(soft music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Fira in MWC23. Is just an amazing day. This place is packed. They said 80,000 people. I think it might even be a few more walk-ins. I'm Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin is here, David Nicholson. But right now we have the Analyst Hot Takes with three friends of theCUBE. Chris Lewis is back again with me in the co-host seat. Zeus Kerravala, analyst extraordinaire. Great to see you, Z. and Sarbjeet SJ Johal. Good to see you again, theCUBE contributor. And that's my new name for him. He says that is his nickname. Guys, thanks for coming back on. We got the all male panel, sorry, but it is what it is. So Z, is this the first time you've been on it at MWC. Take aways from the show, Hot Takes. What are you seeing? Same wine, new bottle? >> In a lot of ways, yeah. I mean, I was talking to somebody this earlier that if you had come from like MWC five years ago to this year, a lot of the themes are the same. Telco transformation, cloud. I mean, 5G is a little new. Sustainability is certainly a newer theme here. But I think it highlights just the difficulty I think the telcos have in making this transformation. And I think, in some ways, I've been unfair to them in some degree 'cause I've picked on them in the past for not moving fast enough. These are, you know, I think these kind of big transformations almost take like a perfect storm of things that come together to happen, right? And so, in the past, we had technologies that maybe might have lowered opex, but they're hard to deploy. They're vertically integrated. We didn't have the software stacks. But it appears today that between the cloudification of, you know, going to cloud native, the software stacks, the APIs, the ecosystems, I think we're actually in a position to see this industry finally move forward. >> Yeah, and Chris, I mean, you have served this industry for a long time. And you know, when you, when you do that, you get briefed as an analyst, you actually realize, wow, there's a lot of really smart people here, and they're actually, they have challenges, they're working through it. So Zeus was saying he's been tough on the industry. You know, what do you think about how the telcos have evolved in the last five years? >> I think they've changed enormously. I think the problem we have is we're always looking for the great change, the big step change, and there is no big step change in a way. What telcos deliver to us as individuals, businesses, society, the connectivity piece, that's changed. We get better and better and more reliable connectivity. We're shunting a load more capacity through. What I think has really changed is their attitude to their suppliers, their attitude to their partners, and their attitude to the ecosystem in which they play. Understanding that connectivity is not the end game. Connectivity is part of the emerging end game where it will include storage, compute, connect, and analytics and everything else. So I think the realization that they are not playing their own game anymore, it's a much more open game. And some things they will continue to do, some things they'll stop doing. We've seen them withdraw from moving into adjacent markets as much as we used to see. So a lot of them in the past went off to try and do movies, media, and a lot went way way into business IT stuff. They've mainly pulled back from that, and they're focusing on, and let's face it, it's not just a 5G show. The fixed environment is unbelievably important. We saw that during the pandemic. Having that fixed broadband connection using wifi, combining with cellular. We love it. But the problem as an industry is that the users often don't even know the connectivity's there. They only know when it doesn't work, right? >> If it's not media and it's not business services, what is it? >> Well, in my view, it will be enabling third parties to deliver the services that will include media, that will include business services. So embedding the connectivity all the way into the application that gets delivered or embedding it so the quality mechanism deliver the gaming much more accurately or, I'm not a gamer, so I can't comment on that. But no, the video quality if you want to have a high quality video will come through better. >> And those cohorts will pay for that value? >> Somebody will pay somewhere along the line. >> Seems fuzzy to me. >> Me too. >> I do think it's use case dependent. Like you look at all the work Verizon did at the Super Bowl this year, that's a perfect case where they could have upsold. >> Explain that. I'm not familiar with it. >> So Verizon provided all the 5G in the Super Bowl. They provided a lot of, they provided private connectivity for the coaches to talk to the sidelines. And that's a mission critical application, right? In the NFL, if one side can't talk, the other side gets shut down. You can't communicate with the quarterback or the coaches. There's a lot of risk at that. So, but you know, there's a case there, though, I think where they could have even made that fan facing. Right? And if you're paying 2000 bucks to go to a game, would you pay 50 bucks more to have a higher tier of bandwidth so you can post things on social? People that go there, they want people to know they were there. >> Every football game you go to, you can't use your cell. >> Analyst: Yeah, I know, right? >> All right, let's talk about developers because we saw the eight APIs come out. I think ISVs are going to be a big part of this. But it's like Dee Arthur said. Hey, eight's better than zero, I guess. Okay, so, but so the innovation is going to come from ISVs and developers, but what are your hot takes from this show and now day two, we're a day and a half in, almost two days in. >> Yeah, yeah. There's a thing that we have talked, I mentioned many times is skills gravity, right? Skills have gravity, and also, to outcompete, you have to also educate. That's another theme actually of my talks is, or my research is that to puts your technology out there to the practitioners, you have to educate them. And that's the only way to democratize your technology. What telcos have been doing is they have been stuck to the proprietary software and proprietary hardware for too long, from Nokia's of the world and other vendors like that. So now with the open sourcing of some of the components and a few others, right? And they're open source space and antenna, you know? Antennas are becoming software now. So with the invent of these things, which is open source, it helps us democratize that to the other sort of skirts of the practitioners, if you will. And that will bring in more applications first into the IOT space, and then maybe into the core sort of California, if you will. >> So what does a telco developer look like? I mean, all the blockchain developers and crypto developers are moving into generative AI, right? So maybe those worlds come together. >> You'd like to think though that the developers would understand everything's network centric today. So you'd like to think they'd understand that how the network responds, you know, you'd take a simple app like Zoom or something. If it notices the bandwidth changes, it should knock down the resolution. If it goes up it, then you can add different features and things and you can make apps a lot smarter that way. >> Well, G2 was saying today that they did a deal with Mercedes, you know this probably better than I do, where they're going to embed WebEx in the car. And if you're driving, it'll shut off the camera. >> Of course. >> I'm like, okay. >> I'll give you a better example though. >> But that's my point. Like, isn't there more that we can do? >> You noticed down on the SKT stand the little helicopter. That's a vertical lift helicopter. So it's an electric vertical lift helicopter. Just think of that for a second. And then think of the connectivity to control that, to securely control that. And then I was recently at an event with Zeus actually where we saw an air traffic control system where there was no people manning the tower. It was managed by someone remotely with all the cameras around them. So managing all of those different elements, we call it IOT, but actually it's way more than what we thought of as IOT. All those components connecting, communicating securely and safely. 'Cause I don't want that helicopter to come down on my head, do you? (men laugh) >> Especially if you're in there. (men laugh) >> Okay, so you mentioned sustainability. Everybody's talking about power. I don't know if you guys have a lot of experience around TCO, but I'm trying to get to, well, is this just because energy costs are so high, and then when the energy becomes cheap again, nobody's going to pay any attention to it? Or is this the real deal? >> So one of the issues around the, if we want to experience all that connectivity locally or that helicopter wants to have that connectivity, we have to ultimately build denser, more reliable networks. So there's a CapEx, we're going to put more base stations in place. We need more fiber in the ground to support them. Therefore, the energy consumption will go up. So we need to be more efficient in the use of energy. Simple as that. >> How much of the operating expense is energy? Like what percent of it? Is it 10%? Is it 20%? Is it, does anybody know? >> It depends who you ask and it depends on the- >> I can't get an answer to that. I mean, in the enterprise- >> Analyst: The data centers? >> Yeah, the data centers. >> We have the numbers. I think 10 to 15%. >> It's 10 to 12%, something like that. Is it much higher? >> I've got feeling it's 30%. >> Okay, so if it's 30%, that's pretty good. >> I do think we have to get better at understanding how to measure too. You know, like I was talking with John Davidson at Sysco about this that every rev of silicon they come out with uses more power, but it's a lot more dense. So at the surface, you go, well, that's using a lot more power. But you can consolidate 10 switches down to two switches. >> Well, Intel was on early and talking about how they can intelligently control the cores. >> But it's based off workload, right? That's the thing. So what are you running over it? You know, and so, I don't think our industry measures that very well. I think we look at things kind of boxed by box versus look at total consumption. >> Well, somebody else in theCUBE was saying they go full throttle. That the networks just say just full throttle everything. And that obviously has to change from the power consumption standpoint. >> Obviously sustainability and sensory or sensors from IOT side, they go hand in hand. Just simple examples like, you know, lights in the restrooms, like in public areas. Somebody goes in there and just only then turns. The same concept is being applied to servers and compute and storage and every aspects and to networks as well. >> Cell tower. >> Yeah. >> Cut 'em off, right? >> Like the serverless telco? (crosstalk) >> Cell towers. >> Well, no, I'm saying, right, but like serverless, you're not paying for the compute when you're not using it, you know? >> It is serverless from the economics point of view. Yes, it's like that, you know? It goes to the lowest level almost like sleep on our laptops, sleep level when you need more power, more compute. >> I mean, some of that stuff's been in networking equipment for a long time, it just never really got turned on. >> I want to ask you about private networks. You wrote a piece, Athenet was acquired by HPE right after Dell announced a relationship with Athenet, which was kind of, that was kind of funny. And so a good move, good judo move by by HP. I asked Dell about it, and they said, look, we're open. They said the right things. We'll see, but I think it's up to HP. >> Well, and the network inside Dell is. >> Yeah, okay, so. Okay, cool. So, but you said something in that article you wrote on Silicon Angle that a lot of people feel like P5G is going to basically replace wireless or cannibalize wireless. You said you didn't agree with that. Explain why? >> Analyst: Wifi. >> Wifi, sorry, I said wireless. >> No, that's, I mean that's ridiculous. Pat Gelsinger said that in his last VMware, which I thought was completely irresponsible. >> That it was going to cannibalize? >> Cannibalize wifi globally is what he said, right? Now he had Verizon on stage with him, so. >> Analyst: Wifi's too inexpensive and flexible. >> Wifi's cheap- >> Analyst: It's going to embed really well. Embedded in that. >> It's reached near ubiquity. It's unlicensed. So a lot of businesses don't want to manage their own spectrum, right? And it's great for this, right? >> Analyst: It does the job. >> For casual connectivity. >> Not today. >> Well, it does for the most part. Right now- >> For the most part. But never at these events. >> If it's engineered correctly, it will. Right? Where you need private 5G is when reliability is an absolute must. So, Chris, you and I visited the Port of Rotterdam, right? So they're putting 5G, private 5G there, but there's metal containers everywhere, right? And that's going to disrupt it. And so there are certain use cases where it makes sense. >> I've been in your basement, and you got some pretty intense equipment in there. You have private 5G in there. >> But for carpeted offices, it does not make sense to bring private. The economics don't make any sense. And you know, it runs hot. >> So where's it going to be used? Give us some examples of where we should be looking for. >> The early ones are obviously in mining, and you say in ports, in airports. It broadens cities because you've got so many moving parts in there, and always think about it, very expensive moving parts. The cranes in the port are normally expensive piece of kits. You're moving that, all that logistics around. So managing that over a distance where the wifi won't work over the distance. And in mining, we're going to see enormous expensive trucks moving around trying to- >> I think a great new use case though, so the Cleveland Browns actually the first NFL team to use it for facial recognition to enter the stadium. So instead of having to even pull your phone out, it says, hey Dave Vellante. You've got four tickets, can we check you all in? And you just walk through. You could apply that to airports. You could do put that in a hotel. You could walk up and check in. >> Analyst: Retail. >> Yeah, retail. And so I think video, realtime video analytics, I think it's a perfect use case for that. >> But you don't need 5G to do that. You could do that through another mechanism, couldn't you? >> You could do wire depending on how mobile you want to do it. Like in a stadium, you're pulling those things in and out all the time. You're moving 'em around and things, so. >> Yeah, but you're coming in at a static point. >> I'll take the contrary view here. >> See, we can't even agree on that. (men laugh) >> Yeah, I love it. Let's go. >> I believe the reliability of connection is very important, right? And the moving parts. What are the moving parts in wifi? We have the NIC card, you know, the wifi card in these suckers, right? In a machine, you know? They're bigger in size, and the radios for 5G are smaller in size. So neutralization is important part of the whole sort of progress to future, right? >> I think 5G costs as well. Yes, cost as well. But cost, we know that it goes down with time, right? We're already talking about 60, and the 5G stuff will be good. >> Actually, sorry, so one of the big boom areas at the moment is 4G LTE because the component price has come down so much, so it is affordable, you can afford to bring it all together. People don't, because we're still on 5G, if 5G standalone everywhere, you're not going to get a consistent service. So those components are unbelievably important. The skillsets of the people doing integration to bring them all together, unbelievably important. And the business case within the business. So I was talking to one of the heads of one of the big retail outlets in the UK, and I said, when are you going to do 5G in the stores? He said, well, why would I tear out all the wifi? I've got perfectly functioning wifi. >> Yeah, that's true. It's already there. But I think the technology which disappears in front of you, that's the best technology. Like you don't worry about it. You don't think it's there. Wifi, we think we think about that like it's there. >> And I do think wifi 5G switching's got to get easier too. Like for most users, you don't know which is better. You don't even know how to test it. And to your point, it does need to be invisible where the user doesn't need to think about it, right? >> Invisible. See, we came back to invisible. We talked about that yesterday. Telecom should be invisible. >> And it should be, you know? You don't want to be thinking about telecom, but at the same time, telecoms want to be more visible. They want to be visible like Netflix, don't they? I still don't see the path. It's fuzzy to me the path of how they're not going to repeat what happened with the over the top providers if they're invisible. >> Well, if you think about what telcos delivers to consumers, to businesses, then extending that connectivity into your home to help you support secure and extend your connection into Zeus's basement, whatever it is. Obviously that's- >> His awesome setup down there. >> And then in the business environment, there's a big change going on from the old NPLS networks, the old rigid structures of networks to SD1 where the control point is moved outside, which can be under control of the telco, could be under the control of a third party integrator. So there's a lot changing. I think we obsess about the relative role of the telco. The demand is phenomenal for connectivity. So address that, fulfill that. And if they do that, then they'll start to build trust in other areas. >> But don't you think they're going to address that and fulfill that? I mean, they're good at it. That's their wheelhouse. >> And it's a 1.6 trillion market, right? So it's not to be sniffed at. That's fixed on mobile together, obviously. But no, it's a big market. And do we keep changing? As long as the service is good, we don't move away from it. >> So back to the APIs, the eight APIs, right? >> I mean- >> Eight APIs is a joke actually almost. I think they released it too early. The release release on the main stage, you know? Like, what? What is this, right? But of course they will grow into hundreds and thousands of APIs. But they have to spend a lot of time and effort in that sort of context. >> I'd actually like to see the GSMA work with like AWS and Microsoft and VMware and software companies and create some standardization across their APIs. >> Yeah. >> I spoke to them yes- >> We're trying to reinvent them. >> Is that not what they're doing? >> No, they said we are not in the business of a defining standards. And they used a different term, not standard. I mean, seriously. I was like, are you kidding me? >> Let's face it, there aren't just eight APIs out there. There's so many of them. The TM forum's been defining when it's open data architecture. You know, the telcos themselves are defining them. The standards we talked about too earlier with Danielle. There's a lot of APIs out there, but the consistency of APIs, so we can bring them together, to bring all the different services together that will support us in our different lives is really important. I think telcos will do it, it's in their interest to do it. >> All right, guys, we got to wrap. Let's go around the horn here, starting with Chris, Zeus, and then Sarbjeet, just bring us home. Number one hot take from Mobile World Congress MWC23 day two. >> My favorite hot take is the willingness of all the participants who have been traditional telco players who looked inwardly at the industry looking outside for help for partnerships, and to build an ecosystem, a more open ecosystem, which will address our requirements. >> Zeus? >> Yeah, I was going to talk about ecosystem. I think for the first time ever, when I've met with the telcos here, I think they're actually, I don't think they know how to get there yet, but they're at least aware of the fact that they need to understand how to build a big ecosystem around them. So if you think back like 50 years ago, IBM and compute was the center of everything in your company, and then the ecosystem surrounded it. I think today with digital transformation being network centric, the telcos actually have the opportunity to be that center of excellence, and then build an ecosystem around them. I think the SIs are actually in a really interesting place to help them do that 'cause they understand everything top to bottom that I, you know, pre pandemic, I'm not sure the telcos were really understand. I think they understand it today, I'm just not sure they know how to get there. . >> Sarbjeet? >> I've seen the lot of RN demos and testing companies and I'm amazed by it. Everything is turning into software, almost everything. The parts which are not turned into software. I mean every, they will soon. But everybody says that we need the hardware to run something, right? But that hardware, in my view, is getting miniaturized, and it's becoming smaller and smaller. The antennas are becoming smaller. The equipment is getting smaller. That means the cost on the physicality of the assets is going down. But the cost on the software side will go up for telcos in future. And telco is a messy business. Not everybody can do it. So only few will survive, I believe. So that's what- >> Software defined telco. So I'm on a mission. I'm looking for the monetization path. And what I haven't seen yet is, you know, you want to follow the money, follow the data, I say. So next two days, I'm going to be looking for that data play, that potential, the way in which this industry is going to break down the data silos I think there's potential goldmine there, but I haven't figured out yet. >> That's a subject for another day. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on. You guys are extraordinary partners of theCUBE friends, and great analysts and congratulations and thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. >> Analyst: Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, this is a wrap on day two MWC 23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. Where Rob Hope and team are just covering all the news. John Furrier is in the Palo Alto studio. We're rocking all that news, taking all that news and putting it on video. Go to theCUBE.net, you'll see everything on demand. Thanks for watching. This is a wrap on day two. We'll see you tomorrow. (soft music)

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to Detroit, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are live day two of our coverage of Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had great conversations. Yeah. All day yesterday. Half a day today. So far we're talking all things, Well, not all things Kubernetes so much more than that. We also have to talk about storage and data management solutions for Kubernetes projects, cuz that's obviously critical. >>Yeah, I mean the big trend here is Kubernetes going mainstream has been for a while. The adopt is crossing over, it's crossing the CADs and with that you're seeing security concerns. You're seeing things being gaps being filled. But enterprise grade is really the, the, the story. It's going enterprise, that's managed services, that's professional service, that's basically making things work at scale. This next segment hits that part and we are gonna talk about it in grade length >>With one of our alumni. Moral morale to Molly is back DP and GM of Port Work's Peer Storage. Great to have you back really? >>Yeah, absolutely. Delightful >>To be here. So I was looking on the website, number one in Kubernetes storage. Three years in a row. Yep. Awesome. What's Coworks doing here at KU Con? >>Well, I'll tell you, we, our engineering crew has been so productive and hard at work that I almost can't decide what to kind of tell you. But I thought what, what, what I thought I would do is kind of tell you that we are in forefront of two major trends in the world of Kubernetes. Right? And the, the two trends that I see are one is as a service, so is trend number one. So it's not software eating the world anymore. That's, that's old, old, old news. It's as a service unifying the world. The world wants easy, We all are, you know, subscribers to things like Netflix. We've been using Salesforce or other HR functions. Everything is as a service. And in the world of Kubernetes, it's a sign of that maturity that John was talking about as a platform that now as a service is the big trend. >>And so headline number one, if you will, is that Port Works is leading in the data management world for Kubernetes by providing, we're going all in on easy on as a service. So everything we do, we are satisfying it, right? So if you think, if you think about, if you think about this, that, that there are really, most of the people who are consuming Kubernetes are people who are building platforms for their dev users. And dev users want self service. That's one of the advantages of, of, of Kubernetes. And the more it is service size and made as a service, the more ready to consume it is. And so we are announcing at the show that we have, you know, the basic Kubernetes data management as a service, ha d r as a service. We have backup as a service and we have database as a service. So these are the three major components of data. And all of those are being made available as a service. And in fact, we're offering and announcing at the show our backup as a service freemium version where you can get free forever a terabyte of, of, you know, stuff to do for Kubernetes for forever. >>Congratulations on the announcement. Totally. In line with what the market wants. Developers want Selfer, they wanna also want simplicity by the way they'll leave if they don't like the service. Correct. So that you, you know that before we get into some more specifics, I want Yeah. Ask you on the industry and some of the point solutions you have, what, it's been two years since the acquisition with Pure Storage. Can you just give an update on how it's gone? Obviously as a service, you guys are hitting all your Marks, developers love it. Storage are big part of the game right now as well as these environments. Yeah. What's the update post acquisition two years. You had a great offering Stay right In >>Point Works. Yeah. So look, John, you're, you're, you're a veteran of the industry and have seen lots of acquisitions, right? And I've been acquired twice before myself. So, you know, there's, there's always best practices and poor practices in terms of acquisitions and I'm, you know, really delighted to say I think this, this acquisition has had some of the best practices. Let me just name a couple of them, right? One of them is just cultural fit, right? Cultural fit is great. Entrepreneurs, anybody, it's not just entrepreneurs. Everybody loves to work in a place they enjoy working with, with people that they, you know, thrive when they, when they interact with. And so the cultural fit with, with Pure is fantastic. The other one is the strategic intent that Pure had when they acquired us is still true. And so that goes a long way, you know, in terms of an investment profile, in terms of the ability to kind of leverage assets within the company. So Pure had kind of disrupted the world of storage using Flash and they wanted to disrupt higher up the stack using Kubernetes. And that's kind of been our role inside their strategy. And it's, it's still true. >>So culture, strategic intent. Yeah. Product market fit as well. You were, you weren't just an asset for customers or acquisition and then let the founders go through their next thing. You are part of their growth play. >>Absolutely. Right. The, the beauty of, of the kind of product market fit is, let's talk about the market is we have been always focused on the global two k and that is at the heart of, you know, purest 10,000 strong customer base, right? They have very strong presence in the, in the global two k. And we, we allow them to kind of go to those same folks with, with the offering. >>So satisfying everything that you do. What's for me as a business, whether I'm a financial services organization, I'm a hospital, I'm a retailer, what's in it for me >>As a customer? Yeah. So the, the what's in it for, for me is two things. It's speed and ease of use, which in a way are related. But, but, but you know, one is when something is provided as a service, it's much more consumable. It's instantly ready. It's like instant oatmeal, right? You just get it just ad hot water and it's there. Yep. So the world of of it has moved from owning large data centers, right? That used to be like 25 years ago and running those data centers better than everybody else to move to let me just consume a data center in the form of a cloud, right? So satisfying the cloud part of the data center. Now people are saying, well I expect that for software and services and I don't want it just from the public cloud, I want it from my own IT department. >>This is old news. And so the, the, the big news here is how fast Kubernetes has kind of moved everything. You know, you take a lot of these changes, Kubernetes is a poster child for things happening faster than the last wave. And in the last couple of years I would say that as a service model has really kind of thrived in the world of Kubernetes. And developers want to be able to get it fast. And the second thing is they want to be able to operate it fast. Self-service is the other benefit. Yeah. So speed and self-service are both benefits of, of >>This. Yeah. And, and the thing that's come up clearly in the cube, this is gonna be part of the headlines we'll probably end up getting a lot of highlights from telling my team to make a note of this, is that developers are gonna be be the, the business if you, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, they're not a department that serves the business, they are the business that means Exactly. They have to be more productive. So developer productivity has been the top story. Yes. Security as a serves all these things. These are, these are examples to make developers more productive. But one of the things that came up and I wanna get your reaction to is, is that when you have disruption and, and the storage vision, you know what disruption it means. Cuz there's been a whole discussion around disruptive operations. When storage goes down, you have back m dr and failover. If there's a disruption that changes the nature of invisible infrastructure, developers want invisible infrastructure. That's the future steady state. So if there's a disruption in storage >>Yeah. It >>Can't affect the productivity and the tool chains and the workflows of developers. Yep. Right? So how do you guys look at that? Cuz you're a critical component. Storage is a service is a huge thing. Yeah. Storage has to, has to work seamlessly. And let's keep the developers out of the weeds. >>John. I think what, what what you put your finger on is another huge trend in the world of Kubernetes where at Cube Con, after all, which is really where, where all the leading practitioners both come and the leading vendors are. So here's the second trend that we are leading and, and actually I think it's happening not just with us, but with other, for folks in the industry. And that is, you know, the world of DevOps. Like DevOps has been such a catchphrase for all, all of us in the industry last five years. And it's been both a combination of cultural change as well as technology change. Here's what the latest is on the, in the world of DevOps. DevOps is now crystallized. It's not some kind of mysterious art form that you read about how people are practicing. DevOps is, it's broken into two, two things now. >>There is the platform part. So DevOps is now a bunch of platforms. And the other part of DevOps is a bunch of practices. So a little bit on both these, the platforms in the world of es there's only three platforms, right? There's the orchestration platforms, the, you know, eks, the open ships of the world and so on. There are the data management platforms, pro people like Port Works. And the third is security platforms, right? You know, Palo Alto Networks, others Aqua or all in this. So these are the three platforms and there are platform engineering teams now that many of our largest customers, some of the largest banks, the largest service providers, they're all operating as a ES platform engineering team. And then now developers, to your point, developers are in the practice of being able to use these platforms to launch new services. So the, the actual IT ops, the ops are run by developers now and they can do it on these platforms. And the platform engineering team provide that as an ease of use and they're there to troubleshoot when problems happen. So the idea of DevOps as a ops practice and a platform is the newest thing. E and, and ports and pure storage leading in the world of data management platforms >>There. Talk about a customer example that you think really articulates the value that Port Works and Pure Storage delivers from a data management perspective. >>Yeah, so there's so many examples. One of the, one of the longest running examples we have is a very, very large service provider that, you know, you all know and probably use, and they have been using us in the cable kinda set box or cable box business. They get streams of data from, from cable boxes all over the world. They collected all in a centralized large kind of thing and run elastic search and analytics on it. Now what they have done is they couldn't keep up with this at the scale and the depth, right? The speed of, of activity and the distributed nature of the activity. The only way to solve this was to use something like Kubernetes manage with Spark coming, bringing all the data in to deep, deep, deep silos of storage, which are all running not even on a sand, but on kind of, you know, very deep terabytes and terabytes of, of storage. So all of this is orchestrated with the Heco coworks and there's a platform engineering team. We are building that platform for them with some of these other components that allows them to kind of do analytics and, and make some changes in real time. Huge kind of setup for, for >>That. Yeah. Well, you guys have the right architecture. I love the vision. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is right in line with Pures. They've always been disruptors. I remember when we first interviewed the CEO when they started Yep. They, they stayed on path. They didn't waiver. EMC was the big player. They ended up taking their lunch and dinner as well and they beat 'em in the marketplace. But now you got this traction here. So I have to ask you, how's the business, what's the results look like? Either GM cloud native business unit of a storage company that's transformed and transforming? >>Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we just hit the two year anniversary, right John? And so what we did was just kind of like step back and hey, you know, we're running so hard, you just take a step back. And we've tripled the business in the two years since the acquisition, the two years before and, and we were growing through proven. So, you know, that that's quite a fe and we've tripled the number of people, the amount of engineering investments we have, the number of go to market investments have, have been, have been awesome. So business is going really well though, I will say. But I think, you know, we have, we can't be, we we're watching the market closely. You know, as a former ceo, I, you have to kind of learn to read the tea leaves when you invest. And I think, you know, what I would say is we're proceeding with caution in the next two quarters. I view business transformation as not a cancelable activity. So that's the, that's the good news, right? Our customers are large, it's, >>It's >>Right. All they're gonna do is say, Hey, they're gonna put their hand, their hand was always going right on the dial. Now they're kind of putting their hand on the dial going, hey, where, what is happening? But my, my own sense of this is that people will continue to invest through it. The question is at what level? And I also think that this is a six month kind of watch, the watch where, where we put the dial. So Q4 and q1 I think are kind of, you know, we have our, our watch kind of watch the market sign. But I have the highest confidence. What >>Does your gut tell you? You're an entrepreneur, >>Which my, my gut says that we'll go through a little bit of a cautious investment period in the next six months. And after that I think we're gonna be back in, back full, full in the crazy growth that we've always been. We're gonna grow by the way, in the next think >>It's core style. I think I'm, I'm more bullish. I think there's gonna be some, you know, weeding out of some overinvestment pre C or pre bubble. But I think tech's gonna continue to grow. I don't see >>It's stopping. Yeah. And, and the investment is gonna be on these core platforms. See, back to the platform story, it's gonna be in these core platforms and on unifying everything, let's consume it better rather than let's go kind of experiment with a whole bunch of things all over the map, right? So you'll see less experimentation and more kind of, let's harvest some of the investments we've made in the last couple >>Of years and actually be able to, to enable companies in any industry to truly be data companies. Because absolutely. We talked about as a service, we all have these expectations that any service we want, we can get it. Yes. There's no delay because patients has gone Yeah. From the pandemic. >>So it is kind of, you know, tightening up the screws on what they've built. They, you know, adding some polish to it, adding some more capability, like I said, a a a, a combination of harvesting and new investing. It's a combination I think is what we're gonna see. >>Yeah. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? You talked about some of the, the growth things in the investment, but as we round out Q4 and head into a new year, what are you excited about? >>Yeah, so you know, I mentioned our, as a service kind of platform, the global two K for us has been a set of customers who we co-create stuff with. And so one of the other set of things that we are very excited about and announcing is because we're deployed at scale, we're, we're, we have upgraded our backend. So we have now the ability to go to million IOPS and more and, and for, for the right backends. And so Kubernetes is a add-on which will not slow down your, your core base infrastructure. Second thing that that we, we have is added a bunch of capability in the disaster recovery business continuity front, you know, we always had like metro kind of distance dr. We had long distance dr. We've added a near sync Dr. So now we can provide disaster recovery and business continuity for metro distances across continents and across the planet. Right? That's kind of a major change that we've done. The third thing is we've added the capability for file block and Object. So now by adding object, we're really a complete solution. So it is really that maturity of the business Yeah. That you start seeing as enterprises move to embracing a platform approach, deploying it much more widely. You talked about the early majority. Yeah. Right. And so what they require is more enterprise class capability and those are all the things that we've been adding and we're really looking forward >>To it. Well it sounds like tremendous evolution and maturation of Port Works in the two years since it's been with Pure Storage. You talked about the cultural alignment, great stuff that you're achieving. Congratulations on that. Yeah. Great stuff >>Ahead and having fun. Let's not forget that, that's too life's too short to do. It is right. >>You're right. Thank you. We will definitely, as always on the cube, keep our eyes on this space. Mur. Meley, it's been great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining, John. >>Thank you so much. It's pleasure. Our, >>For our guests and John Furrier, Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with the cube about Coan Cloud Native Con at 22. We'll be back after a short break.

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to Detroit, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are live day two of our coverage of Coan Cloud Native, Con North America. John, we've had great conversations. Yeah. All day yesterday. Half a day today. So far we're talking all things, Well, not all things Kubernetes so much more than that. We also have to talk about storage and data management solutions for Kubernetes projects, cuz that's obviously critical. >>Yeah, I mean the big trend here is Kubernetes going mainstream has been for a while. The adopt is crossing over, it's crossing the CADs and with that you're seeing security concerns. You're seeing things being gaps being filled. But enterprise grade is really the, the, the story. It's going enterprise, that's managed services, that's professional service, that's basically making things work at scale. This next segment hits that, that part, and we're gonna talk about it in grade length >>With one of our alumni morale to Molly is back VP and GM of Port Work's peer Storage. Great to have you back really? >>Yeah, absolutely. Delightful to >>Be here. So I was looking on the website, number one in Kubernetes storage. Three years in a row. Yep. Awesome. What's Coworks doing here at KU Con? >>Well, I'll tell you, we, our engineering crew has been so productive and hard at work that I almost can't decide what to kind of tell you. But I thought what, what, what I thought I would do is kind of tell you that we are in forefront of two major trends in the world of es. Right? And the, the two trends that I see are one is as a service, so is trend number one. So it's not software eating the world anymore. That's, that's old, old, old news. It's as a service, unifying the world. The world wants easy, We all are, you know, subscribers to things like Netflix. We've been using Salesforce or other HR functions. Everything is as a service. And in the world of Kubernetes, it's a sign of that maturity that John was talking about as a platform that now as a service is the big trend. >>And so headline number one, if you will, is that Port Works is leading in the data management world for the Kubernetes by providing, we're going all in on easy on as a service. So everything we do, we are satisfying it, right? So if you think, if you think about, if you think about this, that, that there are really, most of the people who are consuming Kubernetes are people who are building platforms for their dev users and their users want self service. That's one of the advantages of, of, of Kubernetes. And the more it is service size and made as a service, the more ready to consume it is. And so we are announcing at the show that we have, you know, the basic Kubernetes data management as a service, ha d r as a service. We have backup as a service and we have database as a service. So these are the three major components of data. And all of those are being made available as a service. And in fact, we're offering and announcing at the show our backup as a service freemium version where you can get free forever a terabyte of, of, you know, stuff to do for Kubernetes for forever. >>Congratulations on the announcement. Totally. In line with what the market wants. Developers want self serve, they wanna also want simplicity by the way they'll leave if they don't like the service. Correct. So that you, you know, that before we get into some more specifics, I want to Yeah. Ask you on the industry and some of the point solutions you have, what, it's been two years since the acquisition with Pure Storage. Can you just give an update on how it's gone? Obviously as a service, you guys are hitting all your Marks, developers love it. Storage a big part of the game right now as well as these environments. Yeah. What's the update post acquisition two years, You had a great offering Stay >>Right In Point Works. Yeah. So look, John, you're, you're, you're a veteran of the industry and have seen lots of acquisitions, right? And I've been acquired twice before myself. So, you know, there's, there's always best practices and poor practices in terms of acquisitions and I'm, you know, really delighted to say I think this, this acquisition has had some of the best practices. Let me just name a couple of them, right? One of them is just cultural fit, right? Cultural fit is great. Entrepreneurs, anybody, it's not just entrepreneurs. Everybody loves to work in a place they enjoy working with, with people that they, you know, thrive when they, when they interact with. And so the cultural fit with, with Pure is fantastic. The other one is the strategic intent that Pure had when they acquired us is still true. And so that goes a long way, you know, in terms of an investment profile, in terms of the ability to kind of leverage assets within the company. So Pure had kind of disrupted the world of storage using Flash and they wanted to disrupt higher up the stack using Kubernetes. And that's kind of been our role inside their strategy. And it's, it's still true. >>So culture, strategic intent. Yeah. Product market fit as well. You were, you weren't just an asset for customers or acquisition and then let the founders go through their next thing. You are part of their growth play. >>Absolutely. Right. The, the beauty of, of the kind of product market fit is, let's talk about the market is we have been always focused on the global two k and that is at the heart of, you know, purest 10,000 strong customer base, right? They have very strong presence in the, in the global two k. And we, we allow them to kind of go to those same folks with, with the offering. >>So satisfying everything that you do. What's for me as a business, whether I'm a financial services organization, I'm a hospital, I'm a retailer, what's in it for me >>As a customer? Yeah. So the, the what's in it for, for me is two things. It's speed and ease of use, which in a way are related. But, but, but you know, one is when something is provided as a service, it's much more consumable. It's instantly ready. It's like instant oatmeal, right? You just get it just adho water and it's there. Yep. So the world of of IT has moved from owning large data centers, right? That used to be like 25 years ago and running those data centers better than everybody else to move to let me just consume a data center in the form of a cloud, right? So satisfying the cloud part of the data center. Now people are saying, well I expect that for software and services and I don't want it just from the public cloud, I want it from my own IT department. >>This is old news. And so the, the, the big news here is how fast Kubernetes has kind of moved everything. You know, you take a lot of these changes, Kubernetes is a poster child for things happening faster than the last wave. And in the last couple of years I would say that as a service model has really kind of thrived in the world of Kubernetes. And developers want to be able to get it fast. And the second thing is they wanna be able to operate it fast. Self-service is the other benefit. Yeah. So speed and self-service are both benefits of, of >>This. Yeah. And, and the thing that's come up clearly in the cube, and this is gonna be part of the headlines, we'll probably end up getting a lot of highlights from telling my team to make a note of this, is that developers are gonna be be the business if you, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, they're not a department that serves the business, they are the business that means Exactly. They have to be more productive. So developer productivity has been the top story. Yes. Security as a services, all these things. These are, these are examples to make developers more productive. But one of the things that came up and I wanna get your reaction to Yeah. Is, is that when you have disruption and, and the storage vision, you know what disruption it means. Cuz there's been a whole discussion around disruptive operations. When storage goes down, you have back DR. And failover. If there's a disruption that changes the nature of invisible infrastructure, developers want invisible infrastructure. That's the future steady state. So if there's a disruption in storage >>Yeah. It >>Can't affect the productivity and the tool chains and the workflows of developers. Yep. Right? So how do you guys look at that? Cause you're a critical component. Storage is a service, it's a huge thing. Yeah. Storage has to, has to work seamlessly. And let's keep the developers out of the weeds. >>John. I think what, what what you put your finger on is another huge trend in the world of Kubernetes where Atan after all, which is really where, where all the leading practitioners both come and the leading vendors are. So here's the second trend that we are leading and, and actually I think it's happening not just with us, but with other, for folks in the industry. And that is, you know, the world of DevOps. Like DevOps has been such a catchphrase for all of of us in the industry last five years. And it's been both a combination of cultural change as well as technology change. Here's what the latest is on the, in the world of DevOps. DevOps is now crystallized. It's not some kind of mysterious art form that you read about. Okay. How people are practicing. DevOps is, it's broken into two, two things now. >>There is the platform part. So DevOps is now a bunch of platforms. And the other part of DevOps is a bunch of practices. So a little bit on both these, the platforms in the world of es there's only three platforms, right? There's the orchestration platforms, the, you know, eks, the open ships of the world and so on. There are the data management platforms, pro people like Port Works. And the third is security platforms, right? You know, Palo Alto Networks, others Aqua are all in this. So these are the three platforms and there are platform engineering teams now that many of our largest customers, some of the largest banks, the largest service providers, they're all operating as a ES platform engineering team. And then now developers, to your point, developers are in the practice of being able to use these platforms to launch new services. So the, the actual IT ops, the ops are run by developers now and they can do it on these platforms. And the platform engineering team provide that as an ease of use and they're there to troubleshoot when problems happen. So the idea of DevOps as a ops practice and a platform is the newest thing. And, and ports and pure storage leading in the world of data management >>Platforms there. Talk about a customer example that you think really articulates the value that Port Works and Pure Storage delivers from a data management >>Perspective. Yeah, so there's so many examples. One of the, one of the longest running examples we have is a very, very large service provider that, you know, you all know and probably use, and they have been using us in the cable kind of set box or cable box business. They get streams of data from, from cable boxes all over the world. They collected all in a centralized large kind of thing and run elastic search and analytics on it. Now what they have done is they couldn't keep up with this at the scale and the depth, right? The speed of, of activity and the distributed nature of the activity. The only way to solve this was to use something like Kubernetes manage with Spark coming, bringing all the data in into deep, deep, deep silos of storage, which are all running not even on a sand, but on kind of, you know, very deep terabytes and terabytes of, of storage. So all of this is orchestrated with the he of Coworks and there's a platform engineering team. We are building that platform for them, them with some of these other components that allows them to kind of do analytics and, and make some changes in real time. Huge kind of setup for, for >>That. Yeah. Well, you guys have the right architecture. I love the vision. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is right in line with Pures. They've always been disruptors. I remember when we first interviewed the CEO and they started Yep. They, they stayed on path. They didn't waver. EMC was the big player. They ended up taking their lunch and dinner as well and they beat 'em in the marketplace. But now you got this traction here. So I have to ask you, how's the business, what's the results look like? You're a GM cloud native business unit of a storage company that's transformed and transforming. >>Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we just hit the two year anniversary, right John? And so what we did was just kind of like step back and hey to, you know, we're running so hard, you just take a step back and we've tripled the business in the two years since the acquisition, the two years before and, and we were growing through proven. So, you know, that that's quite a fee. And we've tripled the number of people, the amount of engineering investments we have, the number of go to market investments have been, have been awesome. So business is going really well though, I will say. But I think, you know, we have, we can't be, we're watching the market closely. You know, as a former ceo, I, you have to kind of learn to read the tea leaves when you invest. And I think, you know, what I would say is we're proceeding with caution in the next two quarters. I view business transformation as not a cancelable activity. So that's the, that's the good news, right? Our customers are large, >>It's >>Right. Never gonna stop prices, right? All they're gonna do is say, Hey, they're gonna put their hand, their hand was always going right on the dial. Now they're kind of putting their hand on the dial going, hey, where, what is happening? But my, my own sense of this is that people who continue to invest through it, the question is at what level? And I also think that this is a six month kind of watch, the watch where, where we put the dial. So Q4 and q1 I think are kind of, you know, we have our, our watch kind of watch the market sign. But I have the highest confidence. What >>Does your gut tell you? You're an >>Entrepreneur. My, my gut says that we'll go through a little bit of a cautious investment period in the next six months. And after that I think we're gonna be back in, back full, full in the crazy growth that we've always been. Yeah. We're gonna grow by the way, in the next, I think >>It's corn style. I think I'm, I'm more bullish. I think it's gonna be some, you know, weeding out of some overinvestment, pre covid or pre bubble. But I think tech's gonna continue to grow. I don't see >>It's stopping. Yeah. And, and the investment is gonna be on these core platforms. See, back to the platform story, it's gonna be in these lower platforms and on unifying everything, let's consume it better rather than let's go kind of experiment with a whole bunch of things all over the map, right? So you'll see less experimentation and more kind of, let's harvest some of the investments we've made in the last couple >>Of years and actually be able to, to enable companies in, in the industry to truly be data companies because absolutely. We talked about as a service, we all have these expectations that any service we want, we can get it. Yes. There's no delay because patients has gone Yeah. From the pandemic. >>So it is kind of, you know, tightening up the screws on what they've built. They, you know, adding some polish to it, adding some more capability, like I said, a, a a, a combination of harvesting and new investing. It's a combination I think is what we're gonna see. >>Yeah. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? You talked about some of the, the growth things in the investment, but as we round out Q4 and head into a new year, what are you excited about? >>Yeah, so, you know, I mentioned our, as a service kind of platform. The global two K for us has been a set of customers who we co-create stuff with. And so one of the other set of things that we are very excited about and announcing is because we're deployed at scale, we're, we're, we have upgraded our backend. So we have now the ability to go to million IOPS and more and, and for, for the right backends. And so Kubernetes is a add-on, which will not slow down your, your core base infrastructure. Second thing that that we, we have is added a bunch of capability in the disaster recovery business continuity front, you know, we always had like metro kind of distance Dr. We had long distance dr. We've added a near sync Dr. So now we can provide disaster recovery and business continuity for metro distances across continents and across the planet. Right? That's kind of a major change that we've done. The third thing is we've added the capability for file block and Object. So now by adding object, we're really a complete solution. So it is really that maturity of the business Yeah. That you start seeing as enterprises move to embracing a platform approach, deploying it much more widely. You talked about the early majority. Yeah. Right. And so what they require is more enterprise class capability and those are all the things that we've been adding and we're really looking forward to it. >>Well it sounds like tremendous evolution and maturation of Port Works in the two years since it's been with Pure Storage. You talked about the cultural alignment, Great stuff that you are achieving. Congratulations on that. Great stuff >>Ahead and having fun. Let's not forget that that's too life's too short to do. It is. You're right. >>Right. Thank you. We will definitely, as always on the cube, keep our eyes on this space. Mur. Meley, it's been great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining, John. >>Great. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Our, >>For our guests and John Furrier, Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with the cube about Cob Con Cloud native Con at 22. We'll be back after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

perfect all right we're good uh muhammad you ready yeah i have a watery eyes always so i always tell my interviewers or the producers that sometimes it shouldn't there shouldn't be a problem in the 10-minute window but well yeah so do that while i'm talking you'll see it on the return feed it's a little delayed but and most people have tears when they see dave vellante yeah i i have that effect on people thanks for that okay we all said we good leonard why don't you go alex bye-bye yeah alex got the i just got the thumbs up we're good okay muhammad here we go on dave in five four three we continue now with the network powering hybrid work now we just heard from lawrence wang on the rapid move to wi-fi 6e which is going to increase wi-fi efficiency enable routers and devices to more efficiently use bandwidth and that additional spectrum that lawrence talked about that means more wi-fi channels which is really going to help reduce overlap between networks and make a noticeable difference especially in crowded places we're here now with muhammad imam who's senior director of product management for catalyst switching this is a multi-billion dollar business for cisco if you ever listen to cisco's earnings calls you'll hear the cfo scott heron he'll talk about the catalyst 9000 and double-digit growth and switching this is the fastest ramping product in cisco's history so muhammad that's got to make you feel pretty good yes indeed thank you david and thank you for having me here yeah great to have you so uh look catalyst 9000 it's been really successful what does the 9000x bring to the table for your customers yeah absolutely and um indeed the catalyst 9000 family of switches have been extremely popular with our customers as you said fastest ramping product in cisco's history and the last four or five years we have really evolved the catalyst 9000 family of switches to a very comprehensive product portfolio um addressing the various enterprise use cases that that we that we address but now we see increase in demand on the networks and that really stems from some of the most recent trends that we are seeing right part of it is hybrid workspaces is going to be a video dominant hybrid workspace right a lot of cases is going to be high definition 4k 8k videos we are seeing cloud-based applications everywhere right my spreadsheet is used to be on excel sheet now it's either an office 365 or smartsheets my files used to be on my computer now it's on in the dropbox right so these are trends that are really uh putting pressure on our networks we are also seeing trends where vr headsets are becoming common they are being used for trainings and education use cases webex hologram in certain industries we are seeing robotics are becoming more and more popular and they come with a lot of um applications that are very latency sensitive and as lawrence mentioned earlier wi-fi 6e is really making over the year multi gigabit wi-fi possible right and for all of these different trends and the recent technologies that that are evolving we really need the network that can really address and deliver for these applications and that's where we are bringing the catalyst 9000 x that addresses the increase in network demand we are expanding the catalyst 9000 family with top-of-line premium introductions in the access layer of the switches of the network as well as in the aggregation and core layers so we are bringing 400 gig high-speed core and enterprise core and edge layers of the network we are bringing point-to-point ip ipsec security which will give you 100 gig of ipsec encryption um high density of multi-gigabit which is becoming very common as we evolve our wi-fi networks because we don't want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than a gig high density of 90 watt powering the smart buildings use cases right right um these are all different use cases that are being enabled by the catalyst 9000 and the new getless 9000x family is really addressing some of these new trends and applications well it's good because the metaverse is coming too and we're going to need some help with that right who knows how much bandwidth will need for metabolism absolutely yeah guarantee will be a lot more but so i want to i want to hear more about the the new products that you've just launched and maybe how these offerings are going to help with this new hybrid work model that we've just been discussing absolutely so let me start with the catalyst 9300 we are introducing the catalyst 9300x which is the highest density full multi-gigabit platform with 100 gig uplinks and 90 watt of power on every port available right that's an industry first that we are bringing on the catalyst 9300 family it is also capable of one terabit per second of a stacking which is also unheard of in the industry this will serve our customers with all the new trends that we talked about including the hybrid world um and some of the new trends that are going to come in the next decade but 9300x is not just a high-end campus switch it can also be a lean branch and a box solution where you don't really need an sd van but you do need an encryption point to point from the catalyst 93 from your front branch with the catalyst 9300x to the data center or to the cloud so for the first time we are introducing the ipsec based encryption natively in the hardware and that means no compromise on performance and you can get up to 100 gig of encrypted traffic with the catalyst 9300x second is the catalyst 9400 we are introducing soup 2 and soup 2 xl with 100 gig uplinks enhancing and the the scale and performance giving our customers options for fully loaded line rate multi give it board on a 10 slot chassis right it will give you two to three times bandwidth boost to your existing line cards since it completely removes the over subscriptions and you know the soup 2 on the catalyst 9400 is coming up with the version of the asic that we used in the past on the catalyst 9600 that means it's also bringing the core capabilities that we used that we today have on 9600 on the catalyst 9400 and that brings high density 10 gig um ports on the catalyst 9400 without over subscription right with the core capabilities then we have the catalyst 9600 where we are introducing is supervisor 2 which really triples the bandwidth per slot on the catalyst 98600 it introduces 400 gig uplink and truly drives the transition to 200 gig in the core get 6k customers uh with excel scale requirements now they can transition to the cat 9k with soup 2. and by the way we are also introducing a combo line card on the catalyst 9600 which means now you don't have to burn a whole slot for your uplink pores in fact you can get up to 400 gig of uplink with this new line card um so that's that's a bunch of things that we are bringing on the catalyst 9600 in line with catalyst 9600 we are also introducing catalyst 9500x 100 gig box with 400 gig uplinks in a fixed form factor and all the benefits that i just talked about on the on the supervisor 2 and 9600 it's also available in a fixed form factor on catalyst 9500x got it so that's in summary kind of the multiple uh product lines that we are introducing yeah it's a lot to unpack there i mean your the big theme there of course is optionality you got a lot of choices for customers i love the encrypt everything without a trade-off you know no performance impact and anytime you can reduce my oversubscription it's going to make me happy you know muhammad we've reported in our breaking analysis segments the importance of custom silicon and not every company has the resources or the expertise to develop their own silicon cisco of course does catalyst 9k is bringing silicon 1 based products with this launch tell us more about that why is this important yeah that's really exciting development that we have on the cad 9k family because you know the silicon one is a powerful asic that enables high performance and high scale with modern silicon architecture bringing the architect a converged architecture for switching as well as routing cad 9k as we know has been running on a uadp asic which has been a programmable asic it has served us really well so far on the cat9k family but with the silicon one we are taking it to another level silicon one brings the capabilities of uadp asic and unlocks the excel scale and high performance in the enterprise switches this is a critical and foundational element to meet the core requirement for the next ticket silicon one is a 12.8 terabits per second chip supports up to 10 million routes supports much deeper buffers brings multi-slice voq architectures with this new architecture silicon 1a6 has paved the way to transition the cad 6k xl deployments to cat 9k right so that's kind of the the um the silicon one uh importance in the ket99k family that we are bringing now yeah and it brings differentiation a lot of people kind of sometimes don't appreciate that but but when you have the control like that you can do things that you might not be able to do with off-the-shelf silicon but so but i i want to ask you what about customers that previously purchased from you as you evolve the portfolio to 9k x how do you protect their investment yeah thank you for asking that question because when we started building the cad 9k we always thought about investment protection for our customers so if you buy today how you will have a very long life for that for that product and you will be able to unlock new powers on that platform that you have purchased maybe five years back right that's exactly what we are doing with the catalyst 199000x talking about modular right on the modular side the supervisors that that that we are introducing now are backward compatible with the line cars that you already have in some cases the lime card throughput is doubling and tripling because now you have a new machine that is going to power these line cards right so you don't have to change your line card you just change your supervisor and you have much higher performance and scale with this new supervisor similarly on the stackables you can stack with the existing catalyst 9300s for example and you will be able to you don't have to rip and replace everything it's not a forklift upgrade for our customers you can continue benefiting from your existing catalyst 9000 deployments and add to the power with the catalyst 9000x components as well as new platforms that we are introducing nice that's key this just speaks to the software content that you guys i know you have a lot of software engineers running around and this is welcome to the 2020s folks new world you know i i muhammad zero trust was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic but it's really become a mainstream topic today we talked about the infrastructure we know security has to be built in from the start it can't be bolted on and zero trust is really top of mind for customers how are their security requirements changing as a result of hybrid work and and how do you make sure that as we shift to hybrid that these new security requirements are addressed what are you doing there absolutely and we know as you said security is top of mind for our customers in fact security has been highlighted as the number one reason why a lot of customers pick cisco and cat9k we have a comprehensive zero truss architecture with software defined access where we started with segmentation and expanded into endpoint classification and visibility now we are taking that to the next level and we are introducing talus powered truss assessment for unmanaged endpoints to further make the the workplace is stronger with zero trust and software defined access truss analytics it detects traffic from end points that are exhibiting unusual um behavior by pretending to be um using a mag spoofing or probe is spoofing or man the metal techniques when truss analytics detects such anomalies it signals endpoint analytics to lower the trusted score so we have a trusted score system when when the trusted score goes down it shows up on the dashboard and the network admin can completely deny or limit the access to the network from these endpoints from other security aspect that we are introducing and i touched on that briefly earlier is um for non-sdvan internet only branches where we are where where services security services might be in the cloud right that's a trend that we are seeing to secure that connectivity from a lean branch to the cloud we are introducing the ipsec capability with the catalyst 9300x and that's built in as as we just talked about and as far as the automation is concerned for these use cases they are we are bringing those automation with our command center the cisco dna center and we are bringing the full life cycle of automation as well as assurance for the secure connectivity that is being provided with the with the cisco dna center well a couple takeaways there for me i mean endpoint security has really become much more important up for obvious reasons when you have remote workers the built-in ipsec just that really emphasizes that you got to have it you know built in from the ground up you can't just bolt it on and the automation is key the number one problem that csos face is you know lack of talent so automation you know definitely helps helps with that so okay muhammad thank you so much really appreciate you coming on in a moment we'll look at private 5g and what's been happening at mobile world congress you're watching cube's coverage of the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, welcome to the cubes coverage of Boomi's out of this world. I'm John for your host of the cube at two great guests here, Chris port, chief operating officer of Boomi and Mandy deli wall. Who's the chief marketing officer of Boomi, Chris Mandy. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having us. >>This segment is really about the Boomi, uh, trend and customers, um, and the success you guys had obviously now on a new trajectory go to the next level. And you got a lot of trajectory and success. Chris, as the chief operating officer, we've talked many times about the customer base, uh, and growing poised perfectly for this next wave. Give us the update on the macro trends around your customer base and how Boomi's helping them and how you're, you're getting your growth. >>Absolutely. And John really look forward to seeing you soon later, yo, again, this is a great moment in time. We're now more than 18,000 customers, 800 partners globally. We've actually seen an acceleration of the business through the pandemic. Obviously people are trying to do more with less. So it's just an amazing time to see what our customers are doing. Obviously, an explosion of SAS applications. And when we started thinking about, you know, explosion of endpoints, explosion of data, and now you compound that with a labor sheet, which you know, I know if anyone's looking at movies hiring more than we've ever hired in our life. And obviously we're all seeing this in space. So now basically a high productivity, high time to value tool set like Boomi is an imperative. It's no longer a luxury. And we're seeing that accelerate where our customers you've heard Chris talking about 189,000 unique importance that we now connect to. That's the power of movie. You do that in minutes and that's happening every single day. So again, just extending our footprint, extending our customer, really taking advantage. We're seeing there are real tailwind for the business right now. So really excited. Are you excited to work with, >>You know, Chris, uh, Dave Volante, we're talking about, you know, how do you tell the next big breakout success is rogue usage, shadow it. When you have rogue users, that means there's some innovation happening and you guys have a lot of customers that are hiring because it's all new, it's all new innovation, Mandy. This is kind of like a marketing opportunity. It's like rogue is not a bad word here. There's new functionality. You guys are showing the market that you go with Boomi, you can get more value. And then new things just emerge. New positions, open up value is being created. It's kind of a sign of value. Not, not a negative. It's a positive. >>Yeah, absolutely. We give our customers innovate. They're looking to modernize, transform new business models, right? The world we live in today. And so there's really your choice. We abstract away that complexity. So our platform gives people the ability to go build quickly. And so that's really the thought leadership. >>You know, I love, I love Andy Jassy former CEO of AWS. Now the CEO of Amazon always said, uh, Chris, you know, you know, he's no compression algorithm for experience. And he always talked about Amazon being misunderstood. And then finally people go, oh my God, that's the flow. That's the formula of success. And then they're late to the game. A lot of similarities in the Boomi culture, uh, with his law under undifferentiated, heavy lifting, you guys take away and create net new opportunities. This is an operational opportunity for customers. What's your quick comment on that? >>I love the quote again, 26 billion minutes of working with our customers directly. That's a perfect way to put it. I mean, it's not, it's a mode. There's no substitute for that. Trying to bring that to bear every day. And again would just the imperative of being agile speed, time to value. I mean, Forrester did a study recently, you know, Boomi 65% faster in terms of building integration, manual coding, and more importantly, legacy middleware. And these are now just embarrass. They're not luxuries anymore. So again, you know, when we take the, you know, we bring the bear that 26 billion minutes, everything we do from a successful or which is now double more than double from a footprint, you know, over the last 12 to 18 months. And again, trying to build more and more people into that organization, but cumulating success, successes that part of our DNA. I mean, you know, the thousand plus people across the globe, it's what we think about every single day is how to make customers successful. And again, to your point, there's, there is no substitute for the experience of, >>You know, um, we've been covering Boomi for a long time, Mandy, you know that, and, and we kind of got the picture right away. And you mentioned Chris, some of those KPIs, those are real value points that you look to, but ultimately you guys are, have been successful. And I think one of the tell signs is customer customer value always have great customers. So customer success, this is a pass term SAS term. I I-PASS term is part of the, of the cloud. You have to have customer sets built in from the beginning. You guys always had that as part of your culture, customer success, organizations and operations. What's the update, Chris with customer it's customer success. >>Yeah. Again, I mean, you know, more than doubling the team over the last 18 months in building this even more into the DNA of Boomi overall, we've completely overhauled what we think is a world-class onboarding experience for both our new customers, as well as our existing customers. John, you brought it up, you know, call it road, call it whatever. I mean, we're existing customers every day when you give them the best onboarding experience too, so that they can accelerate their journey, which kind of gets into the Boomi person, our whole community, which when we were together last time, face to face, you wouldn't be seen. We weren't just two years ago, we're now over a hundred thousand members and part of our community growing every single day, incredibly excited about that because that brings the knowledge base to all of their experience. And again, it really brings what customers really want to interact in a digital way and the Boomi versus so, so much significantly the number of knowledge base articles, the number of marketplace type vehicles that our cohorts construct talking to each other about what they're doing is so much more than comms. >>We didn't do this year, but again, you know, the Boomi versus so vibrant now it's kind of a force multiplier for more importantly, how our customers are learning from each other. Yeah. And just to tag onto that, John, over 38% of our customers are publicly. There's a movement here, industry, average of averages are high. So the platform really sells itself and customers nowadays, we're very grateful for that. >>I think you guys are a great example of product market fit and go to market fit. As people look at these metrics, you gotta nail customer success, which from day one, you gotta have the usage metrics. You've gotta have the integration. Now you've got hyper automation. And as you start getting the ecosystem, Mandy, you've got a branding opportunity here. You got, you have, uh, ecosystem, which is another tale sign of success. When you start having that word of mouth. I remember when shadow, it was kind of like poo-pooed, but that was the road behaviors became the cloud. You starting to see you guys see this ecosystem, you've kind of crossed the chasm, create opportunity for your brand. What's your reaction. >>Yeah, absolutely. And we haven't done any brand work yet. Right? That's common. So, you know, we're just getting started. >>Okay. So I have to ask what this viral thing going on. That's going to go, boom, go Boomi it. So a lot of kind of double entendres there, it and boom, you know, everyone knows that icon on their text. Boom. You know, it's good. Things are booming. What's going on? He was the update go, boom. It Boomi is, >>Yeah. So it's go movie. And this was something that our customers brought to us during the pandemic. We didn't have much opportunity. Honestly, we were all sitting behind our computer screens. So we decided that we were going to start to hold wine conversations with customers, just to check in, see how they're doing, see how we can help and get them together to share a story of how they're handling disruptions to the business. So over the course of several months, talking to customers globally, I started to hear people say, well, I told my so-and-so because it'll get done. If you have a problem, doesn't matter what it is. And all of a sudden they crystallized for me like, you know what, this is a movement. And so this wasn't something the marketing team dropped up. This is something we heard from our and have taken it to market. Now our team members talk about it or customers are talking about it. And really, again, it's a Testament to the pervasiveness and capability platform. You start with the connect, but you're able to grow with us as your business changes and opportunities advisement. >>Well, you know, that's a really good indicator of, uh, net, net, net promoter score kind of vibe when people are giving you your marketing slogans, uh, from happy customers. So a really great congratulations to the whole team there. Can you give us some specific examples since you mentioned referenceable customers of customer examples and take me through some of the highlights in your opinion, that kind of show where this is going in terms of customer use case and value. >>Yeah. And I'll start with one that's very near and dear and obviously very relevant, right? There's there's been some press on Moderna here recently. Um, you know, they were in the race to find a cure for COVID-19. They were looking to bring on new employees and they couldn't bring them on onboard these people. So they leveraged the technology to do an integrated, uh, pursuit of driving customers onto their own to their employee platforms. So we ripped, it celebrated their onboarding cut that time in half. So they could actually start working on what matters. So then undifferentiated heavy lifting around the administrative tasks associated with getting my social security number, as well as other aspects that we all have joining a company that's automated, you can get to work faster. So that really helped improve drug development time and make a real difference in terms of getting the vaccine to market. >>So that's a net that's one tangible example, second example, customer of ours, uh, drink customer with net suite. They had to find different routes to market, right? And so they went direct to consumer. So they expanded their business through a global pandemic by leveraging Boomi technology and integrating commerce with their financial systems to be able to get to customers directly and also manage their Omni channel in a, in a new way. So again, innovator die. Right? Great. When you have another customer in India, that's a government, small country, citizens had to go in in-person together for their health ID cards. Well, offices are closed. Nobody's allowed to go be in person anymore. Within one week, they digitally transform. So they can disseminate healthcare cards in a critical time in a global pandemic to their citizens and have them get healthier. So three tangible examples of how we just in the last 18 months have been able to help these customers. >>So Chris, you guys have been operating a great business. Okay. Now you're on your own. You're independent. You got some great financing partners behind you, independent company, great trajectory building on that. A lot of economies of scale, you guys have built into it. Mandy, you've got great customers. Where's the next journey for you guys, take us through the operational growth strategy, uh, for Boomi. >>Well look, I mean, obviously we're on a hiring screen or hiring than we've ever done, and that's pervasive across the entire business, real focus on product engineering, who our go-to market, but we're also, you know, when you heard Chris, we're really redefining I-PASS. I mean, when I think about what I'm most excited about, it's a few things a we're violently aligned from kind of call it the chairman of the board to the newest team member. You know, we know what the opportunity is. We're all aligned, but as importantly, it's what we're doing from a product perspective. You know, when you've heard about intelligent connectivity, you've heard about automating connectivity, what we're doing from a discover perspective, EDA, everything we're doing in the marketplace, really accelerating what the adoption opportunities are for movie across the whole Boomi verse and across all of those new customers that we're acquiring and then ultimately seeing what they do. I mean, again, I, I, I love what Mandy says. I mean, it literally always, I feel so strongly about this within every single company in the world. I mean, it literally should be, no movie is because the opportunities are expansive and endless in terms of what we can do together. And that's what I'm excited about is really kind of unleashing this company on the world, see what we can do next. It was, we really think about this next iteration, >>Mandy, real quick to you, uh, when people say go Boomi it, when your customers say that, what does it mean to them? Why are they saying it? Take us through some of the psychology and some of the implications of, and the meaning of the word go Boomi from a customer perspective. >>Yeah. Great question. I think it's, first of all, it's a Testament of the trust, right? It's just going to work, right? So go get it done. It'll be fast. It'll be easy. It is not complex at all. Drag and drop visual interface. Just go make it happen and go move on to the next data is critical, right? It's the lifeblood of any organization or that backbone of connectivity that gives our customers confidence to go to work. >>Awesome stuff. Chris, final word for you. If you can just share in your opinion and be talking to your customers out there and future customers, what would you say to them as you guys go this next leg of the journey for Boomi? What would you say to them? >>Yeah, I would say come partner with us. Come on, understand what we can do for your business. Come understand what true intelligent, automated connects in Lightspeed in terms of how fast we can do that with you. And let's go explore the art of the possible because to me, that's >>Awesome, Chris. Great to see you, Amanda and great to see you virtually. Can't wait to see you in person and next event, uh, and congratulations on all the success and looking forward to covering the next leg of the journey of Boomi. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This is the cube coverage of Boomi's out of this world event. I'm John furrier hosted the cube. Thanks for watching.

(fastpaced upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market, embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba Fabric Composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform. Primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDP and OSPF BGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric Composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven, if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the plexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with the THEO network products. So in Fabric Composer, we built an integration layer into it that interacts with other orchestrators, vCenter, VMware vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to vCenter that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric Composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great? So three things, actually four right. To simplify or integrate and automate. And it's kind of two and two way, I'm going to to call it. and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Pensando PSM technologies embedded into the 10K. Now we can use Aruba Fabric Composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, Fabric Composer does network primarily. You bring policy into it. You've got one single pane of glass now that does network and policy. It actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. For instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks. What if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that we're, we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments. Where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10K is a very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric Composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them SecOps, NetOps. A lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team, network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, if they're not split, and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba Fabric Composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10K's is a lease switch, it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use Fabric Composer to manage this lease Spitch and the policy you could use Fabric Composer just to manage the least switch and connect and interoperate the lease to the spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Aruba spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabric Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers love their CLIs. We fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, Fabric Composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Netflix. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, right they, they want that CLI access. So you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the netOps view together is important because let's say, let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team. That's really the netOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility, you can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? What a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the iland segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation. But particularly of a compute and virtual type environment. So when you, when you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with the Fabric Composer, we've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So we didn't know about the virtual machines? So it said obviously, a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's, there's a scale problem in policy distribution at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So Fabric Composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names then you can distribute. The 10K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's auto and automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. Now a lot of customers with VMware vCenter, For example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, Fabric Composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto them. And there's one, one final thing that I just want to tell you before, before we move on. There's, there's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation. Meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like vCenter with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the vSphere side, you got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So Fabric Composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping your machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the vCenter side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the Fabric Composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric Composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your, tells you what's going on immediately. Down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network. Down to the end-to-end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So Fabric Composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up with the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day, hopefully. You'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM. We still fully embrace for deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer. They have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort, and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it 'cause it scales really well. It allows Fabric Composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if your that customer that wants to do single pane of glass use Fabric Composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruba tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out. You got the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and the topology map, zero trust. And then remediation with deep^ened inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements. Really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante for theCube. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements coming right up. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba fabric composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform, primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center, networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDPs, OSPs PGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the complexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with with your network products. So in fabric composer, we built an integration layer into it, that interacts with other orchestrators. V-Center, VMware Vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to V-Center that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great, so three things actually for right simplify, you integrate and automate, and it's kind of two and two way I'm going to call it and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Persando PSM technologies embedded into the 10 K. Now we can use Aruba fabric composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, fabric poser does network primarily you bring policy into it, you've got one single pane of glass now that doesn't network in policy, it actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. Like for instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks or frameworks so what if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that where we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10 K the very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them. SecOps, NetOps a lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, they're not split and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba fabric composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10 K's at Leafs, which it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use fabric composer to manage this lead switch and the policy you could use fabric composer just to manage the lease switch and connect and inter-operate the Leaf's to a spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Rube Leaf spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabri Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers that love their CLIs, we fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own API APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, fabric composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Networks. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, they want that CLI access, so you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the NetOps view together is important because let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team, that's really the NetOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility. You can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? When a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the land segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation, particularly the compute-virtual type environment. So when you, you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with a fabric composer. We've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So what do we know about the virtual machines? So it's undoubtedly a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's a scale problem in policy distribution, at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So fabric composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names. Then you can distribute the 10 K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's also an automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. A lot of customers with VMware Vcenter for example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, fabric composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto the, and there's one, final thing that I just want to tell you before we move on, There's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation, meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like V-Center with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the VSphere side, you've got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those, that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So fabric composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping the machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the center side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the fabric composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your tells you what's going on immediately, down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network down to the end to end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So fabric composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up at the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day hopefully, you'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM, we still fully embrace. For deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer that they have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it because it scales really well. It allows fabric composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if you're the customer that wants to do single pane of glass, use fabric composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruber tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out, you get the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and a topology map, zero trust, and then remediation with deepened spend inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements, really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements, coming right up. (soft music)

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

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM, think 20, 21. We're gonna talk about the edge. Like what is the edge, how it's going to evolve. And we're gonna take a look at an autonomous vessel use case, which is quite interesting with me as Rob high. He was an IBM fellow VP and CTO. IBM edge computing. Rob. Welcome. Great to see you again. Thanks Dave. Appreciate that. Yeah. So let's start with the basic question here. You know, people's like, Oh, what is the edge? Like, it's one big thing and it's not, it's it's many things, but how should we think about the edge and why should enterprises, you know, feel like it's necessary to begin to lean in? >>Well, so let's just start with the use cases. Uh, you know, what edge means is the ability to put a camera on a manufacturing floor, you know, perhaps juxtaposed with a robot monitoring the work that the robot is doing using AI visual recognition to detect whether what that robot is doing is producing high quality parts or not. And to be able to do that in real time, to be able to use that analytic thin to, you know, quickly remediate any kind of quality issues, uh, helps lower costs, it helps increase your yield and it helps increase the overall efficiency of your production processes. Or if not that then putting it in something a little bit. It's perhaps a little bit more familiar to us, the idea of an autonomous vehicle, you know, being able to, you know, drive and, and, uh, do driver assistance to drivers safety kinds of features, you know, all of that requires compute and having that compute where people are actually performing these tasks based on the data that they're receiving at the moment that they receive it, they are able to process that real time, be able to give them the feedback that allows them to make better decisions, to be able to do that. >>Not only with lower latency, but actually with better protection of their data, uh, better protection of their personal information or private information. If you're thinking about, you know, the business in which they operate, you know, be able to do that, even when the network fails, be able to do that without necessarily having to transmit tons and tons of data back to the cloud, especially if you end up not actually using that anywhere. That's what as computing really means. >>Yeah. So it sounds like the edge isn't that maybe we shouldn't think of it as a place, but the most logical place to process the data, um, depending on latency and other factors, it's a, that's a good way to look at it. So >>It's just where we do our work. >>Yeah. Well, you do the work, right? That's that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. So, you know, we always were talking about the pandemic changing the way we think about things. And I wonder if you can comment on, on the, the edge context as come back from, you know, work from home or remote work, um, you know, think 20, 22, we hope it's going to be face-to-face could edge play a part in that has the pandemic, uh, made you think differently about the opportunities at edge? >>Yeah. And in fact, what we've seen is the pandemic is actually beginning to accelerate digital transformation. If you think about it, you know, any store that wanted to survive the same Deming could only do so by basically introducing a digital presence, you know, the ability to buy online. And even if you're picking up at the store, picking up the curbside, you know, you can't go into a restaurant without getting that QR code that gives you, you know, your digital menu, um, trying to get workers back into both the factories, as well as the warehouses and offices, and to do so safely, be able to ensure that they're wearing the face mask and socially distancing properly. All of these things I think have driven digital transformation. And if you think about the task of, you know, buying online and picking up the store while store is better, have a pretty good idea of where their inventory is. >>Um, they need to know exactly where that product is so they can quickly pick it and get it available to the client before they arrive at the store. Um, and so that's edge computing. We need edge computing to be able to automate the processes of inventory tracking down to individual items and where they're located throughout the store to be able to do the recognition for whether people are or are not being changing their social distancing or wearing their PPE, um, to be able to ensure that our processes are as automated as possible to limit the amount of human interaction that's required in order to perform these processes. All of that I think has accelerated both digital transformation, as well as particularly the use of edge computing, uh, in, in all of our businesses. >>I think about, you know, the forced March to digital in 2020. And if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business, but to your, my big takeaway from what you just said is that digital transformation is just starting and now people really have some time to think about that, that digital strategy. And as we think about doing things more safely, maybe with less human intervention, we love autonomous vehicles. Examples just cause because there's a technically they're challenging, but, but I wonder if you could tell us the story of the Mayflower autonomous ship it's it's upcoming journey, it's going to be cruelest across the Atlantic, unbelievable collecting data, you know, talk about how edge relates to that story. What can you tell us? >>Well, first of all, this is simply talk about the task of navigating a ship from one port on one side of the world to another port across the ocean, across the Atlantic. Um, you know, the ocean is a dangerous place. Uh, yes, it's wide open it's, you know, lots of water, but the reality is it's full of barriers. Of course, you've got land barriers, you've got other ships, you've got Marine life, you've got debris that gets stuck dropped in the ocean. And so the task of navigating is actually quite difficult. And again, to the same point that we've made earlier, you have to have local compute in order to really be able to make those decisions fast enough with enough acuity, with enough clarity, to be able to, um, to be able to safely safely navigate around those kinds of obstacles. So we have to put compute in the ship. >>So the Mayflower ship is as I sort of implied, uh, a, a ship that will be autonomous. There are no human beings involved in the, in operating the ship. It has to be able to on its own, both recognize these obstacles, recognize on the ship, recognize about recognized, um, you know, that cargo container that happened to fallen off, uh, some other ship and floating through the ocean, uh, recognize, you know, uh, rain life, uh, whales and other, other, uh, fish and birds that might be, uh, uh, on, in the way. Um, and, and, and to be able to, um, do all that, you know, entirely without any human intervention. So that compute power is really a prime example of an edge computer. It is compute in the, in the business of navigation, uh, making decisions about, um, the things that it sees and, and making decisions about how best to circumvent those issues. >>Um, now along the way, I should also say part of what the med flagship is going to do is not only exercise the task of navigation and prove that, um, these algorithms can efficiently and effectively, uh, bring that shift from one side of the world to be upside safe, but along the way, it's going to conduct science is going to, um, collect water samples for the, um, chemical makeup of, of the oceans at various points along the way, it's going to be sampling for microplastics or, uh, examining phytoplankton for its health and life. Uh, it's going to be the detecting wave motions and the wave energy that might be indicative of how the world is transforming in the presence of global climate change. Um, these science packages that are going to be formed are also being performed autonomously without human intervention. And that actually opens up a very exciting potential future, which is the idea of these autonomous ships navigating the oceans, collecting data that can then be brought back for the scientists to examine so that they, the scientists are not having to go out and spend weeks and months at a time in perilous conditions. >>These potentially the only conditions, um, collected that data, but rather they can remain safely at land. The ship will collect the data and they can analyze that data from their home labs. So this is actually a really exciting project, but one that I think would demonstrate not only the idea of edge computing, but also the advances in navigation and Marine science. >>Yeah, because I mean, the ship has to navigate itself. Not only is it bringing back data, but there's a great, great example. I met a lot of the work in machine intelligence today is done in the modeling side. This is, this, this is inference going on in near real time. Uh, which we think is where, where the, the, the action is. That's why we love the autonomous, because there's a lot of IBM tech involved in here as well. Is there not, I mean, you've got to have software and you've got your edge devices. You've got, you know, automation capabilities. I mean, it's not right. That this is like serious technical challenge. >>Yeah. Well, we were approached by the primary team on this project and it didn't take us long to realize the utility that some of our technology would have to advancing their project. And so you're right. I mean, we have things like operational decision manager, ODM, which typically is used in the financial services industry, but now it's being applied to the rules of navigation. We've called the Culver over cold rags. Um, we've got, uh, our AI services that do visual recognition because obviously we've got to be able to detect and identify, um, the things that, that the ship is seeing along the way and be able to distinguish what those things are. Uh, we have our IBM edge application manager, which is being used to manage deployment of these kinds of workloads, and frankly, all of the workloads that are hosted in the ship, getting that managed and deployed onto the ship. Uh, and, and of course, you know, all these things have to be integrated. And so that's just a small sampling of the kinds of technologies, but it's a good example of where I think the edge kind of represents the combination of what we have all been working with in this industry, which is how do we bring technologies together, the solver problem as an integrated solution, >>You mentioned financial services. So I wonder if we could, you know, think beyond shipping maybe, uh, what, what are you seeing in other industries? Are there any patterns that are developing where clients are saying, Hey, we need this sort of this capability. What can you tell us? >>So edge computing is it's probably greatest demand right now in manufacturing, uh, in industrial four dash zero, uh, kinds of, uh, environments where, you know, most of the industry, the industrial industry, the markets have grown up largely dependent upon operations, technology, OT, but one of the things that people need in these kinds of environments is the additional benefits that come from AI. And we've talked about, you know, using AI to do visual recognition on manufacturing processes, looking at quality inspection, for example, but you know, there's other aspects of production optimization of worker safety. We talked a little bit about that, um, around, uh, you know, predictive maintenance and asset management, uh, you know, these kinds of additional things that are necessary to really run your factory efficiently, or you're, you know, you're a drilling rig or your energy production systems. All these kinds of industrial processes can benefit from the advances that are occurring in analytics in, um, in, and then of course, having localized compute to do that with, to both do those kinds of decisions in real time, but also to offload the amount of transmission, the data that we have the transmitting back to the cloud. >>So industry four O or manufacturing is one big area retail. We talked a little bit about that, but you think about, you know, point of sale terminals, and the idea of being able to brute two offers at point of sale, to be able to do price checking to help you navigate the store is digital signage. Um, you know, all the user experiences, spillage and spoilage and loss prevention, these are all kinds of use cases that will benefit retail retailers, um, lot of demand. And of course, again, the need to be able to do that locally within the store, we talked to touch a little bit on automotive. The whole automotive industry right now is going through a really fundamental transformation where virtually every automobile now is being imbued with more and more compute capacity and localized processing for doing driver's safety and, and car maintenance and, and, and even short of, you know, full autonomy, which is of course is another topic in its own, right? Uh, lots of experiences that can be brought there as well. So lots of opportunity in distribution, manufacturing, retail banking, uh, uh, virtually every industry that we've looked at has some opportunity for, um, leveraging the benefit that does computing. >>It's hard to get cars right now because the chip short is. But, um, I wonder real quick, if you could talk about 5g, you hear a lot about 5g, there's a ton tons of hype there. Uh, how should we be thinking about 5g? How real is it? What's your take in terms of its impact on the edge? >>So a couple of thoughts here. One is 5g obviously is accelerating, and it has the effect of accelerating edge computing, because one of the benefits of 5g of course, is lower latency and higher bandwidth. And that kind of opens people's minds, the potential to leverage the network connectivity of equipment that otherwise, you know, is hard to connect. If you think about the factory floor for a moment in all the kinds of equipment you have on the factory floor, if you had to hard wire, all that equipment to get access to the compute power on that, that could be a very expensive proposition. You'd like to kind of wirelessly connect that equipment. And that's one of the things that 5g brings to the table, because some of the spectrum that five peak uses has less potential to interfere with that equipment then than you would otherwise. So I think that what we're going to see is 5g will sort of disproportionately benefit I'll call them industrial or commercial unit use cases as compared to 4g and LTE, which were very much centered on consumer use cases. 5g is accelerating as competing in a many ways. 5g actually depends on edge computing. It doesn't mean that we can't do educated beginning without 5g. We can, we can certainly do it for DLP than wireline. Uh, but I think 5g is going to have a very symbiotic effect on, on edge computing, >>Just like wifi was enabler on mobile, but this is a, you know, much, much, much larger potential. Rob. We got to go, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights. Love to have you back. Awesome. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cubes coverage of IBM. Think 2020, 21, 2021. We'll be right back.

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM, think 2020 >>one brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021 we're gonna talk about the Edge like what is the Edge, how it's going to evolve? And we're gonna take a look at an autonomous vessel use case, which is quite interesting with me is rob high and IBM fellow VP and Cto, IBM edge computing rob. Welcome. It's great to see you again. >>Thanks. Dave appreciate that. Good seeing you too. >>Yeah, So let's start with the basic question here, you know, people are like, well what is the Edge? Like it's one big thing and it's not, it's, it's many things, but how should we think about the edge and why should enterprises, you know, feel like it's necessary to begin to lean in? >>Well, let's just start with the use cases. Uh, you know, what edge means is the ability to put a camera on the manufacturing floor, you know, perhaps juxtaposed with a robot monitoring the work that the robot is doing using ai visual recognition to detect whether what that robot is doing is producing high quality parts or not. And to be able to do that in real time to be able to use that analytic then too, you know, quickly remediate any kind of quality issues, helps lower cost, it helps increase your yield and it helps increase the overall efficiency of your production processes. Or if not that, then putting it in something that's perhaps a bit more familiar to us. The idea of an autonomous vehicle, you know, be able to, you know, dr and do driver assistance to driver safety kinds of features, you know, all of that requires compute and having that compute where people are actually performing these tasks based on the data that they're receiving at the moment they receive it be able to process that real time, give them the feedback that allows them to make better decisions to be able to do that not only with lower latency, but actually with better protection of their data, better protection of their personal information or private information. If you're thinking about the business in which they operate, you know, be able to do that even when the network fails to be able to do that without necessarily have to transmit tons and tons of data back to the cloud, especially if you end up not actually using that anywhere. That's what as computing really means. >>Yeah. So it sounds like the edges, maybe we shouldn't think of it as a place, but the most logical place to process the data of, depending on late and see and other factors. It's that's a good way to look at it. So it's >>yeah, just where we do our work. >>Yeah. Well you do the work, right. That that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. So you know, we always we're talking about the pandemic, changing the way we think about things. And I wonder if you can comment on the the edge context as we come back From we work from home or remote work. You know, I think 2022, we hope it's going to be face to face. Uh good edge play a part in that. Has the pandemic uh made you think differently about the opportunities that edge? >>Yeah. And in fact what we've seen is the pandemic is actually beginning to accelerate digital transformation. If you think about it, you know any store they wanted to survive. This pandemic could only do so by basically introducing a digital presence, you know, the ability to buy online. And even if you're picking up at the store, picking up the curbside, you know you can't go into a restaurant without getting that Q. R. Code that gives you your digital menu. Um Trying to get workers back into factories as well as the warehouses and offices. And to do so safely be able to ensure that they're wearing their face masks and socially distancing properly. All of these things I think have driven digital transformation. And if you think about the task of buying online and picking up the store well stories better have a pretty good idea of where their inventory is. Um They need to know exactly where that product is. So they can quickly pick it and get it available to the client before they arrive at the store. Um And so that's edge computing. We need edge computing to be able to to automate the processes of inventory tracking down to individual items and where they're located throughout the store. To be able to do the recognition for whether people are or not maintaining social distancing or wearing the PP. E. Um to be able to ensure that our processes or as automated as possible to limit the amount of human interaction that's required in order to perform these processes. All of that I think has accelerated both digital transformation as well as particularly the use of edge computing uh in all of our businesses. >>I think about, you know, the force marched to digital in 2020 and if you weren't a digital business you were out of business. But you're my big takeaway from what you just said is a digital transformation is just starting. And now people really have some time to think about that, that digital strategy and and as we think about doing things you know more safely, maybe with less human intervention, we love autonomous vehicles. Examples, just because they're technically they're challenging. But I wonder if you could tell us the story of the Mayflower autonomous ship, its upcoming journey, it's going to be cruelest across the atlantic, unbelievable collecting data. You know, talk about how edge relates to that story. What can you tell us? >>Well, first of all, this is simply talk about the task of navigating a ship from one port on one side of the world too, another port across the ocean, across the atlantic. Um you know, the ocean is a dangerous place. Yes, it's wide open, it's you know, lots of water, but the reality is it's full of barriers. Of course, you've got land barriers, you've got other ships, you've got marine life, you've got debris that gets dropped in the ocean. And so the task of navigating is actually quite difficult. And again, to the same point that we made earlier, you have to have local compute in order to really be able to make those decisions fast enough with enough acuity with enough clarity to be able to be able to safely safely navigate around those kinds of obstacles. So we have to put compute in the ship. So the may fire ship is as I sort of implied a ship that will be autonomous. There are no human beings involved in in operating the ship. It has to be able to on its own. Both recognize these obstacles, recognizing the ship, recognize about, recognize um, you know, that cargo, uh, container that happened to have fallen off some other ships and floating through the ocean, recognize, you know, rain life, uh, whales and other other fish and birds that might be, uh, in the way. Um, and, and, and to be able to um, do all that, you know, entirely without any human invention. So that compute power is really a prime example of an edge computer. It is compute in the, in the business of navigation, making decisions about the things that it sees and making decisions about how best to circumvent those issues. Um, Now along the way, I should also say part of what the Mayflower ship that's going to do is not only exercise the task of navigation and prove that these algorithms can efficiently and effectively bring that shit from one side of the world to the other side safely. But along the way, it's going to conduct science is going to collect water samples for the chemical makeup of the oceans. At various points along the way it's going to be sampling for microplastics are examining phytoplankton for its health and liveliness. It's going to be the detecting wave motions and the wave energy that might be indicative of how the world is transforming in the presence of global climate change. Um These science packages that are going to be formed are also being performed autonomously without inhuman invention. And that actually opens up a very exciting potential future, which is the idea of these autonomous ships navigating the oceans, collecting data that can then be brought back for the scientists to examine so that they the scientists are not having to go out and spend weeks and months at a time in these perilous conditions, these potentially lonely conditions um collecting that data, but rather they can remain safely on land. The ship will collect the data and they can analyze that data from their home labs. So this is actually a really exciting project, but one that I think will demonstrate not only the idea that computing, but also the advances in navigation and marine science. >>Yeah, because I mean the ship has to navigate itself. Not only is it bringing back data, but there's a great, great example. I mean a lot of the work in machine intelligence today is uh in the modeling side. This is this is this is inference going on in near real time, uh which we think is where the action is. That's why we love the autonomous because there's a lot of IBM tech involved in here as well. Is there not? I mean, you've got to have software and you've got your edge devices, you've got, you know, automation capabilities. I mean, it's not all right. This is like serious technical challenge. >>Yeah. Well, we were approached by the primary team on this project and it didn't take us long to realize the utility that some of our technology would have to dancing their project. And so you're right. I mean, we have things like operations, decision and ODM which typically is used in the things of the services industry, but now it's being applied to the rules of navigation would call the cold cold rags. Um We've got our Ai services that do visual recognition because obviously we've got to be able to detect and identify um, the things that the ship is seeing along the way and be able to distinguish what those things are. Uh we have our imagine application manager which is being used to manage deployment of these kinds of workloads and frankly all of the workloads that are hosted in the ship, getting that managed and deployed onto the ship. Uh and and of course, you know, all these things have to be integrated. And so that's just a small sampling of the kinds of technologies. But it's a good example of where I think the edge kind of represents the culmination of what we have all been working within this industry, which is how do we bring technologies together to solve a problem as an integrated solution? >>You mentioned financial services. So I wonder if we could, you know, think beyond shipping, maybe what, what are you seeing in other industries? Are there any patterns that are developing, where clients are saying, hey, we need this sort of this capability? What can you tell us? >>So, I think it is, it's probably greatest demand right now in manufacturing, uh, in industrial 4.0, uh, kinds of environments where, you know, most of the industry, the industrial industries and markets have grown up largely dependent upon operations technology. Ot but one of the things that people need in these kind of environments is the additional benefits that come from A. I and we talked about using ai to do visual recognition on manufacturing processes, looking at quality inspection, for example, but there's other aspects of production optimization of workers safety. We talked a little bit about that around uh, predictive maintenance and asset management. Uh, you know, these kinds of additional things that are necessary to really to run your factory efficiently or you're you're drilling rig or your energy production systems. All these kinds of industrial processes can benefit from the advances that are occurring in analytics. And um, and, and then of course, having localized compute to do that with, to both do these kinds of decisions in real time, but also to offload the amount of transmission that we end up transmitting back to the cloud. So industry 40 or manufacturing is one big area retail. We talked about that, but you think about point of sale terminals and the idea of being able to do offers at point of sale to be able to do price checking to help you navigate the stores, digital signage. Um, you know, all the user experiences, spillage and spoilage and loss prevention. These are all kinds of use cases that will benefit retail retailers. Um, lot demand, of course. Again, the need to be able to do that locally within the store. We talked to touch a little bit on automotive. The whole automotive industry right now is going through a really fundamental transformation where virtually every automobile now is being imbued with more and more compute capacity and localized processing for doing driver safety and car maintenance and, and, and even short of, you know, full autonomy, which is of course is another topic in its own right. Uh lots of experiences that can be brought there as well. So lots of opportunity and distribution, manufacturing, retail banking. Virtually every industry that we've looked at has some opportunity for leveraging the benefits of the computer. Yeah, >>it's hard to get cars right now because the chip shortest. But I wonder real quick if you could talk about five G, you hear a lot about five Gs tons of hype there. How should we be thinking about 5G? How real is it? What's your take in terms of its impact on the edge? >>So a couple of thoughts here, one is 5G obviously is accelerating And it has the effect of accelerating edge computing because one of the benefits of 5G of course is lower latency and higher bandwidth. And that opens people's minds. The potential to leverage the network connectivity of equipment that otherwise is hard to connect. If you think about the factory floor for a moment and all the kinds of equipment you have on the factory floor. If you had to hardwire all that equipment to get access to the compute power on that, that could be a very expensive proposition. You'd like to kind of wirelessly connect that equipment and that's one of things that five day brings to the table because some of the spectrum five take uses has less potential to interfere with that equipment than than you would otherwise. So I think that what we're going to see is 5G will disproportionately benefit. I'll call him industrial or commercial use cases as compared to four G. And L. T. Which were very much centered on consumer use case five Gs accelerating edge computing in many ways Five G actually depends on edge computing doesn't mean that we can't do edge computing without five do we can we can certainly do it for dlt even wire line But I think 5G is going to have a very symbiotic effect on edge computing. >>Yeah just like wifi was enabler mobile but this is much much much larger potential rob. We gotta go. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights. I'd love to have you back, awesome. Thanks. >>Alright appreciate it. Thank >>you for watching everybody's Day Volonte for the cubes coverage of IBM. Think 2020 21 2021 will be right back. >>Yeah. >>Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Okay, we're now going >>to explore what it's like to be the CEO of a fast paced growth company in Silicon Valley. And how the cloud, however, you wanted to find the cloud public cloud on Prem Hybrid, etcetera. How it supported that growth. And with me is Kathy Southwick, who is the CEO of pure storage. Kathy is really deep experience. Managing technology organizations spent a number of years overseeing A T and T s cloud planning and engineering and another few years overseeing a team of a Couple 1000 network and I T engineers working to break the physical stranglehold of fossilized telco networks, implementing network functions, virtualization and a software defined methodology for the company. And, of course, you spent the last couple of years is the CEO of Pure. So Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the program. >>Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. >>You're very welcome. And so so >>given your >>experience with cloud, you know, dating back to really the early part of last decade. How did you look at cloud back then and how How is it evolved from your point of view? >>You know, it's Ah, it's an interesting question because I think that we've there's some things that have moved very fast and there's some some things that are very much the same as they were even a decade ago. I think that all companies are very focused on How do you think about Cloud? Do you think about it as on Prem? And when I started, we really were focused on an on Prem solution, and I'm in building an on Prem private cloud to help modernize our business. So I think that, you know, with that all companies are still in that same mindset of how do I want to think about Cloud? And how do I want to think about that on Prem versus Public versus, you know, combination or some type of hybrid solution? So I think all of us around that journey, it just seems like it's taken. It's probably a bit longer than most of us probably thought from beginning. >>So as a CEO thinking about that evolution, how has that informed the way you think about applying specifically the public cloud to pure business. >>You know, I think that we've been a for pure ourselves. I think we're in a really unique position. We were essentially born in the cloud. So we're, you know, company. That's 10 11 years old. And if I If I give the contrast of that of 18 t being, you know, 130 year old company Onda having a lot of applications that have, you know, lived historically on prim. There's very different issues and challenges that you have pure has had that. I think the advantage just like many other companies that were born in the cloud who have can see what advantages are very quickly. And we made decisions early on that said that we were gonna actually do both. We were gonna look to say, How do I put those applications in that in that data, whether it was on public or in on Prem and be able to do that both in the i t. Side as well as within the product side? So how we build our products now, >>as I mentioned up front, you have obviously a lot of experience managing large technology teams. My question is. When you first saw the emergence of the modern cloud, how did you communicate with your team members? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of building your own private cloud, so I guess that's less threatening to people. But what was it like? You know, Was there a concern? You know, with the eager to jump in? What was that dynamic like? And how did you manage >>it? You know, it's really it's a different depending on the different part of the organization. So I'll give you kind of two things I learned one of them was that our teams in the operation side, they saw it as a huge advantage. They saw it as an opportunity to really modernized to really get themselves both their own individual skill sets advanced, as well as provide a better level of service for our internal, you know, customer, so to speak. Our application in our data partners that we had to work with, um, they thought is an opportunity to bring agility to their applications quicker speed to market, um, or currency of their applications. So they actually got some benefits that they weren't. Actually, I'll call planning for they were they had the opportunity toe get investment in their applications without having to put the that investment on themselves. I would tell you the thing I learned from the teams, this is probably might be a little bit surprised. But often, you know, leaders believe like, you gotta have all the answers. You're gonna drive everything you're gonna let make sure everyone knows what needs to get done and what I actually found. This was actually one of my big moments, I think, was our Our individuals are employees are teams. They're so brilliant and so bright on driving change. And a lot of times leaders, I think, get in the way that so for cloud and adoption, it was really about me getting out of the way. It was really about setting that north star for where we want to go from the ability to deliver fast and quick for our business. And they get out of the way and let our teams actually drive. So it was a great, um, it was we actually actually saw the reverse. I saw more employees wanting to drive, and I needed to, like, back out and just say, Here's what we need to go. Let them drive us there. >>Alright, So I gotta ask you don't Please don't hate me for asking this question, but was your your gender and advantage was at a disadvantage. It wasn't really irrelevant in that regard. >>It was a relevant um, I think that it was I actually I truly believe it's irrelevant. I think it was literally recognizing that leaders need to set vision and what we want to achieve and let our letter of teams help us drive to get there. And I think that that is, you know, gender neutral. I think it's really about, you know, kind of checking your ego and everything else out to the side. And it's really about empowering people in our teams. Thio help drive us there. >>So thinking about that that learning specifically are there any similar tectonic shifts that you're you're seeing today where you can apply that experience? I'm just like, for instance, new modes of application development and requiring new skill sets are, or maybe another that you can think of. >>Yeah, I think I think honestly, it traverse is everything that we that we have to do as a you know, as a leader of a technology team, and whether you're in a high growth company like Pure or you're in a company that's trying to take costs out of your business or trying to, you know, do things. I think that it, um it really is a matter of leaders needing to set the stage. And so if we're trying to drive, you know, changing the business, it's really making sure that we're doing I'll calm or more empowering of our employees and they because they will see the way that we can get there. It's just a matter of, you know, letting them have that ability to do it. >>So you joined pure around two years ago and obviously growing very quickly. I love pandemic has changed the trajectory of that growth, but still good outlook. Um, but Silicon Valley fast paced company, you know, I kind of put it in the camp of the the work days, and the service now is that could have similar similar cultural patterns there. So you talked a little bit about this, but I wonder if we could come back and more specifically how you're leveraging cloud, how you're thinking about it, you know, on Prem Hybrid, Now the edge. And how did that contribute Thio Puros growth? >>Yeah, that za great question because I think that why I shared earlier, you know, we were essentially born in the cloud. I think that what it's really driven us is to be thinking more forward about where customers were going and what their challenges are. So whether it's for the I t. Teams on what we're trying to do to deliver for our business and, you know, innovation, they're obviously trying to make sure they can hit their revenue goals and all those things that important that every business deals with. But we also have that same mindset on how we develop our products. So it's really all driven by where the customer is going that they need data mobility. They need application mobility. They need really portability so that the moment that you have that ability where you can kind of control your destiny and define it, and you only could get that by having, you know, applications that are portable and data that is mobile and secure, that you have that kind of flexibility. So I think for pure we've been definitely in a great position to drive for our customers or drive where our customers are going. And so we have to find our entire product set. So not just how we operate as a business and run our business. But then how we define for our customers Same mindset is if our customers are going to the cloud that we need, have products that can help them to be in the cloud or be, you know, on print and let them decide what that looks like. Well, >>it's interesting you mentioned that and I hearken back to the The Port Works acquisition, which is an attempt to really change the way application development has done is another sort of approach Thio in a sort of modern data architecture, you, as the CEO of a technology company, most CEO, is that I know inside the tech companies that they're sort of the dog Fuding or champagne drinking, you know, testing. So So had you already started to sort of use that tech? Are you starting to, you know, Does it support that vision that you just put forth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >>Yeah, It does. So we eso We had not been using port works as a za product. We were just starting down that path of looking at How do we do container ization for the applications that we do have on Prem? That's both in our engineering side as well as within I t. And so But we quickly have recognized, just like you know, And part of that acquisition is applications or companies won't have the ability to have that portability of their applications and have that flexibility that they're all striving for unless they've done things like containerized or applications made them that they're able to move them across different cloud environments, whether that's on Prem or off Prem or some hybrid eso for ourselves. You know, Port Works was a really critical acquisition, will help us on our own journey of doing the application, modernization and putting that keep those capabilities in place. But it will also enable our customers to have that same flexibility. So, again, going back to the we've adopt, these things aren't like a this is for this group, and this is for you know, this customer. It's really about how we operate both internally and then what we are providing for our customers so that portability and being able to have control of your own destiny, that's that's really to me what hybrid cloud is all about. And you can't really achieve that If you don't have some of these capabilities within your, you know, within kind of your toolbox. >>Great. Thank you for that. So I'm interested in is the head of, ah technology group at a tech company? And what are the meaningful differences? I mean, a lot of differences, but relative to CEO of a large telco or or other incumbent, you know, what are some of the good, the bad? And, uh, you know, the ugly, the differences. >>Yeah, you know, it's I meet with a lot of CEOs across Silicon Valley and we kind of joked that when you are working in a company that is a technology based company, you know, everybody knows how to dio, you know, because you do you have a brilliant engineers and and that they do know. I think the difference that you start to see is that you know, I t is, um is required to make sure that availability is their inherent in what you're doing on immediate roll out with like, you know, an application that's occurring. That's very different than how you do product lifecycle management. Um, what what we've what I've seen, actually, though, is more similarities. I know that's probably surprised to you, but coming out of a T and T, what I have been working on those last couple of years was actually doing the combination of engineering and I t into one organization and that you do have a lot of benefits for, for how you can then develop, how you can manage and the skill sets. There's a lot of similarities. So there's there's actually probably more similarities between companies and on what they're trying to achieve than than you would probably think there would be just because we're all trying to make sure that we can develop quickly. How about is >>it relates to cloud Cathy? I mean, I remember the early days of cloud, a lot of the big banks that we could build our own cloud. We can essentially compete at scale with with Amazon, where you know the big bank on. Then I think they quickly realized well, the economics actually don't favor us necessarily. Do you think there's a different perception about the use of cloud between sort of traditional incumbents and a tech company in Silicon Valley? And if so, how? >>So now I think that the if you are, you know, a bank is you refer to, and having it really is where you're starting from. If you have a very large infrastructure footprint and application footprint, your applications probably not born in the cloud. There's a lot of modernization that has to be done with those applications so that they could operate as efficiently in a public cloud as an example. And I think that's something that sometimes gets overlooked is there are enormous benefits going to public cloud. But there's also cost if your applications or your data doesn't really fit as well in that type of environment. So I think that for large enterprises like the banks, some of the telcos they've got very large footprints of infrastructure. Already, those investments have been made, and what they're really looking for is how doe I increase my ability to, you know, whether it's agility or its speed, or it's lower cost or it's all those things, and I think that's the That's a different path of different journey that they're on. So they're trying to balance all those equations of, you know, the economics as well as the ability to have, you know, no more investment or minimal investment in that infrastructure. For companies like Pure, where we started off of those investments are decision and kind of. The decision tree that we use is if it makes sense. And I don't have to make that investment on Prem for whatever reason, that I should go ahead and make that investment in a public cloud strategy or a hybrid cloud strategy kind. Differentiate that because I think that it's different depending on the company. You are, um, and so it really kind of depends on where you're starting from then. It also depends on what you're trying to achieve if you're just trying to achieve an economic solution. If you're trying to achieve a strategic solution, if you're trying to get agility. Andi, I think it is different for companies, and it's different depending where you're at in your kind of journey. So for a Silicon Valley company whose you know hyper growth, you know, one. We're very focused on abilities. You know everything from scale, because we've got to scale quickly. And those are things that we don't wanna have to start going and building all these data centers to go do that. We don't have those embedded investments. So it's Ah, it's a real difference in where your starting point is. And I think there I think there's value in in all those different type of approaches, >>right? And it's a real advantage for you that you don't have to shell out all that cap ex on Data Center. >>That's right. Um, as you look >>back at the last 10 years of cloud, you know, it was largely about eliminating the heavy lift of infrastructure deployment and SAS if I ng you know the business, what do you see? Going forward? What do you think the was gonna unfold in the 2020 is? Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you expect meaningful differences? >>I think that we're going to get better as, um as you know, technology leaders on how to quickly make decisions. Um, and not its have it less political. And I think Kobe is actually taught us a lot about that around companies more willing to make. I'll call it a A you know, a faster decision and remove some of the red tape. I've heard this from many of my peers that things that might have taken them months and months to get approved. Um, it's nowadays if even if they even have to go get approval. So I think that what we're going to see is we'll see the continuance of, um, you know, a public and I'll call really hybrid cloud type of solutions. And I think it will be more purposeful about what goes there and how. How that can help us toe, you know, I'll call it enable us much faster than we've been able to do it before. I think that's been our challenges. We've, you know, we get mired into some of the you know, the details of some of these things that maybe it would be easier for us to just make the decision to move forward than Thio. Keep going around around on what's the right way to do it. Yeah, >>so that's interesting. You're saying about the fast decisions? I felt like, ah, lot of 2020 was very tactical. Okay, go deal with the work from home, etcetera. Although you you definitely see I t spending, uh, suppressed in 2020. Our forecast was minus 4% but we're saying it's gonna grow. We actually see a decent snapback. You know, what are you seeing? Generally, Not even necessarily pure. But when you talk to some of your colleagues, you obviously in the technology business, it's good to be in the technology business these days. But to use do you see spending, you know, generally coming back And maybe the timing first half, maybe a little soft second. What are you seeing >>there? Yeah, almost identical wage that. I think that we'll see, you know, a little bit of, ah tendency toe, not really hold back, but really kind of see what's happening in the first quarter of the year. There's a lot, you know, going on with companies and everyone's having to kind of balance at what that looks like. I do see. And what I'm hearing from several of my peers is that, you know, it's not necessarily budget cuts. It might be budget re directions. It might be rude prioritization, but definitely technology investments are still there, and it's still important for businesses to keep on their journeys on. But we do see that even at pure as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market as well, do you? What >>about the work from home piece? I mean, prior to co vid, I think the average was about 15 or 16% of employees work from home. You know, now it's gotta be, you know, well, over in the high seventies, Onda CEO is that we've talked to suggest that, you know, that's gonna come down in the first half, maybe down toe, still pretty high 50 60%. But then eventually is gonna settle at a higher rate than it was pre pre covert. Maybe double that rate may be in the 30 35 maybe even 40%. You know? What are you expecting >>Something probably very similar. I think that what companies have recognized and I actually tell you CEO have thought this many of them for many years that there is a huge value value and having some type of hybrid model. There's value in having, you know, both from a business perspective as well as a personal perspective. So employees work life balance and trying to balance that. So I think that, you know, we a pure and myself, As you know the CEO hugely expect that we will see some type of you know, I'll call leveling off, figure out what's the right for the right group. And I think what we don't want to get into is, you know, Chris prescriptive that says, You know, this is what the company will look like as a whole. I think it really is going to come down to certain certain types of work are more conducive to a more work, remote environment others need to have. And I always kind of uses term of individual, you know, productivity versus team. You know, productivity. We've seen, you know, great advances and or individual productivity. A team productivity is still a challenge when you're still trying to do very collaborative, you know, brainstorming sessions. And so we are looking at capabilities to be able to enable our employees to do that. But there there's some things you just can't replace. The human interaction and ability to very quickly inter actively, you know, five minutes catch someone to do that. So I think we'll see. We'll see both. We'll see some leveling off, and I think we'll see some areas of businesses that have once thought You can't do that remote. They might actually say, Hey, that is work that commute remote So I think we'll see a combination of both. That's an >>interesting perspective on productivity. And what's the What's the old saying is You could go go faster alone. But further as a team and and not a lot of folks have been talking about that team productivity, we we clearly saw the hit the positive hit on productivity, especially in the in the technology business. So So my question then is so you expect? You know H Q doesn't go away. Maybe it gets, you know, maybe it gets smaller, Uh, but so is their pent up demand for technology spending at the headquarters. Because you've been you've been, you know, pushing tech out out to the edge out to the remote workers. Securing those remote workers figuring out better ways to collaborate is their pent up demand at H. Q. >>Um, absolutely. We've been, you know, we've been actually exploring different technologies. We've been uh, looking at what are things that you know could help create a different kind of experience, eh? So I do think it will be some different types of technology. Those would be the things that maybe aren't even out there developed yet on Have you create some of those comparable experiences. So I think that the notion of you know individuals will continue to thrive, but we've got to start working on How do we continue to enhance that? That team, um, collaborative productivity environment that looks and feels different than what it might look like today. Yeah. >>They got to leave it there. Great as always. Having you in the Cube. Thanks so much for participating in Cuban Cloud. >>Great. It's great to be here. Thank you. >>Keep it right there. Back more content right after this short break. >>Yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCube, with digital coverage, of Actifio data-driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube coverage of Actifio Data-driven 2020. Really excited to, dig into a fun topic. I have a Cube alumni with us he is a DevOps author, and researcher Gene Kim. Unicorn Project is the most recent, Gene, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, great to see you again, here at the Actifio conference, this is all fantastic. >> Yeah, so your new book, it was much awaited out there, you know, Unicorn's always discussed out there, but you know, the Phoenix Project, as I said, is really this seminal, book when people say, What is that DevOps thing and how do I do it? So, why don't you give us a little bit as to The Unicorn Project, why is it important? Why we're excited to dig into this and, we'll, we'll tie it into the discussion we're having here for the next normal, at Actifio. >> For sure, yeah, in fact, yeah. As you might have heard in the keynote address, you know, the what, what vexed me, after the Phoenix project came out in 2013 is that there is still looming problems that still remain, seven years after the Phoenix project was written. And, you know, these problems I think are very important, around you and what does it really take to enable developers to truly be productive, instead of being locked in a tundra of technical debt. Two is, you know, how do we unlock truly the power of data so that we can help everyone make better decisions, whether it's a developer, or anyone, within the business units and the organizations that we serve. And then three is like, what are really the behaviors that we need from leadership to make these amazing transformations possible? And so The Unicorn Project really is, the fifth project retold, but instead of through the eyes of Ops leadership, is told through the eyes, of a phenomenal developer. And so it was amazing to revisit the, the Phoenix project universe, I in the same timeline, but told from a different point of view. And it was such a fun project to work on, just because, you know, to relive the story, and just expose all these other problems, not happening, not on the side, but from, the development and data side. >> Yeah. They've always these characters in there that, I know I personally, and many people I talked to can, you know, really associate with, there was a return of certain characters, quite prominent, like Brent, you know, don't be the bottleneck in your system. It's great, if you're a fighter firefighter, and can solve everything, but if everything has to come through you, you know, Pedro is always going off, he's getting no sleep and, you know, you'd just get stressed out. You talked a bit more, about the organization and there are the five ideals in the book. So maybe if you can, you know, strongly recommend, of course, anybody at ending active you, got a copy of the books they'll be able to read the whole thing, but, you know, give us the bumper sticker on some of those key learnings. >> Yeah, for sure, yeah. So the five ideals represents five ideas, I think are just very important, for everyone, the organization, serves, especially leadership. The first ideal is locality and simplicity. In other words, when you need to get something done, we should be able to get it done within our team, without having to do a lot of communication coordination, with people outside of our team. The worst, the most horrible feeling is that in order, to do a small little thing, you actually have, to have a, coordinated action that spans 15 teams, right. And that's why you can't get anything done, right? And so that's so much the hallmark of large complex organizations. The second ideal is that what I think the outcomes are, which is focused flow and joy, you know, I've not just now started to for the first time in 20 years, self identify, not as an ops person, but as a developer. And, I really now understand, why we got into technology in the first place. This so that we can solve the business problem at hand unencumbered by minute share. And that allows for a sense of focus flow and even joy. And I love how Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describe it. He said, flow is a state that we feel when we love our work, so much that we lose track of time, and maybe even sense of self. And so I think we all in technology understand, you know, that that is how it is on the best of days and how terrible it is, you know, when we don't have that sense of flow. Third ideal is improvement of daily work, being even more important than daily work itself. The notion is greatness is never free, we must create it and must prioritize it, for the psychological safety. And the fifth is customer focus. So those are all the things I think are so important, for modern leaders, because it really defines the future of work. >> Yeah, we love that flow and it happens otherwise we're stuck, in that waiting place as you quoted Dr. Csi. So one of my favorite books there, there also. So Gene, for this audience here, there was, you know, yes, CICD is wonderful and I need to be able to move and ship fast, but the real transformational power, for that organization was unlocking the value of data, which is, I think something that everybody here can. So maybe to talk a little bit about that you know, we, there there's, we've almost talked too much, you know, data is the new oil and things like that, but it's that, you know, that allowing everybody to tap in and leverage, you know, real time what's happening there were just at the early parts of the industry being able to unlock that future. >> Oh yeah, I love that phrase. Data is new oil, especially since oil, you know, the last 50 years, the standard Port 500 was dominated by, you know, resource extraction oil company and so forth. And now that is no longer true, it's dominated by the tech giants. And, Columbia there was a Columbia journalism review article that said, data's not only the new oil, is really the new soil. And for me, you know, my area of passion for the last seven years has been studying the DevOps enterprise community where, we're taking all the learnings that were really pioneered by the tech giants, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and seeing how they're being adopted by the largest, most complex organizations on the planet, the best known brands across every industry vertical. And it's so true that, you know, where the real learning gets exploited right, is through data. I realized, this is how we get to know our customers better. This is how we understand their wants and needs. This is how we test, and make offers to them to see if they like it or not to see if they value it or not. And, and so for me, one of the best examples, of this was, the target transformation and Adidas how it was just an amazing example of, to what links they went to, to liberate developers from, being shackled by ancient systems of records, data warehouses, and truly enabled developers to get access to the data they need modify it, even delete information, all without having to be dependent on, you know, integration teams that were essentially holding them hostage for six to nine months. And, these programs really enable some of the most strategic programs at their organizations, you know, enabling hundreds of projects over the years. So, I think that is really, just showing to what extent, the value that is created by unlocking data for individuals. And sorry Stu, one more thing that I'm just always dazzled by my friend, Chris Berg. He told me that, somewhere between a third and a half of all company employees use data in their daily work. They either use data or manipulate data as part of the daily work, which, you know, that, population is actually larger than the number of developers in an organization. So it just shows you how big this problem is, and how much value we can create by addressing this problem. >> Well, it's interesting if it's only a third, we still have work to do. What we've been saying for years is, you know, when you talk about digital transformation, the thing that separates those that have transformed and those that haven't is data needs to be at the core. I just can't be doing things the way I was or doing things off intuition, you know, being data-driven, I'm sure you know, the same Gene, if you're not, if you don't have data, you know, you're just some other person with an opinion. >> Yeah, yeah. That's it this is a great point. And in Risto Siilasmaa's amazing book, Transforming Nokia, I mean, he was, he said exactly that. And he said something that was even more astonishing. He said, there's not only at the core, but data also has to be at the edges. You know, he was describing at Amazon, anyone can do an experiment @booking.com. Anyone can do an experiment to see, if they can create value for the customer. They don't need approvals from, committees or their manager. This is something that is really truly part of everyone's daily work. And so, to me, that was a huge aha moment that says, you know, to what degree, you know. Our cultures need to change so that we can not only, use data, but also create learnings and create new data, you know, that the rest of the organization can learn from as well. >> Yeah. One of the other things I definitely, you know, felt in your book, you synthesize so much of the learnings that you've had over the years from like the DevOps enterprise summit. The question I have for you is, you know, you hear some of these, you know, great stories, but the question is, our companies, are they moving fast enough? Have they transformed the entire business or have they taken, you know, we've got one slice of the business that is kind of modernized and we're going to get to the other 30 pieces along the way, but you know, there's wholesale change, you know, 2020 has had such a big impact. What's your thoughts on, you know, how we are doing in the enterprise on pace of change these days? >> That's a great question. I mean, I think some people, when they ask me, you know, how far are we into kind of total adoption of DevOps? It's a newer better way of working. And I would say probably somewhere between 5 and 7%, right, and the math I would take them through is, you know, there are about 20 million developers on the planet of which at best, I think, a million of them are working in a DevOps type way. But yet now that's only growing. I think it was an amazing presentation at DevOps surprise summit in London that was virtual from nationwide building society, the largest organization of its kind. It's a large financially mutually owned organization for housing in the UK. And, they touched about how, you know, post COVID post lockdown suddenly they found themselves able to do them reckless things that would have normally taken four years, in four weeks. And I think that's what almost every organization is learning these days is, when survival is at stake, you know, we can throw the rules out of the window, right. And do things in a way that are safe and responsible, but, you know, create satisfy the business urgent needs, like, you know, provisioning tens of thousand people to work from home safely. You know, I think the shows, I think it's such a powerful proof point of what technology can do when it is unleashed from, you know, perhaps unnecessarily burdensome rules and process. And I think the other point I would make Stu is that, what has been so rewarding is the population of these technology leaders presenting at DevOps enterprise, they're all being promoted, they're all being, being given new responsibilities because they, are demonstrating that they have the best longterm interest of the organization at heart. And, they're being given even more responsibilities because, to make a bigger impact through the organization. So I'm incredibly optimistic about the direction we're heading and even the pace we're going at. >> Well, Gene definitely 2020 has put a real highlight on how fast things have changed, not just work from home, but, but the homeschooling, you know, telehealth, there are so many things out there where there was no choice, but to move forward. So the, the second presentation you participated in was talking about that next normal. So give us a little bit of, you know, what does that mean? You know, what, what we should be looking at going forward? >> Yeah, it was great to catch up with my friend Paul Forte, who I've known for many, many years, and now, now a VP of sales at the Actifio and yeah, I think it is amazing that academic Dr. Colada Perez, she said, you know, in every turning point, you know, where, there's such a the stage for decades of economic prosperity usually comes, by something exactly like what we're going through now, a huge economic recession or depression, following a period of intense re regulations there's new, technology that's unlocking, you know, new ways of working. And she pointed exactly to what's happening in the Covid pandemic in terms of, how much, the way we're working is being revolutionized, not by choice, but out of necessity. And, you know, as she said, you know, we're now learning to what degree we can actually do our daily work without getting on airplanes or, you know, meeting people in person. So, I'm a hue, I have so many friends in the travel industry, right. I think we all want normalcy to return, but I think we are learning, you know, potentially, you know, there are more efficient ways to do things, that don't require a day of travel for a couple hour meeting and day to return, right. So, yeah, I think this is being demonstrated. I think this will unlock a whole bunch of ways of interacting that will create efficiency. So I don't think we're going, as you suggested, right. There will be a new normal, but the new normal is not going to be the same as your old normal. And I think it will be, in general for the better. >> So, Gene, you, you've gone to gotten to see some of the transformation happening in the organizations when it comes to developers, you know, the, the DevOps enterprise summit, the, the state of DevOps, you know. I think five years ago, we knew how important developers were, but there was such a gap between, well, the developers are kind of in the corner, they don't pay for anything. They're not tied to the enterprise. And today it feels like we have a more cohesive story that there, there is that if you put in The Unicorn Project, it's, you know, business and IT, you know. IT, and the developers can actually drive that change and the survival of the business. So, you know, are we there yet success or net developers now have a seat at the table? Or, you know, what do you see on that, that we still need to do? >> Yeah, I think we're still, I mean, I think we're getting there, we're closer than ever. And as my friend, Chris O'Malley the CEO of the famously resurgent mainframe vendor Compuware said, you know, it is, everyone is aware that you can't do any major initiatives these days without some investment in technology, right? In fact, you can't invest in anything without technology. So I think that is now better understood than ever. And, yeah, just the digital, it's a whole digital disruption, I think is really, no one needs to be convinced that if we organize large complex organizations, don't change, they're at a risk of, you know, being decimated by the organizations that can change using an exploiting technology, you know, to their benefit and to the other person's detriment. So, and that primarily comes through software and who creates software developers. So I, by the way, I love the Stripe it was a CFO for Stripe who said, the largest, constraint for them is, and their peers is not access to capital, it is access development talent. I think when you have CFOs talking like that, right. It does says it's suggested something really has changed in the economic environment that we all compete in. >> So, I mentioned that on the research side, one of the things I've loved reading over the years is that, fundamental discussion that, going faster does not mean, that I am sacrificing security, or, you know, the product itself, you know, in the last couple of years, it's, you know, what separates those really high performing companies, and, you know, just kind of the middle of the ground. So, what, what, what advice would you give out there, to make sure that I'm moving my company more along to those high performing methods. >> Yeah, but just to resonate with that, I was interviewing a friend of mine, Mike Nygaard, long time friend of mine, and we were talking on and we were recalling the first time we both heard the famous 2009 presentation doing 10 deploys a day, every day at flicker, by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. And we were both incredulous, right there? We thought it was irresponsible reckless, and maybe even immoral what they were doing, because, you know, I think most organizations were doing three a year, and that was very problematic. How could one do 10 deploys a day. And I think, what we now know, with the size of evidence, especially through the state of DevOps research, is that, you know, for six years, 35,000 plus respondents, the only way that you can be reliable, and secure, is to do smaller deployments more frequently, right? It makes you, be able to respond quicker in the marketplace, allows you to have better stability and reliability in the operational environment, allows you to be more secure. It allows you to be able to, you know, increase market share, increase productivity, and, you know, have happier employees. So, you know, at this point, I think the research is so decisive, that, you know, we can, as a whole book accelerate, that really makes the case for that, that this is something that I now have moral certainty or even absolute certainty oh, right. It's, you know, self evident to me, and it, I think we should have confidence that that really is true. >> Wonderful work, Gene, thanks so much for giving us the update. I really appreciate it, some really good sessions here in Actifio, as well as the book. Thanks so much, great to talk to you. >> Stu is always a pleasure to see you again, and thank you so much. >> Alright, that's our coverage from Actifio Data-driven, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the, on demand content, as well as, as I said, if you were part of the show, definitely recommend reading Gene's book, The Unicorn Project. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube. (soft upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop con and cloud, native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners >>Welcome back. This is the Cube coverage of Cube Con Cloud, native con, the European show for 2020. I'm your host to Minuteman. And when we talk about the container world, we talk about what's happening in cloud. Native storage has been one of those sticking points. One of those things that you know has been challenging, that we've been looking to mature and really happy to welcome back to the program two of our cube alumni to give us the update on the state of storage for the container world. Both of them are oh, founders and CEOs. First of all, we have Xiang Yang from Rancher Labs, of course, was recently acquired by Sue Save it and the intention to acquire on and also joining us from early the relay. Who is with port works? Shang Amerli. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. So early. I actually I'm going to start with you just cause you know we've seen, you know, a couple of waves of companies working on storage. In this environment, we know storage is difficult. Um, And when we change how we're building things, there's architectural things that can happen. Eso maybe if you could just give us a snapshot, you know, Port works, you know, was created to help unpack this. You know, straight on here in 2020 you know, where you see things in the overall kind of computer storage landscape? >>Absolutely. Still, before I kind of jump into port works. I just want to take a minute to publicly congratulate the the whole rancher team, and and Shang and Shannon And will China have known those folks for a while there? They're kind of true entrepreneurs. They represent the serial entrepreneur spirit that that so many folks know in the valley, and so, you know, great outcome for them. We're very happy for them and ah, big congrats and shout out to the whole team. What works is is a little over five years old, and we've been kind of right from the inception of the company recognized that to put containers in production, you're gonna have to solve, not just the orchestration problem. But the issue of storage and data orchestration and so in a natural kubernetes orchestrates containers and what works orchestrates storage and data. And more specifically, by doing that, what we enable is enterprises to be able to take APS that are containerized into production at scale and and have high availability. Disaster recovery, backup all of the things that for decades I t has had to do and has done to support application, reliability and availability. But essentially we're doing it for purpose with the purpose build solution for containerized workloads. >>Alright, shaming. Of course, storage is a piece of the overall puzzle that that ranchers trying to help with. Maybe if you could just refresh our audience on Longhorn, which your organization has its open source. It's now being managed by the CN. CF is my understanding. So help us bring Longhorn into the discussion >>thanks to. So I'm really glad to be here. We've I think rancher and port work started about the same time, and we started with a slightly different focus. More is exactly right to get containers going, you really need both so that the computer angle orchestrating containers as well as orchestrating the storage and the data. So rancher started with, ah, it's slightly stronger focus on orchestrating containers themselves, but pretty quickly, we realized, as adoption of containers grow, we really need it to be able to handle ah, storage feather. And like any new technology, you know, uh, Kubernetes and containers created some interesting new requirements and opportunities, and at the time, really, they weren't. Ah, a lot of good technologies available, you know, technologies like rook and SEF at the time was very, very premature, I think, Ah, the You know, we actually early on try to incorporate ah, the cluster technology. And it was just it was just not easy. And And at the time I think port Works was, ah, very busy developing. Ah, what turned out to be there flagship product, which we end up, end up, uh, partnering very, very closely. But but early on, we really had no choice but to start developing our own storage technology. So Long horn. As a piece of container storage technology, it's actually almost as oh, there's rancher itself. When about funding engineers, we hired he he ended up, you know, working on it and Then over the years, you know the focus shift that I think the original version was written in C plus plus, and over the years it's now being completely re written in Golan. It was originally written more for Docker workload. Now, of course, everything is kubernetes centric. And last year we you know, we we decided to donate the Longhorn Open Source project to CN CF. And now it's a CN CF sandbox project, and the adoption is just growing really quickly. And just earlier this year, we we finally ah decided to we're ready to offer a commercial support for it. So So that's that's where rancher is. And with longhorn and container storage technology. >>Yeah, it has been really interesting to watch in this ecosystem. A couple of years ago, one of the Q con shows I was talking to people coming out of the Believe It was the Sigs, the special interest group for storage, and it was just like, Wow, it was heated. Words were, you know, back and forth. There's not a lot of agreement there. Anybody that knows the storage industry knows that you know standards in various ways of doing things often are contentious and there's there's differences of opinion. Look at the storage industry. You know, there's a reason why there's so many different solutions out there. So maybe it love to hear from early. From your standpoint, things are coming to get a little bit more. There are still a number of options out there. So you know, why is this kind of coop petition? I actually good for the industry? >>Yeah, I think this is a classic example of Coop petition. Right? Let's let's start with the cooperation part right? The first part of time the you know, the early days of CN, CF, and even sort of the Google Communities team, I think, was really very focused on compute and and subsequent years. In the last 34 years, there's been a greater attention to making the whole stack works, because that's what it's going to take to take a the enterprise class production and put it in, you know, enterprise class application and put it in production. So extensions like C and I for networking and CS I container storage interface. We're kind of put together by a working group and and ah ah you know both both in the CN CF, but also within the kubernetes Google community. That's you talked about six storage as an example. And, you know, as always happens, right? Like it It looks a little bit in the early days. Like like a polo game, right where folks are really? Ah, you know, seemingly, uh, you know, working with each other on on top of the pool. But underneath they're kicking each other furiously. But that was a long time back, and we've graduated from then into really cooperating. And I think it's something we should all be proud of. Where now the CS I interface is really a A really very, very strong and complete solution tow, allowing communities to orchestrate storage and data. So it's really strengthened both communities and the kubernetes ecosystem. Now the competition part. Let's kind of spend. I want to spend a couple of minutes on that too, right? Um, you know, one of the classic things that people sometimes confuse is the difference between an overlay and an interface. CSC is wonderful because it defines how the two layers off essentially kind of old style storage. You know, whether it's a san or ah cloud, elastic storage bucket or all of those interact with community. So the the definition of that interface kind of lay down some rules and parameters for how that interaction should happen. However, you still always need an overlay like Port Works that that actually drives that interface and enables Kubernetes to actually manage that storage. And that's where the competition is. And, you know, she mentioned stuff and bluster and rook and kind of derivatives of those. And I think those have been around really venerable and and really excellent products for born in a different era for a different time open stack, object storage and all of that not really meant for kind of primary workloads. And they've been they've been trying to be adapted for, for for us, for this kind of workload. Port Works is really a built from right from the inception to be designed for communities and for kubernetes workloads at enterprise scale. And so I think, you know, as I as I look at the landscape, we welcome the fact that there are so many more people acknowledging that there is a vital need for data orchestration on kubernetes right, that that's why everybody and their brother now has a CS I interface. However, I think there's a big difference between having an interface. This is actually having the software that provides the functionality for H. A, D R. And and for backup, as as the kind of life cycle matures and doing it not just at scale, but in a way that allows kind of really significant removal or reduction off the storage admin role and replaces it with self service that is fully automated within communities. Yeah, if I >>can, you know, add something that that I completely agree. I mean, over the Longhorns been around for a long time. Like I said, I'm really happy that over the years it hasn't really impacted our wonderful collaborative partnership with what works. I mean, Poll works has always been one of our premier partners. We have a lot of, ah, common customers in this fight. I know these guys rave about what works. I don't think they'll ever get out for works. Ah, home or not? Uh huh. Exactly. Like Morissette, you know, in the in the storage space, there's interface, which a lot of different implementations can plugging, and that's kind of how rancher works. So we always tell people Rancher works with three types of storage implementations. One is let we call legacy storage. You know, your netapp, your DMC, your pure storage and those are really solid. But they were not suddenly not designed to work with containers to start with, but it doesn't matter. They've all written CS I interfaces that would enable containers to take advantage of. The second type is some of the cloud a block storage or file storage services like EBS, GFS, Google Cloud storage and support for these storage back and the CS I drivers practically come with kubernetes itself, so those are very well supported. But there's still a huge amount of opportunities for the third type of you know, we call container Native Storage. So that is where Port Works and the Longhorn and other solutions like open EBS storage OS. All these guys fitting is a very vibrant ecosystem of innovation going on there. So those solutions are able to create basically reliable storage from scratch. You know, when you from from just local disks and they're actually also able to add a lot of value on top of whatever traditional or cloud based, persistent storage you already have. So so the whole system, the whole ecosystem, is developing very quickly. A lot of these solutions work with each other, and I think to me it's really less of a competition or even Coop petition. It's really more off raising the bar for for the capabilities so that we can accelerate the amount of workload that's been moved onto this wonderful kubernetes platform in the end of the benefit. Everyone, >>Well, I appreciate you both laying out some of the options, you know, showing just a quick follow up on that. I think back if you want. 15 years ago was often okay. I'm using my GMC for my block. I'm using my netapp for the file. I'm wondering in the cloud native space, if we expect that you might have multiple different data engine types in there you mentioned you know, I might want port works for my high performance. You said open EBS, very popular in the last CN CF survey might be another one there. So is do we think some of it is just kind of repeating itself that storage is not monolithic and in a micro service architecture. You know, different environments need different storage requirements. >>Yeah, I mean quick. I love to hear more is view as well, especially about you know, about how the ecosystem is developing. But from my perspective, just just the range of capabilities that's now we expect out of storage vendors or data management vendors is just increased tremendously. You know, in the old days, if you can store blocks to object store file, that's it. Right. So now it's this is just table stakes. Then then what comes after that? There will be 345 additional layers of requirements come all the way from backup, restore the our search indexing analytics. So I really think all of this potentially off or in the in the bucket of the storage ecosystem, and I just can't wait to see how this stuff will play out. I think we're still very, very early stages, and and there, you know what? What, what what containers did is they made fundamentally the workload portable, but the data itself still holds a lot of gravity. And then just so much work to do to leverage the fundamental work load portability. Marry that with some form of universal data management or data portability. I think that would really, uh, at least the industry to the next level. Marie? >>Yeah. Shanghai Bean couldn't. Couldn't have said it better. Right? Let me let me let me kind of give you Ah, sample. Right. We're at about 160 plus customers now, you know, adding several by the month. Um, just with just with rancher alone, right, we are. We have common customers in all common video expedient Roche March X, Western Asset Management. You know, charter communications. So we're in production with a number off rancher customers. What are these customers want? And why are they kind of looking at a a a Port works class of solution to use, You know, Xiang's example of the multiple types, right? Many times, people can get started with something in the early days, which has a CS I interface with maybe say, $10 or 8 to 10 nodes with a solution that allows them to at least kind of verify that they can run the stack up and down with, say, you know, a a rancher type orchestrator, workloads that are containerized on and a network plug in and a storage plugging. But really, once they start to get beyond 20 notes or so, then there are problems that are very, very unique to containers and kubernetes that pop up that you don't see in a in a non containerized environment, right? Some. What are some of these things, right? Simple examples are how can you actually run 10 to hundreds of containers on a server, with each one of those containers belonging to a different application and having different requirements? How do you actually scale? Not to 16 nodes, which is sort of make typically, maybe Max of what a San might go to. But hundreds and thousands of notes, like many of our customers, are doing like T Mobile Comcast. They're running this thing at 600 thousands of notes or scale is one issue. Here is a critical critical difference that that something that's designed for Kubernetes does right. We are providing all off the storage functions that Shang just described at container granted, granularity versus machine granularity. One way to think about this is the old Data center was in machine based construct. Construct everything you know. VM Ware is the leader, sort of in that all of the way. You think of storage as villains. You think of compute and CPUs, everything. Sub sub nets, right? All off. Traditional infrastructure is very, very machine centric. What kubernetes and containers do is move it into becoming an app defined control plane, right? One of the things were super excited about is the fact that Kubernetes is really not just a container orchestrator, but actually a orchestrator for infrastructure in an app defined way. And by doing that, they have turned, uh, you know, control off the infrastructure via communities over to a kubernetes segment. The same person who uses rancher uses port works at NVIDIA, for example to manage storage as they use it, to manage the compute and to manage containers. And and that's marvellous, because now what has happened is this thing is now fully automated at scale and and actually can run without the intervention off a storage admin. No more trouble tickets, right? No more requests to say, Hey, give me another 20 terabytes. All of that happens automatically with the solution like port works. And in fact, if you think about it in the world of real time services that we're all headed towards right Services like uber now are expected in enterprises machine learning. Ai all of these things analytics that that change talk about are things that you expect to run in a fully automated way across vast amounts of data that are distributed sometimes in the edge. And you can't do that unless you're fully automated and and not really the storage admin intervention. And that's kind of the solution that we provide. >>Alright, well, we're just about out of time. If I could just last piece is, you know, early and saying to talk about where we are with long for and what we should expect to see through the rest of this year and get some early for you to you know, what differentiates port works from Just, you know, the open source version. So And maybe if we start with just kind of long or in general and then really from from your standpoint, >>yeah, so it's so so the go along one is really to lower the bar for folks to run state for workloads on on kubernetes we want you know, the the Longhorn is 100% open source and it's owned by CN cf now. So we in terms of features and functionalities is obviously a small subset of what a true enterprise grade solution like Port Works or, um, CEO on that that could provide. So there's just, you know, the storage role. Ah, future settle. The roadmap is very rich. I don't think it's not really Ranchers go Oh, our Longhorns goal to, you know, to try to turn itself into a into a plug in replacement for these enterprise, great storage or data management solutions. But But they're you know, there's some critical critical feature gaps that we need address. And that's what the team is gonna be focusing on, perhaps for the rest of the year. >>Yeah, uh, still, I would I would kind of, you know, echo what Chang said, right? I think folks make it started with solutions, like longer or even a plug in connector plug in with one of their existing storage vendors, whether it's pure netapp or or EMC from our viewpoint, that's wonderful, because that allows them to kind of graduate to where they're considering storage and data as part of the stack. They really should that's the way they're going to succeed by by looking at it as a whole and really with, You know, it's a great way to get started on a proof of concept architecture where your focus initially is very much on the orchestration and the container ization part. But But, as Xiang pointed out, you know what what rancher did, what I entered it for Kubernetes was build a simple, elegant, robust solution that kind of democratized communities. We're doing the same thing for communities storage right? What Port works does is have a solution that is simple, elegant, fully automated, scalable and robust. But more importantly, it's a complete data platform, right? We we go where all these solutions start, but don't kind of venture forward. We are a full, complete lifecycle management for data across that whole life cycle. So there's many many customers now are buying port works and then adding deal right up front, and then a few months later they might come back and I'd backup from ports. So two shanks point right because of the uniqueness of the kubernetes workload, because it is an app defined control plane, not machine to find what is happening is it's disrupting, Just like just like virtualization day. VM exist today because because they focused on a VM version off. You know, the their backup solution. So the same thing is happening. Kubernetes workloads are district causing disruption of the D r and backup and storage market with solutions like sports. >>Wonderful. Merlin Chang. Thank you so much for the updates. Absolutely. The promise of containers A Z you were saying? Really, is that that Atomic unit getting closer to the application really requires storage to be a full and useful solution. So great to see the progress that's being made. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Welcome, Shannon. We look forward to ah, working with you as you reach for the stars. Congratulations again. We look >>forward to the containing partnership morally and thank you. Still for the opportunity here. >>Absolutely great talking to both of you And stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube Cube Con cloud, native con 2020 Europe. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah