multi looks like it's incremental but today multi is really running on multiple clouds, but a vision toward incremental value. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah, so clearly, the idea of multi is truly multiple clouds. Am I taking advantage of multiple clouds being my private clouds, my hosted clouds and of course my public cloud partners? We believe everybody will be running a great private cloud, picking a primary public cloud and then a secondary public cloud. Hybrid then is saying, which of those infrastructures are identical, so that I can run them without modifying any aspect of my infrastructure operations or applications? And in today's world where people are wanting to accelerate their move to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is spot-on with their needs. Because if I have to refactor my applications, it's a couple million dollars per app and I'll see you in a couple of years. If I can simply migrate my existing application to the hybrid cloud, what we're consistently seeing is the time is 1/4 and the cost is 1/8 or less. Those are powerful numbers. And if I need to exit a data center, I want to be able to move to a cloud environment to be able to access more of those native cloud services, wow, that's powerful. And that's why for seven years now, we've been preaching that hybrid is the future, it is not a way station to the future. And I believe that more fervently today than when I declared it seven years ago. So we are firmly on that path that we're enabling a multi and hybrid cloud future for all of our customers. >> Yeah, you addressed that like Cube 2013, I remember that interview vividly was not a weigh station I got hammered answered. Thank you, Pat, for clarifying that going back seven years. I love the vision, you always got the right wave, it's always great to talk to you but I got to ask you about these initiatives that you're seeing clearly. Last year, a year and a half ago, Project Pacific came out, almost like a guiding directional vision. It then put some meat on the bone Tanzu and now you guys have that whole cloud native initiative, it's starting to flower up, thousands of flowers are blooming. This year, Project Monterey has announced. Same kind of situation, you're showing out the vision. What are the plans to take that to the next level? And take a minute to explain how Project Monterey, what it means and how you see that filling out. I'm assuming it's going to take the same trajectory as Pacific. >> Yeah, Monterey is a big deal. This is re-architecting the core of vSphere and it really is ripping apart the IO stack from the intrinsic operation of vSphere and the SX itself because in many ways, the IO, we've been always leveraging the NIC and essentially virtual NICs, but we never leverage the resources of the network adapters themselves in any fundamental way. And as you think about SmartNICs, these are powerful resources now where they may have four, eight, 16 even 32 cores running in the SmartNIC itself. So how do I utilize that resource, but it also sits in the right place? In the sense that it is the network traffic cop, it is the place to do security acceleration, it is the place that enables IO bandwidth optimization across increasingly rich applications where the workloads, the data, the latency get more important both in the data center and across data centers, to the cloud and to the Edge. So this re-architecting is a big deal, we announced the three partners, Intel, NVIDIA Mellanox and Pensando that we're working with, and we'll begin the deliveries of this as part of the core vSphere offerings beginning next year. So it's a big re-architecting, these are our key partners, we're excited about the work that we're doing with them and then of course our system partners like Dell and Lenovo who've already come forward and says, "Yeah we're going to to be bringing these to market together with VMware." >> Pat, personal question for you. I want to get your personal take, your career going back to Intel, you've seen it all but the shift is consumer to enterprise and you look at just recently Snowflake IPO, the biggest ever in the history of Wall Street. It's an enterprise data company, and the enterprise is now relevant. The consumer enterprise feels consumery, we talked about consumerization of IT years and years ago. But now more than ever the hottest financial IPO enterprise, you guys are enterprise. You did enterprise at Intel (laughing), you know the enterprise, you're doing it here at VMware. The enterprise is the consumer now with cloud and all this new landscape. What is your view on this because you've seen the waves, have you seen the historical perspective? It was consumer, was the big thing now it's enterprise, what's your take on all this? How do you make sense of it because it's now mainstream, what's your view on this? >> Well, first I do want to say congratulations to my friend, Frank and the extraordinary Snowflake IPO. And by the way they use VMware, so I not only do I feel a sense of ownership 'cause Frank used to work for me for a period of time, but they're also a customer of ours so go Frank, go Snowflake. We're excited about that. But there is this episodic to the industry where for a period of time, it is consumer-driven and CES used to be the hottest ticket in the industry for technology trends. But as you say, it has now shifted to be more business-centric, and I've said this very firmly, for instance, in the case of 5G where I do not see consumer. A faster video or a better Facebook isn't going to be why I buy 5G. It's going to be driven by more business use cases where the latency, the security and the bandwidth will have radically differentiated views of the new applications that will be the case. So we do think that we're in a period of time and I expect that it's probably at least the next five years where business will be the technology drivers in the industry. And then probably, hey there'll be a wave of consumer innovation, and I'll have to get my black turtlenecks out again and start trying to be cool but I've always been more of an enterprise guy so I like the next five to 10 years better. I'm not cool enough to be a consumer guy and maybe my age is now starting to conspire against me as well. >> Hey, Pat I know you got to go but a quick question. So you guys, you gave guidance, pretty good guidance actually. I wonder, have you and Zane come up with a new algorithm to deal with all this uncertainty or is it kind of back to old school gut feel? >> (laughing) Well, I think as we thought about the year, as we came into the year, and obviously, COVID smacked everybody, we laid out a model, we looked at various industry analysts, what we call the Swoosh Model, right? Q2, Q3 and Q4 recovery, Q1 more so, Q2 more so. And basically, we built our own theories behind that, we tested against many analyst perspectives and we had Vs and we had Ws and we had Ls and so on. We picked what we thought was really sort of grounded in the best data that we could, put our own analysis which we have substantial data of our own customers' usage, et cetera and picked the model. And like any model, you put a touch of conservatism against it, and we've been pretty accurate. And I think there's a lot of things we've been able to sort of with good data, good thoughtfulness, take a view and then just consistently manage against it and everything that we said when we did that back in March has sort of proven out incrementally to be more accurate. And some are saying, "Hey things are coming back more quickly" and then, "Oh, we're starting to see the fall numbers climb up a little bit." Hey, we don't think this goes away quickly, there's still a lot of secondary things to get flushed through, the various economies as stimulus starts tailoring off, small businesses are more impacted, and we still don't have a widely deployed vaccine and I don't expect we will have one until second half of next year. Now there's the silver lining to that, as we said, which means that these changes, these faster to the future shifts in how we learn, how we work, how we educate, how we care for, how we worship, how we live, they will get more and more sedimented into the new normal, relying more and more on the digital foundation. And we think ultimately, that has extremely good upsides for us long-term, even as it's very difficult to navigate in the near term. And that's why we are just raving optimists for the long-term benefits of a more and more digital foundation for the future of every industry, every human, every workforce, every hospital, every educator, they are going to become more digital and that's why I think, going back to the last question this is a business-driven cycle, we're well positioned and we're thrilled for all of those who are participating with Vmworld 2020. This is a seminal moment for us and our industry. >> Pat, thank you so much for taking the time. It's an enabling model, it's what platforms are all about, you get that. My final parting question for you is whether you're a VC investing in startups or a large enterprise who's trying to get through COVID with a growth plan for that future. What does a modern app look like, and what does a modern company look like in your view? >> Well, a modern company would be that instead of having a lot of people looking down at infrastructure, the bulk of my IT resources are looking up at building apps, those apps are using modern CICD data pipeline approaches built for a multicloud embodiment, right, and of course VMware is the best partner that you possibly could have. So if you want to be modern cool on the front end, come and talk to us. >> All right, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware here on theCUBE for VMworld 2020 virtual, here with theCUBE virtual great to see you virtually, Pat, thanks for coming on, thanks for your time. >> Hey, thank you so much, love to see you in person soon enough but this is pretty good. >> Yeah. >> Thank you Dave. Thank you so much. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE virtual here for VMworld 2020, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante with Pat Gelsinger, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the cubes Palo Alto Studios we're here with the quarantine crew I'm John for your host we've got a great guest John Madison CMO an EVP of products of Fortinet and today more than ever in this changing landscape accelerating faster and faster certainly as this covin 19 crisis has forced business to realize a lot of the at scale problems are at hand and a lot of things are exposed in terms of problems and opportunities you have to take care of one of them security John thanks for coming on cube and looking forward to chatting about your recent event you had this week and also the updates at Florida thanks for joining me yeah it's great to be here John so more than ever the innovation strategies are not just talking points anymore in board meetings or companies there's they actually have to come out of this pandemic and operate through it with real innovation with actionable outcomes they've got to get their house in order you're seeing projects really focusing in on the at scale problems which is essentially keep the network's run and keep the sick the security fabric in place this is critical path stuff but the innovation coming out of it has to be a growth play for companies and this has been a big thing so you guys are in the middle of it we've chatted about all the four to guard stuff and all this you're seeing all the traffic you're seeing all the all the impact this work at home has forced companies to not only deal to new realities but it's exposed some things they need to double down on and things they need to either get rid of or fix fast what's your take on all this yeah you know I think it took a lot of people by surprise and the first thing I would like to do is you know spank our employees our customers and partners for the work they've done in the last six to seven weeks now what was happening was a lot of customers had built their work from home programs around a certain percentage 5% 10% 15% and that's what they scaled it for then all of a sudden you know everybody had to work from home and so you went from maybe a thousand people to 10,000 or 5,000 to 50,000 they had to scale very quickly because this had to be implemented in hours and days not weeks and months luckily our systems are able to gaile very quickly we can scale using a security processing units which offload the CPU and allow a lot of users simultaneously to access through VPN SSL VPN IPSec VPN and then we have an implementation at home ranging from a very simple Microsoft Wyant all the way to our clients all the way to even off Buda gate firewalls at home so we really did work very hard to make sure that our customers could maintain their business proposition during these times you know I want to get those work at home and I think it's a little big Sdn story and you guys have been on for a long time I mean we've talked with your you and your folks many times around st Wynn and what it means to to have that in place but this work at home those numbers are off the charts strange and this is disruption this was an unforeseen disruption it's not like a hurricane or flood this is real and we've also talked with you guys and your team around the endpoint you know the edge of the network that's the explosion of the billions of edges this is just an industry kind of inside baseball conversation and then also the immersion of the lifestyle we now live in so you have a world where it was inside baseball for this industry now every company and everyone's feeling it this is a huge issue I'm at home I got to protect myself I got data I gotta have a VPN I mean this is a reality that just wasn't seen I mean what do you guys are what are you guys doing in this area well I think it changes that this long-term architect and so you know the past we talked about there being millions of edges and people go how many billions of edges and what's happened is if you're working from home that's an edge and so the long term architecture means that companies need to take care of where their network edges are now the SEM at home they had them at the branch office they have them at the end of prize and the data center in the cloud then we need to decide know where to apply the security is it at the endpoint is it at the edges is the data center or bout an S T one is absolutely essential because every edge you'll have whether that were home now whether it be in your data center or eCampus on the cloud needs that st-1 technology and make sure you can guide the applications in a secure manner what's interesting is I actually deployed st-1 in my home here I've got two ISP connections one week I'm casting off with AT&T now that may be overkill right now for most people about putting st-1 in their homes but I think long-term homes are gonna be part of the enterprise network it's just another eight take a minute to explain the SD win I would call it the this is a mill especially this is not your grandfather's st win I mean it's changed st when is the internet I mean basically at home what does that mean if users don't know care what the products are at the end of the day they're working at home so kind of SD win has taken on a new broader scope if you will it's not just the classic SD win or is it can you take us through I mean and this is a category that's becoming much broader what's your what's your nails is there yeah again I'm not saying that you know consumers are gonna be putting SD wine in the homes right now but if I'm an executive and I rely on my communication out there are lots of meetings during the day work from home I want it to be as reliable as possible so if my one is pee goes down and I can't get on the internet that's an issue if I have to ISPs I have much higher availability but more importantly us you and I can guide the applications where I want when they want I can make sure you know my normal home traffic goes off certain direction the certain on a VLAN and segmentation policy whereas my war can be completely set out so again I you know I think SDRAM technology is important for the home long term is important for the branch for the enterprise and the data center and Earls St ones built into all up all our forty gates have sp1 you just switch it on we think it's a four essential technology going forward to drive that cloud on-ramp real quick follow-up on that for the folks in the enterprise I see the enterprise will make it easier for their customers their users who are at home so it feels consumer II invisible if you will I think that's the short-term what's what are what are you seeing your customers and prospective customers thinking when they come back or as they operate now in this new reality when they say you know what we really miss forecasted this now they have to get back to business what are they gonna do do they do more sta on I mean what's the architecture how does that get done what's the conversation like you know as this evolved for the next it's gonna slowly open up it still it's going to be a new reality for at least 12 months what's the conversation with the customer right now when it comes to going in and taking care of this so it doesn't happen again yeah what I'm doing actually actually what I'm doing a lot of virtual ABC's obviously we usually have 200 our customers that come to our corporate quarters or executive briefings and I'm doing actually more virtually and a lot of the opening conversations is they don't think they're gonna go completely Hunter's under percent back to where they were there's always going to be now a fraction of work-from-home people they may move around some of their physical location so as I said the ST when is that piece on the edge whether it be your home ranch campus or data centers gonna be there to guide the applications guide the users and devices to the right applications of wherever they may be as it could be in the cloud of communion data center it could be anywhere and then the key conversation thereafter for customers long-term architecture wise is where do I apply my security stack and the security spat consists of basic things like antivirus all right yes more detection capabilities even even response to Isis given that stack how much do I put in the edge how much do I put in my endpoint how much do I put my branch how much I put in my campus data center and cloud and then how do I maintain a policy a single policy across all of those and then now and again maybe I have to move that stack cross so that's going to be the key long term architecture question for enterprises as they move to a slightly different composition of workforce in different locations is hey I've got to make sure every edge that I have I identify and I secure when SP ran and then how do I apply the security stack cross all the diff tell great insight thanks for sharing that I want to get your take on now speaking of working at home you're also the CMO as well as the EVP of products which is a unique job because you can talk about any think when the cube we love it you had an event accelerate 2020 the folks watching go to the hashtag on Twitter hashtag accelerate 20 that's the hash tag you'll see a lot of the the pictures of the slides and some commentary I was laying down some tweets all the analysts were as well what are some of the highlights for you is a great presentation by the CEO you gave a talk and there's a lot of breakouts you had to do a digital event because you couldn't hold the physical event so you kind of had a shelter-in-place kind of and how did it go and what are some of the highlights yeah on the one side I was a bit sad you know we had or what we call accelerates arrange for this year in Barcelona and New York Mexico and San Jose we had to cancel war for them and I'm very quickly spin up a digital event a virtual event and you know we end up there's some initial targets around you know you know each of our physical events we get between two and three thousand and so we're thinking you know if we got to ten thousand this would be great we actually ended up with thirty thirty-two thousand or something like that registered and actually the percentage that showed off was even higher so we had over 20,000 people actually come online and go through our keynotes we built it so you go through the keynotes then you can go off to the painting what we call the breakouts for more detail we did verticals oh it did more technology sessions and so it's great and you know we tried our best to answer the questions online because these things are on demand we had three we had one for the u.s. one premiere and won't write back and so there was times but to get that sort of exposure to me is amazing twenty thousand people on there listening and it connects into another subject which is education and fun yet for some time as invested I would say you know my CEO says but I'll invest a bit more in education versus the marketing advertising budget now go okay okay that's that hey we'll work on that but education for us we announced a few weeks ago that education is now training is free for customers for everybody and we'd also been you know leading the way by providing free training for our partners now it's completely free for everybody we have something called the network security expert which goes from one to eight one and two of that are actually open to the public right now and if I go to the end of last year we had about two to three thousand people maybe a week come on and do the training obviously majority doing the NSC one courses you get further through to eight it's more technical last week we had over eighty thousand people we just think about those numbers incredible because people you know having more time let's do the training and finding is as they're doing this training going up the stack more quickly and they're able to implement their tools more quickly so training for us is just exploded off the map and I and there's a new reality of all the unemployment and also people are at home and there's a lot of job about the skill gap before in another cube conversation it's it's more apparent than ever and why not make it free give people some hope give them some tools to be successful there's demand yes and it's not you know it's not just them you know IT professionals are Ennis e1 is a foundational course and you'll see kids and students and universities doing it and so Ben Mars granddad's dad's doing it so we we're getting all sorts of comments and social media about the training you know our foundation great stuff has a great we'll put a plug on that when should we get that amplified for its really good stuff I got to ask you about the event one of the things I really like about the presentation was from your CEO and you gave one as well was the clarity around the vision of security and a couple of things that were notable to me was the confluence of the collision between networking and security and at the intersection of those two forces you have an accelerated integrated policy dynamic to me this is the heart of DevOps of what used to be in cloud being kind of applied to security you have data you got all kinds of new things emerging new patterns new signals that's security so you got to be you got to be fast you got to identify things so you guys are in this business that's one force and the other one was the billions of edges and this idea that there's no perimeter so it's everything's immersive so illustrate some points of validation on that from your standpoint is that how you guys are seeing it unfold in the future is that happening now can you give us a feeling for whether where we are and that those those kind of paradigms yeah good point so I think it's been happening it's happening now has been happening the future you know if you look at networking and our CEO Enzi talked about this and that networking hasn't really cheer outing and switching we go back to 2000 we had 100 mega under megabit now you have formed a gigabit but the basic function we haven't really changed that much securities different we've gone from a firewall and we add VPN then we at next-gen firewall then we had SSL inspection now we've added sd1 and so this collisions kind of an equal in that you know networking's sped ahead and firewalling is stayed behind because it's just got too many applications on that so the basic principle premise of the company of putting net is to build and bring that together so it's best of all accelerate the basic security network security functions so you can consolidate multiple functions on one system and then bring networking and security together a really good example of security where or nexium firewall where you can accelerate and so our security processing units and my analogy simple analogy is GPUs inside games where their GPU offloads CPU to allow rendering to happen very quick it's the same for us RSP use way of a network SPU and we have a Content SPU which all flows the CPU to allow a security and networking do it be accelerated work now coming to your second point about the perimeter I I'm not quite sure whether the perimeters disappear and the reason I say that is customer still goes they have firewalls on the front of the networks they have endpoint protection they have protection in the cloud so it's not that the perimeters disappeared it's just but much larger and so now the perimeters sitting across all your infrastructure your endpoints your in factories you got IOT devices you've got workloads in different powered and that means you need to look very carefully at those and give visibility initially and then apply the control that control maybe it's a ten-point security it may be SD mine at the edge it may be a compliance template in the cloud but you need visibility of all those edges which have been created with the perimeters reading across the image it's interesting you bring up a good point we always have kind of debates over beers on this on this topic you know the old model was mote you know get the castle and the gate but here the perimeter of the edge if you believe there's an edge and I do believe you find it perfectly the edge is a perimeter it's an endpoint right so it's a door into the internet so are the network so is the perimeter just an end adorn there's more doors right so or service yeah just think about it the castle would did multiple doors is the back everyone's the door there's this dozle someday and you have to define those H's and have visibility of them and that's why things like network access control know for you know zero trust network access is really important making sure you kind of look at the edge inside your way and so your data center and then it's like you powd what workloads are spinning off and what's the configuration and what's there what's from a data perspective right your recommendation and I'm a customer looking at my network I got compute I got edge devices and users I realized there's a billions of edges on my network now and the realities hit me I wasn't really being proactive on investing what do I do what's the PlayBook for me as I start to rethink that and what do I put into place how do I get going now I got to rethink it I now recognize I got full validation I got to manage this I got to do something what's your recommendation to me if I'm a customer the key to me is and I've had this conversation now for the last five years and it's getting louder and louder and that is I suppose I spend a lot of money on point solution point but even end point may have five point products on there and so they're getting to the conclusion it's just too hard to manage I can't find all the right people I get so many alerts from so many security systems I can't work out what's going on and the conversation now is how do I deploy a platform we call it the security fabric now I don't deploy that fabric across my network I'm not saying you should go from 30 vendors to one vendor that would be nice of course but I what I'm saying as you go from 30 vendors down to maybe five or six platform the platform's perform multiple functions it could be they're out there you attach a platform a designer platform just birth protector or a particular organization or part of the network and so the platform allows you then to build automation and the automation allows you to see things more quickly and react to things more quickly and do things without manual intervention the platform approach it's absolutely starting to resonate yes you've still got very very large customers who put everything into segments of a C's Exedra book most customers now moving towards a yeah I think you know as you see and again back to that collision with the end of the intersection we have integrated policies if you're gonna do any integration which is the data problem so we talk about all the time to a lot of different tools can create silos and there's a use case for that but also creates problematic situations I mean a platform gives you a much more robust capability to be adaptive to be real time to program and automate yeah it's it's it's an issue if you've got 30 vendors and just be honest it's also an issue in the industry so I mean networking the story kind of worked out how to work together you can use the same different vendor switches and routers and they roughly work together with cybersecurity they've all been deal you know built totally separately not to even work and that's why you've got these multiple layers you've got a product the security problem then this got its own analytics engine and manager then you've got a manager of managers and an analyzer of analyzers and the sim system and then a saw I mean just goes on it makes it so complex for people and that's why I think they look into something a bit more simplified but most importantly the platform must be friendly from a consumption model you must be able to do an appliance where you need to do virtual machine SAS cloud native container whatever it may be because that network has changed in those ages as those edges move you've got them to have a platform that adaptable to the consumption model require you know I had a great cartridge with Phil Quaid you see your seaso over there and we were chatting around you know this idea of I won't say customization but there's no one turnkey monolithic application it seems to these platforms tend to be enabling where the seaso trend is to have teams building ok and and and almost a customized but building software to automate to solve their use case for their outcome so enabling that is a trend we're seeing so I think you guys are on the right track there any comment on your take on this enabling platform is that something that you guys are seeing that CSIS is looking at more in-house development more use case focus because they have the data they got real-time they need to be building on a platform not told what they could do yeah I think you've always had this this network team trying to build things fast and open and the security team trying to post things down and make it more secure you know it becomes even more problematic if you kind of go to the cloud where you've got pockets a developer's kind of thing do things in the DevOps way really as fast as possible and sometimes the controls are not put in place in fact no the big as I said the biggest issue for the cloud is not so much you know malware it it's more about miss configuration that's why you're seeing the big breaches and that's more of a customer thing to do and so I think what the seaso is trying to do is make sure they apply the controls appropriately and again their job has become much harder now we've got all the multitude of endpoints that they didn't have before they've got now there when that's not just the closed MPLS network is old off different types of broadband 5 G's coming towards the end of this year next year as well the data centers may have decreased a bit but they've still got datacenter capacity and they're probably got 5 or 6 hours and 20 different SAS applications that put a deal with and they've got to deal with developers in there so it's a harder job for them and they need to melt or add those tools but come back to that single point of management great stuff John Madison CMO EVP great insight there it's almost a master class right there you laid it all out on what's going on a final question any change is what any other news updates on the four net front I know you guys got some answer I didn't see the breakouts of the session I had something else going on I think I've been walking dog and do some other things but you know being at home and to take care of things what's new what's what's out that people might have missed that's coming out of for today you're telling me you didn't have 60 hour a breakout on dedicated I don't think yeah we've you know we've have a lot going on you know we have a big R&D team here in North America and Canada and with a lot of products coming out this time of the year we bring out our 40 OS network operating system with 6.4 over 300 new features inside there including new orchestration systems for sp1 and then also we actually launched on network processor seven and the board gate already 200 F powered by four network processor sevens it's some system out there and provide over 800 gigs of fire or capacities but in bill V explain acceleration they can do things like elephant flows huge flows of data so there's always there's always new products coming out of 14 it sure those are the two big ones for this quarter you guys certainly are great interviews to talk to great a lot of expertise there final final question you know everyone every company's got their culture Moore's laws cadence of Moore's laws Intel faster cheaper smaller what's the for Annette culture if you had to kind of boil it down what's it you guys are always pushing great products out there all high quality I'll see security you got to be buttoned up and have good ops and controls but you still need to push the envelope and have stadia what's the culture if you had to kind of boil the culture down for Porter net what would it be that's always an interesting question and so the company's been going since 2000 okay the founders are still there NZ's CEO and Michael Z's the CTO and I think that one of the philosophies is that listen to the customer very closely because you can get distracted by shiny objects all over the place I want to go and do this oh yeah let's build this what about this and in the end the customer and and what they want may get lost and so we listen very closely we use you know we have a very high content of technology people who can translate the customer use case into what we should build and so I think that's the culture we have and maintain that so we're very close to our customers we've been building very quickly for them make sure it works it needs tweaking then we'll look at it again a very very customer driven always great to hear from the founders you guys had a great event accelerate 20 that's the hashtag some great highlights on Twitter some commentary there and of course go to Ford a net site to check out the replays Sean man so thanks for taking the time to share your insights here on the cube conversation I really appreciate it thank you okay it's cube concert here in Palo Alto we're bringing you all the interviews during this time we have our quarantine crew the cube is virtual we'll do whatever it takes to get the interviews out there and get the stories out there and the people behind the tech making it happen I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought you by SUSE. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital. And really excited to welcome to the program a first time guest, and he's relatively fresh off the keynote, Alexander Kocher, who is the President and Managing Director of Elektrobit, talking about autonomous vehicles. Alex, thanks so much or joinin' us. >> Thank you, Stu, for inviting me. >> All right, so you know, definitely really interesting technologies, and a lot of talent. So many of the ways we talk about in the IT industry, to talk about cloud computing, edge impacting things, how AI fits into the world, and the balance between people and technology. Well, your company's living it. So why don't we start a little bit. Elektrobit, at least from the research I've done and from the keynote, you are a software company if I have it right. And autonomous vehicles is really what you're driving for. But give our audience a little bit of Elektrobit where you fit in the market today. >> Yeah, Elektrobit, so you can say we are software creatrs unlocking the future of mobility. We are pioneering software in the automotive industry since more than 30 years, empowering already now more than 1 billion devices, in hundreds of millions of cars, and serving since more than 30 years the automotive industry. So as software is becoming the second biggest enabler of the innovation in the car, we are driving this with our technologies. We are focusing on software infrastructure solutions, so coming from the deep, deep layers in the car, up to the HMI, up to the user interface, and providing there specific technologies for really building the basis, and able our customers to focus on their innovations. So this is car infrastructure software. This is software for autonomous driving, as you said. And this is application software mainly in the tooling to create fancy and good-looking user interfaces in modern vehicles. >> Yeah, wow, 30 years. You know most people don't think about software that long in the automotive industry. Of course anybody that owned a car understands that a lot of times it no longer, ya know, people going under the hood, but they're plugging something in and going on a computer, understand what that is. If you could, give us a little bit, what are the trends going on? We've been talking for the last couple a years, if you talk from an autonomous vehicle stand point. Probably people have seen the five stages model that's been put out there, everything from some driver-assist technologies, to a fully autonomous vehicle. But what are you seeing, your software, the companies you supply to and the users, what's happening there? >> So, I would class the trends at the moment in our industry in three blocks. There is electrification, where software is for sure playing a role, but is more used as a supporting technology. Here dominating innovation is coming from other technologies like battery, fuel cells, charging mechanisms, and so on. But then the second trend and the third trend, automated driving and connectivity, to really make the car part of the internet, these are two mega trends where software is dominating the scene, and really also dominating the value of the car as well. And I think these are the trends. We need for all of those to develop new car connectors, similar to server infrastructures already, so that you can seamlessly integrate applications, services from the cloud into the car. And I think these are the trends. And the partnership we are the moment working with SUSE is really coming into play as well to combine experiences from other industries, from other technologies, open source technologies with the embedded world. And create added value for our customer. >> Yeah so let's dig into that SUSE partnership a little bit. Obviously community is a big thing that's talked about there, at the show and from SUSE's customers. There's what can we learn, what is the role of open source, and how do we really enable innovation? So what's important about the partnership with SUSE? >> I think, let me give a little bit of a background. So when becoming an IT device, the amount of software, the complexity is increasing like hell. What he have at the moment, round about 10% created by software in the car, we will see 30% value created by software in 10 years from now. And this is done by a disruptive change in the development model. At the moment we stopped developing functions and features at the point when we introduce the car into the market. This will completely change. Just think about a mobile device like I have it here in my hand. During the whole life cycle of this device, which is of course much shorter than the life cycle of a car, you will innovate and update functions here. This will also be introduced in the next generation, which is under development at the moment, of cars. So that you can update applications, new services during the whole life cycle of the car. And this requires new platforms. It doesn't stop at the introduction of the car. It will continue over a real, real long period of time, years it takes, even. We have a long maintenance cycles. And therefore you need to have new partnership models, and also other technologies where this is already applied with other technologies in other industries. And here our partnership really comes into play, where we need to even get other talent pools. other pools of creativity, other pools of and forces of innovation, so that we really enable with existing methods, new methods, our customers to focus on their differentiating functions to compete against their competitor. And here exactly our partnership is targeting it. >> Okay so it sounds like we're talking specifically Linux means that there's a common underlying programming model, and that there's a skill set pool out there. Am I getting that right? >> Yes, correct. At the moment, so the automotive industry stands for reliable, high performance, high quality of cars and maintaining these features and essential functions over a long, long period of time. But when using embedded technologies, you are endangered always to re-implement it again and again and reuse is not necessarily that what is implemented here from one generation to the other, completely innovated sometimes, And here with other technologies, like you're doing with Linux for example, an open source, you open up a complete new field of innovation and creativity, and of course also access to talent pools, which is very much limited at the very moment in the embedded world as well. >> Alex, I'm curious how Elektrobit thinks about data. Number one, all the training data, how AI is done. Is there any industry sharing going on with that discussion? Let's start there and then maybe we'll talk a little bit about security when we get through the basic data points. >> (laughs) Yeah so, indeed, just think about cars. One of the most accurate sensor in our environment, with all the sensors you have, camera sensors, radio sensors, liter sensors, and so on and so forth, which create a hell lot amount of data, a terabyte by day. And of course this is something which needs to be shared, because the road infrastructure, we talked about this beforehand, is the same independent, whether it's a BMW car, whether it's a GM car, whether it's a Ford car, or a Daimler car, or a Toyota. So it's for all the cars the same car infrastructure. And of course there's a lot of discussion ongoing to share this data. Although now when making business out of that, the business model needs to, as you mentioned, for sure recognize and respect the privacy of the data in order to make business out of that. >> Excellent-- >> So then--Sorry >> Please, please continue. >> So yes, I think there is discussion ongoing. And already in, for example, in map data and traffic control, there is already ongoing the share of the data amongst the manufacturers as well. >> Excellent. And of course, security is paramount. When I look at Elektrobit, cyber security is prominent in the automotive discussion. How does that play in? What's the experience that you've had there from the security side. >> Yeah, so Elektrobit, so we built up our security, but really coming from inside the car. Now three years ago we acquired a company with out mother company together which is now integrated and consolidated within Elektrobit. It's called Argus Cyber Security from Tel Aviv in Israel. And with that we are now able to really provide solutions, end to end solutions from deep inside the car up to the cloud, so that the data stream is secure to the highest standards of security, of course. And this is, on the long side, really securing remote control, maintenance of the car, but also then privacy in terms when you download new services, when you provide information into the cloud where you are. For example we talked abut this data as new currency from the sensors existing in the car. So for that reason exactly we acquired this company with their technologies we are able to provide end to end solutions also for the existing software we are providing to our customers. >> Right, Alex, I'm curious just when you talk about autonomous vehicles, anything distinct about Europe? I think about the challenge and the opportunity. Number one, you're in Germany. You've got some of the best highways in the world. Well thought-out, really well architected. But throughout Europe you also have some the oldest cities where it could be really challenging to traverse. So anything different you might be able to share with our audience about what we should look for for that journey of autonomous vehicle in Europe? >> So... basically your question, already lined it out. So yes, I think autonomous driving and it's starting with functions like hybrid pilot so that you really create a kind of a clean room, where you have a very well-defined environment, where you can start to drive autonomous, and really hands off, eyes off, so level three, level four. In old cities, the structure is yeah, grown, grown over hundreds of years. So it's for sure not foreseen for autonomous driving, at that point in time. Or let's say at that point in time you had an autonomous vehicular horse which found all the time the stable. But nowadays it's a little bit different. So the more difficult environment is for sure the center of cities. And there it will take a while. But we are on the go by going really step by step from a very well-defined environment like a highway, where you can define certain use cases. And with the evolution of sensors, with the evolution of algorithms, with the evolution of processing power, then go step by step to a more complex environment like inner cities. >> Excellent. What should people be looking for when it comes to autonomous vehicles? What can you give us on the next 12 to 24 months, what you're expecting in the industry? >> So I think at the moment, I think in the 12 to, we're still in the face when it comes to autonomous driving, we have driver assistance functions evolving from there. A level two, level two plus. Level three functions where you really then have hands off, will probably come in two, three, four years. Here it's not only the industry by itself who is the limiting factor, but also the regulations on the outside. We just recently saw the announcement of Audi that homologation related to topics at the moment not clear. This is also to be considered. Technology is already prepared, ie, I'm now, even with driver-assistance functions, able to drive. I had an experience with my car by 200km/hr around the curve, and pulling the steers a little bit off So it's still in the face. You have to be aware that you can control. So the function itself is already existing. But homologation that you really can do this for more than 10 seconds, this is the critical thing. And really be prepared techonology for all the eventual things. So here we have limiting factors also from the regulations around that. And this is basically what we have to deal with. So just recently announced by Audi A8 in the introduction. >> Excellent stuff. All right, Alex, I want to give you the final word. Just share with the audience at SUSECON, what it means for Elektrobit to participate in this partnership. >> Yeah, I think the main thing of this partnership is really that we... We are enabled to really provide and infrastructure which fulfills the complete requirements of the car industry. So long-term maintenance, enablement of secure downloads during the whole life cycle of the car, and reusabilty, backward compatibility which is very important thing as well, when you produce technologies for products which have a very long product life cycle. And with the experience SUSE brings into play from other industries, with their solutions, with their Linux distributions and container technologies, with our experience from the automotive industry, I'm really sure that with that partnership, we enable our customers to focus on their innovations, and we enable ourselves to provide the basic solutions for the industry, and for... new future intelligent vehicles. >> All right, well, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates. Fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thank you, Stu, for inviting me. >> All right, lots more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back to the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course this year it's rather than all coming to San Francisco we are talking to red hat executives their partners and their customers where they are around the globe happy to welcome back one of our cube alumni Lisa Spellman who's a corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Xeon and memory group Lisa thanks so much for joining us and where are you joining us from well thank you for having me and I'm a little further north than where the conference was gonna be held so I'm in Portland Oregon right now excellent yeah we've had you know customers from around the globe as part of the cube coverage here and of course you're near the mothership of Intel so Lisa you know but let's start of course you know the Red Hat partnership you know I've been the Intel executives on the keynote stage for for many years so talk about to start us off the Intel Red Hat partnership as it stands today in 2020 yeah you know on the keynote stage for many years and then actually again this year so despite the virtual nature of the event that we're having we're trying to still show up together and demonstrate together to our customers and our developer community really give them a sense for all the work that we're doing across the important transformations that are happening in the industry so we view this partnership in this event as important ways for us to connect and make sure that we have a chance to really share where we're going next and gather feedback on where our customers and that developer community need us to go together because it is a you know rich long history of partnership of the combination of our Hardware work and the open-source software work that we do with Red Hat and we see that every year increasing in value as we expand to more workloads and more market segments that we can help with our technology yeah well Lisa you know we've seen on the cube for for many years Intel strong partnerships across the industry from the data centers from the cloud I think we're gonna talk a little bit about edge for this discussion too though edge and 5g III think about all the hard work that Intel does especially with its partnership you know you talked about and I think that the early days of Red Hat you know the operating system things that were done as virtualization rolled out there's accelerations that gone through so when it comes to edge in 5g obviously big mega waves that we spend a lot of talking about what's what's Intel's piece obviously we know Intel chips go everywhere but when it comes to kind of the engineering work that gets done what are some of the pieces that Intel spork yeah and that's a great example actually of what I what we are seeing is this expansion of areas of workloads and investment and opportunity that we face so as we move forward into 5g becoming not the theoretical next thing but actually the thing that is starting to be deployed and transformed you can see a bunch of underlying work that Intel and Red Hat have done together in order to make that a reality so you look at they move from a very proprietary ASIC based type of workload with a single function running on it and what we've done is drive to have the virtualization capabilities that took over and provided so much value in the cloud data center also apply to the 5g network so the move to network function virtualization and software-defined networking and a lot of value being derived from the opportunity to run that on open source standard and have that open source community really come together to make it easier and faster to deploy those technologies and also to get good SLA s and quality of service while you're driving down your overall total cost of ownership so we've spent years working on that together in the 5g space and network space in general and now it's really starting to take off then that is very well connected to the edge so if you think about the edge as this point of content creation of where the actions happening and you start to think through how much of the compute or the value can I get out at the edge without everything having to go all the way back to the data center you start to again see how those open standards in very complex environments and help people manage their total cost of ownership and the complexity all right Lisa so when you're talking about edge solutions when I've been talking to Red Hat where their first deployments have really been talking to the service providers really I've seen it as an extension of what you were talking about network functions virtualization you know everybody talks about edges there's a lot of different edges out there the service providers being the first place we see things but you know all the way out even to the consumer edge and the device edge where Intel may or may not have you know some some devices there so help us understand you know where where you're sitting and where should we be looking as these technologies work you know it's a it's a great point we see the edge being developed by multiple types of organizations so yes the service providers are obviously there in so much as they already even own the location points out there if you think of all the myriad of poles with the the base stations and everything that's out there that's a tremendous asset to capitalize on you also see our cloud service provider customers moving towards the edge as well as they think of new developer services and capabilities and of course you see the enterprise edge coming in if you think of factory type of utilization methodologies or in manufacturing all of those are very enterprise based and are really focused on not that consumer edge but on the b2b edge or the you know the infrastructure edge is what you might think of it as but they're working through how do they add efficiency capability automation all into their existing work but making it better so at Intel the way that we look at that is it's all opportunities to provide the right foundation for that so when we look at the silicon products that we develop we gather requirements from that entire landscape and then we work through our silicon portfolio you know we have our portfolio really focused on the movement the storage and the processing of data and we try to look at that in a very holistic way and decide where the capability will best serve that workload so you do have a choice at times whether some new feature or capability goes into the CPU or the Zeon engine or you could think about whether that would be better served by being added into a smart egg type of capability and so those are just small examples of how we look at the entirety of the data flow in the edge and at what the use case is and then we utilize that to inform how we improve the silicon and where we add feature well Lisa as you were going through this it makes me also think about one of the other big mega waves out there artificial intelligence so lots of discussion as you were saying what goes where how we think about it cloud edge devices so how does AI intersect with this whole discussion of edge that we were just having yeah and you're probably gonna have to cut me off because I could go on for a long time on on this one but AI is such an exciting at capability that is coming through everywhere literally from the edge through the core network into the cloud and you see it infiltrating every single workload across the enterprise across cloud service providers across the network service providers so it is truly on its way to being completely pervasive and so again that presents the same opportunity for us so if you look at your silicon portfolio you need to be able to address artificial intelligence all the way from the edge to the cloud and that can mean adding silicon capabilities that can handle milliwatts like ruggedized super low power super long life you don't literally out at the edge and then all the way back to the data center where you're going for a much higher power at a higher capability for training of the models so we have built out a portfolio that addresses all of that and one of the interesting things about the edges people always think of it as a low compute area so they think of it as data collection but more and more of that data collection is also having a great benefit from being able to do an amount of compute and inference out at the edge so we see a tremendous amount of actual Zeon product being deployed out at the edge because of the need to actually deliver quite high-powered compute right there and that's improving customer experiences and it's changing use cases through again healthcare manufacturing automotive you see it in all the major fast mover edge industries yeah now we're really good points they make their Lisa we all got used to you know limitless compute in the cloud and therefore you know let's put everything there but of course we understand there's this little thing called the speed of light that makes it that much of the information that is collected at the edge can't go beyond it you know I saw a great presentation actually last year talking about the geosynchronous satellites they collect so much information and you know you can't just beam it back and forth so I better have some compute there so you know we've known for a long time that the challenge of you know of our day has been distributed architectures and edge just you know changes that you know the landscape and the surface area that we need the touch so much more when I think about all those areas obviously security is an area that comes up so how does Intel and its partners make sure that no matter where my data is and you talk about the various memory that you know security is still considered at each aspect of the environment oh it's a huge focus because if you think of people and phrases they used to say like oh we got to have the fat pipe or the dumb pipe to get you know data back and or there is no such thing as a dumb pipe anymore everything is smart the entire way through the lifecycle and so with that smartness you need to have security embedded from the get-go into that work flow and what people need to understand is they undergo their edge deployments and start that work is that your obligation for the security of that data begins the you collect that data it doesn't start when it's back to the cloud or back in the data center so you own it and need to be on it from the beginning so we work across our Silicon portfolio and then our software ecosystem to think through it in terms of that entire pipeline of the data movement and making sure that there's not breakdowns in each of the handoff chain it's a really complex problem and it is not one that Intel is able to solve alone nor any individual silicon or software vendor along the way and I will say that some of the security work over the past couple years has led to a bringing together of the industry to address problems together whether they be on any other given day a friend or a foe when it comes to security I feel like I've seen just an amazing increase over the past two two and a half years on the collaboration to solve these problems together and ultimately I think that leads to a better experience for our users and for our customers so we are investing in it not just at the new features from the silicon perspective but in also understanding newer and more advanced threat or attack surfaces that can happen inside of the silicon or the software component all right so Lisa final question I have for you want to circle back to where we started it's Red Hat summit this week-long partnerships as I mentioned we see Intel it all the cloud shows you partner with all the hardware software providers and the like so big message from Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud to talk about how that fits in with everything that Intel is doing it's an area of really strong interconnection between us and Red Hat because we have a vision of that open hybrid cloud that is very well aligned and the part about it is that it is rooted not just in here's my feature here's my feature from either one of us it's rooted in what our customers need and what we see our enterprise customers driving towards that desire to utilize the cloud to in prove their capabilities and services but also maintain that capability inside their own house as well so that they have really viable work load transformation they have opportunities for their total cost of ownership and can fundamentally use technology to drive their business forward all right well Lisa Spellman thank you so much for all the update from Intel and definitely look forward to seeing the breakouts the keynotes and the like yes me too all right lots more coverage here from the cube redhead summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio the one constant that we know for customers is change and how they manage their data there are applications in this ever-changing world is something that is always interesting to dig into and helping me with this conversation first time guests on the program Joe DeAngelo who is a distinguished engineer and national practice lead of availability solutions with Veritas is here with me Joe thanks so much for joining us it's - thanks for having me yours is great all right so first before we get into it give us a little bit about you know your background what you work on how long you been with Veritas sure so I've been with Veritas for nine years in various different roles I was a product manager when I joined the company since then I joined the field sales technical or technical field sales organization working as an advocate with some of our more strategic customers sort of like the liaison back to the product team before that I was a consultant sort of as a implementing these technologies from Veritas and of course it was a customer - so always had sort of that round out that full full spectrum of experience with love that we can draw on some of your experience as a customer right let's start there if we will now you're working with a lot of customers and the space you're working on the availability solutions I kind of teed it up with we know that there's change happening you know when I talk about customers in their cloud journey it is an ever moving thing it's not a one-way thing there's data centers there's cloud there's edge there's all of these environments and what you know figuring out what application what application goes where and how that's changing over time is there's a real challenge for customers these days is it not it absolutely is and really one of the sort of the foundational tenants of the availability solutions at Veritas is that we give customers the ability to sort of decouple their applications from all of that sort of chaos that's in the in their infrastructure whether it's in the cloud whether it's hyper-converged physical virtual different storage technologies they can run their application where they need to run it when they need to run it and be to know that it'll be performance yeah well we know from Veritas as legacy I remember seeing the billboards and the t-shirts there are no hardware agenda so you understand Veritas has always been a software share company when you look at that kind of wave of you know software-defined storage and the like help us understand you know today here's 2020 we're living in the future you know what that means for you know customers data is customers application what the availability solution in the product lines that you work yeah I mean that's that's a terrific question well what it means is you have a myriad of choices you have to decide on so it's not just the individual application but really the the composition of those apps and the relationships they have with other different other applications you mentioned software-defined storage I mean we cut our teeth on software-defined storage back when that wasn't even a term you know thirty years ago all right I like to think that it's almost in our DNA that you know taking and virtualizing storage is one of the first things we did as a technology today we we've taken that same sort of approach to commoditizing most of the infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what operating system it doesn't matter what storage vendor you use doesn't matter what cloud provider you use our technology gives you the luxury or I like to say breathing room in many cases to make those decisions so that they can align with your business outcomes more effectively all right so Joe the the product we're going to be talking a bit about is info scale for people that aren't familiar you know what is info scale how does it fit in this ever-changing landscape you mentioned you know cloud and operating systems and hypervisors and everything so help us tee up we're in for a scale fits sure thing so info scale is really a moniker if nothing else on top of our storage foundation veritos volume manager Veritas file system veritas cluster server technologies and those have been industry staples for decades right being able to address the needs of the most critical applications and so most stringent and high demanding workloads be at the top financial institutions health care providers etc the the technology itself really addresses resiliency and availability from sort of three areas we'd like to think that you can provide the ability to keep your services online with our with our high availability and disaster recovery solutions but we also wanna make sure that those applications and those data sets that you're using the technology with making sure that they're performing right because an underperforming application is just as detrimental to availability as would be a simply going offline and we also want to give you the ability to migrate workloads and move those applications among different technologies so that's really where the the focus of impost scalable it ok so you know Joe when you have customers that are trying to figure out ok I'm taking an application do I take that from my data center do I move that to the cloud I'm building a new application where do I do that how does in fel scale fit into that discussion and how is the discussion of info scale fit with the infrastructure discussion that they are having yeah absolutely so inevitably what the choice a lot of the customers I have conversations with struggle with just what's the first step to get to the cloud and many of them are locked into a proprietary solution or some technology that doesn't really have an analogue or some sort of equivalency in the cloud with info scale what we allowed them to do is actually replicate that data anywhere they want to go because you said we don't have a hardware agenda it doesn't matter what the storage underneath the covers might be so we can go from physical storage on Prem into the public cloud across any variety of different tiers of storage that exists there and this works at not just the from a data set standpoint but the applications as well so if you've got something as critical as a database a relational database that's Oracle them as a sequel database whatever may be you can very easily replicate those and move those workloads into the public cloud for purposes of migrations or disaster recovery with truth be told of the exact same thing you know migrations just a one-way ticket a dr is a roundtrip ticket but the technology is exactly the same so that's how you're able to achieve those goals ok we talked about application in general you mentioned some specific is there you know you know a compatibility list or you know what sorts of classes of applications how do I know if my application today is something that fits under this certainly so we have a catalogue of agents that we support what we call our bundled agents or agent framework and it it's a list of roughly over 500 different infrastructure components applications and services that we monitor and protect for the purposes of again for disaster recovery and migration capabilities pretty much all the enterprise applications the most prolific workloads that are in the in the industry today so are your databases or middleware to your application servers those are all included but we also have the ability to very easily introduce custom applications so a customer can take and say they may have written something homegrown and it has any number of different components to it if you could tell me how to start it how to stop it how to monitor it we can put it into info skill okay Joe I think we paint a pretty good picture of what info scale is maybe if you have a customer example that might help us understand a little bit about kind of the use cases and commonly why they're using it now that work well I can I have a little bit of an anecdote that I like to tell a story about a customer a state agency that was a big info scale user just happened to be on Windows and we've gotten through a deployment and everything was looking great and they were able to move all of their their their applications in this particular these Windows applications all in it being particularly info scale being replicated and having both high availability as well as disaster recovery and everything was looking great I finished the project on a Friday afternoon and bye-bye Sunday morning I was getting frantic phone calls from the people that I was working with at the time I was actually a consultant and they're asking me what what happened what's going on why what's what's what's the issue here I go I left the customer just fine on Friday there were no issues at all and they said you need to reach out to your team there and see what's going on so we're getting some phone calls that there's some problems like okay so I got on the phone and I spoke to my contact there and he said oh no nothing's wrong with the environment but we might have some issues with who's gonna be maintaining it come Monday morning and I go why it was well I think half the team well pretty much all the team's gonna be calling in rich Monday morning and I go what are you talking about goes the entire IT staff hit the Mega Millions jackpot so the this is the entire staff this was the DBAs the network admins the manager the managers manager all had the Mega Man jackpot so needless to say they weren't too concerned about coming into work on Monday morning but this poor person that was left he was holding the bag he said we already reached out to support your guys are on the call we're confident knowing that you know that that veritas is going to be there to help us through this transitional period because we've got this consistent layer so I used that example because it's a fantastic story but too it addresses the fact that disasters come in many different flavors and many different you know they can produce and manifest in many different ways and your people that to me that that's always your most critical asset and when those suffer that you know this technology is there really helped address me well Joe I like that example rather than I think going forward rather than saying well what happens if one of your critical staff gets hit by a bus yeah what if your entire support team you know it did happen all right what would you say are some of the kind of misconceptions that but maybe people don't understand if they're that they haven't look closely at in post-game lately yeah great question so I think some of the misconceptions about it is that it's tied to a very specific sort of heritage big iron unix only workloads admittedly we cut our teeth in that space right whether it's going back in the days of the original Sun OS and some of the the big iron systems we gained a lot of traction a lot of you know we earned our stripes in that space but in reality that that space is shrunk tremendously over the last you know 10 or 15 years for a variety of reasons and I think there's still some misconception that that info scale or veritas you know volume management file system only is relevant in that space and truth be told nothing could be further from nothing to be further from the truth because if you go back to what I comment I made earlier about this idea of commoditizing that infrastructure we can help customers transition throughout all those different sort of points of inflection so if going from the big iron to go into the more commodity commoditized you know x86 hardware going from physical to virtual going from virtual to the cloud going from virtual to hyper-converged and even back in some cases we have the capabilities and the wherewithal to be able to help customers do those kinds of transitions yeah I've been in the industry long enough I remember a lot of those UNIX migrations you know whether it going over to Windows whether I'm going over the Linux what would you say are some of the similarities some of the differences from what we did in those environments compared to what's often a cloud discussion today yeah so truth be told is that we we we tend to not reinvent the wheel at Veritas we look and say okay what are some of the really you know tremendously powerful tools and capabilities that we have how do we apply those to new platforms you take the cloud for example one of the things that we've always prided ourselves on is giving customers again that breathing room to make a decision and say I'm gonna move to a new platform so I can literally take a worker that was running on UNIX and I can move it over to Linux well that same model now can be applied where I can take that legacy work load running in Solaris I can move that directly into the public cloud and that's something that turns a lot of heads because I asked a lot of customers I know would it be compelling if I had a means for you to be able to take that legacy Solaris environment or that UNIX workload and I can write it directly into say ec2 in AWS and they're all there it's it's they're incredulous they're thinking no this can't happen there's no way you can do this and I said yes it can because we look at the cloud is another platform and we want to be able to have customers take full advantage of it exploit it but at the same time not be fearful that they won't have a way to move data in and out yeah oh it's Veritas helping with some of the the management pieces when you talk about going through those migrations it's one thing about what platform I live on but how do I manage that environment what skills that do I need yeah how are you working hand-in-hand with your customers on that well the great thing about it is is that there is a there's a sense of parity between what we do on Prem and what you do in the public cloud when you're using info scale because again we consume cloud resources just like they were any other platform so whether you were going from physical to virtual virtual to hyper converts or into the public cloud the same operations the same configurations the same the same scripts the same user interface all the things all of the the the machinery and the tooling that's around those applications can can can be consistent and in many cases that is it is invaluable because a lot of customers while they want to adopt the public cloud they don't want to have to redefine their operational paradigm they want to be able to take those workloads and I want to just be able to scoop them up and say put me in the public cloud I don't want to change everything around it because I don't have the bandwidth to do that to take on a whole new react of texture using the cloud that's that's basically starting your IT from from zero and building only backup and they don't have the time or the money or the resources to make that happen so looking for that consistency looking for that parity between the on-prem the public cloud all right what are some of the features that are most resonating with your customers well I would say first and foremost the the the fact that that our core technology around volume management helps you to virtualize storage all the capabilities you have there the fact that our file system can transition between different different Indians rate going from UNIX to Linux going from from Solaris to Red Hat and so on that gives you that flexibility our Hardware agnostic replication with volume replicator giving you the ability to not only provide dr over any geographic distance but also the ability to migrate between those platforms so being able to take and replicate data that's on a UNIX system today into the public cloud running Linux so that's with volume replicator we also have capabilities that allow you to utilize local storage in the sense that and treat it like it's shared storage some of the challenges with the public cloud are around some of the restrictive storage architectures so you take like a an availability zone inside of AWS all that storage is only available inside of at that particular availability zone if you want to move an application over to the other node you can't share storage between those availability zones we didn't focus Caleb you can and you can basically address some of those gaps or shoot through some of those blind spots yeah how was your team helping your customers keep up with all those changes you know we look at the public cloud there there's always new instances there's new zones there's it's it's a constant reinvention happening and day out yeah absolutely so a couple of things were happening first and foremost we're in the marketplace we have CF T's we've got you know a.m. eyes for that product so that you can further info scale so you can spin those up much more quickly working to get in the same thing for the azure marketplace we integrate with a lot of the automation and orchestration tools that are in the market today the ansible is the Puppets the chef's making sure that what I call the time to value for our technology is as short as possible so that you get out of the business of becoming you know a very tossed admin but focusing more on your on your business and what Veritas can do to help you improve that yeah it's interesting stuff a lot of automation going on in this space you know it's a very different world for your customers you know is is there some that you need to kind of react eight customers as do you know what Veritas is doing today versus what they might yeah there's there's a we're we're not your father's Veritas kind of mentality that we try to promote and I think you you've seen over the last 12 to 18 months that our our messaging our corporate strategy in general has had a tremendous sort of resurgence of info scale being a big part of that because recognize that when you talk about Veritas as a whole with our API strategy of availability protection and insights availability of your services in your data are critical to your success as an enterprise not just from an IT perspective and it's where info scale really plays sort of the the sort of the critical role in achieving that any other what sort of outcomes do you do your customers find once they've rolled these solutions out well I think operationally that there is a significant reduction in the overhead needed to make some of the more complex and and and really challenging operations you know cookie cutter I had a customer just last week you know this might sound like a little bit of you know self-promotion but he said storage foundation is the single greatest software-defined storage technology that's ever been written and because they are able to achieve a migration on a scale that they never would have been able to achieve without without a technology like this and of course I know there's no way to vet that statement but you're just going to if the customer is gonna has said it we will take them on there he did it it was I took pause I'm like wow I was like can I quote you on that he was just like yes you may Joe what else what other features underneath or kind of lesser-known things from info scale do you want to make sure customers know about oh yeah I mean listen there there are so many incredible capabilities that are included with info scale I would say that most important is that you know we can do things like transparently tear storage between on-prem and the public cloud and that can be something as granular as and as an Oracle database or something is you know general-purpose is just a shared you know NFS file system we have intelligent caching mechanisms to accelerate performance of workloads that again address the issues of performance on Prem as well as the public cloud we can help you transition your applications we have a migration wizard framework inside of our dashboard our info scale operations manager that allows you to on you know on the fly establish all of the necessary relationships between the different different clusters to be able to move applications from from from UNIX to the Linux move it from physical to virtual to go from a virtual and a hyper-converged we identify all those pieces and you know I said in an on-demand fashion build all the components for you we have you know a number of different you know what's most common talk about today is ransomware right this idea that how do we insulate our data from the from the threats of ransomware you can do so many different off host snapshot recovery method methodologies with info scale right creating an air gap between your data and secondary data sets that you can recover instantly from but has that enough gap so that that something that would corrupt the primary data set would not infiltrate your secondary copies so I mean there's just so many cool things that it can do it's just the use cases are just pretty you know innumerable yeah so last question Joe is a let's go up level a little bit you talk about you know the application portfolios really changing for a lot of customers lift relational databases we talked about you know virtual and physical and and cloud environments ever changing so when customers think about Veritas how should they when and how should they be thinking about Veritas well especially from from the from an availability standpoint it's really about abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure providing a resilient and performant storage layer to achieve really the the goals of your business not just the goals of your IT because at the end of the day we want to make sure that there is a direct line of sight between what you're trying to do is an enterprise what you're trying to do as a business be it a financial service institution healthcare provider doesn't matter what the industry is and that that the investments you make an IT can directly contribute to that and with Veritas we really help customers to make that a reality and we do it tactically with the idea of protecting your applications and ensuring that you have resilient services and we do it strategically by giving a platform to be able to host any number of different applications across all different operating systems and technologies so DeAngelo thank you so much for all the updates really a pleasure all right be sure to check out the cube net for all of the interviews we have go hit the search you can find past interviews we've done with Veritas as well as all the shows that we'll be at at 2020 and beyond I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watching the Q

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering micron insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>We'll come back to San Francisco. Everybody wears pier 27. This is the queue. We're following micron insight 2019. Dave Volante with David flora. Theresa Kelly is here. She is the vice president of the CPG consumer products group at my country. So thanks for running over to the cube for a moment. >>Glad to be here. Thank you. So tell us about CPG. What's the, what's the scope? >> So CPG is a consumer products group. We have a crucial Grande that's been around for 23 years. Uh, we sell to you and you and me. And we provide SSD solutions and DRAM solutions. So it could be someone upgrading their computer, it can be someone that is trying to be a gamer because we have high performance DRAM. And today we announced we broke the world record. Yeah. So with a, an AMD platform and ASIS, uh, a team. So the three teams, partners, so pretty excited about that. Tell us about the hard news. What are the announcements that you made? So I just mentioned that we broke the record. So we were able to achieve a, a speed of 6,024 mega transfers with the AMD, um, partnership. And as soon as, so pretty excited about that because that just shows we are, you know, a vertically integrated company and we're great. We've got great product out there and we provide that to the gamers out there and are able to give a group a solution both at the mainstream and the high end performance. >> And then that's a major growth area. That game is, yes, it is a couple of these shows. Yes, yes. Different normal than number audiences they get in person and online. So you got it. >>So when we started the cube, we started on Justin TV, which became, >>which we used to get so much traffic. We're like, where's all this traffic coming from? You know, what it was, it was the gamers, so. Huh. What's the importance of gaming? Well, let's start, >> you mentioned Twitch. We've got one of the teams we sponsor that's a big Twitch, uh, following up there, the energy team. And so they're one of the, uh, both set better happening. So, you know, from a gaming perspective, it, it, it is a very, you know, one of the fastest growing, uh, consumer DRAM markets. And it is something that allows us to put both DRAM and SSD out there to the consumer. We sell to the consumer. We also partner with those that make those platforms. You know, it could be someone upgrading a computer or um, someone that's buying it in the store. So pretty excited about because we have both solutions and are, are both vertically integrated, which no one else has. >>Some gamers need. They need memory, they need need. Joe's about more about the, the crucial brand. You know, you guys are amplifying that know what's behind the brand and what's the brand promise. Yeah, crucial is um, having met with some friends yesterday, they said, you are a trusted brand. We know we're gonna get quality product from you. We ask what do we know now? And we do, we deliver on what we say. We don't make hype news. We very much are able to say we're going to deliver such a product and, and bring that back to you. And we're known for great customer support too. We've spent time over the past 12 months continuing to build out a portfolio for our consumers and they've, the response has been great. Both again on the SSD side and on the DRAM side. So it is, it's a brand that is worldwide. We're across the world. We sell places like Amazon but also a lot in Europe and in Asia. There's still a lot of retail, so we saw to retail too and or@crucial.com so we're provide solutions. >>Well it's good. Yeah. Consumer spending is powering our economy right now, so that's great. Last question is what should we expect going forward? You know, give us some guideposts. >>So you know, we have, as with the announcements today, I mentioned, I hadn't mentioned that the exit was announced today. It's our portable SSD almost twice as fast as any SSD portable SSD out there with that price point. So pretty excited for that. Again, giving great, you know, value for our money with our vertical integration. And we definitely have, um, insights into wine to build, uh, a broader portfolio in time for our consumers and we look to them and where the market's going to provide the solutions. And as mentioned, gaming is very important to us, so we intend to continue to have investments there too. >>Love, it sure is the gift that keeps on giving, right? We keep increasing capacities, lowering costs, and now increasing performance. Theresa, thanks very much for coming on the. Okay. Give right there. We be back shortly. Is this the cube from micron inside 2019.