(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the Cube's coverage of International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE series of profiles around leaders in the tech industry sharing their stories, advice, best practices, what they're doing in their jobs their vision of the future, and more importantly, passing it on and encouraging more and more networking and telling the stories that matter. Our next guest is a great executive leader talking about how to lead in challenging times. Krista Satterthwaite, who is Senior Vice President and GM of Mainstream Compute. Krista great to see you're Cube alumni. We've had you on before talking about compute power. And by the way, congratulations on your BPT and Black Professional Tech Network 2023 Black Tech Exec of the Year Award. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And thanks for having me. >> I knew I liked you the first time we were doing interviews together. You were so smart and so on top of it. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem. >> All kidding aside, let's get into it. You know, one of the things that's coming out on these interviews is leadership is being showcased and there's a network effect happening in the industry and you're starting to see people look and hear stories that they may or may not have heard before or news stories are coming out. So, one of the things that's interesting is that also in the backdrop of post pandemic, there's been a turn in the industry a little bit, there's a little bit of headwind in certain areas, some tailwinds in cloud and other areas. Compute, your area is doing very well. It could be challenging. And as a leader, has the conversation changed? And where are you at right now in the network of folks you're working with? What's the mood? >> Yeah, so actually I, things are much better. Obviously we had a chip shortage last year. Things are much, much better. But I learned a lot when it came to going through challenging times and leadership. And I think when we talk to customers, a lot of 'em are in challenging situations. Sometimes it's budget, sometimes it's attracting and retaining talent and sometimes it's just demands because, it's really exciting that technology is behind everything. But that means the demands on IT are bigger than ever before. So what I find when it comes to challenging times is that there's really three qualities that are game changers when it comes to leading and challenging times. And the first one is positivity. People have to feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel to make sure that, their attitudes stay up, that they stay working really really hard and they look to the leader for that. The second one is communication. And I read somewhere that communication is leadership. And we had a great example from our CEO Antonio Neri when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. He had an all employee meeting every week for a month and we have tens of thousands of employees. And then even after that month, we had 'em very regularly. But he wanted to make sure that everybody heard from, him his thoughts had all the updates, knew how their peers were doing, how we were helping customers. And I really learned a lot from that in terms of communicating and communicating more during tough times. And then I would say the third one is making sure that they are informed and they feel empowered. So I would say a leader who is able to do that really, really stands out in a challenging time. >> So how do you get yourself together? Obviously you the chip shortage everyone knows in the industry and for the folks not in the tech industry, it was an economic potential disaster, because you don't get the chips you need. You guys make servers and technology, chips power everything. If you miss a shipment, it could cause a lot of backlash. So Cisco had an earnings impact. It has impact to the business. When do you have that code red moment where it's like, okay, we have to kind of put the pause and go into emergency mode. And how do you handle that? >> Well, you know, it is funny 'cause when it, when we have challenges, I come to learn that people can look at challenges and hard work as a burden or a mission and they behave totally different. If they see it as a burden, then they're doing the bare minimum and they're pointing fingers and they're complaining and they're probably not getting a whole lot done. If they see it as a mission, then all of a sudden they're going above and beyond. They're working really hard, they're really partnering. And if it affects customers for HPE, obviously we, HPE is a very customer centric company, so everyone pays attention and tries to pitch in. But when it comes to a mission, I started thinking, what are the real ingredients for a mission? And I think it's important. I think it's, people feel like they can make an impact. And then I think the third one is that the goal is clear, even if the path isn't, 'cause you may have to pivot a lot if it's a challenge. And so when it came to the chip shortage, it was a mission. We wanted to make sure that we could ship to customers as quickly as possible. And it was a mission. Everybody pulled together. I learned how much our team could pull off and pull together through that challenge. >> And the consequences can be quantified in economics. So it's like the burn the boats example, you got to burn the boats, you're stuck. You got to figure out a solution. How does that change the demands on people? Because this is, okay, there's a mission it they're not, it's not normal. What are some of those new demands that arise during those times and how do you manage that? How do you be a leader? >> Yeah, so it's funny, I was reading this statement from James White who used to be the CEO of Jamba Juice. And he was talking about how he got that job. He said, "I think it was one thing I said that really convinced them that I was the right person." And what he said was something like, "I will get more out of people than nine out of 10 leaders on the planet." He said, "Because I will look at their strengths and their capabilities and I will play to their passions." and their capabilities and I will play their passions. and getting the most out people in difficult times, it is all about how much you can get out of people for their own sake and for the company's sake. >> That's great feedback. And to people watching who are early in their careers, leading is getting the best out of your team, attitude. Some of the things you mentioned. What advice would you give folks that are starting to get into the workforce, that are starting to get into that leadership track or might have a trajectory or even might have an innate ability that they know they have and they want to pursue that dream? >> Yeah so. >> What advice would you give them? >> Yeah, what I would say, I say this all the time that, for the first half of my career I was very job conscious, but I wasn't very career conscious. So I'd get in a role and I'd stay in that role for long periods of time and I'd do a good job, but I wasn't really very career conscious. And what I would say is, everybody says how important risk taking is. Well, risk taking can be a little bit of a scary word, right? Or term. And the way I see it is give it a shot and see what happens. You're interested in something, give it a shot and see what happens. It's kind of a less intimidating way of looking at risk because even though I was job conscious, and not career conscious, one thing I did when people asked me to take something on, hey Krista, would you like to take on more responsibility here? The answer was always yes, yes, yes, yes. So I said yes because I said, hey I'll give it a shot and see what happens. And that helped me tremendously because I felt like I am giving it a try. And the more you do that, the the better it is. >> It's great. >> And actually the the less scary it is because you do that, a few times and it goes well. It's like a muscle that builds. >> It's funny, a woman executive was on the program. I said, the word balance comes up a lot. And she stopped and said, "Let's just talk about balance for a second." And then she went contrarian and said, "It's about not being unbalanced. It's about being, taking a chance and being a little bit off balance to put yourself outside your comfort zone to try new things." And then she also came up and followed and said, "If you do that alone, you increase your risk. But if you do it with people, a team that you trust and you're authentic and you're vulnerable and you're communicating, that is the chemistry." And that was a really good point. What's your reaction? 'Cause you were talking about authentic conversations good communications with Antonio. How does someone get, feel, find that team and do you agree with it? And what was your, how would you react to that? >> Yes, I agree with that. And when it comes to being authentic, that's the magic and when someone isn't, if someone's not really being themselves, it's really funny because you can feel it, you can sense it. There's kind of a wall between you and them. And over time people won't be able to put their finger on it, but they'll feel a distance from you. But when you're authentic and you share who you are, what you find is you find things in common with other people. 'Cause you're sharing more of who you are and it's like, oh, I do that too. Oh, I'm interested in that too. And build the bonds between people and the authenticity. And that's what people crave. They want people to be authentic and people can tell when you're authentic and when you're not. >> Is managing and leading through a crisis a born talent or can you learn it? >> Oh, definitely learned. I think that we're born knowing nothing and I once read people are nurtured into greatness and I think that's true. So yeah, definitely learned. >> What are some examples that can come out of a tough time as folks may look at a crisis and be shy away from it? How do they lean into it? What advice would you give folks? How do you handle it? I mean, everyone's got different personality. Okay, they get to a position but stepping through that door. >> Yeah, well, I do this presentation called, "10 things I Wish I Knew Earlier in my Career." And one of those things is about the growth mindset and the growth mindset. There's a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck and the growth mindset is all about learning and not always having to know everything, but really the winning is in the learning. And so if you have a growth mindset it makes you feel better about everything because you can't lose. You're winning because you're learning. So when I've learned that, I started looking at things much differently. And when it comes to going through tough times, what I find is you're exercising muscles that you didn't even know you had, which makes you stronger when the crisis is over, obviously. And I also feel like you become a lot a much more creative when you're in challenging times. You're forced to do things that you hadn't had to do before. And it also bonds the team. It's almost like going through bootcamp together. When you go through a challenge together it bonds you for life. >> I mean, you could have bonding, could be trauma bonding or success bonding. People love to be on the success side because that's positive and that's really the key mindset. You're always winning if you have that attitude. And learnings is also positive. So it's not, it's never a failure unless you make it. >> That's right, exactly. As long as you learn from it. And that's the name of the game. So, learning is the goal. >> So I have to ask you, on your job now, you have a really big responsibility HPE compute and big division. What's the current mindset that you have right now in your career, where you're at? What are some of the things on your mind that you think about? We had other, other seniors leaders say, hey, you know I got the software as my brain and the hardware's my body. I like to keep software and hardware working together. What is your current state of your career and how you looking at it, what's next and what's going on in your mind right now? >> Yeah, so for me, I really want to make sure that for my team we're nurturing the next generation of leadership and that we're helping with career development and career growth. And people feel like they can grow their careers here. Luckily at HPE, we have a lot of people stay at HPE a long time, and even people who leave HPE a lot of times they come back because the culture's fantastic. So I just want to make sure I'm contributing to that culture and I'm bringing up the next generation of leaders. >> What's next for you? What are you looking at from a career personal standpoint? >> You know, it's funny, I, I love what I'm doing right now. I'm actually on a joint venture board with H3C, which is HPE Joint Venture Company. And so I'm really enjoying that and exploring more board service opportunities. >> You have a focus of good growth mindset, challenging through, managing through tough times. How do you stay focused on that North star? How do you keep the reinforcement of the mission? How do you nurture the team to greatness? >> Yeah, so I think it's a lot of clarity, providing a lot of clarity about what's important right now. And it goes back to some of the communication that I mentioned earlier, making sure that everybody knows where the North Star is, so everybody's focused on the same thing, because I feel like with the, I always felt like throughout my career I was set up for success if I had the right information, the right guidance and the right goals. And I try to make sure that I do that with my team. >> What are some of the things that you could share as we wrap up here for the folks watching, as the networks increase, as the stories start to unfold more and more on digital like we're doing here, what do you hope people walk away with? What's working, what needs work, and what is some things that people aren't talking about that should be discussed publicly? >> Do you mean from a career standpoint or? >> For career? For growing into tech and into leadership positions. >> Okay. >> Big migration tech is now a wide field. I mean, when I grew up, broke into the eighties, it was computer science, software engineering, and three degrees in engineering, right? >> I see huge swath of AI coming. So many technical careers. There's a lot more women. >> Yeah. And that's what's so exciting about being in a technical career, technical company, is that everything's always changing. There's always opportunity to learn something new. And frankly, you know, every company is in the business of technology right now, because they want to closer to their customers. Typically, they're using technology to do that. Everyone's digitally transforming. And so what I would say is that there's so much opportunity, keep your mind open, explore what interests you and keep learning because it's changing all the time. >> You know I was talking with Sue, former HP, she's on a lot of boards. The balance at the board level still needs a lot of work and the leaderships are getting better, but the board at the seats at the table needs work. Where do you see that transition for you in the future? Is that something on your mind? Maybe a board seat? You mentioned you're on a board with HPE, but maybe sitting on some other boards? Any, any? >> Yes, actually, actually, we actually have a program here at HPE called the Board Ready Now program that I'm a part of. And so HPE is very supportive of me exploring an independent board seat. And so they have some education and programming around that. And I know Sue well, she's awesome. And so yes, I'm looking into those opportunities right now. >> She advises do one no more than two. The day job. >> Yeah, I would only be doing one current job that I have. >> Well, kris, it was great to chat with you about these topics and leadership and challenging times. Great masterclass, great advice. As SVP and GM of mainstream compute for HPE, what's going on in your job these days? What's the most exciting thing happening? Share some of your work situations. >> Sure, so the most exciting thing happening right now is HPE Gen 11, which we just announced and started shipping, brings tremendous performance benefit, has an intuitive operating experience, a trusted security by design, and it's optimized to run workloads so much faster. So if anybody is interested, they should go check it out on hpe.com. >> And of course the CUBE will be at HPE Discover. We'll see you there. Any final wisdom you'd like to share as we wrap up the last minute here? >> Yeah, so I think the last thing I'll say is that when it comes to setting your sights, I think, expecting it, good things to happen usually happens when you believe you deserve it. So what happens is you believe you deserve it, then you expect it and you get it. And so sometimes that's about making sure you raise your thermostat to expect more. And I always talk about you don't have to raise it all up at once. You could do that incrementally and other people can set your thermostat too when they say, hey, you should be, you should get a level this high or that high, but raise your thermostat because what you expect is what you get. >> Krista, thank you so much for contributing to this program. We're going to do it quarterly. We're going to do getting more stories out there, so we'll have you back and if you know anyone with good stories, send them our way. And congratulations on your BPTN Tech Executive of the Year award for 2023. Congratulations, great prize there and great recognition for your hard work. >> Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. >> Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of National Woodman's Day. I'm John Furrier, stories from the front lines, management ranks, developers, all there, global coverage of international events with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Valente with theCUBE, and one of the most gratifying aspects of my role as a host of "theCUBE TV" is I get to cover a wide range of topics. And quite often, we're able to bring to our program a level of expertise that allows us to more deeply explore and unpack some of the topics that we cover throughout the year. And one of our favorite topics, of course, is data. Now, in 2021, after being in isolation for the better part of two years, a group of industry analysts met up at AWS re:Invent and started a collaboration to look at the trends in data and predict what some likely outcomes will be for the coming year. And it resulted in a very popular session that we had last year focused on the future of data management. And I'm very excited and pleased to tell you that the 2023 edition of that predictions episode is back, and with me are five outstanding market analyst, Sanjeev Mohan of SanjMo, Tony Baer of dbInsight, Carl Olofson from IDC, Dave Menninger from Ventana Research, and Doug Henschen, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Now, what is it that we're calling you, guys? A data pack like the rat pack? No, no, no, no, that's not it. It's the data crowd, the data crowd, and the crowd includes some of the best minds in the data analyst community. They'll discuss how data management is evolving and what listeners should prepare for in 2023. Guys, welcome back. Great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. (Tony and Dave faintly speaks) >> All right, before we get into 2023 predictions, we thought it'd be good to do a look back at how we did in 2022 and give a transparent assessment of those predictions. So, let's get right into it. We're going to bring these up here, the predictions from 2022, they're color-coded red, yellow, and green to signify the degree of accuracy. And I'm pleased to report there's no red. Well, maybe some of you will want to debate that grading system. But as always, we want to be open, so you can decide for yourselves. So, we're going to ask each analyst to review their 2022 prediction and explain their rating and what evidence they have that led them to their conclusion. So, Sanjeev, please kick it off. Your prediction was data governance becomes key. I know that's going to knock you guys over, but elaborate, because you had more detail when you double click on that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Dave, for having us on the show today. And we self-graded ourselves. I could have very easily made my prediction from last year green, but I mentioned why I left it as yellow. I totally fully believe that data governance was in a renaissance in 2022. And why do I say that? You have to look no further than AWS launching its own data catalog called DataZone. Before that, mid-year, we saw Unity Catalog from Databricks went GA. So, overall, I saw there was tremendous movement. When you see these big players launching a new data catalog, you know that they want to be in this space. And this space is highly critical to everything that I feel we will talk about in today's call. Also, if you look at established players, I spoke at Collibra's conference, data.world, work closely with Alation, Informatica, a bunch of other companies, they all added tremendous new capabilities. So, it did become key. The reason I left it as yellow is because I had made a prediction that Collibra would go IPO, and it did not. And I don't think anyone is going IPO right now. The market is really, really down, the funding in VC IPO market. But other than that, data governance had a banner year in 2022. >> Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And of course, you saw data clean rooms being announced at AWS re:Invent, so more evidence. And I like how the fact that you included in your predictions some things that were binary, so you dinged yourself there. So, good job. Okay, Tony Baer, you're up next. Data mesh hits reality check. As you see here, you've given yourself a bright green thumbs up. (Tony laughing) Okay. Let's hear why you feel that was the case. What do you mean by reality check? >> Okay. Thanks, Dave, for having us back again. This is something I just wrote and just tried to get away from, and this just a topic just won't go away. I did speak with a number of folks, early adopters and non-adopters during the year. And I did find that basically that it pretty much validated what I was expecting, which was that there was a lot more, this has now become a front burner issue. And if I had any doubt in my mind, the evidence I would point to is what was originally intended to be a throwaway post on LinkedIn, which I just quickly scribbled down the night before leaving for re:Invent. I was packing at the time, and for some reason, I was doing Google search on data mesh. And I happened to have tripped across this ridiculous article, I will not say where, because it doesn't deserve any publicity, about the eight (Dave laughing) best data mesh software companies of 2022. (Tony laughing) One of my predictions was that you'd see data mesh washing. And I just quickly just hopped on that maybe three sentences and wrote it at about a couple minutes saying this is hogwash, essentially. (laughs) And that just reun... And then, I left for re:Invent. And the next night, when I got into my Vegas hotel room, I clicked on my computer. I saw a 15,000 hits on that post, which was the most hits of any single post I put all year. And the responses were wildly pro and con. So, it pretty much validates my expectation in that data mesh really did hit a lot more scrutiny over this past year. >> Yeah, thank you for that. I remember that article. I remember rolling my eyes when I saw it, and then I recently, (Tony laughing) I talked to Walmart and they actually invoked Martin Fowler and they said that they're working through their data mesh. So, it takes a really lot of thought, and it really, as we've talked about, is really as much an organizational construct. You're not buying data mesh >> Bingo. >> to your point. Okay. Thank you, Tony. Carl Olofson, here we go. You've graded yourself a yellow in the prediction of graph databases. Take off. Please elaborate. >> Yeah, sure. So, I realized in looking at the prediction that it seemed to imply that graph databases could be a major factor in the data world in 2022, which obviously didn't become the case. It was an error on my part in that I should have said it in the right context. It's really a three to five-year time period that graph databases will really become significant, because they still need accepted methodologies that can be applied in a business context as well as proper tools in order for people to be able to use them seriously. But I stand by the idea that it is taking off, because for one thing, Neo4j, which is the leading independent graph database provider, had a very good year. And also, we're seeing interesting developments in terms of things like AWS with Neptune and with Oracle providing graph support in Oracle database this past year. Those things are, as I said, growing gradually. There are other companies like TigerGraph and so forth, that deserve watching as well. But as far as becoming mainstream, it's going to be a few years before we get all the elements together to make that happen. Like any new technology, you have to create an environment in which ordinary people without a whole ton of technical training can actually apply the technology to solve business problems. >> Yeah, thank you for that. These specialized databases, graph databases, time series databases, you see them embedded into mainstream data platforms, but there's a place for these specialized databases, I would suspect we're going to see new types of databases emerge with all this cloud sprawl that we have and maybe to the edge. >> Well, part of it is that it's not as specialized as you might think it. You can apply graphs to great many workloads and use cases. It's just that people have yet to fully explore and discover what those are. >> Yeah. >> And so, it's going to be a process. (laughs) >> All right, Dave Menninger, streaming data permeates the landscape. You gave yourself a yellow. Why? >> Well, I couldn't think of a appropriate combination of yellow and green. Maybe I should have used chartreuse, (Dave laughing) but I was probably a little hard on myself making it yellow. This is another type of specialized data processing like Carl was talking about graph databases is a stream processing, and nearly every data platform offers streaming capabilities now. Often, it's based on Kafka. If you look at Confluent, their revenues have grown at more than 50%, continue to grow at more than 50% a year. They're expected to do more than half a billion dollars in revenue this year. But the thing that hasn't happened yet, and to be honest, they didn't necessarily expect it to happen in one year, is that streaming hasn't become the default way in which we deal with data. It's still a sidecar to data at rest. And I do expect that we'll continue to see streaming become more and more mainstream. I do expect perhaps in the five-year timeframe that we will first deal with data as streaming and then at rest, but the worlds are starting to merge. And we even see some vendors bringing products to market, such as K2View, Hazelcast, and RisingWave Labs. So, in addition to all those core data platform vendors adding these capabilities, there are new vendors approaching this market as well. >> I like the tough grading system, and it's not trivial. And when you talk to practitioners doing this stuff, there's still some complications in the data pipeline. And so, but I think, you're right, it probably was a yellow plus. Doug Henschen, data lakehouses will emerge as dominant. When you talk to people about lakehouses, practitioners, they all use that term. They certainly use the term data lake, but now, they're using lakehouse more and more. What's your thoughts on here? Why the green? What's your evidence there? >> Well, I think, I was accurate. I spoke about it specifically as something that vendors would be pursuing. And we saw yet more lakehouse advocacy in 2022. Google introduced its BigLake service alongside BigQuery. Salesforce introduced Genie, which is really a lakehouse architecture. And it was a safe prediction to say vendors are going to be pursuing this in that AWS, Cloudera, Databricks, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce now, IBM, all advocate this idea of a single platform for all of your data. Now, the trend was also supported in 2023, in that we saw a big embrace of Apache Iceberg in 2022. That's a structured table format. It's used with these lakehouse platforms. It's open, so it ensures portability and it also ensures performance. And that's a structured table that helps with the warehouse side performance. But among those announcements, Snowflake, Google, Cloud Era, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, all embraced Iceberg. But keep in mind, again, I'm talking about this as something that vendors are pursuing as their approach. So, they're advocating end users. It's very cutting edge. I'd say the top, leading edge, 5% of of companies have really embraced the lakehouse. I think, we're now seeing the fast followers, the next 20 to 25% of firms embracing this idea and embracing a lakehouse architecture. I recall Christian Kleinerman at the big Snowflake event last summer, making the announcement about Iceberg, and he asked for a show of hands for any of you in the audience at the keynote, have you heard of Iceberg? And just a smattering of hands went up. So, the vendors are ahead of the curve. They're pushing this trend, and we're now seeing a little bit more mainstream uptake. >> Good. Doug, I was there. It was you, me, and I think, two other hands were up. That was just humorous. (Doug laughing) All right, well, so I liked the fact that we had some yellow and some green. When you think about these things, there's the prediction itself. Did it come true or not? There are the sub predictions that you guys make, and of course, the degree of difficulty. So, thank you for that open assessment. All right, let's get into the 2023 predictions. Let's bring up the predictions. Sanjeev, you're going first. You've got a prediction around unified metadata. What's the prediction, please? >> So, my prediction is that metadata space is currently a mess. It needs to get unified. There are too many use cases of metadata, which are being addressed by disparate systems. For example, data quality has become really big in the last couple of years, data observability, the whole catalog space is actually, people don't like to use the word data catalog anymore, because data catalog sounds like it's a catalog, a museum, if you may, of metadata that you go and admire. So, what I'm saying is that in 2023, we will see that metadata will become the driving force behind things like data ops, things like orchestration of tasks using metadata, not rules. Not saying that if this fails, then do this, if this succeeds, go do that. But it's like getting to the metadata level, and then making a decision as to what to orchestrate, what to automate, how to do data quality check, data observability. So, this space is starting to gel, and I see there'll be more maturation in the metadata space. Even security privacy, some of these topics, which are handled separately. And I'm just talking about data security and data privacy. I'm not talking about infrastructure security. These also need to merge into a unified metadata management piece with some knowledge graph, semantic layer on top, so you can do analytics on it. So, it's no longer something that sits on the side, it's limited in its scope. It is actually the very engine, the very glue that is going to connect data producers and consumers. >> Great. Thank you for that. Doug. Doug Henschen, any thoughts on what Sanjeev just said? Do you agree? Do you disagree? >> Well, I agree with many aspects of what he says. I think, there's a huge opportunity for consolidation and streamlining of these as aspects of governance. Last year, Sanjeev, you said something like, we'll see more people using catalogs than BI. And I have to disagree. I don't think this is a category that's headed for mainstream adoption. It's a behind the scenes activity for the wonky few, or better yet, companies want machine learning and automation to take care of these messy details. We've seen these waves of management technologies, some of the latest data observability, customer data platform, but they failed to sweep away all the earlier investments in data quality and master data management. So, yes, I hope the latest tech offers, glimmers that there's going to be a better, cleaner way of addressing these things. But to my mind, the business leaders, including the CIO, only want to spend as much time and effort and money and resources on these sorts of things to avoid getting breached, ending up in headlines, getting fired or going to jail. So, vendors bring on the ML and AI smarts and the automation of these sorts of activities. >> So, if I may say something, the reason why we have this dichotomy between data catalog and the BI vendors is because data catalogs are very soon, not going to be standalone products, in my opinion. They're going to get embedded. So, when you use a BI tool, you'll actually use the catalog to find out what is it that you want to do, whether you are looking for data or you're looking for an existing dashboard. So, the catalog becomes embedded into the BI tool. >> Hey, Dave Menninger, sometimes you have some data in your back pocket. Do you have any stats (chuckles) on this topic? >> No, I'm glad you asked, because I'm going to... Now, data catalogs are something that's interesting. Sanjeev made a statement that data catalogs are falling out of favor. I don't care what you call them. They're valuable to organizations. Our research shows that organizations that have adequate data catalog technologies are three times more likely to express satisfaction with their analytics for just the reasons that Sanjeev was talking about. You can find what you want, you know you're getting the right information, you know whether or not it's trusted. So, those are good things. So, we expect to see the capabilities, whether it's embedded or separate. We expect to see those capabilities continue to permeate the market. >> And a lot of those catalogs are driven now by machine learning and things. So, they're learning from those patterns of usage by people when people use the data. (airy laughs) >> All right. Okay. Thank you, guys. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Tony Bear, let's bring up the predictions. You got something in here about the modern data stack. We need to rethink it. Is the modern data stack getting long at the tooth? Is it not so modern anymore? >> I think, in a way, it's got almost too modern. It's gotten too, I don't know if it's being long in the tooth, but it is getting long. The modern data stack, it's traditionally been defined as basically you have the data platform, which would be the operational database and the data warehouse. And in between, you have all the tools that are necessary to essentially get that data from the operational realm or the streaming realm for that matter into basically the data warehouse, or as we might be seeing more and more, the data lakehouse. And I think, what's important here is that, or I think, we have seen a lot of progress, and this would be in the cloud, is with the SaaS services. And especially you see that in the modern data stack, which is like all these players, not just the MongoDBs or the Oracles or the Amazons have their database platforms. You see they have the Informatica's, and all the other players there in Fivetrans have their own SaaS services. And within those SaaS services, you get a certain degree of simplicity, which is it takes all the housekeeping off the shoulders of the customers. That's a good thing. The problem is that what we're getting to unfortunately is what I would call lots of islands of simplicity, which means that it leads it (Dave laughing) to the customer to have to integrate or put all that stuff together. It's a complex tool chain. And so, what we really need to think about here, we have too many pieces. And going back to the discussion of catalogs, it's like we have so many catalogs out there, which one do we use? 'Cause chances are of most organizations do not rely on a single catalog at this point. What I'm calling on all the data providers or all the SaaS service providers, is to literally get it together and essentially make this modern data stack less of a stack, make it more of a blending of an end-to-end solution. And that can come in a number of different ways. Part of it is that we're data platform providers have been adding services that are adjacent. And there's some very good examples of this. We've seen progress over the past year or so. For instance, MongoDB integrating search. It's a very common, I guess, sort of tool that basically, that the applications that are developed on MongoDB use, so MongoDB then built it into the database rather than requiring an extra elastic search or open search stack. Amazon just... AWS just did the zero-ETL, which is a first step towards simplifying the process from going from Aurora to Redshift. You've seen same thing with Google, BigQuery integrating basically streaming pipelines. And you're seeing also a lot of movement in database machine learning. So, there's some good moves in this direction. I expect to see more than this year. Part of it's from basically the SaaS platform is adding some functionality. But I also see more importantly, because you're never going to get... This is like asking your data team and your developers, herding cats to standardizing the same tool. In most organizations, that is not going to happen. So, take a look at the most popular combinations of tools and start to come up with some pre-built integrations and pre-built orchestrations, and offer some promotional pricing, maybe not quite two for, but in other words, get two products for the price of two services or for the price of one and a half. I see a lot of potential for this. And it's to me, if the class was to simplify things, this is the next logical step and I expect to see more of this here. >> Yeah, and you see in Oracle, MySQL heat wave, yet another example of eliminating that ETL. Carl Olofson, today, if you think about the data stack and the application stack, they're largely separate. Do you have any thoughts on how that's going to play out? Does that play into this prediction? What do you think? >> Well, I think, that the... I really like Tony's phrase, islands of simplification. It really says (Tony chuckles) what's going on here, which is that all these different vendors you ask about, about how these stacks work. All these different vendors have their own stack vision. And you can... One application group is going to use one, and another application group is going to use another. And some people will say, let's go to, like you go to a Informatica conference and they say, we should be the center of your universe, but you can't connect everything in your universe to Informatica, so you need to use other things. So, the challenge is how do we make those things work together? As Tony has said, and I totally agree, we're never going to get to the point where people standardize on one organizing system. So, the alternative is to have metadata that can be shared amongst those systems and protocols that allow those systems to coordinate their operations. This is standard stuff. It's not easy. But the motive for the vendors is that they can become more active critical players in the enterprise. And of course, the motive for the customer is that things will run better and more completely. So, I've been looking at this in terms of two kinds of metadata. One is the meaning metadata, which says what data can be put together. The other is the operational metadata, which says basically where did it come from? Who created it? What's its current state? What's the security level? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The good news is the operational stuff can actually be done automatically, whereas the meaning stuff requires some human intervention. And as we've already heard from, was it Doug, I think, people are disinclined to put a lot of definition into meaning metadata. So, that may be the harder one, but coordination is key. This problem has been with us forever, but with the addition of new data sources, with streaming data with data in different formats, the whole thing has, it's been like what a customer of mine used to say, "I understand your product can make my system run faster, but right now I just feel I'm putting my problems on roller skates. (chuckles) I don't need that to accelerate what's already not working." >> Excellent. Okay, Carl, let's stay with you. I remember in the early days of the big data movement, Hadoop movement, NoSQL was the big thing. And I remember Amr Awadallah said to us in theCUBE that SQL is the killer app for big data. So, your prediction here, if we bring that up is SQL is back. Please elaborate. >> Yeah. So, of course, some people would say, well, it never left. Actually, that's probably closer to true, but in the perception of the marketplace, there's been all this noise about alternative ways of storing, retrieving data, whether it's in key value stores or document databases and so forth. We're getting a lot of messaging that for a while had persuaded people that, oh, we're not going to do analytics in SQL anymore. We're going to use Spark for everything, except that only a handful of people know how to use Spark. Oh, well, that's a problem. Well, how about, and for ordinary conventional business analytics, Spark is like an over-engineered solution to the problem. SQL works just great. What's happened in the past couple years, and what's going to continue to happen is that SQL is insinuating itself into everything we're seeing. We're seeing all the major data lake providers offering SQL support, whether it's Databricks or... And of course, Snowflake is loving this, because that is what they do, and their success is certainly points to the success of SQL, even MongoDB. And we were all, I think, at the MongoDB conference where on one day, we hear SQL is dead. They're not teaching SQL in schools anymore, and this kind of thing. And then, a couple days later at the same conference, they announced we're adding a new analytic capability-based on SQL. But didn't you just say SQL is dead? So, the reality is that SQL is better understood than most other methods of certainly of retrieving and finding data in a data collection, no matter whether it happens to be relational or non-relational. And even in systems that are very non-relational, such as graph and document databases, their query languages are being built or extended to resemble SQL, because SQL is something people understand. >> Now, you remember when we were in high school and you had had to take the... Your debating in the class and you were forced to take one side and defend it. So, I was was at a Vertica conference one time up on stage with Curt Monash, and I had to take the NoSQL, the world is changing paradigm shift. And so just to be controversial, I said to him, Curt Monash, I said, who really needs acid compliance anyway? Tony Baer. And so, (chuckles) of course, his head exploded, but what are your thoughts (guests laughing) on all this? >> Well, my first thought is congratulations, Dave, for surviving being up on stage with Curt Monash. >> Amen. (group laughing) >> I definitely would concur with Carl. We actually are definitely seeing a SQL renaissance and if there's any proof of the pudding here, I see lakehouse is being icing on the cake. As Doug had predicted last year, now, (clears throat) for the record, I think, Doug was about a year ahead of time in his predictions that this year is really the year that I see (clears throat) the lakehouse ecosystems really firming up. You saw the first shots last year. But anyway, on this, data lakes will not go away. I've actually, I'm on the home stretch of doing a market, a landscape on the lakehouse. And lakehouse will not replace data lakes in terms of that. There is the need for those, data scientists who do know Python, who knows Spark, to go in there and basically do their thing without all the restrictions or the constraints of a pre-built, pre-designed table structure. I get that. Same thing for developing models. But on the other hand, there is huge need. Basically, (clears throat) maybe MongoDB was saying that we're not teaching SQL anymore. Well, maybe we have an oversupply of SQL developers. Well, I'm being facetious there, but there is a huge skills based in SQL. Analytics have been built on SQL. They came with lakehouse and why this really helps to fuel a SQL revival is that the core need in the data lake, what brought on the lakehouse was not so much SQL, it was a need for acid. And what was the best way to do it? It was through a relational table structure. So, the whole idea of acid in the lakehouse was not to turn it into a transaction database, but to make the data trusted, secure, and more granularly governed, where you could govern down to column and row level, which you really could not do in a data lake or a file system. So, while lakehouse can be queried in a manner, you can go in there with Python or whatever, it's built on a relational table structure. And so, for that end, for those types of data lakes, it becomes the end state. You cannot bypass that table structure as I learned the hard way during my research. So, the bottom line I'd say here is that lakehouse is proof that we're starting to see the revenge of the SQL nerds. (Dave chuckles) >> Excellent. Okay, let's bring up back up the predictions. Dave Menninger, this one's really thought-provoking and interesting. We're hearing things like data as code, new data applications, machines actually generating plans with no human involvement. And your prediction is the definition of data is expanding. What do you mean by that? >> So, I think, for too long, we've thought about data as the, I would say facts that we collect the readings off of devices and things like that, but data on its own is really insufficient. Organizations need to manipulate that data and examine derivatives of the data to really understand what's happening in their organization, why has it happened, and to project what might happen in the future. And my comment is that these data derivatives need to be supported and managed just like the data needs to be managed. We can't treat this as entirely separate. Think about all the governance discussions we've had. Think about the metadata discussions we've had. If you separate these things, now you've got more moving parts. We're talking about simplicity and simplifying the stack. So, if these things are treated separately, it creates much more complexity. I also think it creates a little bit of a myopic view on the part of the IT organizations that are acquiring these technologies. They need to think more broadly. So, for instance, metrics. Metric stores are becoming much more common part of the tooling that's part of a data platform. Similarly, feature stores are gaining traction. So, those are designed to promote the reuse and consistency across the AI and ML initiatives. The elements that are used in developing an AI or ML model. And let me go back to metrics and just clarify what I mean by that. So, any type of formula involving the data points. I'm distinguishing metrics from features that are used in AI and ML models. And the data platforms themselves are increasingly managing the models as an element of data. So, just like figuring out how to calculate a metric. Well, if you're going to have the features associated with an AI and ML model, you probably need to be managing the model that's associated with those features. The other element where I see expansion is around external data. Organizations for decades have been focused on the data that they generate within their own organization. We see more and more of these platforms acquiring and publishing data to external third-party sources, whether they're within some sort of a partner ecosystem or whether it's a commercial distribution of that information. And our research shows that when organizations use external data, they derive even more benefits from the various analyses that they're conducting. And the last great frontier in my opinion on this expanding world of data is the world of driver-based planning. Very few of the major data platform providers provide these capabilities today. These are the types of things you would do in a spreadsheet. And we all know the issues associated with spreadsheets. They're hard to govern, they're error-prone. And so, if we can take that type of analysis, collecting the occupancy of a rental property, the projected rise in rental rates, the fluctuations perhaps in occupancy, the interest rates associated with financing that property, we can project forward. And that's a very common thing to do. What the income might look like from that property income, the expenses, we can plan and purchase things appropriately. So, I think, we need this broader purview and I'm beginning to see some of those things happen. And the evidence today I would say, is more focused around the metric stores and the feature stores starting to see vendors offer those capabilities. And we're starting to see the ML ops elements of managing the AI and ML models find their way closer to the data platforms as well. >> Very interesting. When I hear metrics, I think of KPIs, I think of data apps, orchestrate people and places and things to optimize around a set of KPIs. It sounds like a metadata challenge more... Somebody once predicted they'll have more metadata than data. Carl, what are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Yeah, I think that what Dave is describing as data derivatives is in a way, another word for what I was calling operational metadata, which not about the data itself, but how it's used, where it came from, what the rules are governing it, and that kind of thing. If you have a rich enough set of those things, then not only can you do a model of how well your vacation property rental may do in terms of income, but also how well your application that's measuring that is doing for you. In other words, how many times have I used it, how much data have I used and what is the relationship between the data that I've used and the benefits that I've derived from using it? Well, we don't have ways of doing that. What's interesting to me is that folks in the content world are way ahead of us here, because they have always tracked their content using these kinds of attributes. Where did it come from? When was it created, when was it modified? Who modified it? And so on and so forth. We need to do more of that with the structure data that we have, so that we can track what it's used. And also, it tells us how well we're doing with it. Is it really benefiting us? Are we being efficient? Are there improvements in processes that we need to consider? Because maybe data gets created and then it isn't used or it gets used, but it gets altered in some way that actually misleads people. (laughs) So, we need the mechanisms to be able to do that. So, I would say that that's... And I'd say that it's true that we need that stuff. I think, that starting to expand is probably the right way to put it. It's going to be expanding for some time. I think, we're still a distance from having all that stuff really working together. >> Maybe we should say it's gestating. (Dave and Carl laughing) >> Sorry, if I may- >> Sanjeev, yeah, I was going to say this... Sanjeev, please comment. This sounds to me like it supports Zhamak Dehghani's principles, but please. >> Absolutely. So, whether we call it data mesh or not, I'm not getting into that conversation, (Dave chuckles) but data (audio breaking) (Tony laughing) everything that I'm hearing what Dave is saying, Carl, this is the year when data products will start to take off. I'm not saying they'll become mainstream. They may take a couple of years to become so, but this is data products, all this thing about vacation rentals and how is it doing, that data is coming from different sources. I'm packaging it into our data product. And to Carl's point, there's a whole operational metadata associated with it. The idea is for organizations to see things like developer productivity, how many releases am I doing of this? What data products are most popular? I'm actually in right now in the process of formulating this concept that just like we had data catalogs, we are very soon going to be requiring data products catalog. So, I can discover these data products. I'm not just creating data products left, right, and center. I need to know, do they already exist? What is the usage? If no one is using a data product, maybe I want to retire and save cost. But this is a data product. Now, there's a associated thing that is also getting debated quite a bit called data contracts. And a data contract to me is literally just formalization of all these aspects of a product. How do you use it? What is the SLA on it, what is the quality that I am prescribing? So, data product, in my opinion, shifts the conversation to the consumers or to the business people. Up to this point when, Dave, you're talking about data and all of data discovery curation is a very data producer-centric. So, I think, we'll see a shift more into the consumer space. >> Yeah. Dave, can I just jump in there just very quickly there, which is that what Sanjeev has been saying there, this is really central to what Zhamak has been talking about. It's basically about making, one, data products are about the lifecycle management of data. Metadata is just elemental to that. And essentially, one of the things that she calls for is making data products discoverable. That's exactly what Sanjeev was talking about. >> By the way, did everyone just no notice how Sanjeev just snuck in another prediction there? So, we've got- >> Yeah. (group laughing) >> But you- >> Can we also say that he snuck in, I think, the term that we'll remember today, which is metadata museums. >> Yeah, but- >> Yeah. >> And also comment to, Tony, to your last year's prediction, you're really talking about it's not something that you're going to buy from a vendor. >> No. >> It's very specific >> Mm-hmm. >> to an organization, their own data product. So, touche on that one. Okay, last prediction. Let's bring them up. Doug Henschen, BI analytics is headed to embedding. What does that mean? >> Well, we all know that conventional BI dashboarding reporting is really commoditized from a vendor perspective. It never enjoyed truly mainstream adoption. Always that 25% of employees are really using these things. I'm seeing rising interest in embedding concise analytics at the point of decision or better still, using analytics as triggers for automation and workflows, and not even necessitating human interaction with visualizations, for example, if we have confidence in the analytics. So, leading companies are pushing for next generation applications, part of this low-code, no-code movement we've seen. And they want to build that decision support right into the app. So, the analytic is right there. Leading enterprise apps vendors, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, they're all building smart apps with the analytics predictions, even recommendations built into these applications. And I think, the progressive BI analytics vendors are supporting this idea of driving insight to action, not necessarily necessitating humans interacting with it if there's confidence. So, we want prediction, we want embedding, we want automation. This low-code, no-code development movement is very important to bringing the analytics to where people are doing their work. We got to move beyond the, what I call swivel chair integration, between where people do their work and going off to separate reports and dashboards, and having to interpret and analyze before you can go back and do take action. >> And Dave Menninger, today, if you want, analytics or you want to absorb what's happening in the business, you typically got to go ask an expert, and then wait. So, what are your thoughts on Doug's prediction? >> I'm in total agreement with Doug. I'm going to say that collectively... So, how did we get here? I'm going to say collectively as an industry, we made a mistake. We made BI and analytics separate from the operational systems. Now, okay, it wasn't really a mistake. We were limited by the technology available at the time. Decades ago, we had to separate these two systems, so that the analytics didn't impact the operations. You don't want the operations preventing you from being able to do a transaction. But we've gone beyond that now. We can bring these two systems and worlds together and organizations recognize that need to change. As Doug said, the majority of the workforce and the majority of organizations doesn't have access to analytics. That's wrong. (chuckles) We've got to change that. And one of the ways that's going to change is with embedded analytics. 2/3 of organizations recognize that embedded analytics are important and it even ranks higher in importance than AI and ML in those organizations. So, it's interesting. This is a really important topic to the organizations that are consuming these technologies. The good news is it works. Organizations that have embraced embedded analytics are more comfortable with self-service than those that have not, as opposed to turning somebody loose, in the wild with the data. They're given a guided path to the data. And the research shows that 65% of organizations that have adopted embedded analytics are comfortable with self-service compared with just 40% of organizations that are turning people loose in an ad hoc way with the data. So, totally behind Doug's predictions. >> Can I just break in with something here, a comment on what Dave said about what Doug said, which (laughs) is that I totally agree with what you said about embedded analytics. And at IDC, we made a prediction in our future intelligence, future of intelligence service three years ago that this was going to happen. And the thing that we're waiting for is for developers to build... You have to write the applications to work that way. It just doesn't happen automagically. Developers have to write applications that reference analytic data and apply it while they're running. And that could involve simple things like complex queries against the live data, which is through something that I've been calling analytic transaction processing. Or it could be through something more sophisticated that involves AI operations as Doug has been suggesting, where the result is enacted pretty much automatically unless the scores are too low and you need to have a human being look at it. So, I think that that is definitely something we've been watching for. I'm not sure how soon it will come, because it seems to take a long time for people to change their thinking. But I think, as Dave was saying, once they do and they apply these principles in their application development, the rewards are great. >> Yeah, this is very much, I would say, very consistent with what we were talking about, I was talking about before, about basically rethinking the modern data stack and going into more of an end-to-end solution solution. I think, that what we're talking about clearly here is operational analytics. There'll still be a need for your data scientists to go offline just in their data lakes to do all that very exploratory and that deep modeling. But clearly, it just makes sense to bring operational analytics into where people work into their workspace and further flatten that modern data stack. >> But with all this metadata and all this intelligence, we're talking about injecting AI into applications, it does seem like we're entering a new era of not only data, but new era of apps. Today, most applications are about filling forms out or codifying processes and require a human input. And it seems like there's enough data now and enough intelligence in the system that the system can actually pull data from, whether it's the transaction system, e-commerce, the supply chain, ERP, and actually do something with that data without human involvement, present it to humans. Do you guys see this as a new frontier? >> I think, that's certainly- >> Very much so, but it's going to take a while, as Carl said. You have to design it, you have to get the prediction into the system, you have to get the analytics at the point of decision has to be relevant to that decision point. >> And I also recall basically a lot of the ERP vendors back like 10 years ago, we're promising that. And the fact that we're still looking at the promises shows just how difficult, how much of a challenge it is to get to what Doug's saying. >> One element that could be applied in this case is (indistinct) architecture. If applications are developed that are event-driven rather than following the script or sequence that some programmer or designer had preconceived, then you'll have much more flexible applications. You can inject decisions at various points using this technology much more easily. It's a completely different way of writing applications. And it actually involves a lot more data, which is why we should all like it. (laughs) But in the end (Tony laughing) it's more stable, it's easier to manage, easier to maintain, and it's actually more efficient, which is the result of an MIT study from about 10 years ago, and still, we are not seeing this come to fruition in most business applications. >> And do you think it's going to require a new type of data platform database? Today, data's all far-flung. We see that's all over the clouds and at the edge. Today, you cache- >> We need a super cloud. >> You cache that data, you're throwing into memory. I mentioned, MySQL heat wave. There are other examples where it's a brute force approach, but maybe we need new ways of laying data out on disk and new database architectures, and just when we thought we had it all figured out. >> Well, without referring to disk, which to my mind, is almost like talking about cave painting. I think, that (Dave laughing) all the things that have been mentioned by all of us today are elements of what I'm talking about. In other words, the whole improvement of the data mesh, the improvement of metadata across the board and improvement of the ability to track data and judge its freshness the way we judge the freshness of a melon or something like that, to determine whether we can still use it. Is it still good? That kind of thing. Bringing together data from multiple sources dynamically and real-time requires all the things we've been talking about. All the predictions that we've talked about today add up to elements that can make this happen. >> Well, guys, it's always tremendous to get these wonderful minds together and get your insights, and I love how it shapes the outcome here of the predictions, and let's see how we did. We're going to leave it there. I want to thank Sanjeev, Tony, Carl, David, and Doug. Really appreciate the collaboration and thought that you guys put into these sessions. Really, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Valente for theCUBE, signing off for now. Follow these guys on social media. Look for coverage on siliconangle.com, theCUBE.net. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat sparkling music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my cohost John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three. You're smiling. >> Yeah. >> You're still radiating energy. Is it, is it the community that's keeping your, your level up? >> It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great and Serverless wave is hitting. More and more Serverless embedded into the like, things like analytics, are going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end-to-end, and again, the, the zero-ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome, about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. >> Yeah, we are, and our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from Arc XP. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> Savannah: How this show going for you? >> It's been great and you know, it's the end of the day but there's so much great energy at the show this year. >> Savannah: There really is. >> It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including this session. So, it's been really a stimulating time. >> What do you do at Arc, what do you, what's your role? >> So, I'm Vice President of Technology and Product Development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform, so, in that platform we have content tools, we have delivery tools, we have subscription tools. It's a really exciting time in all those spaces. >> John: And your customer base is? >> Our customers today started with publishers. So, Arc XP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago and word got out about how great it was, built on top of the AWS tech stack and other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce as well as enterprise scenarios. >> I think that's really interesting and I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? >> Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press Broadcast Newsroom Tools, some of them that you have used for many years, and you know, one of the things that was really exciting about joining ARC, was they were cloud native and they were cloud native from the start and so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate, and now we see developers here at re:Invent be able to do custom Lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that, really, no one else can do in the CMS space >> Which, which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? >> Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us, just like- >> Savannah: Are you back in office? >> All of them. We actually have a globally distributed team, and so, if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington, DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office, but most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was ARC week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face-to-face, and that same energy you see at re:Invent, was there in person with our engineers. >> I believe that. So, I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital- I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. >> Joe: Yes. >> Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? You see more niche or industry specific? >> Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. >> Savannah: There's a couple companies in that category. >> There's a couple big ones out there. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling, and so, solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, corporate HR department. >> Savannah: Which is everyone, right? >> Virtually everyone needs to get their story out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong, cloud-based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. >> What are some of the challenges today that aren't, that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? >> So, you know, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well, but what I'd say is unique to Arc and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So, it's not just about one channel. >> Savannah: Right. It's about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools, is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. >> A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. >> Absolutely, yep. >> It's all data. >> Joe: It's an immense amount of data. >> How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or are kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends, and what are some of the core issues you see? >> Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets, and you know, when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class that it's in, is really the, the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader, but beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AIML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. >> What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? 'Cause remember we're in digital, Page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You got things like Substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies or change, some of the small ones go out of business, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming, that a platform could deliver, so that a company can value their content, and their talent? >> For sure. I mean this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades. >> I was going to say we're- >> Right. >> So it's like- >> Joe: Right, and so we've seen that play out- >> John: Little softball for you. >> Really for almost every format. It's a softball, but- >> It's day three. >> How are we addressing that? You know what, first and foremost, you got to do great storytelling, so, we have tools for that, but then presenting that story, and a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it, and so, you know, we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. >> 50 million plus registered users, correct? >> Yeah, it's unbelievable to scale. Really, Arc is a growth story, and so we went from serving the Washington Post needs, to over 2000 sites today, across 25 countries. >> Very- >> How do we get to that? How do we get that audience if we want to? Can we join that network? Is it a network of people? >> I love that question. >> Of people that are using Arc XP? >> Yeah. >> Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community, so I think they actually had a meeting yesterday, and so that's one way to get involved, but as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. >> Yeah. >> So, we see a wide appeal for our platform, and what's unique about ARC, is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS, where we take care of all of the services, over a hundred Amazon services, behind the scenes- >> Wow. >> Built into Arc. We manage all of that for our customers, including the CDN. So, it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up, we've got teams to take care of that 24/7 >> Great value proposition and a lot of need for this, people doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology? I see serverless is a big part of it on the EDB stack. What's the, what's the secret sauce? >> I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that Arc has in the Washington Post >> You understand it. >> And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world, and I've spent a lot of time, in many newsrooms. So, I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. >> Talk about understanding your user. I mean that that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used, now, by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get Arc up and running quite quickly. Correct? >> For sure. So, one of the things we built into Arc XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks, that our customers don't have to end up with a custom codebase when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution, of every site be a custom codebase. We're a product with extensibility hooks. >> Savannah: Right. >> That really enables someone to get started very quickly, and that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into Arc, itself. So that journey of migrating a site is really smooth with our toolset. >> What's the history of the company? Is it, did it come from the Washington Post or was that it's original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? >> Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So, designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling. >> Savannah: And one of the largest media outlets out there. >> So, that's that "DNA", the "special sauce". >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that's where that connection is. >> That really is where it comes through. >> John: Awesome. Congratulations on- >> Now today, you know, those roots are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in, experts in understanding different systems for inventory management, so we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. >> My final question, before we go to the challenge- >> Savannah: To the challenge. >> Is, what's next? What's on the roadmap as you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing? What's some of the next milestone or priorities for your business? >> So, it is really about growth and that's the story of Arc XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So, our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So, that's why I'd say next year is about, it's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business but still provide great value on the roadmap. >> And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. >> And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. >> Yeah. >> So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. >> John: Or theCUBE. >> Joe: Or theCUBE. >> Savannah: I know, I was just- >> There's just great formats out there. >> Best dev meeting, let's chat after, for sure. >> Exactly, that's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this side- >> So great to have you on. >> In a lot of different ways. So, we have a new tradition here at re:Invent, where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel, Instagram video, 30 second, thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you are thinking about since we're here at this year's show? >> I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration, and how that's resulting in us using new technologies. You know, the conversation's no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure, the conversation's about observability, how do we know what's going in? How do we make sure we're getting the most value for our customers with those, that technology set. So, I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So, next year think it's going to be a great year with that, putting together these new technologies. >> I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. Arc is lucky to have you and we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? >> Favorite place to sail. So, I lived in the Caribbean for many years, as we were talking about earlier >> None of us are jealous up here at all. >> And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during Covid but is now back open, so, if any you've had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Catamaran, there's some great spots. >> Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation, maybe a team off-site. >> Bucket list item, of course. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, Let's bring everyone together. >> Here we go. I love it. Well Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon, and thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here, live from the AWS re:Invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to Las Vegas. The Cube is here, live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. Amazing attendance. This is day one of our coverage. Lisa Martin here with Day Ante. David is great to see so many people back. We're gonna be talk, we've been having great conversations already. We have a wall to wall coverage for the next three and a half days. When we talk to companies, customers, every company has to be a data company. And one of the things I think we learned in the pandemic is that access to real time data and real time analytics, no longer a nice to have that is a differentiator and a competitive all >>About data. I mean, you know, I love the topic and it's, it's got so many dimensions and such texture, can't get enough of data. >>I know we have a great guest joining us. One of our alumni is back, Evan Kaplan, the CEO of Influx Data. Evan, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to the Cube. >>Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So here >>We are, day one. I was telling you before we went live, we're nice and fresh hosts. Talk to us about what's new at Influxed since the last time we saw you at Reinvent. >>That's great. So first of all, we should acknowledge what's going on here. This is pretty exciting. Yeah, that does really feel like, I know there was a show last year, but this feels like the first post Covid shows a lot of energy, a lot of attention despite a difficult economy. In terms of, you know, you guys were commenting in the lead into Big data. I think, you know, if we were to talk about Big Data five, six years ago, what would we be talking about? We'd been talking about Hadoop, we were talking about Cloudera, we were talking about Hortonworks, we were talking about Big Data Lakes, data stores. I think what's happened is, is this this interesting dynamic of, let's call it if you will, the, the secularization of data in which it breaks into different fields, different, almost a taxonomy. You've got this set of search data, you've got this observability data, you've got graph data, you've got document data and what you're seeing in the market and now you have time series data. >>And what you're seeing in the market is this incredible capability by developers as well and mostly open source dynamic driving this, this incredible capability of developers to assemble data platforms that aren't unicellular, that aren't just built on Hado or Oracle or Postgres or MySQL, but in fact represent different data types. So for us, what we care about his time series, we care about anything that happens in time, where time can be the primary measurement, which if you think about it, is a huge proportion of real data. Cuz when you think about what drives ai, you think about what happened, what happened, what happened, what happened, what's going to happen. That's the functional thing. But what happened is always defined by a period, a measurement, a time. And so what's new for us is we've developed this new open source engine called IOx. And so it's basically a refresh of the whole database, a kilo database that uses Apache Arrow, par K and data fusion and turns it into a super powerful real time analytics platform. It was already pretty real time before, but it's increasingly now and it adds SQL capability and infinite cardinality. And so it handles bigger data sets, but importantly, not just bigger but faster, faster data. So that's primarily what we're talking about to show. >>So how does that affect where you can play in the marketplace? Is it, I mean, how does it affect your total available market? Your great question. Your, your customer opportunities. >>I think it's, it's really an interesting market in that you've got all of these different approaches to database. Whether you take data warehouses from Snowflake or, or arguably data bricks also. And you take these individual database companies like Mongo Influx, Neo Forge, elastic, and people like that. I think the commonality you see across the volume is, is many of 'em, if not all of them, are based on some sort of open source dynamic. So I think that is an in an untractable trend that will continue for on. But in terms of the broader, the broader database market, our total expand, total available tam, lots of these things are coming together in interesting ways. And so the, the, the wave that will ride that we wanna ride, because it's all big data and it's all increasingly fast data and it's all machine learning and AI is really around that measurement issue. That instrumentation the idea that if you're gonna build any sophisticated system, it starts with instrumentation and the journey is defined by instrumentation. So we view ourselves as that instrumentation tooling for understanding complex systems. And how, >>I have to follow quick follow up. Why did you say arguably data bricks? I mean open source ethos? >>Well, I was saying arguably data bricks cuz Spark, I mean it's a great company and it's based on Spark, but there's quite a gap between Spark and what Data Bricks is today. And in some ways data bricks from the outside looking in looks a lot like Snowflake to me looks a lot like a really sophisticated data warehouse with a lot of post-processing capabilities >>And, and with an open source less >>Than a >>Core database. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, thank you for that >>Part that that was not arguably like they're, they're not a good company or >>No, no. They got great momentum and I'm just curious. Absolutely. You know, so, >>So talk a little bit about IOx and, and what it is enabling you guys to achieve from a competitive advantage perspective. The key differentiators give us that scoop. >>So if you think about, so our old storage engine was called tsm, also open sourced, right? And IOx is open sourced and the old storage engine was really built around this time series measurements, particularly metrics, lots of metrics and handling those at scale and making it super easy for developers to use. But, but our old data engine only supported either a custom graphical UI that you'd build yourself on top of it or a dashboarding tool like Grafana or Chronograph or things like that. With IOCs. Two or three interventions were important. One is we now support, we'll support things like Tableau, Microsoft, bi, and so you're taking that same data that was available for instrumentation and now you're using it for business intelligence also. So that became super important and it kind of answers your question about the expanded market expands the market. The second thing is, when you're dealing with time series data, you're dealing with this concept of cardinality, which is, and I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the idea that that it's a multiplication of measurements in a table. And so the more measurements you want over the more series you have, you have this really expanding exponential set that can choke a database off. And the way we've designed IIS to handle what we call infinite cardinality, where you don't even have to think about that design point of view. And then lastly, it's just query performance is dramatically better. And so it's pretty exciting. >>So the unlimited cardinality, basically you could identify relationships between data and different databases. Is that right? Between >>The same database but different measurements, different tables, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. So you can handle, so you could say, I wanna look at the way, the way the noise levels are performed in this room according to 400 different locations on 25 different days, over seven months of the year. And that each one is a measurement. Each one adds to cardinality. And you can say, I wanna search on Tuesdays in December, what the noise level is at 2:21 PM and you get a very quick response. That kind of instrumentation is critical to smarter systems. How are >>You able to process that data at at, in a performance level that doesn't bring the database to its knees? What's the secret sauce behind that? >>It's AUM database. It's built on Parque and Apache Arrow. But it's, but to say it's nice to say without a much longer conversation, it's an architecture that's really built for pulling that kind of data. If you know the data is time series and you're looking for a time measurement, you already have the ability to optimize pretty dramatically. >>So it's, it's that purpose built aspect of it. It's the >>Purpose built aspect. You couldn't take Postgres and do the same >>Thing. Right? Because a lot of vendors say, oh yeah, we have time series now. Yeah. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Right. >>And they >>Do. Yeah. But >>It's not, it's not, the founding of the company came because Paul Dicks was working on Wall Street building time series databases on H base, on MyQ, on other platforms and realize every time we do it, we have to rewrite the code. We build a bunch of application logic to handle all these. We're talking about, we have customers that are adding hundreds of millions to billions of points a second. So you're talking about an ingest level. You know, you think about all those data points, you're talking about ingest level that just doesn't, you know, it just databases aren't designed for that. Right? And so it's not just us, our competitors also build good time series databases. And so the category is really emergent. Yeah, >>Sure. Talk about a favorite customer story they think really articulates the value of what Influx is doing, especially with IOx. >>Yeah, sure. And I love this, I love this story because you know, Tesla may not be in favor because of the latest Elon Musker aids, but, but, but so we've had about a four year relationship with Tesla where they built their power wall technology around recording that, seeing your device, seeing the stuff, seeing the charging on your car. It's all captured in influx databases that are reporting from power walls and mega power packs all over the world. And they report to a central place at, at, at Tesla's headquarters and it reports out to your phone and so you can see it. And what's really cool about this to me is I've got two Tesla cars and I've got a Tesla solar roof tiles. So I watch this date all the time. So it's a great customer story. And actually if you go on our website, you can see I did an hour interview with the engineer that designed the system cuz the system is super impressive and I just think it's really cool. Plus it's, you know, it's all the good green stuff that we really appreciate supporting sustainability, right? Yeah. >>Right, right. Talk about from a, what's in it for me as a customer, what you guys have done, the change to IOCs, what, what are some of the key features of it and the key values in it for customers like Tesla, like other industry customers as well? >>Well, so it's relatively new. It just arrived in our cloud product. So Tesla's not using it today. We have a first set of customers starting to use it. We, the, it's in open source. So it's a very popular project in the open source world. But the key issues are, are really the stuff that we've kind of covered here, which is that a broad SQL environment. So accessing all those SQL developers, the same people who code against Snowflake's data warehouse or data bricks or Postgres, can now can code that data against influx, open up the BI market. It's the cardinality, it's the performance. It's really an architecture. It's the next gen. We've been doing this for six years, it's the next generation of everything. We've seen how you make time series be super performing. And that's only relevant because more and more things are becoming real time as we develop smarter and smarter systems. The journey is pretty clear. You instrument the system, you, you let it run, you watch for anomalies, you correct those anomalies, you re instrument the system. You do that 4 billion times, you have a self-driving car, you do that 55 times, you have a better podcast that is, that is handling its audio better, right? So everything is on that journey of getting smarter and smarter. So >>You guys, you guys the big committers to IOCs, right? Yes. And how, talk about how you support the, develop the surrounding developer community, how you get that flywheel effect going >>First. I mean it's actually actually a really kind of, let's call it, it's more art than science. Yeah. First of all, you you, you come up with an architecture that really resonates for developers. And Paul Ds our founder, really is a developer's developer. And so he started talking about this in the community about an architecture that uses Apache Arrow Parque, which is, you know, the standard now becoming for file formats that uses Apache Arrow for directing queries and things like that and uses data fusion and said what this thing needs is a Columbia database that sits behind all of this stuff and integrates it. And he started talking about it two years ago and then he started publishing in IOCs that commits in the, in GitHub commits. And slowly, but over time in Hacker News and other, and other people go, oh yeah, this is fundamentally right. >>It addresses the problems that people have with things like click cows or plain databases or Coast and they go, okay, this is the right architecture at the right time. Not different than original influx, not different than what Elastic hit on, not different than what Confluent with Kafka hit on and their time is you build an audience of people who are committed to understanding this kind of stuff and they become committers and they become the core. Yeah. And you build out from it. And so super. And so we chose to have an MIT open source license. Yeah. It's not some secondary license competitors can use it and, and competitors can use it against us. Yeah. >>One of the things I know that Influx data talks about is the time to awesome, which I love that, but what does that mean? What is the time to Awesome. Yeah. For developer, >>It comes from that original story where, where Paul would have to write six months of application logic and stuff to build a time series based applications. And so Paul's notion was, and this was based on the original Mongo, which was very successful because it was very easy to use relative to most databases. So Paul developed this commitment, this idea that I quickly joined on, which was, hey, it should be relatively quickly for a developer to build something of import to solve a problem, it should be able to happen very quickly. So it's got a schemaless background so you don't have to know the schema beforehand. It does some things that make it really easy to feel powerful as a developer quickly. And if you think about that journey, if you feel powerful with a tool quickly, then you'll go deeper and deeper and deeper and pretty soon you're taking that tool with you wherever you go, it becomes the tool of choice as you go to that next job or you go to that next application. And so that's a fundamental way we think about it. To be honest with you, we haven't always delivered perfectly on that. It's generally in our dna. So we do pretty well, but I always feel like we can do better. >>So if you were to put a bumper sticker on one of your Teslas about influx data, what would it >>Say? By the way, I'm not rich. It just happened to be that we have two Teslas and we have for a while, we just committed to that. The, the, so ask the question again. Sorry. >>Bumper sticker on influx data. What would it say? How, how would I >>Understand it be time to Awesome. It would be that that phrase his time to Awesome. Right. >>Love that. >>Yeah, I'd love it. >>Excellent time to. Awesome. Evan, thank you so much for joining David, the >>Program. It's really fun. Great thing >>On Evan. Great to, you're on. Haven't Well, great to have you back talking about what you guys are doing and helping organizations like Tesla and others really transform their businesses, which is all about business transformation these days. We appreciate your insights. >>That's great. Thank >>You for our guest and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

okay welcome back everyone we're here live in monaco for siliconangle thecube's coverage of the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier your host we're here with al berger the founder of the digital bits blockchain digital bits is presented it's an open ecosystem they're the main presenters bringing everybody together al burgia is the man of the hour al great to see you cube alumni great to see you again john thanks thanks for having me back on the show it's been this is an inaugural event yeah you you and your team put together the digital bits foundation um the digits blockchains enabling technology the proof is in the pudding as i always say now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem why monaco this is inaugural event what's going on here what's the motivation what does all this mean all this stuff coming together share uh why monaco i mean there's uh it's part of this next chapter for us things are happening in monaco and and um um we've yet to unveil that and we thought you know what better place to unveil what we're doing in monaco other than to do it in monaco so that was really the genesis of what gave birth this idea to have the monaco crypto summit um but that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all there are organizations that here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the digital bits watching not bad to come to monaco in the summer though it's pretty pretty nice area beautiful views yeah summer time in monaco is always great but this inaugural event first of all i love the name so congratulations on the name i think it's got a lot of legs to it i think this will be something that's going to be around for a long long time so it's a good good call there there's a lot of other dynamics going on prince albert's got some involvement he's interested in crypto we're going to hear more about that in the yacht club presentation later tonight you got startups companies building on top of the capabilities of digital bits you know you and i have talked in the past on the cube about the technology um your technologists uh followed a lot of your adventures to success and exits multiple exits in tech silicon valley knows you everyone knows you know around the world it's kind of like a cloud game but it's decentralized you've got infrastructure platform applications um there's super applications and decentralized device to all kinds of new stuff going on so you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models and horowitz you name it now a global financial markets converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and d-apps everything's happening so what's your reaction to someone who's been through many cycles built companies and sold them and been successful what's your analysis i mean this journey is then different and you has a unique some similarities but definitely some unique characteristics in prior journeys uh in in you know venturing off to found a company and so forth and for me it's been obviously the traditional way um you know prior to this obviously it was in the valley and and had uh uh quite the journey um what i would say this time is um with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency it's the amount of say capital formation the amount of people involvement in into an early technology into an evolving technology and there's various subcategories now across nfts metabours and um and all things fungible um there's a global stage immediately and um and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved um it's it's kind of some semblances of like the dot-com bubble in a sense but with a much bigger ecosystem um in comparison to what we saw in the 90s um the thing about blockchain is that it it needs to the more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible and so as to use your analogy of stack i mean it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers protocol layer application d app layer in many corners of the world but it all starts with an idea so it's really hard to go from point a to point b um like any other new opportunity and so for us it's been a journey we're evolving in this next chapter um and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit we'll start to see and start to feel even more so how uh the digitalbits ecosystem is is becoming more and more decentral we're going to see a bunch of folks coming on us off stage are going to come here sit down on thecube and chat with me about their opportunities how would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day and then obviously there's a vip gala tonight at the yacht club with prince albert in attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players what's happening here what's the what's the vibe what's the purpose what's being presented can you just quickly share uh take a minute to explain what's going on so relative to to the summit um it's you know organizations uh platforms um there's there's uh a few metaverse uh platforms here that will be um i mean they've been in in existence but they'll be unveiling um their connection and how they're leveraging the digital business watching for the very first time and so um but also other categories as well even um soon here massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to um the digital blockchain so this is the physical world massive uh resort um real estate development completely being tokenized you just had some success in digital assets obviously the roma team i saw the announcement on on youtube was pretty big um you get digital bits on the jersey a new player so caught my attention you got sports teams you got here you got applications people building on top of digital bits why for us it yeah vision is needs to be supported by a strategy um from inception it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy and and uh some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early you know onset from 2017-18 when it when the journey kind of began for the digital biz blockchain but um also part of it is timing and one of the things that we saw more recently again kind of like the journey and the stack you're referring to before nobody foresaw the pandemic nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen um and figuring out what to do with their time and many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic and so that became a huge accelerant for the space and so um another quote you know i've i'll take away from you that i you know recall you saying many years ago um you need to have a horse on the track to be in the race yeah we're very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development um awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant we're in a position to to move with the industry um and so it's been an incredible couple of years i mean it was great for you guys yeah and so there you know there's different contributors in the ecosystem some some that i'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space um and other things that i'm not affiliated with there's a lot of things that again are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse for example um and i'm humbled by it just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital that's watching but i had no um stake in building what they've built in terms of this is enabling technology so just to kind of pivot off you said yeah the pandemic was a tailwind now for um this movement for many reasons one people sitting at home boy hey this is technically vegas work on the blockchain two the future of work or the future of how things are organized is was remote work remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization like i mean come on you're talking about people going this is not the future is not where it used to be that kind of galvanized a lot of people and also the business models have shifted so now post pandemic everything's hybrid which is virtual physical so that's the perfect storm so total acceleration agree um and we're seeing the traction now what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it that's the platform and and that's that's again what i want to ask you is i had people always ask me what's digital bits so i'm going to ask you what is digital bits well digital bits is both the name of a blockchain it's also the name of a cryptocurrency the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain and so um it began 2017 as a fork of stellar in terms of the original repository um and you know there's a question i was asked earlier today in a press conference of like oh there's all these blockchains well we're still in this like early stage uh this early part of this uh evolution and so i i don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening out there as competitive but rather complementary because in unison you know there's different use cases different categories uh where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in in this sort of phase of it all um for us um we've been referred to as a few different things one of which is you know the aspiration become this blockchain for brands i think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability it's not necessarily that um it's as a result of new technology it's the tech a lot of this technology has been there it's just how it's being exploited and used um we're unveiling today for example and part of now this chapter for me is working with um community um developers hold on before you get there so okay i see digital bits i love the name by the way so thanks for that you kind of get to the news now you have a press conference take me through the press conference what's the news what are you guys announcing here today so the press conference we we did share not everything uh there's more um uh likely in store by the end of today that's not on the agenda uh and and maybe i'll be back on the show later today um we will have you back we'll find out come on but in terms of in terms of what we shared so far at the press conference um uh it was centered around two key themes i wanted to um obviously talked about the array of things to come today but focus on some of the things i'm directly involved in one of which was nico swap and the other are the number of things involved here within monaco so in terms of nico swap um by way of nane nico and in the spirit of decentralization nico in ancient greek means victory for the people so we thought that was a fitting name for the platform it's a decentralized exchange platform on uh the digital bits blockchain um filled with liquidity pool technology automated market making technology it's it's but by way of comparison digital bits is version of let's say a uniswap but lower cost faster and so forth and there's a number of organizations here today that will uh are announcing that they're deploying on nicos bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and and launching um on on nicoswap so we're i'm super excited about that this is you know part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization um and so what that enables is by virtue of uh being able to again help helping other organizations getting their horse on the track the common denominator for us is digital bits it's um you know the fact that every application every utility token every nft you know does require digital bits including the digital bits currency to provide that security to to be used for gas fees and and and so on and so forth so um the blockchain itself the cryptocurrency it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary uh the one way you can kind of think of it um but yeah we shared a lot around an ecoswap um uh what it looks like and um its key functionality and and who are some of the organizations that are uh on on board day one the other part of the press conference today we shared um was more monaco centric digital bits in monaco and this journey is just beginning uh it's super humbling it's super exciting for me to be a part of it um there is again no real particular order there's a an ecampus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector so um academia so skills government issues solve some skill gap correct right it's an organization a financial institution a whole department needs to know more about blockchain how they can leverage it um digitalbits um is the blockchain um that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this ecampus that's launching here in monaco with uh uh an organization called amvini the other thing uh that we shared and announced uh today is that um the first sov first and only sovereign cloud in europe is the monaco cloud as recently launched what makes it soft and in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics but digital bits blockchain nodes are being deployed in the monaco cloud um and so beyond the nodes that already exist it's um the network is further being let's say hardest to bring your scale in resiliency you know the whole thing around censorship resistance right the more nodes there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in in sovereign clouds um and so in europe the first for that is the monaco cloud so we're really honored to be working with the team there and mvne and so forth for that and then um and then as well um a number of months ago we began a journey with the prince albert of monaco foundation um the the chair president is uh prince albert and um the uh vice president ceo is olivia windham who was in attendance at the uh at the press conference as well and um and we unveiled um the foundations uh platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain uh utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency um as well as uh nft ticketing and so forth uh so we unveiled that we showcased that for uh for members of the press um how it will be used and and so forth some of the questions you got um i mean it went everywhere from um there was a regulatory regulation question related to europe um to questions around decentralization what are what are we doing how do we compare to uh proof of work you know why why digital bits a big part of that is i think we have a lot of common values with um the foundation of prince albert foundation uh around the environment being eco-friendly and so on and so forth and so um um questions of that sort you know how what do you know what's the next chapter look like and and how how um is more and more decentralization in my view going to be fueled and you said you got some announcements you can't talk about um coming okay so is that what's that going to be related to you get a little bit of teaser on that is it going to be something how big we be massive is it the grand finale or is it it's not a finale the unveiling it's an op unboxing of a new deal what's what's what is it a deal is it technology um it is uh um it's it's um large uh organization um that um is is leveraging uh both um the digital bits watching and digital body swerve that one okay good well al thanks for coming on and congratulations we will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the yacht club in monaco yacht club tonight for the big event we hope to be live there but if not we will report on that yeah thanks for having me john all right congratulations digital [ __ ] really rocking the world here in monaco love the name digital bits makes tons tons of sense platform to enable applications this is the future you're going to start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not it's a technology enabling the creative and the and and the application transformations to decentralization it's coming almost every single category will be centralized we'll be covering a blanket on the cube i'm john furrier thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

>>the Cube presents H p E discover 2022. Brought to you by H P E. >>Okay, we're back at HPD. Discovered 2022 This is Day Three. We're kind of in the mid point of day three. John Furry and Dave Volonte Wall to wall coverage. I think there are 14th hp slash hp Discover we've sort of documented the history of the company over the last decade. Plus, I'm not a is here is executive vice president at Infosys and Cejudo. Sankaran Kutty is the CEO and vice president of Infosys. Infosys doing some amazing work in the field with clients. Guys, Thanks for coming on the Cube. Thank >>you for the opportunity. >>Yeah, absolutely so. Digital transformation. It's all the buzz word kind of pre pandemic. It was sort of Yeah, you know, we'll get there a lot of lip service to it. Some Some started the journey and then, of course, pandemic. If you weren't digital business, you are out of business. What are the trends that you're seeing now that we're exiting the isolation economy? >>Yeah, um, again, as you rightly called out pre pandemic, it was all about using sort of you know innovation at scale as one of the levers for digital transformation. But if you look at now, post Pandemic, one of the things that we see it's a big trend is at a broad level, right? Digital transformation is not about cost. Take out. Uh, it's all about growth, right? So essentially, uh, like, uh, what we hear from most of the CEO s and most of the customers and most of the executives in the tech company, Digital transformation should be used for business growth. And essentially, it means three things that we see three trends in that space. One is how can you build better products and solutions as part of your transformation strategy? How can you basically use digital transformation to expand into new markets and new new territories and new regions? And the third is, how can you better the experience for your customers? Right. So I think that is broadly what we see as, uh, some other things. And essentially, if you have better customer experience, they will buy more. If you expand into new markets, your revenue will increase. If you actually build better products and solutions, consumers will buy it right, so It's basically like a sort of an economy that goes hand in hand. So I would say the trend is clearly going towards business growth than anything else when it comes to the, >>you know, follow up on that. We had I d. C on yesterday and they were sharing with some of their high level numbers. We've looked at this and and and it seems like I t spending is pretty consistent despite the fact that, for example, you know, the to see the consumer businesses sort of tanking right now. Are you seeing any pullback or any evidence that people are pulling the reins back on the digital transformation Or they just going because if they don't keep keep moving fast, they're gonna fall behind. What are you seeing there? Absolutely. >>In fact, you know what? What we call them as the secular headwinds, right? I mean, if you look at the headwinds here, we see digital transformation is in the minds of everybody, every customer, right. So while there are budget constraints, where are all these macro tailwinds as we call with respect to inflation, with respect to what's happening with Russia and Ukraine with respect to everything that's happening with respect to supply chain right. I think we see some of those tail headwinds. But essentially, digital transformation is not stopping. Everybody is going after that because essentially they want to be relevant in the market. And if they want to be relevant in the market, they have to transform. And if they have to transform, they have to adopt digital transformation. >>Basically, there's no hiding anymore. You know, hiding and you can't hide the projects and give lip service because there's evidence of what the consequences are. And it can be quantified. Yes, you go out of business, you lose money. You mentioned some of the the cost takeouts growth is yes. So I got given the trends and the headwinds and the tail winds. What are you guys seeing as the pattern of companies that came out of the pandemic with growth? And what's going on with that growth driver? What are the elements that are powering companies to grow? Is that machine learning? Is that cloud scales and integration? What are some of the key areas that's given that extra up into the right? >>Yes, I I would say there are six technologies that are defining how growth is being enabled, right? So I think we call it as cloud ai edge five g, Iot and of course, everything to do with a And so these are six technologies that are powering digital transformation. And, uh, one of the things that we are saying is more and more customers are now coming and saying that we want to use these six technologies to drive business outcomes. Uh, for example, uh, we have a very large oil and gas customer of ours who says that, you know, we want to basically use cloud as a lever to Dr Decarbonization. E S G is such a big initiative for everybody in the SGS in the minds of everybody. So their outcome of using technology is to drive decarbonization. And they don't make sure that, you know, they achieve the goals of E. S G. Right There is another customer of ours in the retail space. They are saying we want to use cloud to drive experience for our employees. So I would say that you know, there is pretty much, you know, all these drivers which are helping not just growing their business, but also bettering the experience and meeting some of the organisation goals that they have set up with respect to cloud. So I would say Cloud is playing a big role in every digital transformation initiative of the company. >>How do you spend your time? What's the role of the CEO inside of a large organisation like Infosys? >>So, um, one is in terms of bringing in an outside in view of how technology is making an impact to our customers. And I'm looking at How do we actually start liberating some of these technologies in building solutions, you know, which can actually drive value for our customers? That's one of the focus areas. You know what I do? Um, And if you look at some of the trends, you know what we have seen in the past years as well as what we're seeing now? Uh, there's been a huge spend around cloud which is happening with our customers and predominantly around the cloud Native application development, leveraging some of the services. What's available from the cloud providers like eh? I am l in Hyoty. Um, and and there's also a new trend. You know what we are seeing off late now, which is, um, in terms of improving the experience overall experience liberating some of the technologies, like technologies like block, block, chain as well as we are, we are right, and and this is actually creating new set of solutions. Um, new demands, you know, for our customers in terms of leveraging technologies like matadors leveraging technologies like factory photo. Um, and these are all opportunities for us to build solutions, you know, which can, you know, improve the time to market for our customers in terms of adopting some of these things. Because there has been a huge focus on the improved end user experience or improve experience improved, uh, productivity of, uh, employees, you know, which is which has been a focus. Uh, post pandemic. Right? You know, it has been something which is happening pre pandemic, but it's been accelerated Post pandemic. So this is giving an opportunity for for my role right now in terms of liberating these technologies, building solutions, building value propositions, taking it to our customers, working with partners and then trying to see how we can have this tightly integrated with partners like HP E in this case, and then take it jointly to the market and and find out you know, what's what's the best we can actually give back to our customers? >>You know, you guys have been we've been following you guys for for a long, long time. You've seen many cycles, uh, in the industry. Um, and what's interesting to get your reaction to what we're seeing? A lot of acceleration points, whether it's cloud needed applications. But one is the software business is no longer there. It's open source now, but cloud scale integrations, new hybrid environment kind of brings and changes the game, so there's definitely software plentiful. You guys are doing a lot of stuff with the software. How are customers integrated? Because seeing more and more customers participating in the open source community uh, so what? Red hat's done. They're transforming the open shift. So as cloud native applications come in and get scale and open source software, cloud scale performance and integrations are big. You guys agree with that? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you if you look at it, um, right from the way we can't socialise those solutions, um, open source is something What we have embedded big way right into the solution. Footprint. What we have one is, uh, the ability for us to scale the second is the ability for us to bring in a level of portability, right? And the third is, uh, ensuring that there is absolutely no locking into something. What we're building. We're seeing this this being resonated by our customers to because one is they want to build a child and scalable applications. Uh, it's something where the whole, I would say, the whole dependency on the large software stacks. Uh, you know, the large software providers is likely diminishing now, right? Uh, it's all about how can I simplify my application portfolio Liberating some of the open source technologies. Um, how can I deploy them on a multi cloud world liberating open standards so that I'm not locked into any of these providers? Um, how can I build cloud native applications, which can actually enable portability? And how can I work with providers who doesn't have a lock in, you know, into their solutions, >>And security is gonna be embedded in everything. Absolutely. >>So security is, uh, emperor, right from, uh, design phase. Right? You know, we call it a secure by design And that's something What? We drive for our customers right from our solutions as well as for developing their own solutions >>as opposed to secure by bolt on after the fact. What is the cobalt go to market strategy? How does that affect or how you do business within the HP ecosystem? Absolutely. >>I think you know what we did in, uh, in 2000 and 20. We were the first ones, uh, to come out with an integrated cloud brand called Cobalt. So essentially, our thought process was to make sure that, you know, we talk one consistent language with the customer. There is a consistent narrative. There is a consistent value proposition that we take right. So, essentially, if you look at the Cobalt gold market, it is based on three pillars. The first pillar is all about technology solutions. Getting out of data centres migrating were close to cloud E r. P on Cloud Cloud, Native Development, legacy modernisation. So we'll continue to do that because that's the most important pillar. And that's where our bread and butter businesses right. The second pillar is, uh, more and more customers are asking industry cloud. So what are you specifically doing for my industry. So, for example, if you look at banking, uh, they would say we are focused on Modernising our payment systems. We want to reduce the financial risk that we have because of anti money laundering and those kind of solutions that they're expecting. They want to better the security portion. And of course, they want to improve the experience, right? So they are asking for each of these imperatives that we have in banking. What are some of those specific industry solutions that you are bringing to the table? Right. So that's the second pillar of our global go to market. And the third pillar of our go to market as soon as I was saying is looking at what we call us Horizon three offerings, whether it is metal wars, whether it is 13.0, whether it is looking at something else that will come in the future. And how do we build those solutions which can become mainstream the next 18 to 24 months? So that's essentially the global >>market. That's interesting. Okay, so take the banking example where you've got a core app, it's probably on Prem, and it's not gonna have somebody shoved into the cloud necessarily. But they have to do things like anti money, money laundering and know your ky. See? How are they handling that? Are they building micro services? Are you building for them microservices layers around that that actually might be in the cloud or cloud Native on Prem and Greenway. How is that? How are customers Modernising? >>Absolutely brilliant question. In fact, what we have done is, uh, as part of cobalt, we have something called a reference. Architecture are basically a blueprint. So if you go to a bank and you're engaging a banking executive, uh, the language that we speak with them is not about, uh, private cloud or public cloud or AWS or HP or zero, right? I mean, we talk the language that they understand, which is the banking language. So we take this reference architecture, and we say here is what your core architecture should look like. And, as you rightly called out, there is K. I see there is retail banking. There is anti money laundering. There is security experience. Uh, there are some kpi s and those kind of things banking a PSR open banking as we call, How do we actually bring our solutions, which we have built on open source and something that are specific to cloud and something that our cloud neutral and that's what we take them. So we built this array of solutions around each of those reference architectures that we take to our customers. >>Final question for you guys. How are you guys leveraging the H, P E and new Green Lake and all the new stuff they got here to accelerate the customers journey to edge the cloud? >>So I would say it on three areas right now. This is one is Obviously we are working very closely with HP in terms of taking out solutions jointly to the market and, um, leveraging the whole green late model and providing what I call it as a hyper scale of like experience for our customers in a hybrid, multi cloud world. That's the first thing. The second thing is Onion talked about the cobalt, right? It's an important, I would say, an offering from, uh, you know and offering around cloud from our side. So what we've done is we've closely integrated the assets. You know what I was referring to what we have in our cobalt, uh, under other Kobold umbrella very closely with the HP ecosystem, right? You know, it can be tools like the Emphasis Polly Cloud Platform or the Emphasis pollinate platform very tightly integrated with the HP stack, so that we could actually offer the value proposition right across the value chain. The thought of you know we have actually taken the industry period, like what again mentioned right in terms of rather than talking about a public cloud or a private cloud solution or an edge computing solution. We actually talk about what exactly are the problem statements? What is there in manufacturing today? Or it's there in financial industries today? Or or it's in a bank today or whatever it's relevant to the industry. That's an industry people. So we talk right from an industry problem and and and and and and build that industry, industry people solutions, leveraging the assets, what we have in the and the framework that we have within the couple, plus the integrated solutions. What we bring along with HB. That's that's Those are the three things, what we do along with >>it and that that industry pieces do. There's a whole data layer emerging those industries learning cos they're building their own clouds. Look, working with companies like you because they want to monetise. That's a big part of their digital strategy, guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cue. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Thank >>you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate. >>Thank you. Thank you for watching John and I will be back. John Ferrier, Development at HPD Discovered 2022. You're watching the queue? >>Yeah. >>Mm.

(inspiring music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier for re:Mars coverage. Two days of live action, a lot of things happening in space, robotics, automation, and machine learning. That's Mars spelled backwards, but that's machine learning, automation, robotics and space. Got a great guest, Jens Ortmann, associate director at Boston Consulting Group, also known as BCG. Jens, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> So tell me what you're working on. You've got a very cool project you're working on, 'Involved'. Take us through what it is, explain what the project is. >> Yeah, so I'm part of the data science unit within BCG Gamma and I'm focusing on solving business problems for the automotive industry. What I would like to talk about is actually a small internal site project that we were building. It's a conversion rate engine, where we built an advanced analytics tool that computes the conversion rate for car dealerships, at scale. So for every single car dealer in a market, we can compute the conversion rate. >> John: What is a conversion rate? Can you explain that? >> So a conversion rate is very simple. It's actually out of the people that come into your car dealership, how many do you, as a car dealer, manage to sell a car to? >> So, what's your sell, through monthly kind of- >> Per visitor that come into, so your walk-ins. >> So, physical? >> Physical, yeah. So this was for physical stores. It's actually a key metric for sales performance for car dealerships, or for the automotive manufacturers to be aware of. >> So I'm watching here in the show floor at re:Mars, you've got the 'Just Walk Through', which is Amazon's 'take whatever you want and go', are you seeing you're getting analytics on like people coming in, you can see them, there's a drop off rate? Take me through how it works, the challenges because I don't envision like, "Oh, so they walked in and they left but they didn't leave with a car." It's not take and walk out, it's not grab and go. But the concept of using computer vision, I can imagine it being a popular thing. So how do you measure this, people coming in? >> It's actually a big challenge that we learned when we were doing this project. Traditionally, people were measuring it with like these laser sensors but the signal is very, very messy. Now when we wanted to do it at scale, we partnered with an Israeli startup called Play Sense, who aggregate mobile phone data. So we used mobile footfall data to measure how many people visit a store. So it actually is a combination of three main data sources to get to the conversion rate. One, as I mentioned, the mobile footfall data, the second one is building footprints, actual outlines of buildings that we source from the cadastral agency that we need to use it to cut out the footfall data to get the visitors. And the third one, of course, is sales that we get from the official car registration data. Then we combine those to have the key numbers. >> Is there a facial recognition involved in this? >> There's no facial recognition involved. >> So the tire kickers that come in and kick the tires and leave, but might come back. Is that factored in too, or? >> So there is a lot of pre-processing going on to really only get the signals from visitors. So filtering out people that maybe come into the store after hours, cleaning crews, people that come into the store every day, people that work there, they would be in the footfall data. So we applied some logic to identify exactly those people that are most likely actually visitors interested in buying a car >> Well everyone can relate to buying a car, obviously. I wanted you to step back and you mentioned scale. Can you scope the scale of the problem for us? How big is this observation space? What systems are involved? 'Cause when you say scale, I'm thinking all the dealerships in the aggregate. Or, is it by franchise or is it anonymous data? Can you scale the scope of this thing, or scope the scale? >> So we built this as a prototype for the German market and we used the top 10 car brands in Germany. They have around 10,000 car dealerships, for which we all have data. The actual mobile phone footprint data, it's a lot more. I think it was 30 million data points. >> Are you triangulating that? How does that mobile data work? Signal? >> So the mobile data is coming through apps. So mobile apps where you allow the app to track your location. >> Got it, okay. >> That gets anonymized and then you have these mobile data aggregators, like Play Sense. >> Got it, okay. >> That sell the data on. >> So you have to plug into a lot of systems? >> Yes. >> To make all this work. >> Yes and a lot of different data sources. >> And how easy is that? What's the challenge there? Is it cloud integration? How are you guys pulling this together? >> So we build it as a prototype initially, based on our own internal infrastructure, using basic Python and regular cloud infrastructure to process the data. >> All right, so I'm looking at my notes here. Data sets, you have a lot of data sets. What kind of analytics are you running on that? Can you share some examples? >> So I have to be careful since we filed a patent on this but a lot of the thing is actually in data processing, making sure that the data points we get are accurate and usable for this, and then differentiating between the different types of businesses that people are running. So there is on the one hand, you have the problem of outliers, basically filtering out when numbers don't make sense. On the other hand, there is a lot going on in the business itself. Like what do you do when a car dealership sells cars of multiple brands? You see only one visitor seeing cars of different brands but you see sales for two different types of brands. So this is just two examples of some of the processing that we had to implement to make this happen. >> So where can people find out information on this project? Or is it pretty much not public? Are you sharing anything publicly? >> So currently, we have held off the publication on this because we filed a patent on it. We're now about to go to market, building out a solution for the US as well, to then bring this to clients. >> What do you think about this show here at re:Mars? What's your assessment of the vibe? What's it like? Share with the folks who aren't here, what's your takeaway? >> It's really fun. It's really impressive. And it has a great, really inspiring vibe of cool innovative solutions. >> Yeah, you get the creative geniuses, you got the industrial geniuses, you got the software geniuses, all kind of coming together, and they're real people and they're here as a community. To me, the positive future vibe of this show, really is resonating in the keynotes and the energy. It's a forward thinking, positive message. And it's not marketing, this is the vibe. >> Exactly, I think it's something we really need at the moment. >> Yeah, we can solve all of the global problems by going to the moon and Mars. First the moon, then Mars. Who knows, maybe the breakthrough is there. >> People solve a lot of fundamental issues along the way that'll help in a lot of different areas as well. >> I wonder if I'll be alive when there's tourism in the moon. I was just joking with the folks earlier, "Oh yeah, I left that part on Earth, I have to go get it." Cause there's going to be a whole infrastructure there. Construction, all in good time. Okay, what's next for you guys? Tell me what's next on the project. You got a patent pending, so you're a little bit tight lipped and quiet on the secret sauce, I get that. What's next for the vision of the project? >> So this is just one example of how we can use this. Especially this footfall data set in an innovative way in the automotive industry. What we would like to look into is getting more details. Currently, we only see a single data point for a visitor. What would be interesting to understand, also, like the journey of visitors. Did they visit other car dealerships? Or, where are they from? What demographics do they come from? If you can tie that to a geographic location. And then on the business side as well, linking this for example, for companies to marketing campaigns. Does advertisement catch on? Do discounts catch on? Do they drive more people into the stores? Do they drive more sales? How does it affect conversion rate? Also, benchmark within the network, how different car dealerships are performing, how different brands are performing. And then eventually, everything is going to online. This can also be a foundation to set a baseline for online sales, which is still at the very early stages in the automotive industry. >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of reference implementations here for other applications, not just dealerships, all footfall traffic. That's interesting. The question I have for you, and the final question really before we wrap up, is the convergence of online, offline, physical, virtual. It's pretty clear we're living in a hybrid steady state right now, with all the post pandemic and the innovations pulled forward. So, having a device on me, IOT device or phone, will be a big part of things. So I'm buying online and I'm walking in, I'm one presence, virtually and physical. How do you guys see that around the corner? What's next there? Because I can see that coming together in my mind. >> It is. I mean, we can see it happen at Tesla. Tesla barely has any physical dealerships anymore, they have showrooms and do all the sales online. And I think that has a large impact on the industry at the moment. Driving the more traditional manufacturers also to think about what can be and what can be in a digital and online first world. >> Yeah, well this is happening. Well, Jens, thanks for coming on. I appreciate the commentary on re:Mars. Thanks for sharing your perspective and sharing about your project at Boston Consulting Group, also known as BCG. >> Thank you very much. >> Very reputable firm. Okay, that's the Cube coverage here at re:Mars. I'm John Furrier, your host. Two days of wall to wall coverage here. It's a great show. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space, Mars. Of course, you got Reinvent, the big show, and at Reinforce, the security show. You got the space-software-robotics show, security. And then of course Reinvent is the big show. The Cube covers it, all three will be here. So keep watching here for more coverage. We'll be right back. (gentle inspiring music)

>> Welcome back to Los Angeles. TheCUBE is live. I can't say that enough. The cube is live. We're at KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21. We've been here all day yesterday, and today and tomorrow I'm talking with lots of guests, really uncovering what's going on in the world of Kubernetes. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Nicholson. We've got some folks. Next we're going to be talking about a customer use case, which is always one of my favorite things to talk about. Please welcome Micah Coletti, the principal platform engineer at CHG healthcare, and Venkat Ramakrishnan VP of products from Portworx by Pure Storage, guys welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah. So Micah, first of all, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of CHG healthcare. >> Yeah. So CHG healthcare, we're a staffing company. So we try like a little companion. So our clients are doctors and hospitals, so we help staff hospitals with temporary doctors or even permanent placing. So we deal with a lot of doctors, a lot of nursing and we're a combination of multiple companies. So CHG is the parent. So, and yeah, we're known in the industry as one of the leaders in this field and providing hospitals with high quality doctors and nurses. And, you know, our customer service is like number one, and one of the things our CEO is really focused on is now how do we make that more digital? How do we provide that same level of quality of service, but a digital experience as rich for her. >> I can imagine it was a massive need for that in the last 18 months alone. >> COVID definitely really raised that awareness up for us and the importance of that digital experience and that we need to be out there in the digital market. >> Absolutely. So you're a customer port works by pure storage, we're going to get into that, but then Venkat talk to us about what's going on, the acquisition of port works by pure storage was about a year ago. Talk to us about your VP of products what's going on. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I think I could not say how much of a great fit for a Portworx will be part of pure storage, it's, pure itself is a very fast moving, large startup that's a dominant leader in the flash and data center space, and, you know, pure recognizes the fact that Kubernetes is the new operating system of the cloud is not how, you know, it's kind of virtualizing the cloud itself, and there's a, you know, a big burgeoning need for data management and Kubernetes and how you can kind of orchestrate workloads between your on-prem data centers and the cloud and back. So Portworx fits right into the story as complete vision of data management for our customers, and it's been phenomenal. Our business has grown as part of being part of a pure, and you know, we're looking at launching some new products as well, and it's all exciting times. >> So you must've been pretty delighted to be acquired as a startup by essentially a startup because, because although pure has reached significant milestones in the storage business and is a leader in flash storage still that that startup mindset is absolutely unique. That's not, that's not the same as being acquired by a company that's been around for a hundred years seeking to revitalize itself. >> Absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? >> Yeah, So I think, you know, purist culture is a highly innovation-driven and it's a very open, flat culture, right? I mean, it's, everybody in pure is accessible. It can easily have a composition with folks and everybody has his learning mindset and Portworx is and has always been the same way. Right? So when you put these teams together, if we can create wonders, I mean, we right after the acquisition, just within a few months, we announced an integrated solution that portworx orchestrates volumes and file shares in pure splash products and then delivers as an integrated solution for our customers, and pure has a phenomenal cloud-based monitoring and management system called pure one that we integrated well into. Now, we're bringing the power of all of the observability that pure's customers are used to for all of the corporate customers, and I've been super happy, you know, delegating that capability to our customers and our customers are delighted. Now they can have a complete view all the way from Kubernetes app to the flash. and I don't think any one company in the planet can even plan they can do that. >> I think it's fair to acknowledge that pure one was observability before observability was a word that everyone used regularly. >> Yep. >> Sounds very interesting. >> Micah Talk to us about, obviously you are a customer. CHG is a customer of Portworx now Portworx by Pure Storage. Talk to us about the use case. What, what was the compellent? Was there a compelling event and from a storage perspective that led you to Portworx in the first place. >> So we beat, they began this, our CEO base came to the vision, we need to have a digital presence we need enhances. and this was even before COVID. So they brought me on board and my, my manager read glossary. We basically had this task to, how are we going to get out into the cloud? How are we going to make that happen? And we chose to follow a very much a cloud native strategy and the platform of choice, I mean, it just made sense with Kubernetes. And so when we were looking at Kubernetes, we were starting to figure out how we're doing. We knew that data is going to be a big factor. You know, being a, provide data. We're very much focused on an event driven. We're really pushing to event driven architecture. So we leverage Kafka on top of Kubernetes, but at the time we were actually leveraging Kafka with a MSK down, out in AWS, and that was just a huge cost to us. So I came on board, I had experienced with Portworx, a prior company before that, and I basically said, we need to figure out a great storage relay overlay. and the only way to do is we got to have high performance storage, we've got to have secure. We got to be able to backup and recover that storage. And the Portworx was the right match. And that allowed us to have a very smooth transition off of MSK onto Kubernetes saving us a significant amount of money per month, and just leverage that already existing hardware that our existing compute memory and just, and the, and move right to Portworx. >> Leveraging your existing investments. >> Exactly. >> Which is key, >> Very key, very key so. >> So how common are the challenges that when you guys came together with CHG, how common are the challenges? >> It's actually a, that's a great question. You know, this is, you know, I'll tell you the challenges that Micah and his team are running into is what we see a lot in the industry where people pay a ton of money, you know to other vendors are, you know, especially in some cases use some cloud native services, but they want to have control over the data. They want to control the cost and they want higher performance and they want to have, you know, there's also governance and regulatory things that they need to control better. So they want to kind of bring these services and have more control over them. Right? So now we will work very well with all of our partners, including the cloud providers, as well as, you know, on-prem and server vendors and everybody, but different customers have different kinds of needs. And Portworx gives them that flexibility. If you are a customer who want, you know, have a lot of control over your applications, the performance, the latency, and want to control costs very well and leverage your existing investments Portworx can deliver that for you in your data center. Right now, you can integrate that with pure slash and you get a complete solution, or you want to run it in cloud, and you still want to have leverage the agility of the cloud and scale Portworx delivers a solution for you as well. So it kind of not only protects their investment its future proves their architecture, you get future proving your architecture completely. So if you want to tear the cloud or burst the cloud, you have a great solution that you can continue to leverage >> Micah, when you hear future-proof and I'm a marketer. So I always go, I love to know what it means to different people. What does that mean to you in your environment? >> My environment. So a future-proof means like one of the things we've been addressing lately, that's just a real big challenge. And I'm sure it's a challenge in the industry, especially the Q and A's is upgrading our clusters. The ability to actually maintain a consistent flow with how fast Kubernetes is growing, you know, they're, they they're out. I think he cast, we leverage the cast. So it's like 121 or 122 now, and that effort to upgrade a cluster, it can be a daunting one. With Portworx, we actually were able to make that to where we could actually spin up a brand new cluster. And with Portworx shift, all our applications, services, data migrated completely over, Portworx handles all of that for us and stand up that new cluster in, in less than a day. And that effort, I mean, it would take us a week, two weeks to do so, not even man hours and time spent there, but just the reliability of being able to do that in the cost, you know, instead of standing up a new cluster and configuring it and doing all that and spending all that time, we can just really, we move to what we call blue green cut-over strategy. And Portworx is an essential piece of that. >> So Venkat, is it fair to say that there are a variety of ways that people approach Portworx from a value perspective in terms of, I know that one area that you are particularly good in is the area of backups in this environment, but then you get data management and there's a third kind of vector there. What is the third vector? >> As all of the data services, >> Data services, >> Yeah Like for example, deep database as a service on any Kubernetes cluster feed on your cloud or your on-prem data centers. >> Which data, what kind of databases are you talking about? >> I mean we're talking about anything from Reddit Kafka, Post-stress my sequel console, we are supporting. We just announced something called a Portworx Data Services Offering that essentially delivers all these databases as a service on any Kubernetes cluster that a customer can point to and lets them kind of get the automated management of the database from day one to day three, the entire life cycle, you know, through regular Kubernetes, scoop cuddle experience through APIs and SDKs and a nice slick UI that they can, you know, that's, role-based access control and all of that, that they can completely control their data and their applications through it. And you know, that's the third vector of Portworx office. >> Micah a question for you. So Portworx has been a part of pure storage? You've known it since obviously for several years before you were at CHG, you brought it to CHG. You now know it a year into being acquired by a fast paced startup. Talk to me about the relationship and some of the benefits that you're getting with Portworx as a part of pure storage? >> Well, I mean, one of the things I, you know, when I heard about the acquisition, my first thing was, I was a little bit concerned is that relationship going to change? And when we were acquiring, when we were looking at adopting Portworx, one thing I would tell my management is Portworx is not just a vendor that wants to throw a solution on you and provide some capability. They're a partner. They want to partner with you and your success in your journey and this whole cloud native journey to provide this rich digital experience in the, for not only our platform engineering team, but our Dev teams, but also be able to really accelerate the development of our services. So we can provide that digital portal for our end users. And that didn't change. If anything, that it accelerated that relationship did not change. You know, I came to Venkat with an issue. We just we're, we're dealing with, he immediately got someone on a phone call with me. And so that has not changed. So it's really exciting to see that now that they've been acquired, that they still are very much invested in the success of their customers and making sure we're successful. You know, it's not all of a sudden. I was worried I was going to have to do a whole different support PA process, and it was going to go into a black hole. Didn't happen. They still are very much involved with their customers. >> It's sounds kind of Venkat similar to what you talked about with the cultural alignment. I've known here for a long time and they're very customer centric sounds like one of the areas in which there was a very strong alignment with Portworx >> Absolutely. and Portworx has always taken pride in being customer first company. Our founders are heavily customer focused. You know, they are aligned. They want, they have always aligned. our portraits business to our customers' needs. Now Pure is a company that's maniacally focused on customers, right? I mean, that's all in a pure pounder cars and everybody cared about. And so, you know, bringing these companies together and being part of the Pure team, I kind of see how, how synergistic it is. And, you know, we have, you know, that has enabled us to serve our customer's customers even better than before. >> So I'm curious about the two of you personally, in terms of your, your histories, I'm going to assume that you didn't both just bounce out of high school into the world of Kubernetes, right? So like Lisa and I you're spanning the generations between the world of say virtualization based on x86 architecture, virtualization, where you're not, you don't have microservices, you have a full blown operating system that you're working with. Kind of talk about, you know, Micah with you first talk about what that's been like navigating that change. We were in the midst of that. Do you have advice for others that are navigating that change? >> Don't be afraid of it. You know, a lot of people want to, you know, I call it we're moving from where we're name me. We still have cats and dogs. They have a name that the VMs either whether or not they're physical boxes or their VMs to where it's more like, he'd say cattle, you know, it's like we don't own the OOS and not to be afraid of afraid of that, because change is really good. You know, the ability for me to not have to worry about patching and operating system, it's huge, you know, where I can rely on someone like EKS and, and the version and allow them to, if a CV comes out, they let me know. I go and I use their tools to be able to upgrade. So I don't have to literally worry about owning that OOS and containers as the same thing. You know, you, you know, it's all about being fault-tolerant right. And being able to be changed or where, you know, you can actually roll out a new version of a container, a base image with a lot of ease without having to go and patch a bunch of servers. I mean, patch night was hell and sorry if I could say that, but it was a nightmare, you know, but this whole world has just been a game changer with that. >> So Venkat from your perspective, you were coming at it, going into a startup, looking at the landscape in the future and seeing opportunity. What what's that been like for you? I guess the question for you is more something, Lisa and I talk about this concept of peak Kubernetes, where are we in the wave? Is this just, is this just the beginning? Are we in the thick of it? >> I think I would say we're kind of transitioning from early adopters, early majority phase in the whole, you know, crossing the chasm analogy, right? So I would say we're still early stages of this big wave. That's going to transform how infrastructure is built. Apps are apps are built and managed and run in production. I think some of the pieces, the key pieces are falling in place and maturing. There are some other pieces like observability and security, you know, kind of edge use cases need to be, you know, they're kind of going to get a lot more mature and you'll see that the cloud, as we know today, and the apps, as we know today, they're going to be radically different. And you know, if you're not building your apps and your business on this modern platform, on this modern infrastructure, you're going to be left behind. You know, I, my wife's birthday was a couple of days ago. I was telling the story to my couple of friends is that I, I used another flowers delivery website. They miss delivering the flowers on the same day, right. So they told me all kinds of excuses. Then I just went and looked up a, you know, like door dash, which is delivers, you know, and then, you know, like your food, but there's also flower delivery and door dash and I don't do I door dash flowers to her, and I can track the flower delivery all the way she did not need them, but my kids love the chocolates though. Right. So, and you know, the case in point is that you cannot be in a building, a modern business without leveraging the model tool chain and modern tool chain and how the business is going to be delivered at that thing is going to be changing dramatically. And those kinds of customer experience, if you don't deliver, you're not going to be successful in business. And Kubernetes is the fundamental technology that enables this containers is a fundamental piece of technology that enables building new businesses, you know, modernizing existing businesses. And the 5G is going to be, there's going to be new innovations. It's going to get unleashed. And again, Kubernetes and containers enable us to leverage those. And so we're still scratching the surface on this. It's big. Now, it's going to be much, much bigger, you know, as, as we go into the next couple of years. >> Speaking, scratching the surface, Micah, take us out in the last 30 seconds or so with where CHG healthcare is on institutional transformation, how is Portworx facilitating that? >> So we're, we're right in the thick of it. I mean, we are, we still have what we call the legacy. We're working on getting those, but I mean, we're really moving forward to provide that rich experience, especially with event driven platforms like Kafka and Kubernetes and partnering with Portworx is one of the key things for us with that. And AWS along with that. But we're a, and I remember I heard a talk and I can't, I can't remember her name, but he talked about how, how Pure Kubernetes is sort of like the 56K modem, right. You're hearing it and see, but it's got to get to the point where it's just there. It's just the high-speed internet and Kelsey Hightower. That's great. But yeah, and I really liked that because that's true, you know, and that's where we are. We're all in that transition where we're still early, it's still at 50. So you still want to hear note, you still want to do cube CTL. You want to learn it the hard way and do all that fun stuff. But eventually it's going to be where it's just, it's just there. And it's running everything like 5G. I mean, stripped down doing micro, you know, Kate's things like that. You know, we're going to see it in a lot of other areas and just periphery and really accelerate the industry in compute and memory and storage, and. >> Yeah, a lot of acceleration. Guys thank you. This has been a really interesting session. I always love digging into customer use cases. How CHG is really driving its evolution with Portworx. Venkat, thanks for sharing with us, What's going on with Portworx a year after the acquisition. It sounds like all good stuff. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Pleasure. All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Los Angeles. This is our coverage of KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21.

>>mhm, mm. All right. Mhm. Mhm, mm mm. Mhm. Yeah, mm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Welcome to future cloud made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte and I'm your host. You know, the cloud is evolving like the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. No longer is the cloud. Just a remote set of services, you know, somewhere up there. No, the cloud, it's extending to on premises. Data centers are reaching into the cloud through adjacent locations. Clouds are being connected together to each other and eventually they're gonna stretch to the edge and the far edge workloads, location latency, local laws and economics will define the value customers can extract from this new cloud model which unifies the operating experience independent of location. Cloud is moving rapidly from a spare capacity slash infrastructure resource to a platform for application innovation. Now, the challenge is how to make this new cloud simple, secure, agile and programmable. Oh and it has to be cloud agnostic. Now, the real opportunity for customers is to tap into a layer across clouds and data centers that abstracts the underlying complexity of the respective clouds and locations. And it's got to accommodate both mission critical workloads as well as general purpose applications across the spectrum cost, effectively enabling simplicity with minimal labor costs requires infrastructure i. E. Hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI and partnerships within an ecosystem. It's kind of accommodate a variety of application deployment models like serverless and containers and support for traditional work on VMS. By the way, it also requires a roadmap that will take us well into the next decade because the next 10 years they will not be like the last So why are we here? Well, the cube is covering Cisco's announcements today that connect next generation compute shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to this new decentralized cloud. Now, of course in today's world you wouldn't be considered modern without supporting containers ai and operational tooling that is demanded by forward thinking practitioners. So sit back and enjoy the cubes, special coverage of Cisco's future cloud >>From around the globe. It's the Cube presenting future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>We're here with Dejoy Pandey, a VP of emerging tech and incubation at Cisco. V. Joy. Good to see you. Welcome. >>Good to see you as well. Thank you Dave and pleasure to be here. >>So in 2020 we kind of had to redefine the notion of agility when it came to digital business or you know organizations, they had to rethink their concept of agility and business resilience. What are you seeing in terms of how companies are thinking about their operations in this sort of new abnormal context? >>Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think what what we're seeing is that pretty much the application is the center of the universe. And if you think about it, the application is actually driving brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value. So the example I like to give is think about a banking app uh recovered that did everything that you would expect it to do. But if you wanted to withdraw cash from your bank you would actually have to go to the ATM and punch in some numbers and then look at your screen and go through a process and then finally withdraw cash. Think about what that would have, what what that would do in a post pandemic era where people are trying to go contact less. And so in a situation like this, the digitization efforts that all of these companies are going through and and the modernization of the automation is what is driving brand recognition, brand trust and brand experience. >>Yeah. So I was gonna ask you when I heard you say that, I was gonna say well, but hasn't it always been about the application, but it's different now, isn't it? So I wonder if you talk more about how the application is experience is changing. Yes. As a result of this new digital mandate. But how should organizations think about optimizing those experiences in this new world? >>Absolutely. And I think, yes, it's always been about the application, but it's becoming the center of the universe right now because all interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So if the application is unreliable or if the application is not available is untrusted insecure, uh, there's a problem. There's a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have with our company. So if you think about an application developer, the weight he or she is carrying on their shoulders is tremendous because you're thinking about rolling features quickly to be competitive. That's the only way to be competitive in this world. You need to think about availability and resiliency. Like you pointed out and experience, you need to think about security and trust. Am I as a customer or consumer willing to put my data in that application? So velocity, availability, Security and trust and all of that depends on the developer. So the experience, the security, the trust, the feature, velocity is what is driving the brand experience now. >>So are those two tensions that say agility and trust, you know, Zero Trust used to be a buzzword now it's a mandate. But are those two vectors counter posed? Can they be merged into one and not affect each other? Does the question makes sense? Right? Security usually handcuffs my speed. But how do you address that? >>Yeah that's a great question. And I think if you think about it today that's the way things are. And if you think about this developer all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out and they're going to pick and choose a piece and services that matter to them and build up their app and they want the complexities of the infrastructure and security and trust to be handled by somebody else is not that they don't care about it but they want that abstraction so that is handled by somebody else. And typically within an organization we've seen in the past where this friction between Netapp Sec ops I. T. Tops and and the cloud platform Teams and the developer on one side and these these frictions and these meetings and toil actually take a toll on the developer and that's why companies and apps and developers are not as agile as they would like to be. So I think but it doesn't have to be that way. So I think if there was something that would allow a developer to pick and choose, discover the apis that they would like to use connect those api is in a very simple manner and then be able to scale them out and be able to secure them and in fact not just secure them during the run time when it's deployed. We're right off the back when the fire up that I'd and start developing the application. Wouldn't that be nice? And as you do that, there is a smooth transition between that discovery connectivity and ease of consumption and security with the idea cops. Netapp psych ops teams and see source to ensure that they are not doing something that the organization won't allow them to do in a very seamless manner. >>I want to go back and talk about security but I want to add another complexity before we do that. So for a lot of organizations in the public cloud became a staple of keeping the lights on during the pandemic but it brings new complexities and differences in terms of latency security, which I want to come back to deployment models etcetera. So what are some of the specific networking challenges that you've seen with the cloud native architecture is how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. In fact, if you think about cloud, to me that is a that is a different way of seeing a distributed system. And if you think about a distributed system, what is at the center of the distributed system is the network. So my my favorite comment here is that the network is the wrong time for all distribute systems and modern applications. And that is true because if you think about where things are today, like you said, there's there's cloud assets that a developer might use in the banking example that I gave earlier. I mean if you want to build a contact less app so that you get verified, a customer gets verified on the app. They walk over to the ATM and they were broadcast without touching that ATM. In that kind of an example, you're touching the mobile Rus, let's say U S A P is you're touching cloud API is where the back end might sit. You're touching on primary PS maybe it's an oracle database or a mainframe even where transactional data exists. You're touching branch pipes were the team actually exists and the need for consistency when you withdraw cash and you're carrying all of this and in fact there might be customer data sitting in salesforce somewhere. So it's cloud API is a song premise branch. It's ass is mobile and you need to bring all of these things together and over time you will see more and more of these API is coming from various as providers. So it's not just cloud providers but saas providers that the developer has to use. And so this complexity is very, very real. And this complexity is across the wide open internet. So the application is built across this wide open internet. So the problems of discovery ability, the problems of being able to simply connect these apis and manage the data flow across these apis. The problems of consistency of policy and consumption because all of these areas have their own nuances and what they mean, what the arguments mean and what the A. P. I. Actually means. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem. And that is a problem of building out this network, making traffic engineering easy, making policy easy, making scale out, scale down easy, all of that our networking problems. And so we are solving those problems uh Francisco. >>Yeah the internet is the new private network but it's not so private. So I want to go back to security. I often say that the security model of building a moat, you dig the moat, you get the hardened castle that's just outdated now that the queen is left her castle, I always say it's dangerous out there. And the point is you touched on this, it's it's a huge decentralized system and with distributed apps and data, that notion of perimeter security, it's just no longer valid. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you're thinking about this problem and you definitely address some of that in your earlier comments. But what are you specifically doing to address this and how do you see it evolving? >>Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very important point. I mean, I think if you think about again the wide open internet being the wrong time for all modern applications, what is perimeter security in this uh in this new world? I mean, it's to me it boils down to securing an API because again, going with that running example of this contact lists cash withdrawal feature for a bank, the ap wherever it's it's entre branch SAs cloud, IOS android doesn't matter that FBI is your new security perimeter. And the data object that is trying to access is also the new security perimeter. So if you can secure ap to ap communication and P two data object communication, you should be good. So that is the new frontier. But guess what software is buggy? Everybody's software not saying Cisco software, everybody's Softwares buggy. Uh software is buggy, humans are not reliable and so things mature, things change, things evolve over time. So there needs to be defense in depth. So you need to secure at the API layer had the data object layer, but you also need to secure at every layer below it so that you have good defense and depth if any layer in between is not working out properly. So for us that means ensuring ap to ap communication, not just during long time when the app has been deployed and is running, but during deployment and also during the development life cycle. So as soon as the developer launches an ID, they should be able to figure out that this api is security uses reputable, it has compliant, it is compliant to my to my organization's needs because it is hosted, let's say from Germany and my organization wants appears to be used only if they are being hosted out of Germany so compliance needs and and security needs and reputation. Is it available all the time? Is it secure? And being able to provide that feedback all the time between the security teams and the developer teams in a very seamless real time manner. Yes, again, that's something that we're trying to solve through some of the services that we're trying to produce in san Francisco. >>Yeah, I mean those that layered approach that you're talking about is critical because every layer has, you know, some vulnerability. And so you you've got to protect that with some depth in terms of thinking about security, how should we think about where where Cisco's primary value add is, I mean as parts of the interview has a great security business is growing business, Is it your intention to to to to add value across the entire value chain? I mean obviously you can't do everything so you've got a partner but so has the we think about Cisco's role over the next I'm thinking longer term over the over the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean I think so, we do come in with good strength from the runtime side of the house. So if you think about the security aspects that we haven't played today, uh there's a significant set of assets that we have around user security around around uh with with do and password less. We have significant assets in runtime security. I mean, the entire portfolio that Cisco brings to the table is around one time security, the secure X aspects around posture and policy that will bring to the table. And as you see, Cisco evolve over time, you will see us shifting left. I mean, I know it's an overused term, but that is where security is moving towards. And so that is where api security and data security are moving towards. So learning what we have during runtime because again, runtime is where you learn what's available and that's where you can apply all of the M. L. And I models to figure out what works what doesn't taking those learnings, Taking those catalogs, taking that reputation database and moving it into the deployment and development life cycle and making sure that that's part of that entire they have to deploy to runtime chain is what you will see. Cisco do overtime. >>That's fantastic phenomenal perspective video. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to have you and look forward to having you again. >>Absolutely. Thank you >>in a moment. We'll talk hybrid cloud applications operations and potential gaps that need to be addressed with costume, Das and VJ Venugopal. You're watching the cube the global leader in high tech coverage. Mhm >>You were cloud. It isn't just a cloud. It's everything flowing through it. It's alive. Yeah, connecting users, applications, data and devices and whether it's cloud, native hybrid or multi cloud, it's more distributed than ever. One company takes you inside, giving you the visibility and the insight you need to take action. >>One company >>has the vision to understand it, all the experience, to securely connect at all on any platform in any environment. So you can work wherever work takes you in a cloud first world between your cloud and being cloud smart, there's a bridge. Cisco the bridge to possible. >>Okay. We're here with costume does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco. And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for cloud compute at Cisco. KTV. J. Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave to be here. >>Katie, let's talk about cloud you And I last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud and I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper Scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no that's that's that's a perfect question to start with. Dave. So yes. So the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um There's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift. In fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers they're saying well how do I in the context of my business implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DEVOPS and really harnessed that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud and that platform. Uh It's inter site we've been investing in. Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today that were closer today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud. Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any, any version of that, whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs, super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently and then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners. The streets of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. Just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets and then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh we'll talk about some more of those day. >>Great, thank you, Katie VJ. Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCIi corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha, she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream? You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment. Smaller organizations can take advantage. But if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Mhm. >>Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and computer group. Right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers and inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh As you rightly said, harsher car is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with harsher card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed i E C. To be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russian government shutdown. >>Yeah, Terra form gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there. The inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps, uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend? What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now, Cloud Native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for A. Ks. And this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what interstate kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and clog native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we are today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager, the Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to the KS are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of, of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you. BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So, couple of things to close on, first of all, um Inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is um, we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale, is everything they're doing to innovate superfast, All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco, How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thank thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you >>Dave in a moment. We're gonna come back and talk about disruptive technologies and futures in the age of hybrid cloud with Vegas Rattana and James leach. You're watching the cube, the global leader in high tech coverage. >>What if your server box >>wasn't a box at >>all? What if it could do anything run anything? >>Be any box you >>need with massive scale precision and intelligence managed and optimized from the cloud integrated with all your clouds, private, public or hybrid. So you can build whatever you need today and tomorrow. The potential of this box is unlimited. Unstoppable unseen ever before. Unbox the future with Cisco UCS X series powered by inter site >>Cisco. >>The bridge to possible. Yeah >>we're here with Vegas Rattana who's the director of product management for Pcs at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for U. C. S. At the Cisco as well. We're gonna talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you because let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving. They're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high performance workload requirements. What's this guy's point of view on all this? I mean specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >>Sure. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric that's writers that drives the processing power, the Golden city all have been evolving just an amazing place and the peace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. We're talking about the impact on the customers. Well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product based approach of delivering these platforms, innovations to the applications. What has happened is uh, these innovations today are being packaged as point point products to meet the needs of a specific application and as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more to abuse, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more course, something different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors want you to you purpose built servers. The variety of, you know, a blade form factor, you know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call camera for taking the photos right? And we were all excited about it. It's when a smart phones the right that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume through one device. And you know, I could uh, that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers were benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to go to that. >>And I like to look, it's always been about the applications. But to your point, the applications are now moving in a much faster pace. The the customer experience is expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new Applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's that I always say the next 10 years, they ain't gonna be like the last James Public Cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and and and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone we were swooning about low cost standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scale, Is how are they filtering into on prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >>Absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume, compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view, a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application, they wanna move outward, Right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We're we've decided that we're not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which, frankly, our customers don't want, they don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get at the public with the public cloud, but they wanted across all of their cloud options they wanted across private cloud across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation Orchestration, but they also need kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services, They may need terror form workload optimization. All of these services have to be available, um, from within the operating model, a consistent operating model. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud anywhere where the application lives. It doesn't matter what matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right. This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series and inter site as that operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen >>is acute. First, first time technology vendor has ever said it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades, we're gonna deliver a single pane of glass is going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and, and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X series for a minute James? Uh, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today was like a fire hose of announcements. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with inter site and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >>Right. So I think it goes hand in hand, right. Um the two pieces go together very well. So we have uh, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems of the cost was talking about before we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models are different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure so that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about is the data center is not centered right? It's no longer centered applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And you know, we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage. Right? So we want all the sas benefits um, of a Ci CD model of, you know, the inter site can bring, we want all that that proactive recommendation engine with the power of A I behind it. We want the connected support experience went all of that. They want to do it across the single infrastructure and we think that that's how they tie together, that's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >>So Vegas, I make you laugh a little bit when I was an analyst at I D C, I was deep in infrastructure and then when I left I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, uh infrastructure, it was just a, you know, roadblock but but so the target speakers with Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure, deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong uh but but so let's talk about the the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there, X series, how does it fit into this, this converged infrastructure business that you've, you've built and grown with partners, you got storage partners like Netapp and Pure, you've got i SV partners in the ecosystem. We see cohesive, he has been a while since we we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >>Absolutely, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. You know, they have absolutely you brought up a very good point. You see this is about the ecosystem that it brings together, it's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can, you know, go off and running pretty quick. The converse infrastructure has been one of the corners 2.5 hour of the strategy, as you pointed out in the last decade. And and and I'm I'm very glad to share that converse infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications. Seven today, in fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance resiliency latency are the critical requirements there almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualized and business critical data bases and so forth with X series with our partnerships with our Stories partners. Those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition as a hybrid cloud world, so we are now bringing in the benefits of canvas in infrastructure uh to the world of hybrid cloud will be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CIA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the Stories partners to deliver the same benefits to the new ways applications as well. >>Yeah, that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model. Right, go ahead please. >>I was going to say, you know, the CIA model will continue to thrive. It will transition uh it will expand the use cases now for the new use cases that were beginning to, you know, say they've absolutely >>great thank you for that. And James uh have said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, um a lot of lot of parts to it and we heard Katie talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean I like that because it shows some vision and you've got a road map that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just uh, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >>Sure. You know that's a great question. Number one. Number two, um I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2000 and nine when we brought you C. S to market these are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's that's not really going to work anymore frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly future proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even you're not even today proved. So we re thought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example, daisy chaining them together >>like who >>needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Um, second of all, um, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right. It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right. So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you talk about the mid plane is a great example. You know, the mid plane and a chastity is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just we took it out, right. It's not no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So, as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new, high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost. No problem at all. Right, So, we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist. They they may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves. Right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability flexibility and and future proofing. >>I like I like that phrase True hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years and but to me this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You can support the mission critical applications. You can you can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workload. You're not locked into one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs, Vegas and James. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. >>When we return shortly thomas Shiva who leads Cisco's data center group will be here and thomas has some thoughts about the transformation of networking I. T. Teams. You don't wanna miss what he has to say. You're watching the cube. The global leader in high tech company. Okay, >>mm. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. >>Mhm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're here with thomas Shiva who is the Vice president of Product Management, A K A VP of all things data center, networking STN cloud. You name it in that category. Welcome thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observe ability. When you think about observe ability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring problem resolution across the network. How does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just it's not just the networking team is actually the application team to write. And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we set us a couple years back and really what happens the applications are going to be deployed uh in different locations, right. Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prayer, uh, and they are built differently right there, built as microservices, they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user better visibility. Where are my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge while the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's that's really the problem statement. What what we're trying to go afterwards, observe ability. >>Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have phds to figure all this stuff out. So, so you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how how are you doing that, >>correct? So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that that is called 1000 Ice. And so what this does is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on uh links between if I run from a site to aside from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousands agent. Right? Instead of just having uh inversion machine clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices. Right? We announced this with the catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 catalyst product line for the for the SD were in products as well as to the data center products the next line. Um and so what you see is is, you know, half a saying, you have 1000 eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements uh for how your applications run. And this is really uh, the power of tying together the footprint of where the network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So okay. So as the cloud evolves and expands it connects your actually enabling 1000 eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have 1000 I sensor and you can't bring this together and you can quite frankly pick if you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a uh, domain one and I have another one domain to, I can't do monitor that link. I can also monitor have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations that data centre, our headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just we have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other foods that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of R. O. I. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and devops to this world of of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling I. T. Organizations to move to a cloud operating model? Is that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observe ability. So really, really what we're seeing and this is going on for uh I want to say a couple of years now, it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider. Right? It's really around the network team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model. Right? But this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public club is operating and like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for why? So one of the examples uh then we have removing some of the control software assets, the customers that they can deploy on prayer uh to uh an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy, insane. She ate things there and then just run it that way. Right. And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now limited availability available on AWS and will become available in mid this year, both in Italy as unusual as a service. You can just go to market place, you can load it there and now you create, you can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically employing their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >>So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right. Ice, right. I see. I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that like for instance, turn in effect my or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is that there's a lot of people talking about else. How do I get to zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure. Again, whether this is only campus X as well as a data center and Ice help today, you can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there. Right. In this particular case we would instant Ice in the cloud as a software load. You now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center on my campus, going to the respective control over this DNA Center for campus or whether it is the A. C. I. Policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure? >>zero. Trust that, you know, it was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about right. I mean I wonder if you talk about cloud native apps, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations. They're maintaining legacy apps. They're connecting their data to systems in the cloud there, sharing that data. I need these developers, they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud? Native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So, you know, we're going to the top of his visibility, we talked about the operating model, how how our network operators actually want to use tools going forward. Now, the next step to this is it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools, how they, how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly as how, let's say, a devops team on application team or Oclock team also wants to take advantage of the program ability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which is really two angles, that is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure. Right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the on ramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools, a P I S that can be used in leverage by standard uh cloud tools or uh cloud native tools. Right. And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both answerable uh script capabilities that exist from red hat as well as uh Ashitaka from capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure, automation and what what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the ap team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in situation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools. Right. Whether it's this ice that I just mentioned, whether this is our D. C. And controllers in the data center, uh whether these are the controllers in the in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So operator or uh devops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, with everything how they brought the application. >>This is key. You can't even have the conversation of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's that's very important. Last question, thomas our customers actually using this, they made the announcement today. There are there are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the past and using the D. D. Cisco high performance infrastructure, but also on the compute side as well as on an exercise one of the customers. Uh and this is like an interesting case. It's Rakuten uh record and is a large tackle provider, a mobile five G. Operator uh in Japan and expanding and is in different countries. Uh and so people something oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big the big three or four. But if you look at it, there's a lot of the tackle service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with with Rakuten and help them building a high performance uh, data and infrastructure based on hard gig and actually phone a gig uh to drive their deployment to. It's a five G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is uh where the whole the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility uh together with the high performance infrastructure becoming reality and delivering actually services, >>you have some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, your enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds. Telcos that are either approximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper scholars may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So so that's a great case study uh thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>I'd like to thank Cisco and our guests today V Joy, Katie VJ, viscous James and thomas for all your insights into this evolving world of hybrid cloud, as we said at the top of the next decade will be defined by an entirely new set of rules. And it's quite possible things will evolve more quickly because the cloud is maturing and has paved the way for a new operating model where everything is delivered as a service, automation has become a mandate because we just can't keep throwing it labor at the problem anymore. And with a I so much more as possible in terms of driving operational efficiencies, simplicity and support of the workloads that are driving the digital transformation that we talk about all the time. This is Dave Volonte and I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Stay Safe, be well and we'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by >>enterprise DB. Hello everyone. This is Dave Volonte for the cube we're covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual cube edition. Welcome to our conversation with the Ceo Ed Boyajian is here is the Ceo of enterprise DB and we're gonna talk about what's happening in open source and database in the future of tech. Ed welcome. >>Hi Dave, Good to be here. >>Hey, several years ago, at a, at a Postgres Vision event, you put forth the premise that the industry was approaching a threshold moment, a digital transformation was the linchpin of that shift now. Ed Well you were correct and I have no doubt the audience agreed. Most people went back to their offices after that event and they returned to their hyper focus of their day to day jobs. Maybe a few accelerated their digital initiatives, but generally pre Covid, we moved in a pretty incremental pace and then the big bang hit. And if you were digital business, you are out of business. So that single event created the most rapid change that we've ever seen in the tech industry by far, nothing really compares. So the question is why is Postgres specifically and e d B generally the right fit for this new world? >>Yeah, I think, look, a couple of things are happening gave right along the bigger picture of digital transformation. We are seeing the database market in transformation and and I think the things that are driving that shift are the things that are resulting the success of Postgres and the success of B D B I think first and foremost we're seeing a dramatic re platform ng. And just like we saw in the world of Lennox where I was at red hat during that shift where people are moving from UNIX based systems to x 86 systems. We're seeing that similar re platform in happening. Whether that's from traditional infrastructures to cloud based infrastructures or container based infrastructures, it's a great opportunity for databases to be changed out. Postgres wins in that context because it's so easily deployed anywhere. I think the second thing that's changing is we're seeing a broad expansion of developers across the enterprise so they don't just live in I. T. Anymore. And I think as developers take on more power and control their defining the agenda and it's another place where Postgres shines, it's been a priority of the dBS to make postgres easier. Uh and that's coming to life. And I think the last Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggested that I think they survey 65 developers, the second most loved and the second most used database by developers, Postgres. And so I think there again Postgres shines in a moment of change. Uh and then I think the third is kind of obvious. It's always an elephant in the room, no pun intended. But it's this relentless nagging burden of the expenses of the incumbent proprietary databases and the need. And we especially saw this in Covid to start to change that more dramatically, change that economic equation here Again. PostGres shines. >>You know, I want to ask you, I'm gonna jump ahead to the future for a second because you're talking about the re platform NG and with your red hat chops, I kind of want to pick your brain on this because you're right, you saw it with red hat and you're kind of seeing it again when you think about open shift and where it's going my my question is related to replant forming around new types of workloads, new processing models at the edge. I mean you're seeing an explosion of processing power, GPU SNP us accelerators, dSPs and it appears that this is happening at a very low cost. I'm referring that you're saying Postgres can take advantage of that trend as well that that broader re platform ng trend to the edge, is that correct? >>It is. And I think you know this is, this has been one of the, I think the most interesting things with posters now I've been here almost 13 years. So if you put that in some perspective, I've watched Uh and participated in leading transformation in the category, you know, we've been squarely focused on postgres. So we've got 300 engineers who worry about making postgres better. And as you look across that landscape of time, not only as Postgres gotten more performant and more scalable, it's also proven to be the right database choice in the world of not just legacy migrations, but new application development. And I think that stack overflow developer survey is a good indicator of how developers feel about postgres. But you know, over that time frame I think if you went back to 2008 when I joined E D. B, post chris was considered a really good general purpose database. And today I think post chris is a great general purpose database. General purpose isn't sexy in the market broadly speaking, but Postgres capabilities across workloads in every area is really robust. Let me just spend a second on it. We look at our customer base is deploying in what we think of as systems of record, which are the traditional er, P type apps, uh you know where there's a single source of truth you might think of the RP apps there. We look at our customers deploying in systems of engagement. And those are apps that you might think of in the context of social media style apps or websites that are backed by a database in the third area Systems of analytics where you would typically think of data warehouse style applications interestingly. Postgres performs well and our customers report using us across that whole landscape of application areas. And I think that is one of postgres hidden superpowers. Is that ability to reach into each area of requirement on the workload side. >>And as always alluding to before that that itself is evolving as you now inject ai into the equation ai influencing and it's just a very exciting times ahead. There's no there's no database, You know, 20 years ago it was kind of boring. Now it's just exploding. I want to come back to that the notion of of post grass and maybe talk about other database models. Uh, I mean you mentioned that you've evolved from this, you know, system of record. You can take a system engagement on structured data etcetera. Jason. It's so how should we think about post grass in relation to other databases and specifically other business models of companies that provide database services? Why is Postgres attractive? Where is it winning? >>Yeah, I think a couple of places. So I mean first and foremost Postgres, you know, at his core, post chris is a sequel, relational databases in acid compliance, equal relational database. And that is inherently a strength of Postgres. But it's also a multi model database, which means we handle a lot of other, um, you know, database requirements, whether that's geospatial or or Jason, uh, for documents or time series, things like that. And so Postgres extensive bility is one of its inherent strengths and that's kind of been built in from the beginning of Postgres. So not surprisingly, people use postgres across the number of workloads because at the end of the day there's still value in having a database is able to do more. There are a lot of important specialty databases and I think they will remain important specialty databases, but Postgres thrives in its ability to cross cross over in that way. Um and I think that is, you know, one of the different key differentiators in how we've seen the market in the business development and that's the breadth of of workloads that Postgres succeeds in. But but our growth, if you kind of ventured it across vectors, we see growth happening, you know, in a few dimensions. First we see growth happening in new applications. About half of our customers that come to us today for new uh new postgres users are deploying us on new applications. The others are our second area migrating away from some existing legacy in companies often oracle. Not always. Um The third area of growth we see is in cloud, where Postgres is deployed very prolifically, both in the traditional cloud platforms, Uh like EC two, but then then again also uh in the database as a service environment. And then the fourth area growth we're seeing now is around uh container deployment, kubernetes deployment. >>Well, you may Oracle's prominent because it's just it's a big installed base and it's expensive and people, >>you >>know, they got a look at them. It's funny, I do a lot of TCO work and mostly, you know, usually TCO is about labor costs. When it comes to Oracle, it's about license costs and maintenance costs. And so to the extent that you can reduce that, at least for a portion of your state, you're gonna you're gonna drop right to the bottom line. But but but but I want to ask you about that kind of that spectrum that you think about the prevailing models for database you've got. On the one hand, You've got the right tool for the right job approach. It might be 10 or 12 data stores in the cloud. On the other hand, you've got, you know, kind of a converged approach. Oracle's going that direction clearly. Postgres with its open source innovation is going that direction. And it seems to me that at scale that's a more the latter is a more cost effective model. How do you think about that? >>Well, you know, I think at the end of the day, you kind of have to look at it. I mean, the business side of my brain looks at that as an addressable market question. Right? And you've heard me talk about three broad categories of workloads and you know, people define workloads in different bucket, but that's how we do it. But if you look at just a system of record in the system of engagement market, I think that's what would be traditionally viewed as the database market. Uh and there that's you know, let's just say for the sake of arguments of $45-$50 billion $18 billion dollar market. And you know, as we talk about that. So all in it's still between 60 and $70 billion market. And I think what happens there's so much heat and light poured on the valuation multiples of some of the specialty players. That the market gets confused, but the reality is our customers don't get confused. I mean if you look at those specialty players take that $48 billion market. I mean add up Mongo red is cockroach neo, all of those. I mean hugely valued companies. All unicorn companies. But combined to add up to a billion bucks don't get me wrong that's important revenue and meaningful in the workloads they support. But it's not. It doesn't define the full transformation of this category. Look at the systems of analysis again, another great great market example. I mean if you add up the consolidation of the Hadoop vendors add in there. Um Snowflake, you're still talking you know a billion five in revenue and an $18 billion market. So while those are all important technologies, the question is in this transformation move to the database market fully transform you. And my view is no it didn't were in the first maybe second inning of a $65 billion transformation. And I think this is where Postgres will ultimately shine. I think this is how Postgres wins because at the end of the day the nature of the workloads fits with postgres and the future tech that we're building in post schools will serve that broader set of needs I think more effectively >>well. And I love these tam expansion discussions because I think you're right on and I think it comes back to the data and we all talk about the data growth, the data explosion, we see the I. D. C. Numbers and you ain't seen nothing yet. And so data by its very nature is distributed. That's why I get so excited about these new platform models and and I want to tie it back to developers and open source because to me that is the linchpin of innovation um in the next decade it has been, I would even say for the last decade we've seen it, but it's gaining momentum, so, so in thinking about innovation and and specifically Postgres and an open source, you know, what can you share with us in terms of how we should think about your advantage, and again, what, where people are glomming leaning in to that advantage? >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think I think you bring up a really important topic for us as a company. Postgres we think is an incredibly powerful community, uh and when you step away from it again, I remember I told you I was at red hat before, now here at E D B, and there's a common thread that runs through those two experiences in both experiences. The companies are attached and prominent alongside a strong independent, open source community, and I think the notion of an independent community is really important to understand around postgres. There are hundreds and thousands of people contributing to Postgres now. E D B plays a big role in that. About approaching a third of the contributions. In the last release released, 13 of Postgres came from E D B. You might look at that and say gee, that sounds like a lot, but if you step away from it, you know, about 30% of those contributions, Most of the contributions come from a universe around D D. B. And that's inherently healthy for the community's ability to innovate and accelerate. And I think that while we play a strong role there, you can imagine that having and there are other great companies that are contributing to Postgres, I think having those companies participating and contributing gets the best, the best ideas to the front in innovation. So I think the inherent nature Postgres community makes it strong and healthy. And then contrast that to some of the other prominent high value open source companies, the companies and the communities are intimately intertwined. They're one and the same. They're actually not independent open source communities. And I think that therein lies one of the, one of the inherent weaknesses in those but postgres to rise because you know, we bring all those ideas from the DB, we bring a commercial contingent with us all the things we hope we emphasize and focus on in growth and postgres, whether that's in the areas of scalability, manageability, all hot topics, of course security, all of those areas. And then, you know, performance as always, all of those areas are informed to us by enterprise customers deploying post chris at scale. And I think that's the heart of what makes a successful independent project. >>Yeah. The combinatorial powers of of that ecosystem. Uh they their their multiplication, I've as opposed to the resources of one. I want to talk about postgres Vision 2021 sort of set up that a little bit. The theme this year is the future. Is you, what do you mean by that? >>So if you think about what we just said post the category is in transit database categories and transformation. And we know that many of our people are interested in. Postgres are early in their journey, their early in their experience. And so we want to focus this year's postcards vision on them that we understand as a company has been committed to postgres as long as we have and with the understanding we have the technology and best practices, we want to share that view those insights uh, with those who are coming to postgres, Some for the first time, some who are experienced >>Postgres. Vision 21 is june 22nd and 23rd. Go to enterprise db dot com and register the cube is going to be there. We hope you will be too. Ed, thanks for coming to the Cuban previewing the event. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you. We'll see you at Vision 21 >>mm mm.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>from around the globe, >>it's the cube with digital coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 brought to you by IBM Hello welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube had a great conversation here about cloud data, AI and all things. C X O from KPMG is Vinod Swaminathan who's the strategy head of strategy of Ai data and cloud as well as the C. I. O advisory at KPMG you know thanks for coming on the cube. >>My pleasure jOHn thanks for having me. >>So you guys have an interesting perspective, you sit between the business value being created from technology and the clients trying to put it to work um and KPMG impeccable reputation over the years obviously bringing great business value to clients. You guys do that. Um you're in the middle of the hot stuff cloud data and Ai um Ai is great if you have the data and the architecture do that in cloud scale brings so many new good things to the table. Um how is this playing out right now in your mind because we're here at IBM think where the story is transformed, transformation is the innovation. Innovation does set the table for net new capabilities at scale. This seems to be a common thread here. What's your take on the current situation? >>Well, let me start with the fundamental premise that we're seeing playing out with many of our clients and that is, clients are beginning to connect the different silos within their business to better respond to what their customers are asking for. Um you know, we we tend to work with large enterprises, very well established businesses and we're also fortunate to serve the needs of high growth companies as well. So we're in a very unique position as a trusted advisor to both legacy companies transforming and high growth companies looking to drive the transformation in the industry as well. So there are a few things that we're seeing right the first and foremost is responding quickly and effectively to very rapidly changing customer needs. And I think the pandemic really, you know put a spotlight on how fast organizations had to pivot and I have to commend a lot of these organizations and doing a phenomenal job, I would argue, spit band aiding and gluing together a response to what their customers expected. Right? So as I look at post pandemic, we're seeing a lot of clients now looking to take stock of things that they did during the pandemic, how they address customer demand to really smooth them out and streamline as a strategy, how they're going to become more customer driven KPMG. We call this the connected enterprise where you really work effectively across the front, middle and back office in an enterprise to seamlessly address the client. Right? Anything you do in finance really is driven by what your customers want. It's no longer, hey finance sit in the back office, right. Anything you do in marketing is no longer hey I'm doing it just to address the demand side of the equation, right? It's very integral to connect marketing with fulfillment. Right? So we call this the connected enterprise. So that transformation is only possible if customers and our clients are able to effectively leverage cloud from an architectural perspective. And when I say cloud, what we're seeing, smarter clients of ours start to think about is cloud in its entirety. So it's not just the public cloud, it's the cloud architecture, right? The ability to scale up scale out right scale down, right, irrespective of where all of this sits from an infrastructure perspective. So cloud is very critical for becoming that connected enterprise. Uh The data pieces integral, I think the data business today represents trillions of dollars. I think everybody has bought into the fact that data is the new oil and all of that good stuff that we've heard. Uh but it really is a trillion dollar business and it has some unique challenges. So being connected requires, right that are that an enterprise become very data driven? I think it's hard to escape ai it's everywhere to the point where we don't even uh we're not even conscious of ai at work, Right? So I think uh five years ago a I was a novel concept today. It's the expectation of customers who interact with big brands that ai is an integral part of how they are being served. Right? So cloud data ai architecture sort of the ingredients if you will. And then cool technology really starts to bring this connected concept together and post pandemic. We're going to start to see a lot of rationalization uh and big investments and moving forward in this trajectory. >>It's interesting cloud data now you, the way you talk about it makes me think about like this the constant of the old Os I stack right? You have infrastructure and cloud, you have data in the middle layer and then A. I is that that wonder area where the upside takes advantage of that data? Um Very cool insight. You know, Thanks for sharing that. The question I have for you put the pandemic I want to get your reaction to some conversations I've had in the industry and they tend to go like this. Um when we come out of the pandemic this is like a C X O. Talking to Ceo. Or C. I. O. Or C. So when we come out of the pandemic we need a growth strategy, we need to be hidden, we need to be on the upswing, okay? Not on the downswing or still trying to figure it out. Um And and that's a cool conversation because there's been to use cases that we've identified companies that had no has had a headwind because of the pandemic either because of business disruption or the second categories, they've had a tail when they had a business opportunity. So the ones that had a headwind, they would retool, they used the pandemic to retool and the ones that had the tailwind would use the pandemic to either bring net new capabilities or or transform and innovate. So either way that's a successful use case. The ones who didn't do anything aren't going to survive much. We know that, but in those two cases they're not mutually exclusive. That's what the smart money's been doing. The smart teams. What's your advice now that we're in that mode where we're coming around the corner? How do companies get on that uptick? What have you guys advise into clients? What are you hearing and what, what's your reaction to that concept? >>Well, I think every company that is going to be on the survivors list post pandemic actually has digitally transformed, um, you know, even if they don't want to acknowledge it right in a lot of different ways. Um, so I think that's here to stay. Um, what I, and I'll give you a simple example, um, you know, I, I belong to a local club, you know, kitchen shut down, you know, no activities. I was amazed that it took them only four days John four days to actually bring a digital reservation system online through their mobile app. So in the past, the mobile app was simply for me to go look at the directory. But now I can do so many more things. Right? And I was talking to my club CI. All right. I mean, really not a C I. O. But you know, it was uh, it was, it was a staff member who was charged with driving the digital transformation. So there you go. >>Good consultant, you, you know, uh >>but what he talked to me about was fascinating. And this is what we're going to see. Right? So first he said, another was so easy to bring some of those, you know, interactive experience type capabilities online to serve our customer base. It made us think, why the hell didn't we do it before. Alright, so, back to your question, I think post pandemic, we're going to see a lot of companies recognizing that low code, no code, right? Cloud AI capabilities are very much within the reach of the average business user, right? In companies like IBM have done a phenomenal job of demystifying the technology and trying to make it much more accessible for the business user. We're going to see continued momentum, right? And adopting these kinds of simple technologies to transform right business processes, customer interaction, so on and so forth. Right? So we we see that coming out of the pandemic, there's no stopping that. I think the second thing we see is a very firm commitment at the leadership level um that you know, stopping or slowing down these kinds of activities is a non starter at the board level. That's a nonstarter at the management committee level, right? Don't come to me saying we need to slow down things, Come to me saying we need to speed up things, right? But that said, we're seeing rationalization, conversations begin to happen and that starts with the strategy, right, tailwind or headwind, irrespective of which side of the equation you fell right in that, in that dynamic, what we're seeing is clients coming back and saying, all right, we know our strategy needs to be different. Let's make sure that we have a strategy that aligns better with um where our customers want to go, where the industry is headed. And let's acknowledge that there are technological capabilities now, but actually turbocharge the execution of the strategy. Technology is not the strategy, it's still connected enterprise thought. How do I serve my customers whose expectations have dramatically changed coming out of the pandemic? And that's why I gave you the club example. I never want to call anybody to make a reservation anymore. I mean, even the local hair salon has a queuing system and a reservation system because you know, that's just the way it is, Right? So there are some simple things that have happened on the customer side of uh, you know, the equation, which is forcing a lot of our clients to start, you know, accelerating their digital investments. Um, you know, rather than decelerating, >>it's interesting. That's great insight. I think just to summarize that, I think you're pointing out is the obvious, hey, it works the indifference of the digital to go the next level and see X O. S and C I O. S have had, you know, either politics or blockers or just will it work? And, and I think with the pandemic necessity is the mother of all inventions. You say, hey, we got to get back on business that the economics and the user experience is more than acceptable. It's actually preferred. I think that club example really highlights that expectation change and I >>think that's an interesting architecture discussion right? And I don't mean that technically I think businesses are starting to think about how are they architect right. And this is where the connected enterprise concept from KPMG is resonating because now you know we see our clients no longer thinking about finance, sales marketing right and fulfillment right? That's how the architect of their business before now they're realizing that they need to sort of put it on its side. Right, I love the cube analogy, I'm going to borrow it, they're flipping the cube on the side and pulling out a whole new business architecture which by the way is enabled and supported by an underlying technology architecture that's very different. Right? So I think businesses are going to get re architected in technology companies like IBM and Red Hot are going to be right there helping clients go through that re architected along with partners like us. >>The script has been flipped and the cube has been turned and I think this was the revelation. The economics are clear. So I gotta ask you, I mean I've always been I've been joking with IBM the president like it, but I've been saying that, you know, business now is software enabled and the operating systems, distributed computing. As you mentioned, these subsystems are part of this fabric and red hat there and operating systems company. Um so kind of in a good position with what Marvin's doing. If you think about if you look at squint through and connect the dots, I mean you're looking at an underlying operating system that's open and connected to business, it's not just software apps that run something like an ear piece system, it's an business software model for the entire company completely instrumented. This is what hybrid cloud is, could you, because you take a few minutes to talk about the relationship that you guys have with IBM on how you guys are working together to bring this hybrid cloud vision to their customers and to the market. >>So KPMG and IBM go back about 20 plus years long standing relationship. Um In fact, I kid around with many of my fellow partners here at KPMG that IBM is the only relationship that we did not divest off when we went through our let's flip management consulting off from our accounting business, so on and so forth that everybody went through, right? So very long standing relationship, you know, we're a trusted partner of IBM well we're very different from a lot of the partners that IBM has were business consultants, right? We don't have, you know, we help clients think through their business first before we get into the technology implementation. So I don't have armies of IBM certified engineers sitting on the bench looking for work to do. It's actually the other way around. Right? So it's been a great marriage when IBM has phenomenal technology in this case. You know, they have been leaders in AI, we've got an AI based relationship now going back five years, um you know, where we consumed Watson proved to ourselves and the world that it can be done very innovatively supporting business transformation. And now we're able to, together with IBM effectively have that conversation with clients, right? Because we're client number zero, uh we're big into a hybrid, multi cloud, um you know, we're big red hat customers. Uh you know, we use red hat in our own modernization of several different workloads. So our relationship with IBM is very strong, were a good supplier to them as well, so we help them with their strategy and go to market as well. So an interesting sort of relationship. Um look, when we work with clients, we typically tend to, you know, take a trusted advisor role uh with clients, our brand speaks to the trust that we're able to bring when we talk to clients. Uh I kid around um you know, when you're going through a transformation, you probably want the town skeptic holding your hand. That's us, right? We're very risk averse. We like working with clients who you know, kind of want that, you know, critical look when they're investing in technology driven transformation. Um you know, some of the things that IBM has done is pretty phenomenal. Right? So for example, I don't see um you know, I I don't see a lot of providers out there who give clients the kind of options that IBM gives with their multi cloud capabilities. Right? So, you know, show me conversational ai capability that can run on private cloud, that can run on google amazon IBM and a whole bunch of other cloud providers. Right? So I think as IBM invests in that open right philosophy and obviously the red hat acquisition only further enhances that, right, um it's a great opportunity for us to be able to take very powerful KPMG value propositions um you know, enabled by this kind of IBM technology, Right? So that's how we tend to go to market. Um one of the solutions were offering with IBM is called the KPMG data mesh. It's built on IBM cloud pack for data, which is enabled by red hats open shift and it's a very innovative solution in the marketplace that fundamentally asked the question to clients, why are you spending inordinate amount of time and resources moving data around in order to become data driven? Uh it just amazes me john how much money is being thrown at, you know, moving data around, particularly as you get into this complex hybrid, multi cloud world. Right. How many times am I going to move data from, you know, a mainframe database into my, you know, cloud repository before I can start doing uh real higher value work. Right, So KPMG data mesh enabled by the IBM cloud packed the data says, hey, legal data, wherever it is. You know, we can take up to 30 of costs out and really get you on this journey to become data driven without spending the first nine months of every project building a data warehouse or building an expensive data where data lake, Right? Because all of those, frankly our 20th century mindset, right? So if I can leave the data where it is, your favorite terminology virtually is the data and really focus on what do I do with the data as opposed to, you know, how do I move the data? Right. It really starts to change the mindset around becoming data driven. Right, so that's a great example of a solution where we've married our value proposition to clients around connected and trusted and leveraged IBM technology. Right? In a hybrid multi cloud one, >>you know, a great insight, love the focus. Hybrid cloud, congratulations on your KPMG mesh solution, their cloud mesh, awesome. Taking advantage of the IBM work and love your perspective on the industry. I think you you called it right? I think that's a great perspective. That's the way we're on big transformation innovation wave. Thanks for coming on the key, appreciate it. >>Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me have a good day. >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm >>mm.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Okay, >>we're now going to explore the vision of the future of cloud computing From the perspective of one of the leaders in the field, J G >>Share >>a pure off is the vice president of As Your Data ai and Edge at Microsoft G. Welcome to the Cuban cloud. Thanks so much for participating. >>Well, thank you, Dave, and it's a real pleasure to be here with you. And I just wanna welcome the audience as well. >>Well, jg judging from your title, we have a lot of ground to cover, and our audience is definitely interested in all the topics that are implied there. So let's get right into it. You know, we've said many times in the Cube that the new innovation cocktail comprises machine intelligence or a I applied to troves of data. With the scale of the cloud. It's it's no longer, you know, we're driven by Moore's law. It's really those three factors, and those ingredients are gonna power the next wave of value creation and the economy. So, first, do you buy into that premise? >>Yes, absolutely. we do buy into it. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why we put Data Analytics and Ai together is because all of that really begins with the collection of data and managing it and governing it, unlocking analytics in it. And we tend to see things like AI, the value creation that comes from a I as being on that continues off, having started off with really things like analytics and proceeding toe. You know, machine learning and the use of data. Interesting breaks. Yes. >>I'd like to get some more thoughts around a data and how you see the future data and the role of cloud and maybe how >>Microsoft, you >>know, strategy fits in there. I mean, you, your portfolio, you got you got sequel server, Azure, Azure sequel. You got arc, which is kinda azure everywhere for people that aren't familiar with that. You've got synapse. Which course that's all the integration a data warehouse, and get things ready for B I and consumption by the business and and the whole data pipeline and a lot of other services as your data bricks you got You got cosmos in their, uh, Blockchain. You've got open source services like Post Dress and my sequel. So lots of choices there. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you think about the future of Of of Cloud data platforms? It looks like your strategies, right tool for the right job? Is that fair? >>It is fair, but it's also just to step back and look at it. It's fundamentally what we see in this market today is that customer was the Sikh really a comprehensive proposition? And when I say a comprehensive proposition, it is sometimes not just about saying that. Hey, listen way No, you're a sequel server company. We absolutely trust that you have the best Azure sequel database in the cloud, but tell us more. We've got data that's sitting in her group systems. We've got data that's sitting in Post Press in things like mongo DB, right? So that open source proposition today and data and data management and database management has become front and center, so are really sort of push. There is when it comes to migration management, modernization of data to present the broadest possible choice to our customers so we can meet them where they are. However, when it comes to analytics. One of the things they asked for is give us a lot more convergence use. You know it, really, it isn't about having 50 different services. It's really about having that one comprehensive service that is converged. That's where things like synapse Fitzer, where in just land any kind of data in the leg and then use any compute engine on top of it to drive insights from it. So, fundamentally, you know, it is that flexibility that we really sort of focus on to meet our customers where they are and really not pushing our dogma and our beliefs on it. But to meet our customers according to the way they have deployed stuff like this. >>So that's great. I want to stick on this for a minute because, you know, I know when when I have guests on like yourself, do you never want to talk about you know, the competition? But that's all we ever talk about. That's all your customers ever talk about, because because the counter to that right tool for the right job and that I would say, is really kind of Amazon's approach is is that you got the single unified data platform, the mega database that does it all. And that's kind of Oracle's approach. It sounds like you wanna have your cake and eat it, too, so you you got the right tool for the right job approach. But you've got an integration layer that allows you to have that converge database. I wonder if you could add color to that and you confirm or deny what I just said. >>No, that's a That's a very fair observation, but I I say there's a nuance in what I sort of describe when it comes to data management. When it comes to APS, we have them customers with the broadest choice. Even in that, even in that perspective, we also offer convergence. So, case in point, when you think about Cosmos TV under that one sort of service, you get multiple engines, but with the same properties, right global distribution, the five nines availability. It gives customers the ability to basically choose when they have to build that new cloud native AB toe, adopt cosmos Davey and adopted in a way that it's and choose an engine that is most flexible. Tow them, however you know when it comes to say, you know, writing a sequel server, for example from organizing it you know you want. Sometimes you just want to lift and shift it into things. Like I asked In other cases, you want to completely rewrite it, so you need to have the flexibility of choice there that is presented by a legacy off What's its on premises? When it moved into things like analytics, we absolutely believe in convergence, right? So we don't believe that look, you need to have a relation of data warehouse that is separate from a loop system that is separate from, say, a B I system. That is just, you know, it's a bolt on for us. We love the proposition off, really building things that are so integrated that once you land data, once you prep it inside the lake, you can use it for analytics. You can use it for being. You can use it for machine learning. So I think you know, are sort of differentiated. Approach speaks for itself there. Well, >>that's that's interesting, because essentially, again, you're not saying it's an either or, and you're seeing a lot of that in the marketplace. You got some companies say no, it's the Data Lake and others saying No, no put in the data warehouse and that causes confusion and complexity around the data pipeline and a lot of calls. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Ah, lot of customers struggled to get value out of data and and specifically data product builders of frustrated that it takes too long to go from. You know, this idea of Hey, I have an idea for a data service and it could drive monetization, but to get there, you gotta go through this complex data lifecycle on pipeline and beg people to add new data sources. And do you do you feel like we have to rethink the way that we approach data architectures? >>Look, I think we do in the cloud, and I think what's happening today and I think the place where I see the most amount of rethink the most amount of push from our customers to really rethink is the area of analytics in a I. It's almost as if what worked in the past will not work going forward. Right? So when you think about analytics on in the Enterprise today, you have relational systems, you have produced systems. You've got data marts. You've got data warehouses. You've got enterprise data warehouses. You know, those large honking databases that you use, uh, to close your books with right? But when you start to modernize it, what deep you are saying is that we don't want to simply take all of that complexity that we've built over say, you know, 34 decades and simply migrated on mass exactly as they are into the cloud. What they really want is a completely different way of looking at things. And I think this is where services like synapse completely provide a differentiated proposition to our customers. What we say there is land the data in any way you see shape or form inside the lake. Once you landed inside the lake, you can essentially use a synapse studio toe. Prep it in the way that you like, use any compute engine of your choice and and operate on this data in any way that you see fit. So, case in point, if you want to hydrate relation all data warehouse, you can do so if you want to do ad hoc analytics using something like spark. You can do so if you want to invoke power. Bi I on that data or b i on that data you can do so if you want to bring in a machine learning model on this breath data you can do so, so inherently. So when customers buy into this proposition, what it solves for them and what it gives them is complete simplicity, right? One way to land the data, multiple ways to use it. And it's all eso. >>Should we think of synapse as an abstraction layer that abstracts away the complexity of the underlying technology? Is that a fair way toe? Think about it. >>Yeah, you can think of it that way. It abstracts away, Dave a couple of things. It takes away the type of data, you know, sort of the complexities related to the type of data. It takes away the complexity related to the size of data. It takes away the complexity related to creating pipelines around all these different types of data and fundamentally puts it in a place where it can be now consumed by any sort of entity inside the actual proposition. And by that token, even data breaks. You know, you can, in fact, use data breaks in in sort off an integrated way with a synapse, Right, >>Well, so that leads me to this notion of and then wonder if you buy into it s Oh, my inference is that a data warehouse or a data lake >>could >>just be a node in inside of a global data >>mesh on. >>Then it's synapses sort of managing, uh, that technology on top. Do you buy into that that global data mesh concept >>we do. And we actually do see our customers using synapse and the value proposition that it brings together in that way. Now it's not where they start. Often times when a customer comes and says, Look, I've got an enterprise data warehouse, I want to migrate it or I have a group system. I want to migrate it. But from there, the evolution is absolutely interesting to see. I give you an example. You know, one of the customers that we're very proud off his FedEx And what FedEx is doing is it's completely reimagining its's logistics system that basically the system that delivers What is it? The three million packages a day on in doing so in this covert times, with the view of basically delivering our covert vaccines. One of the ways they're doing it is basically using synapse. Synapse is essentially that analytic hub where they can get complete view into their logistic processes. Way things are moving, understand things like delays and really put all that together in a way that they can essentially get our packages and these vaccines delivered as quickly as possible. Another example, you know, is one of my favorite, uh, we see once customers buy into it, they essentially can do other things with it. So an example of this is, uh is really my favorite story is Peace Parks Initiative. It is the premier Air White Rhino Conservancy in the world. They essentially are using data that has landed in azure images in particular. So, basically, you know, use drones over the vast area that they patrol and use machine learning on this data to really figure out where is an issue and where there isn't an issue so that this part with about 200 rangers can scramble surgically versus having to read range across the last area that they cover. So What do you see here is you know, the importance is really getting your data in order. Landed consistently. Whatever the kind of data ideas build the right pipelines and then the possibilities of transformation are just endless. >>Yeah, that's very nice how you worked in some of the customer examples. I appreciate that. I wanna ask you, though, that that some people might say that putting in that layer while it clearly adds simplification and e think a great thing that they're begins over time to be be a gap, if you will, between the ability of that layer to integrate all the primitives and all the peace parts on that, that you lose some of that fine grain control and it slows you down. What would you say to that? >>Look, I think that's what we excel at, and that's what we completely sort of buy into on. It's our job to basically provide that level off integration that granularity in the way that so it's an art, absolutely admit it's an art. There are areas where people create simplicity and not a lot of you know, sort of knobs and dials and things like that. But there are areas where customers want flexibility, right? So I think just to give you an example of both of them in landing the data inconsistency in building pipelines, they want simplicity. They don't want complexity. They don't want 50 different places to do this. Just 100 to do it. When it comes to computing and reducing this data analyzing this data, they want flexibility. This is one of the reasons why we say, Hey, listen, you want to use data breaks? If you're you're buying into that proposition and you're absolutely happy with them, you can plug plug it into it. You want to use B I and no, essentially do a small data mart. You can use B I If you say that. Look, I've landed in the lake. I really only want to use em melt, bringing your animal models and party on. So that's where the flexibility comes in. So that's sort of really sort of think about it. Well, >>I like the strategy because, you know, my one of our guest, Jim Octagon, e E. I think one of the foremost thinkers on this notion of off the data mesh and her premises that that that data builders, data product and service builders air frustrated because the the big data system is generic to context. There's no context in there. But by having context in the big data architecture and system, you could get products to market much, much, much faster. So but that seems to be your philosophy. But I'm gonna jump ahead to do my ecosystem question. You've mentioned data breaks a couple of times. There's another partner that you have, which is snowflake. They're kind of trying to build out their own, uh, data cloud, if you will, on global mesh in and the one hand, their partner. On the other hand, there are competitors. How do you sort of balance and square that circle? >>Look, when I see snowflake, I actually see a partner. You know that when we essentially you know, we are. When you think about as you know, this is where I sort of step back and look at Azure as a whole and in azure as a whole. Companies like snowflakes are vital in our ecosystem, right? I mean, there are places we compete, but you know, effectively by helping them build the best snowflake service on Asia. We essentially are able toe, you know, differentiate and offer a differentiated value proposition compared to, say, a Google or on AWS. In fact, that's being our approach with data breaks as well, where you know they are effectively on multiple club, and our opportunity with data breaks is toe essentially integrate them in a way where we offer the best experience. The best integrations on Azure Barna That's always been a focus. >>That's hard to argue with. Strategy. Our data with our data partner eat er, shows Microsoft is both pervasive and impressively having a lot of momentum spending velocity within the budget cycles. I wanna come back thio ai a little bit. It's obviously one of the fastest growing areas in our in our survey data. As I said, clearly, Microsoft is a leader in this space. What's your what's your vision of the future of machine intelligence and how Microsoft will will participate in that opportunity? >>Yeah, so fundamentally, you know, we've built on decades of research around, you know, around, you know, essentially, you know, vision, speech and language that's being the three core building blocks and for the for a really focused period of time we focused on essentially ensuring human parody. So if you ever wondered what the keys to the kingdom are it, czar, it's the most we built in ensuring that the research posture that we've taken there, what we then done is essentially a couple of things we focused on, essentially looking at the spectrum. That is a I both from saying that, Hollis and you know it's gotta work for data. Analysts were looking toe basically use machine learning techniques, toe developers who are essentially, you know, coding and building a machine learning models from scratch. So for that select proposition manifesto us, as you know, really a. I focused on all skill levels. The other court thing we've done is that we've also said, Look, it will only work as long as people trust their data and they can trust their AI models. So there's a tremendous body of work and research we do in things like responsibility. So if you ask me where we sort of push on is fundamentally to make sure that we never lose sight of the fact that the spectrum off a I, and you can sort of come together for any skill level, and we keep that responsibly. I proposition. Absolutely strong now against that canvas, Dave. I'll also tell you that you know, as edge devices get way more capable, right where they can input on the edge, see a camera or a mike or something like that, you will see us pushing a lot more of that capability onto the edge as well. But to me, that's sort of a modality. But the core really is all skill levels and that responsible denia. >>Yeah, So that that brings me to this notion of wanna bring an edge and and hybrid cloud Understand how you're thinking about hybrid cloud multi cloud. Obviously one of your competitors, Amazon won't even say the word multi cloud you guys have, Ah, you know, different approach there. But what's the strategy with regard? Toe, toe hybrid. You know, Do you see the cloud you bringing azure to the edge? Maybe you could talk about that and talk about how you're different from the competition. >>Yeah, I think in the edge from Annette, you know, I live in I'll be the first one to say that the word nge itself is conflated. Okay, It's, uh but I will tell you, just focusing on hybrid. This is one of the places where you know I would say the 2020 if I would have looked back from a corporate perspective. In particular, it has Bean the most informative because we absolutely saw customers digitizing moving to the cloud. And we really saw hybrid in action. 2020 was the year that hybrid sort of really became really from a cloud computing perspective and an example of this is we understood it's not all or nothing. So sometimes customers want azure consistency in their data centers. This is where things like Azure stack comes in. Sometimes they basically come to us and say, We want the flexibility of adopting flexible pattern, you know, platforms like, say, containers orchestra, Cuban Pettis, so that we can essentially deployed wherever you want. And so when we design things like art, it was built for that flexibility in mind. So here is the beauty of what's something like our can do for you. If you have a kubernetes endpoint anywhere we can deploy and as your service onto it, that is the promise, which means if for some reason, the customer says that. Hey, I've got this kubernetes endpoint in AWS and I love as your sequel. You will be able to run as your sequel inside AWS. There's nothing that stops you from doing it so inherently you remember. Our first principle is always to meet our customers where they are. So from that perspective, multi cloud is here to stay. You know, we're never going to be the people that says, I'm sorry, we will never see a But it is a reality for our customers. >>So I wonder if we could close. Thank you for that by looking, looking back and then and then ahead. And I wanna e wanna put forth. Maybe it's, Ah criticism, but maybe not. Maybe it's an art of Microsoft, but But first you know, you get Microsoft an incredible job of transitioning. It's business as your nominee president Azzawi said. Our data shows that so two part question First, Microsoft got there by investing in the cloud, really changing its mind set, I think, in leveraging its huge software state and customer base to put Azure at the center of its strategy, and many have said me included that you got there by creating products that air Good enough. You know, we do a 1.0, it's not that great. And the two Dato, and maybe not the best, but acceptable for your customers. And that's allowed you to grow very rapidly expanding market. >>How >>do you respond to that? Is that is that a fair comment? Ume or than good enough? I wonder if you could share your >>thoughts, gave you? You hurt my feelings with that question. I don't hate me, g getting >>it out there. >>So there was. First of all, thank you for asking me that. You know, I am absolutely the biggest cheerleader. You'll find a Microsoft. I absolutely believe you know that I represent the work off almost 9000 engineers and we wake up every day worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and toe. Absolutely. Make sure we deliver the best in the first time that we do. So when you take the platter off products we've delivered in nausea, be it as your sequel, be it as your cosmos TV synapse as your data breaks, which we did in partnership with data breaks, a za machine learning and recently when we prevail, we sort off, you know, sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data government solution in azure purview. I would humbly submit to you that we're leading the way and we're essentially showing how the future off data ai and the actual work in the cloud. >>I'd be disappointed if you if you had If you didn't, if you capitulated in any way J g So so thank you for that. And the kind of last question is, is looking forward and how you're thinking about the future of cloud last decade. A lot about your cloud migration simplifying infrastructure management, deployment SAS if eyeing my enterprise, lot of simplification and cost savings. And, of course, the redeployment of resource is toward digital transformation. Other other other valuable activities. How >>do >>you think this coming decade will will be defined? Will it be sort of more of the same? Or is there Is there something else out there? >>I think I think that the coming decade will be one where customers start one law outside value out of this. You know what happened in the last decade when people leave the foundation and people essentially looked at the world and said, Look, we've got to make the move, you know, the largely hybrid, but we're going to start making steps to basically digitize and modernize our platforms. I would tell you that with the amount of data that people are moving to the cloud just as an example, you're going to see use of analytics ai for business outcomes explode. You're also going to see a huge sort of focus on things like governance. You know, people need to know where the data is, what the data catalog continues, how to govern it, how to trust this data and given all other privacy and compliance regulations out there. Essentially, they're complying this posture. So I think the unlocking of outcomes versus simply Hey, I've saved money Second, really putting this comprehensive sort off, you know, governance, regime in place. And then, finally, security and trust. It's going to be more paramount than ever before. Yeah, >>nobody's gonna use the data if they don't trust it. I'm glad you brought up your security. It's It's a topic that hits number one on the CEO list. J G. Great conversation. Obviously the strategy is working, and thanks so much for participating in Cuba on cloud. >>Thank you. Thank you, David. I appreciate it and thank you to. Everybody was tuning in today. >>All right? And keep it right there. I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.