(bright music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante, with the opening keynote conversation with Vittorio Viarengo. He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud at VMware, Cube Alumni. Vittorio, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure. >> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event. Again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around supercloud? What's your perspective? >> Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever. I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of least resistance, and they create innovations, and then the entire stacks moves around, and if you look at developers over the last, you know, 15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right? And the reason they're going for the cloud is, you now, they say software is eating the world. Is really who builds software? Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world, and so initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually, we got the multiple clouds, and now, the reality is that the applications there, it's how we make money, how we save money. They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies running on multiple clouds today, and so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years, and I think that that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges, and it's prime to a simplification, and that's where we're trying. >> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, that we had in the 2010s, where there was really, you know, one main cloud. Now, you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? >> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a... I started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, you know, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now, you still have to be a C++ developer, but now, with a one line of code, you can initiate, open the yellow world and start to build your applications, but it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now, we get five millions developers building applications that are 20 years later, we're still using, okay? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say, "Okay, this is the customers, and we're going to map it to SAP," and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous, you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now, you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything, and so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers and networking and storage look like one, and now, you know, and the business never cares if you're running SAP back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive. They care that it runs, right? And so I think that now, we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms and unify the APIs and the way do management and security across multiple cloud. >> Let's unpack that because I think the virtualization angle is interesting 'cause with virtualization enabled AWS. If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor, got them going, and that established that value. Now, the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is supercloud in your mind? >> So in our mind, supercloud is a set of cloud native services that, first of all... Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem and is no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingo franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden. It's down there, it just does its thing. The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think, "Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just, you know, deploy on- Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution, and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take, to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application and single pipeline so you can build your application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then, basically, factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. >> One of the trade-offs of abstraction, you go back to the mainframe. They had to squeeze out the performance overheads. VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we going to see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. Are you going to see a trade-off? What trade-off do you see that the industry, technically, has to attack? >> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale. You know, now, I have five million developers writing applications, but I think, eventually, what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills, and if I had a dollar every time I heard, "Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization," well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java application are running out on the JVM? So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs, but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off you were making on the lower level. >> On the evolution of hybrid cloud, 'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge, right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? 'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed. It's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people are thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? (men laugh) >> So there is a lot of unpack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud, so 75%, 85% going to 85%- >> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations? >> Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. >> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right? That's the assumption you- >> Well, initially, it's not identical, right? That's why you need a supercloud, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want, and then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realize that the security share responsibility model to deal with. They realize that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them, and then they go into like, (indistinct). Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal, and then you end up with the enlightment, right? Now, we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal, and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, "Okay, I have an application here, an application there. Okay, great, big deal." The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here that uses a pieces of a service of an application over there. Okay, now, I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices," and then the third stage is like, "Okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud." >> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? >> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right? That's why we acquired Pivotal, and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that... Well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering, product management in the company then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers, and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and deliver value, and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs at the... And so over the last five years, we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. No Hypervisor required. >> So that's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do they need to rely on partners? Because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well. So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you going to need help from the ecosystem? >> First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the supercloud. So that to me is success already, and, of course, there are tremendous companies that are going to deliver fantastic value for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security and the development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform, and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull that off. >> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend. He had that very cool blackboard, and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the supercloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. When is this going to be real? >> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces. Right, there's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary, and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud, and we invested in first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu. So with Tanzu, you can build application, manage Kubernetes cluster, secure, creating this service match, and so that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at all the Hypervisor, if you're using Hypervisor. You looking at East-West traffic with NSX and cross cloud networks, and so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make more announcement around the supercloud, which we called cross-cloud services. >> Vittorio, I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship, and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware, and you look at what's happened since, and this is where the supercloud conversation starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon of the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are going to be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it, the super pass. This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud? Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out. How has that changed the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now, you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? >> So I think that that's where the innovation, the ability to aggregate common... Because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features, like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the PaaS level, you know, when you are orchestrated these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, this group of developers can only use this many resources, but also a run time that you don't run out of like, you know, you get that bill shock, and so those are the areas where I think there's this more ability for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level which is taken by the- >> So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right? You have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers, if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right? >> Yeah. >> That's a bold aspiration. >> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight. (men laugh) But seriously, I think, going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value, and I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. You're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourself in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. >> You know, it's great. That's where we've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage. Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level's been fun to watch, and the developers have had a great run. I mean, open sources booming, developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left, a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now, and I think it's only going to get better, but developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done. Move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, "Hey, we love this, too, but we got to align with the developer." Level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, "Hey, I got to run this with automation with the higher level services." So there seems to be a focus around the supercloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse, VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that and what's the message cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and/or faster? >> I think if you go back to what where we started, right? Developers run the show, and I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the op side and the security side in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global, one of our customers, their band runs their operation. Basically, told me I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers, same thing they say, okay, we sat down. We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those guard rails, right? These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use? Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security, that we have a single pipeline that feeds that, and Cerner, using our technology was able to... They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler, It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the supercloud, being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want, but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also, make sure that operation and security, as a saying." >> Shift left shield right, basically. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. We've got 15 seconds. What is supercloud? What's the bumper sticker? >> The supercloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. >> And it's inclusive of on-prem. I'll just throw that in. (John laughs) >> All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have a industry panel to talk about and debate Supercloud 22. We'll be right back after this break.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the words of my colleague CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars, not to restore them to their original luster and beauty. Nope. They buy classic cars to extract the platinum that's inside the catalytic converter and monetize that. Broadcom's planned 61 billion acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era and chapter for the virtualization pioneer, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as an independent company by Dell. For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps the sole agenda item. For customers, it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches, and most certainly higher prices. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem. Let's first look at the key deal points, it's been well covered in the press. But just for the record, $61 billion in a 50/50 cash and stock deal, resulting in a blended price of $138 per share, which is a 44% premium to the unaffected price, i.e. prior to the news breaking. Broadcom will assume 8 billion of VMware debt and promises that the acquisition will be immediately accretive and will generate 8.5 billion in EBITDA by year three. That's more than 4 billion in EBITDA relative to VMware's current performance today. In a classic Broadcom M&A approach, the company promises to dilever debt and maintain investment grade ratings. They will rebrand their software business as VMware, which will now comprise about 50% of revenues. There's a 40 day go shop and importantly, Broadcom promises to continue to return 60% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to get to the money slide literally in a moment that Broadcom shared on its investor call. Broadcom has more than 20 business units. It's CEO Hock Tan makes it really easy for his business unit managers to understand. Rule number one, you agreed to an operating plan with targets for revenue, growth, EBITDA, et cetera, hit your numbers consistently and we're good. You'll be very well compensated and life will be wonderful for you and your family. Miss the number, and we're going to have a frank and uncomfortable bottom line discussion. You'll four, perhaps five quarters to turn your business around, if you don't, we'll kill it or sell it if we can. Rule number two, refer to rule number one. Hello, VMware, here's the money slide. I'll interpret the bullet points on the left for clarity. Your fiscal year 2022 EBITDA was 4.7 billion. By year three, it will be 8.5 billion. And we Broadcom have four knobs to turn with you, VMware to help you get there. First knob, if it ain't recurring revenue with rubber stamp renewals, we're going to convert that revenue or kill it. Knob number two, we're going to focus R&D in the most profitable areas of the business. AKA expect the R&D budget to be cut. Number three, we're going to spend less on sales and marketing by focusing on existing customers. We're not going to lose money today and try to make it up many years down the road. And number four, we run Broadcom with 1% GNA. You will too. Any questions? Good. Now, just to give you a little sense of how Broadcom runs its business and how well run a company it is, let's do a little simple comparison with this financial snapshot. All we're doing here is taking the most recent quarterly earnings reports from Broadcom and VMware respectively. We take the quarterly revenue and multiply by four X to get the revenue run rate and then we calculate the ratios off of the most recent quarters revenue. It's worth spending some time on this to get a sense of how profitable the Broadcom business actually is and what the spreadsheet gurus at Broadcom are seeing with respect to the possibilities for VMware. So combined, we're talking about a 40 plus billion dollar company. Broadcom is growing at more than 20% per year. Whereas VMware's latest quarter showed a very disappointing 3% growth. Broadcom is mostly a hardware company, but its gross margin is in the high seventies. As a software company of course VMware has higher gross margins, but FYI, Broadcom's software business, the remains of Symantec and what they purchased as CA has 90% gross margin. But the I popper is operating margin. This is all non gap. So it excludes things like stock based compensation, but Broadcom had 61% operating margin last quarter. This is insanely off the charts compared to VMware's 25%. Oracle's non gap operating margin is 47% and Oracle is an incredibly profitable company. Now the red box is where the cuts are going to take place. Broadcom doesn't spend much on marketing. It doesn't have to. It's SG&A is 3% of revenue versus 18% for VMware and R&D spend is almost certainly going to get cut. The other eye popper is free cash flow as a percentage of revenue at 51% for Broadcom and 29% for VMware. 51%. That's incredible. And that my dear friends is why Broadcom a company with just under 30 billion in revenue has a market cap of 230 billion. Let's dig into the VMware portfolio a bit more and identify the possible areas that will be placed under the microscope by Hock Tan and his managers. The data from ETR's latest survey shows the net score or spending momentum across VMware's portfolio in this chart, net score essentially measures the net percent of customers that are spending more on a specific product or vendor. The yellow bar is the most recent survey and compares the April 22 survey data to April 21 and January of 22. Everything is down in the yellow from January, not surprising given the economic outlook and the change in spending patterns that we've reported. VMware Cloud on AWS remains the product in the ETR survey with the most momentum. It's the only offering in the portfolio with spending momentum above the 40% line, a level that we consider highly elevated. Unified Endpoint Management looks more than respectable, but that business is a rock fight with Microsoft. VMware Cloud is things like VMware Cloud foundation, VCF and VMware's cross cloud offerings. NSX came from the Nicira acquisition. Tanzu is not yet pervasive and one wonders if VMware is making any money there. Server is ESX and vSphere and is the bread and butter. That is where Broadcom is going to focus. It's going to look at VSAN and NSX, which is software probably profitable. And of course the other products and see if the investments are paying off, if they are Broadcom will keep, if they are not, you can bet your socks, they will be sold off or killed. Carbon Black is at the far right. VMware paid $2.1 billion for Carbon Black. And it's the lowest performer on this list in terms of net score or spending momentum. And that doesn't mean it's not profitable. It just doesn't have the momentum you'd like to see, so you can bet that is going to get scrutiny. Remember VMware's growth has been under pressure for the last several years. So it's been buying companies, dozens of them. It bought AirWatch, bought Heptio, Carbon Black, Nicira, SaltStack, Datrium, Versedo, Bitnami, and on and on and on. Many of these were to pick up engineering teams. Some of them were to drive new revenue. Now this is definitely going to be scrutinized by Broadcom. So that helps explain why Michael Dell would sell VMware. And where does VMware go from here? It's got great core product. It's an iconic name. It's got an awesome ecosystem, fantastic distribution channel, but its growth is slowing. It's got limited developer chops in a world that developers and cloud native is all the rage. It's got a far flung R&D agenda going at war with a lot of different places. And it's increasingly fighting this multi front war with cloud companies, companies like Cisco, IBM Red Hat, et cetera. VMware's kind of becoming a heavy lift. It's a perfect acquisition target for Broadcom and why the street loves this deal. And we titled this Breaking Analysis taming the VMware beast because VMware is a beast. It's ubiquitous. It's an epic software platform. EMC couldn't control it. Dell used it as a piggy bank, but really didn't change its operating model. Broadcom 100% will. Now one of the things that we get excited about is the future of systems architectures. We published a breaking analysis about a year ago, talking about AWS's secret weapon with Nitro and it's Annapurna custom Silicon efforts. Remember it acquired Annapurna for a measly $350 million. And we talked about how there's a new architecture and a new price performance curve emerging in the enterprise, driven by AWS and being followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, a trend toward custom Silicon with the arm based Nitro and which is AWS's hypervisor and Nick strategy, enabling processor diversity with things like Graviton and Trainium and other diverse processors, really diversifying away from x86 and how this leads to much faster product cycles, faster tape out, lower costs. And our premise was that everyone in the data center is going to competes, is going to need a Nitro to be competitive long term. And customers are going to gravitate toward the most economically favorable platform. And as we describe the landscape with this chart, we've updated this for this Breaking Analysis and we'll come back to nitro in a moment. This is a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap formally known as market share or presence within the survey, pervasiveness that's on the horizontal axis. And we plot various companies and products and we've inserted VMware's net score breakdown. The granularity in those colored bars on the bottom right. Net score is essentially the green minus the red and a couple points on that. VMware in the latest survey has 6% new adoption. That's that lime green. It's interesting. The question Broadcom is going to ask is, how much does it cost you to acquire that 6% new. 32% of VMware customers in the survey are increasing spending, meaning they're increasing spending by 6% or more. That's the forest green. And the question Broadcom will dig into is what percent of that increased spend (chuckles) you're capturing is profitable spend? Whatever isn't profitable is going to be cut. Now that 52% gray area flat spending that is ripe for the Broadcom picking, that is the fat middle, and those customers are locked and loaded for future rent extraction via perpetual renewals and price increases. Only 8% of customers are spending less, that's the pinkish color and only 3% are defecting, that's the bright red. So very, very sticky profile. Perfect for Broadcom. Now the rest of the chart lays out some of the other competitor names and we've plotted many of the VMware products so you can see where they fit. They're all pretty respectable on the vertical axis, that's spending momentum. But what Broadcom wants is that core ESX vSphere base where we've superimposed the Broadcom logo. Broadcom doesn't care so much about spending momentum. It cares about profitability potential and then momentum. AWS and Azure, they're setting the pace in this business, in the upper right corner. Cisco very huge presence in the data center, as does Intel, they're not in the ETR survey, but we've superimposed them. Now, Intel of course, is in a dog fight within Nvidia, the Arm ecosystem, AMD, don't forget China. You see a Google cloud platform is in there. Oracle is also on the chart as well, somewhat lower on the vertical axis, but it doesn't have that spending momentum, but it has a big presence. And it owns a cloud as we've talked about many times and it's highly differentiated. It's got a strategy that allows it to differentiate from the pack. It's very financially driven. It knows how to extract lifetime value. Safra Catz operates in many ways, similar to what we're seeing from Hock Tan and company, different from a portfolio standpoint. Oracle's got the full stack, et cetera. So it's a different strategy. But very, very financially savvy. You could see IBM and IBM Red Hat in the mix and then Dell and HP. I want to come back to that momentarily to talk about where value is flowing. And then we plotted Nutanix, which with Acropolis could suck up some V tax avoidance business. Now notice Symantec and CA, relatively speaking in the ETR survey, they have horrible spending momentum. As we said, Broadcom doesn't care. Hock Tan is not going for growth at the expense of profitability. So we fully expect VMware to come down on the vertical axis over time and go up on the profit scale. Of course, ETR doesn't measure the profitability here. Now back to Nitro, VMware has this thing called Project Monterey. It's essentially their version of Nitro and will serve as their future architecture diversifying off x86 and accommodating alternative processors. And a much more efficient performance, price in energy consumption curve. Now, one of the things that we've advocated for, we said this about Dell and others, including VMware to take a page out of AWS and start developing custom Silicon to better integrate hardware and software and accelerate multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. That layer above the cloud, not just running on individual clouds. So this is all about efficiency and simplicity to own this space. And we've challenged organizations to do that because otherwise we feel like the cloud guys are just going to have consistently better costs, not necessarily price, but better cost structures, but it begs the question. What happens to Project Monterey? Hock Tan and Broadcom, they don't invest in something that is unproven and doesn't throw off free cash flow. If it's not going to pay off for years to come, they're probably not going to invest in it. And yet Project Monterey could help secure VMware's future in not only the data center, but at the edge and compete more effectively with cloud economics. So we think either Project Monterey is toast or the VMware team will knock on the door of one of Broadcom's 20 plus business units and say, guys, what if we work together with you to develop a version of Monterey that we can use and sell to everyone, it'd be the arms dealer to everyone and be competitive with the cloud and other players out there and create the de facto standard for data center performance and supercloud. I mean, it's not outrageously expensive to develop custom Silicon. Tesla is doing it for example. And Broadcom obviously is capable of doing it. It's got good relationships with semiconductor fabs. But I think this is going to be a tough sell to Broadcom, unless VMware can hide this in plain site and make it profitable fast, like AWS most likely has with Nitro and Graviton. Then Project Monterey and our pipe dream of alternatives to Nitro in the data center could happen but if it can't, it's going to be toast. Or maybe Intel or Nvidia will take it over or maybe the Monterey team will spin out a VMware and do a Pensando like deal and demonstrate the viability of this concept and then Broadcom will buy it back in 10 years. Here's a double click on that previous data that we put in tabular form. It's how the data on that previous slide was plotted. I just want to give you the background data here. So net score spending momentum is the sorted on the left. So it's sorted by net score in the left hand chart, that was the y-axis in the previous data set and then shared and or presence in the data set is the right hand chart. In other words, it's sorted on the right hand chart, right hand table. That right most column is shared and you can see it's sorted top to bottom, and that was the x-axis on the previous chart. The point is not many on the left hand side are above the 40% line. VMware Cloud on AWS is, it's expensive, so it's probably profitable and it's probably a keeper. We'll see about the rest of VMware's portfolio. Like what happens to Tanzu for example. On the right, we drew a red line, just arbitrarily at those companies and products with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, everything but Tanzu from VMware makes that cut. Again, this is no indication of profitability here, and that's what's going to matter to Broadcom. Now let's take a moment to address the question of Broadcom as a software company. What the heck do they know about software, right. Well, they're not dumb over there and they know how to run a business, but there is a strategic rationale to this move beyond just doing portfolios and extracting rents and cutting R&D, et cetera, et cetera. Why, for example, isn't Broadcom going after coming back to Dell or HPE, it could pick up for a lot less than VMware, and they got way more revenue than VMware. Well, it's obvious, software's more profitable of course, and Broadcom wants to move up the stack, but there's a trend going on, which Broadcom is very much in touch with. First, it sells to Dell and HPE and Cisco and all the OEM. so it's not going to disrupt that. But this chart shows that the value is flowing away from traditional servers and storage and networking to two places, merchant Silicon, which itself is morphing. Broadcom... We focus on the left hand side of this chart. Broadcom correctly believes that the world is shifting from a CPU centric center of gravity to a connectivity centric world. We've talked about this on theCUBE a lot. You should listen to Broadcom COO Charlie Kawwas speak about this. It's all that supporting infrastructure around the CPU where value is flowing, including of course, alternative GPUs and XPUs, and NPUs et cetera, that are sucking the value out of the traditional x86 architecture, offloading some of the security and networking and storage functions that traditionally have been done in x86 which are part of the waste right now in the data center. This is that shifting dynamic of Moore's law. Moore's law, not keeping pace. It's slowing down. It's slower relative to some of the combinatorial factors. When you add up in all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators, et cetera. So we've talked about this a lot in Breaking Analysis episodes. So the value is shifting left within that middle circle. And it's shifting left within that left circle toward components, other than CPU, many of which Broadcom supplies. And then you go back to the middle, value is shifting from that middle section, that traditional data center up into hyperscale clouds, and then to the right toward infrastructure software to manage all that equipment in the data center and across clouds. And look Broadcom is an arms dealer. They simply sell to everyone, locking up key vectors of the value chain, cutting costs and raising prices. It's a pretty straightforward strategy, but not for the fate of heart. And Broadcom has become pretty good at it. Let's close with the customer feedback. I spoke with ETRs Eric Bradley this morning. He and I both reached out to VMware customers that we know and got their input. And here's a little snapshot of what they said. I'll just read this. Broadcom will be looking to invest in the core and divest of any underperforming assets, right on. It's just what we were saying. This doesn't bode well for future innovation, this is a CTO at a large travel company. Next comment, we're a Carbon Black customer. VMware didn't seem to interfere with Carbon Black, but now that we're concerned about short term disruption to their tech roadmap and long term, are they going to split and be sold off like Symantec was, this is a CISO at a large hospitality organization. Third comment, I got directly from a VMware practitioner, an IT director at a manufacturing firm. This individual said, moving off VMware would be very difficult for us. We have over 500 applications running on VMware, and it's really easy to manage. We're not going to move those into the cloud and we're worried Broadcom will raise prices and just extract rents. Last comment, we'll share as, Broadcom sees the cloud data center and IoT is their next revenue source. The VMware acquisition provides them immediate virtualization capabilities to support a lightweight IoT offering. Big concern for customers is what technology they will invest in and innovate, and which will be stripped off and sold. Interesting. I asked David Floyer to give me a back of napkin estimate for the following question. I said, David, if you're running mission critical applications on VMware, how much would it increase your operating cost moving those applications into the cloud? Or how much would it save? And he said, Dave, VMware's really easy to run. It can run any application pretty much anywhere, and you don't need an army of people to manage it. All your processes are tied to VMware, you're locked and loaded. Move that into the cloud and your operating cost would double by his estimates. Well, there you have it. Broadcom will pinpoint the optimal profit maximization strategy and raise prices to the point where customers say, you know what, we're still better off staying with VMware. And sadly, for many practitioners there aren't a lot of choices. You could move to the cloud and increase your cost for a lot of your applications. You could do it yourself with say Zen or OpenStack. Good luck with that. You could tap Nutanix. That will definitely work for some applications, but are you going to move your entire estate, your application portfolio to Nutanix? It's not likely. So you're going to pay more for VMware and that's the price you're going to pay for two decades of better IT. So our advice is get out ahead of this, do an application portfolio assessment. If you can move apps to the cloud for less, and you haven't yet, do it, start immediately. Definitely give Nutanix a call, but going to have to be selective as to what you actually can move, forget porting to OpenStack, or do it yourself Hypervisor, don't even go there. And start building new cloud native apps where it makes sense and let the VMware stuff go into manage decline. Let certain apps just die through attrition, shift your development resources to innovation in the cloud and build a brick wall around the stable apps with VMware. As Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware said, "We are building the software mainframe". Now marketing guys got a hold of that and said, Paul, stop saying that, but it's true. And with Broadcom's help that day we'll soon be here. That's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research our topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson does the production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and thanks to Rob Hof, who was our editor in chief at siliconangle.com. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETRs website at etr.ai for all the survey action. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin learn Dubois joins me next VP of product management at Dell technologies. Laura, welcome back to the program. >>Yeah. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's just fantastic to be here and talking about data protection. Um, you know, now that we're coming out of COVID, it's just wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. >>Isn't it so refreshing. So you're going to provide some updates on Dell's data protection software, some of the innovation, how you're working with customers and prospects on that. So let's go ahead and dig right in. Let's talk about some of the innovation and the enhancements that Dell is making to its data protection suite of software, and also how customers are influencing that. >>Yeah, so it's a great question, Lisa and you're right. We have driven a lot of innovation and enhancements in our data protection suite. And let me just level set a second. So data protection suite, you know, is a solution that is deployed by really tens of thousands of customers. And we continue to innovate and enhance that data protection suite data protection suite is comprised primarily of three main data protection, software capabilities, so longstanding capabilities and customer adoption of Avamar, which continues to be a central capability on our portfolio. The second one is networker. Um, so networker is also an enterprise grade, highly scalable and performance data protection solution. And then a couple of years ago, um, we launched a new data protection capability called power protect data manager. So all three of these capabilities were really the foundation of our data protection suite. And as I said, you know, enterprises around the world rely on these three capable sets of capabilities to protect their data, regardless of wherever it resides. And, um, it's really central now more than ever in the face of, you know, increasing security, um, you know, risks and compliance and the need to be able to have an always kind of available environment that customers rely on the capabilities and data protection suite to really make sure their enterprises resilient. Absolutely. >>And make sure that that data is recoverable. If anything happens, you mentioned cybersecurity. We'll get into that in a second, but so thousands of Avamar and networker customers, what are some of the key workloads and data that these customers are protecting with these technologies? >>Yeah, I mean, so actually tens of thousands, tens of thousands, tens of thousands of customers that rely on data protection suite and you know, it really, I think the, the, the strength and advantage of our portfolio is its breadth, breadth and Kip terms with client operating environments in terms of applications and databases in terms of workloads and, and, and specifically use cases. So, I mean, the breadth that we offer is unparalleled. Um, you know, pretty much when a windows, Linux, um, open VMs, NetWare, you know, kind of, you know, going back in time, a long tail of kind of operating environments and then databases, right? So everything from SQL and Oracle and Sybase and DB two to new types of databases, like, you know, the no SQL or, or content store and, and, and, um, key value store types of types of, um, no SQL, uh, schema was if you will. >>And so, and then lastly is the, the use cases, right? So being able to protect data, whether that be data that's in a data center, out in remote or branch locations or data that's out in the cloud, right. And of course, create increasingly customers are placing their data, um, in a variety of locations, on edge, on core data centers and in cloud environments. And, um, we actually have over, uh, six exabytes of capacity on our management, across public cloud environments. So, um, pretty extensive deployment of our, our data protection suite in public clouds, you know, the leading hyperscalers, um, uh, cloud environments on premises as well. >>So let's talk a little bit about the customer influence because obviously there's a very cooperative relationship that Dell has with its customers that help you achieve things. Like, for example, I saw that according to IDC, Dell technologies is number one and data protection, appliances, and software leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for data center, backup and recovery for over 20 years. Now, talk to us a little bit more about that symbiotic customer Dell. >>Yeah. So it's a great question. We see our customers and strategic partners, and we really want to understand their business, their requirements. We engage on a quarterly basis with customers and partners in, um, it advisory councils. And then of course, we are always engaging with customers outside of those cycles on a kind of a one-on-one basis. And so we're really driving the innovation and the backlogs and the roadmap for data protection suite based upon customer feedback and, um, uh, approximately 79% of the fortune 100 customers, our Dell data, Dell technologies, data protection customers. Now that's not to say that that's our only customer base. We have customers in commercial accounts in mid-market and in, uh, federal agencies. Um, but you know, we take our customer relationships really, really seriously, and we engage with them, uh, on a regular basis, both in a group forum to provide feedback as well as in a one-on-one basis. And we're building our roadmaps and our, and our, our, our product releases based on feedback from customers. And, um, again, you know, large customer base that we take very seriously, >>Right to the customer listening obviously is critical for Dell. So you talked a little bit about what that cycle looks like in terms of quarterly meetings, and then those individual meetings, what are some of the enhancements and advancements that customers have actually influenced? >>Yeah, so we, I mean, we, I think, um, continuing, continuing to provide simplicity and ease of use is a key, uh, element of our portfolio and our in our strategy, right? So continuing to modernize and update the software in terms of workflows, in terms of, uh, know common experiences, also increasingly customers want to automate their data protection process. So really taking an API first strategy for how we deliver capabilities to customers, you know, continuing to expand our client, um, database hypervisor environments, continue to extend out our cloud support. Um, you know, things like, um, protection of cloud, native applications with, uh, increasingly customers containerizing, um, and building scale-out applications. We want to be able to protect Kubernetes environment. So that's kind of an area of focus for us. Um, another area of focus for us is going deeper with our key strategic partners, you know, whether that'd be a, a cloud partner, a hypervisor partner, and then of course, customers, in fact, one of the top three things that we consistently hear from, from these councils that we do is the, the criticality of security security and or data protection environment, but the criticality of being able to be resilient from, and, and in the event of a, of a cyber attack to be able to resilient recover from that cyber attack. >>So that is an area where we continue to make, uh, innovations and investments, uh, in the data protection suite. >>And that's so critical. One of the things that we saw in the last year, 15 months, plus Laura, is this massive rise in ransomware. It's now a household word, the colonial pipeline, for example, that meat plan, it's, it's now many businesses knowing it's not if we get attacked, but it's when, so having the ability to be resilient and recover that data is table stakes for, I imagine a business in any organization, I want to understand a little bit more. So you talked about tens of thousands of customers using Avamar and networker. So now they have the capability of also expanding and using more of, of the suite. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think it starts with the customer environment and what workloads and use cases they have and because of the breadth of capabilities and Dave, the data protection suite, you know, we really optimize the solution based upon their needs, right? So if they have, um, a large portfolio of, of applications that they need to maintain, but they're also building applications or, or, or systems for the future, we have S you know, solution there. If they have a single hypervisor strategy or a multiple hypervisor strategy, we have a, you know, a strategy there, if they have data that's on premise and across a range of public clouds, you know, one large customer we have as a, you know, kind of, uh, uh, uh, three-plus one strategy around cloud. So there's, they, there's, they're, they're leveraging, you know, three different, um, uh, public cloud, I as environments. And then they're also have their on-premise cloud environment. So, you know, we, it really starts with the customer workload and the data and where it lives, whether that's be out in an edge location in a row remote or branch office on an end point somewhere, they need to protect whether it be in a core data center or multiple data centers, or rather that be in the cloud. Um, you know, that's how we think about optimizing the solution for the, for the customers. >>Curious if you can give me any examples of customers, maybe by industry that were, have been with Dell for a long time with Avamar networker and how they've expanded, being able to pick, as you say, as their, or as their environment grows. And we've got, um, now as this blur, right, it's now work from anywhere data centers, edge. Talk to me about some customers, examples that you think really articulate the value of what Dell is doing. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think one customer, um, in the financial services sector comes to mind. They have a large, uh, um, amount of unstructured data that they need to protect, you know, petabytes, petabytes, and petabytes of data they need to protect. And so I think that's one customer that comes to mind is someone we've been with for a long time, uh, you know, been partnering with for a long time, >>A lot of, of, um, flexibility and choice for Avamar, a networker customers, as things change the world continues to pivot. And we know it's absolutely essential to be able to recover that data. You mentioned 70, I think 79% of the fortune 100 are using, uh, Dell technologies for data protection software. That's probably something that's only going to continue to grow. Um, lots of stuff coming up, as you mentioned, but what are some of the things that you're personally excited about as the world starts to open up and you get to actually go out and engage with customers >>I'm in just looking forward to like in-person meetings, right? I mean, I just love going and trying to understand what problems the customers are trying to solve and how we can help address those. Um, I think, you know, what I see customers sort of struggling with is how do they kind of manage their current environment while they're building for the future? Um, so there's a lot of interest in questions around, you know, the, how do they protect some of these new types of workloads, whether they're deployed on premise or in the public cloud. Um, so that continues to be an area where we, you know, we continue to engage with customers. Um, I'm also really personally excited about, you know, the extensions that we're doing and our cyber recovery capabilities socio can expect to hear more about some of those in the, in the next 12 months, because we're really, um, you know, seeing that as a key, uh, driver to kind of increase, um, you know, increased policies around and, and implementations around data protection, uh, is, is because of these, you know, the, the need to be able to re be resilient from cyber attacks. >>Um, I would say we're also doing some very interesting integrations with VMware. Um, we're going to have some first and only announcements around VMware and managing protection for VMware, uh, you know, VM environments. So we can look forward to hearing more about that. And, you know, we have customers that are deployed our data protection solutions at scale. Um, you know, one customer has 150,000 clients they're protecting with our data protection offerings. Wow. 150,000. And so, you know, we're continuing to improve the, and enhance the products to meet those kinds of scale requirements. And, um, you know, I'm excited by the fact that, that we've had this long standing relationship with this one particular customer and, you know, continue to, to help and, and flow an edge where, where their needs go. >>And that's something that even a great job of talking about is just not just a longstanding relationships, but really that dedication that Dell has to innovating with its customers. Laura, thank you for sharing some of the updates of what's new, what you're continuing to do with customers and what you're looking forward to in the future. It sounds like we might hear some news around the VMworld timeframe. Yes. All right, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time. >>It's been great to be here. Thanks so much. >>Excellent for Laura Dwight and Lisa Martin, you're watching this cube conversation.

(gentle music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. Laura Dubois joins me next, VP of product management at Dell Technologies, Laura, welcome back to the program. >> Yeah, thank you so much Lisa, it's just fantastic to be here and talking about data protection now that we're coming out of COVID, it's just wonderful to be here, thank you so much. >> Isn't it so refreshing. So, you're going to provide some updates on Dell's data protection software, some of the innovation, how you're working with customers and prospects. So let's go ahead and dig right in, let's talk about some of the innovation and the enhancements that Dell is making to its data protection suite of software and also how customers are influencing that. >> Yeah, so it's a great question Lisa and you're right. We have driven a lot of innovation and enhancements in our data protection suite. And let me just level a second. So data protection suite, is a solution that is deployed by really tens of thousands of customers. And we continue to innovate and enhance that data protection suite. Data protection suite is comprised primarily of three main data protection software capabilities. So, longstanding capabilities and customer adoption of Avamar, which continues to be a central capability on our portfolio. The second one is Networker. So Networker is also an enterprise grade, highly scalable and performance data protection solution. And then a couple of years ago, we launched a new data protection capability called power protect data manager. So, all three of these capabilities, really the foundation of our data protection suite. And as I said, enterprises around the world rely on these three sets of capabilities to protect their data, regardless of wherever it resides. And it's really central now more than ever in the face of increasing security, risks and compliance and the need to be able to have an always kind of available environment that customers rely on the capabilities and data protection suite to really make sure their enterprises resilient. >> Absolutely, and make sure that that data is recoverable if anything happens, you mentioned cybersecurity. We'll get into that in a second. But so thousands of Avamar and Networker customers, what are some of the key workloads and data that these customers are protecting with these technologies? >> Yeah, I mean, so, actually tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands of customers that rely on data protection suite. And it really, I think the strength and advantage of our portfolio is its breadth, breadth in terms of client operating environments, in terms of applications and databases, in terms of workloads and specifically use cases. So I mean, the breadth that we offer is unparalleled, pretty much whether Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NetWare, kind of going back in time a long tail of kind of operating environments and then databases, right. So everything from SQL and Oracle and Sybase and DB2 to new types of databases, like the NoSQL or content store and key value store types of NoSQL schemas, if you will. And so, and then lastly is the word they use cases, right? So being able to protect data, whether that be data that's in a data center, out in remote or branch locations or data that's out in the cloud, right. And of course, increasingly customers are placing their data in a variety of locations; on Edge, on core data centers and in cloud environments. And we actually have over six exabytes of capacity under management, across public cloud environments. So pretty extensive deployment of our data protection suite in public clouds, you know, the leading hyperscalers, cloud environments and premises as well. >> So let's talk a little bit about the customer influence 'cause obviously there's a very cooperative relationship that Dell has with its customers that help you achieve things. Like, for example, I saw that according to IDC, Dell Technologies is number one in data protection, appliances, and software, leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery for over 20 years now. Talk to us a little bit more about that symbiotic customer, Dell relationship. >> Yeah, so it's a great question. We see our customers as strategic partners, and we really want to understand their business, their requirements. We engage on a quarterly basis with customers and partners in advisory councils. And then of course, we are always engaging with customers outside of those cycles on a kind of a one-on-one basis. And so we are really driving the innovation and the backlogs and the roadmap for data protection suite based upon customer feedback. And approximately 79% of the fortune 100 customers, our Dell data, Dell Technologies data protection customers. Now that's not to say that that's our only customer base. We have customers in commercial accounts, in mid-market in federal agencies, but, you know, we take our customer relationships really, really seriously, and we engage with them on a regular basis, both in a group forum to provide feedback as well as in a one-on-one basis. And we're building our roadmaps and our product release is based on feedback from customers, and again, know large customer base that we take very seriously. >> Right to the customer listening obviously it is critical for Dell. So you talked a little bit about what that cycle looks like in terms of quarterly meetings and then those individual meetings. What are some of the enhancements and advancements that customers have actually influenced? >> Yeah, so we, I mean, we, I think continuing to provide simplicity and ease of use is a key element of our portfolio and our strategy, right? So continuing to modernize and update the software in terms of workflows, in terms of, you know, common experiences also increasingly customers want to automate their data protection process. So really taking an API-first strategy for how we deliver capabilities to customers, continuing to expand our client database, hypervisor environments, continue to extend out our cloud support, you know, things like protection of cloud native applications with increasingly customers containerizing and building scale-out applications. We want to be able to protect Kubernetes environment. So that's kind of an area of focus for us. Another area of focus for us is going deeper with our key strategic partners, whether that'd be a cloud partner or a hypervisor partner. And then of course, customers, in fact, one of the top three things that we consistently hear from these councils that we do is the criticality of security, security and our data protection environment but the criticality of being able to be resilient from, and in the event of a cyber attack to be able to resilient recover from that cyber attack. So that is an area where we continue to make innovations and investments in the data protection suite as well. >> And that's so critical. One of the things that we saw in the last year, 15 months plus Laura, is this massive rise in ransomware. It's now a household word, the Colonial Pipeline for example, the meat packing plant, it's now many businesses knowing it's not, if we get attacked, but it's when. So having the ability to be resilient and recover that data is table stakes for, I imagine a business in any organization. I want to understand a little bit more. So you talked about tens of thousands of customers using Avamar and Networker. So now they have the capability of also expanding and using more of the suite. Talk to me a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think it starts with the customer environment and what workloads and use cases they have. And because of the breadth of capabilities indeed the data protection suite, we really optimize the solution based upon their needs, right. So if they have a large portfolio of applications that they need to maintain but they're also building applications or systems for the future, we have a solution there. If they have a single hypervisor strategy or a multiple hypervisor strategy, we have a strategy there, if they have data that's on-premise and across a range of public clouds, one large customer we have as a, kind of three-plus one strategy around cloud. So they're leveraging three different public cloud, IS environments, and then they're also have their on-premise cloud environment. So, you know, we, it really starts with the customer workload and the data, and where it lives; whether that's be out in an Edge location in a remote or branch office, on an end point somewhere, they need to protect whether it be in a core data center or multiple data centers, or rather be in the cloud. That's how we think about optimizing the solution for the customers. >> Curious if you can give me any examples of customers maybe by industry that were, have been with Dell for a long time with Avamar and Networker for a long time and how they've expanded, being able to pick, as you say, as their, or as their environment grows and we've got, now this blur of right. It's now worked from anywhere, data centers, Edge. Talk to me about some customers examples that you think really articulate the value of what Dell is delivering. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think one customer in the financial services sector comes to mind. They have a large amount of unstructured data that they need to protect, you know, petabytes, petabytes and petabytes of data they need to protect. And so I think that's one customer that comes to mind is someone we've been with for a long time, been partnering with for a long time. Another customer I mentioned in the, it was a kind of a three-letter software company that is a really strategic partner for us with on-premise, in the cloud. You know, healthcare is a big and important sector for Dell. We have integrations into kind of leading healthcare applications. So that's another big, whether they be a healthcare provider or a healthcare insurance company, and had a fourth example, but it's escaping my mind right now, but, I would say going back to the cyber discussion, I mean, one thing that we, where we see really customers looking for guidance from us around cyber recovery and cyber resilience is in what the, you know, of course president Biden just released this executive board on his mandate for ensuring that the federal agencies but also companies in the millisecond sector, sectors be able to ensure resilience from cyber attacks. So that's companies in financial services, that's companies in healthcare, energy, oil, and gas transportation, right. Obviously in companies and industries that are critical to our economy and our infrastructure. And so that has been an area where we've seen, recently in the last, I would say 12 months increased in engagement, you mentioned Colonial Pipeline, for example. So those are some high salient highlights I think of in terms of, you know, kind of key customers. But pretty much every sector. I mean, the U.S. government, all of the the agencies, whether they be civilian, or DOD or key kind of engagement partners of ours. >> Yeah, and as you said in the last year, what a year it's been. But really a business in every industry has got to be able to be resilient and recover when something happens. Can you talk a little bit about some of the specific enhancements that you guys have made to the suite? >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, we continue to enhance our hypervisor capabilities. So we continue to enhance not only the core VMware or hyperbaric capabilities but we continue to enhance some of the extensions or plugins that we have for those. So whether that be things like our VRealized plugin or a vCloud director plugin for say, VMware. So that's kind of a big focus for us. Continuing to enhance capabilities around leveraging the cloud for long-term retention. So that's another kind of enhancement area for us. But cloud in general is an ara where we continue to drive more and more enhancement. Improving performance in cloud environments for a variety of use cases, whether that be DR to the cloud, backup or replications of the cloud or backing up workloads that are already in the cloud. There's a key use cases for us, as well as the archive to cloud use cases. So there's just some examples or areas where we've driven enhancements and you can expect to see more, you know we have a six month release cadence for Avamar and Networker, and we continue with that momentum. And at the end of this month, we have the next major release of our data protection suite. And then six months later, we'll have the next update and so on and so forth. And we've been doing that actually for the last three to four years. This is a six month release cadence for data protection suite. We continue with that momentum. And like I said, simplicity and modernity, APIs and automation, extending our workloads and hypervisors and use cases. And then cloud is a big focusing area as well, as well as security and cyber resilience. >> Right, and so a lot of flexibility in choice for Avamar and Networker customers. As things change the world continues to pivot and we know it's absolutely essential to be able to recover that data. You mentioned 70, I think 79% of the Fortune 100 are using Dell technologies for data protection software. That's probably something that's only going to continue to grow. Lots of stuff coming up. As you mention, what are some of the things that you're personally excited about as the world starts to open up and you get to actually go out and engage with customers? >> I'm in just looking forward to like in-person meetings. I mean, I just loved going and trying to understand what problems the customers are trying to solve and how we can help address those. I think, you know, what I see customers sort of struggling with is how do they kind of manage their current environment while they're building for the future? So there's a lot of interest in questions around, how do they protect some of these new types of workloads, whether they're deployed on premise or in the public cloud. So that continues to be an area where we continue to engage with customers. I'm also really personally excited about the extensions that we're doing in our cyber recovery capabilities so as you can expect to hear more about some of those in the next 12 months, because we're really seeing that as a key driver to kind of increased policies around and implementations around data protection is because of these, you know, the needs to be able to be resilient from cyber attacks. I would say we're also doing some very interesting integrations with VMware. We're going to have some first and only announcements around VMware and managing protection for VMware, you know, VM environments. So you can look forward to hearing more about that. And we have customers that have deployed our data protection solutions at scale. One customer has 150,000 clients who they're protecting with our data protection offerings, 150,000. And so we're continuing to improve the, and enhance the products to meet those kinds of scale requirements. And I'm excited by the fact that we've had this long standing relationship with this one particular customer and continue to help in flowing up where their needs go. >> And that's something that even a great job of talking about is just not just a longstanding relationships but really that dedication that Dell has to innovating with its customers. Laura, thank you for sharing some of the updates of what's new, what you're continuing to do with customers, and what you're looking forward to in the future. It sounds like we might hear some news around the VMworld timeframe. >> Yes, I think so. >> All right, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, it's been great to be here. Thanks so much. >> Excellent from Laura Dubois and Lisa Martin, you're watching this Cube Conversation. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco, North America all over the world, and most of the parts Asia, Pacific Amazon Summit is the hashtag. This is part of theCUBE Virtual Program, where we're going to be covering Amazon Summits throughout the year. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And of course, we're not at the events. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios, with our COVID-19 quarantine crew. And we got a great guest here from AWS, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, leads the team on elastic compute, and its business where it's evolving and most importantly, what it means for the customers in the industry. Dave, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE virtual program. >> Hey John, it's really great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So we got the summit going down. It's new format because of the shelter in place. They're going virtual or digital, virtualization of events. And I want to have a session with you on EC2, and some of the new things they're going on. And I think the story is important, because certainly around the pandemic, and certainly on the large scale, SaaS business models, which are turning out to be quite the impact from a positive standpoint, with people sheltering in place, what is the role of data in all this, okay? And also, there's a lot of pressure financially. We've had the payroll loan programs from the government, and to companies really looking at their bottom lines. So two major highlights going on in the world that's directly impacted. And you have some products, and news around this, I want to do a deep dive on that. One is AppFlow, which is a new integration service by AWS, that really talks about taking the scale and value of AWS services, and integrating that with SaaS Applications. And the migration acceleration program for Windows, which has a storied history of database. For many, many years, you guys have been powering most of the Windows workloads, ironic that you guys are not Microsoft, but certainly had success there. Let's start with the AppFlow. Okay, this was recently announced on the 22nd of April. This is a new service. Can you take us through why this is important? What is the service? Why now, what was the main driver behind AppFlow? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launcher AppFlow, what we're really trying to do is make it easy for organizations and enterprises to really control the flow of their data, between the number of different applications that they use on premise, and AWS. And so the problem we started to see was, enterprises just had this data all over the place, and they wanted to do something useful with it. Right, we see many organizations running Data Lakes, large scale analytics, Big Machine Learning on AWS, but before you can do all of that, you have to have access to the data. And if that data is sitting in an application, either on-premise or elsewhere in AWS, it's very difficult to get out of that application, and into S3, or Redshift, or one of those services, before you can manipulate it, that was the challenge. And so the journey kind of started a few years ago, we actually launched a service on the EC2 network, inside Private Link. And it was really, it provided organizations with a very secure way to transfer network data, both between VPCs, and also between VPC, and on-prem networks. And what this highlighted to us, is organizations say that's great, but I actually don't have the technical ability, or the team, to actually do the work that's required to transform the data from, whether it's Salesforce, or SAP, and actually move it over Private Link to AWS. And so we realized, while private link was useful, we needed another layer of service that actually provided this, and one of the key requirements was an organization must be able to do this with no code at all. So basically, no developer required. And I want to be able to transfer data from Salesforce, my Salesforce database, and put that in Redshift together with some other data, and then perform some function on that. And so that's what AppFlow is all about. And so we came up with the idea about a little bit more than a year ago, that was the first time I sat down, and actually reviewed the content for what this was going to be. And the team's been hard at work, and launched on the 22nd of April. And we actually launched with 14 partners as well, that provide what we call connectors, which allow us to access these various services, and companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake, to name a few. >> Well, certainly you guys have a great ecosystem of SaaS partners, and that's you know well documented in the industry that you guys are not going to be competing directly with a lot of these big SaaS players, although you do have a few services for customers who want end to end, Jassy continues to pound that home on my Cube interviews. But I think this, >> Absolutely. is notable, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because this seems to be the key unlocking of the value of SaaS and Cloud, because data traversal, data transfer, there's costs involved, also moving traffic over the internet is unsecure, and unreliable. So a couple questions I wanted to just ask you directly. One is did the AppFlow come out of the AWS Private Link piece of it? And two, is it one directional or bi-directional? How is that working? Because I'm guessing that you had Private Link became successful, because no one wants to move on the internet. They wanted direct connects. Was there something inadequate about that service? Was there more headroom there? And is it bi-directional for the customer? >> So let me take the second one, it's absolutely bi-directional. So you can transfer that data between an on-premise application and AWS, or AWS and the on-premise application. Really, anything that has a connector can support the data flow in both directions. And with transformations, and so data in one data source, may need to be transformed, before it's actually useful in a second data source. And so AppFlow takes care of all that transformation as well, in both directions, And again, with no requirement for any code, on behalf of the customer. Which really unlocks it for a lot of the more business focused parts of an organization, who maybe don't have immediate access to developers. They can use it immediately, just literally with a few transformations via the console, and it's working for you. In terms of, you mentioned sort of the flow of data over the internet, and the need for security of data. It's critically important, and as we look at just what had happened as a company does. We have very, very strict requirements around the flow of data, and what services we can use internally. And where's any of our data going to be going? And I think it's a good example of how many enterprises are thinking about data today. They don't even want to trust even HTTPS, and encryption of data on the internet. I'd rather just be in a world where my data never ever traverses the internet, and I just never have to deal with that. And so, the journey all started with Private Link there, and probably was an interesting feature, 'cause it really was changing the way that we asked our customers to think about networking. Nothing like Private Link has ever existed, in the sort of standard networking that an enterprise would normally have. It's kind of only possible because of what VPC allows you to do, and what the software defined network on AWS gives you. And so we built Private Link, and as I said, customers started to adopt it. They loved the idea of being able to transfer data, either between VPCs, or between on-premise. Or between their own VPC, and maybe a third party provider, like Snowflake, has been a very big adopter of Private Link, and they have many customers using it to get access to Snowflake databases in a very secure way. And so that's where it all started, and in those discussions with customers, we started to see that they wanted us to up level a little bit. They said, "We can use Private Link, it's great, "but one of the problems we have is just the flow of data." And how do we move data in a very secure, in a highly available way, with no sort of bottlenecks in the system. And so we thought Private Link was a great sort of underlying technology, that empowered all of this, but we had to build the system on top of that, which is AppFlow. That says we're going to take care of all the complexity. And then we had to go to the ecosystem, and say to all these providers, "Can you guys build connectors?" 'Cause everybody realized it's super important that data can be shared, and so that organizations can really extract the value from that data. And so the 14 of them at launch, we have many, many more down the road, have come to the party with with connectors, and full support of what AppFlow provides. >> Yeah us DevOps purists always are pounding the fist on the table, now virtual table, API's and connectors. This is the model, so people are integrating. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I think you said low code, or no code on the developer simplicity side. Is it no code, or low code? Can you just explain quickly and clarify that point? >> It's no code for getting started literally, for the kind of, it's basic to medium complexity use case. It's not code, and a lot of customers we spoke to, that was a bottleneck. Right, they needed something from data. It might have been the finance organization, or it could have been human resources, somebody else in organization needed that. They don't have a developer that helps them typically. And so we find that they would wait many, many months, or maybe even never get the project done, just because they never ever had access to that data, or to the developer to actually do the work that was required for the transformation. And so it's no code for almost all use cases. Where it literally is, select your data source, select the connector, and then select the transformations. And some basic transformations, renaming of fields, transformation of data in simple ways. That's more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. And then obviously through to the destination, with the connector on the other side, to do the final transformation, to the final data source that you want to migrate the data to. >> You know, you have an interesting background, was looking at your history, and you've essentially been a web services kind of guy all your life. From a code standpoint software environment, and now I'll say EC2 is the crown jewel of AWS, and doing more and more with S3. But what's interesting, as you build more of these layers services in there, there's more flexibility. So right now, in most of the customer environments, is a debate around, do I build something monolithic, and or decoupled, okay? And I think there's a world where there's a mutually, not mutually exclusive, I mean, you have a mainframe, you have a big monolithic thing, if it does something. But generally people would agree that a decoupled environment is more flexible, and more agile. So I want to kind of get to the customer use case, 'cause I can really see this being really powerful, AppFlow with Private Link, where you mentioned Snowflake. I mean, Snowflake is built on AWS, they're doing extremely, extremely well, like any other company that builds on AWS. Whether it's theCUBE Cloud, or it's Snowflake. As we tap those services, customers, we might have people who want to build on our platform on top of AWS. So I know a bunch of startups that are building within the Snowflake ecosystem, a customer of yours. >> Yeah. >> So they're technically a customer of Amazon, but they're also in the ecosystem of say, Snowflake. >> Yes. >> So this brings up an interesting kind of computer science problem, which is architecturally, how do I think about that? Is this something where AppFlow could help me? Because I certainly want to enable people to build on a platform, that I build if I'm doing that, if I'm not going to be a pure SaaS turnkey application. But if I'm going to bring partners in, and do integration, use the benefits of the goodness of an API or Connector driven architecture, I need that. So explain to me how this helps me, or doesn't help me. Is this something that makes sense to you? Does this question make sense? How do you react to that? >> I think so, I think the question is pretty broad. But I think there's an element in which I can help. So firstly, you talk about sort of decoupled applications, right? And I think that is certainly the way that we've gone at Amazon, and been very, very successful for us. I think we started that journey back in 2003, when we decoupled the monolithic application that was amazon.com. And that's when our service journey started. And a lot of that sort of inspired AWS, and how we built what we built today. And we see a lot of our customers doing that, moving to smaller applications. It just works better, it's easier to debug, there's ownership at a very controlled level. So you can get all your engineering teams to have very clear and crisp ownership. And it just drives innovation, right? 'Cause each little component can innovate without the burden of the rest of the ecosystem. And so that's what we really enjoy. I think the other thing that's important when you think about design, is to see how much of the ecosystem you can leverage. And so whether you're building on Snowflake, or you're building directly on top of AWS, or you're building on top of one of our other customers and partners. If you can use something that solves the problem for you, versus building it yourself. Well that just leaves you with more time to actually go and focus on the stuff that you need to be solving, right? The product you need to be building. And so in the case of AppFlow, I think if there's a need for transfer of data, between, for example, Snowflake and some data warehouse, that you as an organisation are trying to build on a Snowflake infrastructure. AppFlow is something you could potentially look at. It's certainly not something that you could just use for, it's very specific and focused to the flow of data between services from a data analytics point of view. It's not really something you could use from an API point of view, or messaging between services. It's more really just facilitating that flow of data, and the transformation of data, to get it into a place that you can do something useful with it. >> And you said-- >> But like any of our services-- (speakers talk over each other) Couldn't be using any layer in the stack. >> Yes, it's a level of integration, right? There's no code to code, depending on how you look at it, cool. Customer use cases, you mentioned, large scale analytics, I thought I heard you say, machine learning, Data Lakes. I mean, basically, anyone who's using data is going to want to tap some sort of data repository, and figure out how to scale data when appropriate. There's also contextual, relevant data that might be specific to say, an industry vertical, or a database. And obviously, AI becomes the application for all this. >> Exactly. >> If I'm a customer, how does AppFlow relate to that? How does that help me, and what's the bottom line? >> So I think there's two parts to that journey. And depending on where customers are, and so there's, we do have millions of customers today that are running applications on AWS. Over the last few years, we've seen the emergence of Data Lakes, really just the storage of a large amount of data, typically in S3. But then companies want to extract value out of, and use in certain ways. Obviously, we have many, many tools today, from Redshift, Athena, that allow you to utilize these Data Lakes, and be able to run queries against this information. Things like EMR, and one of our oldest services in the space. And so doing some sort of large scale analytics, and more recently, services like SageMaker, are allowing us to do machine learning. And so being able to run machine learning across an enormous amount of data that we have stored in AWS. And there's some stuff in the IoT, workload use space as well, that's emerging. And many customers are using it. There's obviously many customers today that aren't using it on AWS, potential customers for us, that are looking to do something useful with data. And so the one part of the journey is taking up all of that infrastructure, and we have a lot of services that make it really easy to do machine learning, and do analytics, and that sort of thing. And then the other problem, the other side of the problem, which is what AppFlow is addressing is, how do I get that data to S3, or to Redshift, to actually go and run that machine learning workload? And that's what it's really unlocking for customers. And it's not just the one time transfer of data, the other thing that AppFlow actually supports, is the continuous updating of data. And so if you decide that you want to have that view of your data in S3, for example, and Data Lake, that's kept up to date, within a few minutes, within an hour, you can actually configure AppFlow to do that. And so the data source could be Salesforce, it could be Slack, it could be whatever data source you want to blend. And you continuously have that flow of data between those systems. And so when you go to run your machine learning workload, or your analytics, it's all continuously up to date. And you don't have this problem of, let me get the data, right? And when I think about some of the data jobs that I've run, in my time, back in the day as an engineer, on early EC2, a small part of it was actually running the job on the data. A large part of it was how do I actually get that data, and is it up to date? >> Up to date data is critical, I think that's the big feature there is that, this idea of having the data connectors, really makes the data fresh, because we go through the modeling, and you realize why I missed a big patch of data, the machine learnings not effective. >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's only-- >> Exactly, and the other thing is, it's very easy to bring in new data sources, right? You think about how many companies today have an enormous amount of data just stored in silos, and they haven't done anything with it. Often it'll be a conversation somewhere, right? Around the coffee machine, "Hey, we could do this, and we can do this." But they haven't had the developers to help them, and haven't had access to the data, and haven't been able to move the data, and to put it in a useful place. And so, I think what we're seeing here, with AppFlow, really unlocking of that. Because going from that initial conversation, to actually having something running, literally requires no code. Log into the AWS console, configure a few connectors, and it's up and running, and you're ready to go. And you can do the same thing with SageMaker, or any of the other services we have on the other side that make it really simple to run some of these ideas, that just historically have been just too complicated. >> Alright, so take me through that console piece. Just walk me through, I'm in, you sold me on this. I just came out of meeting with my company, and I said, "Hey, you know what? "We're blowing up this siloed approach. "We want to kind of create this horizontal data model, "where we can mix "and match connectors based upon our needs." >> Yeah. >> So what do I do? I'm using SageMaker, using some data, I got S3, I got an application. What do I do? I'm connecting what, S3? >> Yeah, well-- >> To the app? >> So the simplest thing is, and the simplest place to find this actually, is on Jeff Bezos blog, that he did for the release, right? Jeff always does a great job in demonstrating how to use our various products. But it literally is going into the standard AWS console, which is the console that we use for all of our services. I think we have 200 of them, so it is getting kind of challenging to find the ball in that console, as we continue to grow. And find AppFlow. AppFlow is a top level service, and so you'll see it in the console. And the first thing you got to do, is you got to configure your Source-Connect. And so it's a connector that, where's the data coming from? And as I said, we had 14 partners, you'll be able to see those connectors there, and see what's supported. And obviously, there's the connectivity. Do you have access to that data, or where is the data running? AppFlow runs within AWS, and so you need to have either VPN, or direct connect back to the organization, if the data source is on-premise. If the data source happens to be in AWS, and obviously be in a VPC, and you just need to configure some of that connectivity functionality. >> So no code if the connectors are there, but what if I want to build my own connector? >> So building your own connector, that is something that we working with third parties with right now. I could be corrected, but not 100% sure whether that's available. It's certainly something I think we would allow customers to do, is to extend sort of either the existing connectors, or to add additional transformations as well. And so you'd be able to do that. But the transformations that the vast majority of our customers are using are literally just in the console, with the basic transformations. >> It comes bigger apps that people have, and just building those connectors. How does a partner get involved? You got 14 partners now, how do you extend the partner base contact in Amazon Partner Manager, or you send an email to someone? How does someone get involved? What are you recommending? >> So there are a couple of ways, right? We have an extensive partner ecosystem that the vast majority of these ISVs are already integrated with. And so, we have the 14 we launched with, we also pre announced SAP, which is going to be a very critical one for the vast majority of our customers. Having deep integration with SAP data, and being able to bring that seamlessly into AWS. That'll be launching soon. And then there's a long list of other ones, that we're currently working on. And they're currently working on them themselves. And then the other one is going to be, like with most things that Amazon, feedback from customers. And so what we hear from customers, and very often you'll hear from third party partners as well, who'll come and say, "Hey, my customers are asking me "to integrate with the AppFlow, what do I need to do?" And so, you know, just reaching out to AWS, and letting them know that you'd be interested in integrating, that you're not part of the partner program. The team would be happy to engage, and bring you on board, so-- >> (mumbles) on playbook, get the top use cases nailed down, listen to customers, and figure it out. >> Exactly. >> Great stuff Dave, we really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to digging in AppFlow, and I'll check on Jeff Bezos blog. Sure, it's April 22, was the launch day, probably had up there. One of the things that want to just jump into, now moving into the next topic, is the cost structure. A lot of pressure on costs. This is where I think this Migration Acceleration Program for Windows is interesting. Andy Jassy always likes to boast on stage at Reinvent, about the number of workloads of Windows running on Amazon Web Services. This has been a big part of the customers, I think, for over 10 years, that I can think of him talking about this. What is this about? Are you still seeing uptake on Windows workloads, or, I mean,-- >> Absolutely. >> Azure has got some market share, >> Absolutely. >> but now you, doesn't really kind of square in my mind, what's going on here. Tell us about this migration service. >> Yeah, absolutely, on the migration side. So Windows is absolutely, we still believe AWS is the best place to run a Windows workload. And we have many, many happy Windows customers today. And it's a very big, very large, growing point of our business today, it used to be. I was part of the original team back in 2008, that launched, I think it was Windows 2008, back then on EC2. And I remember sort of working out all the details, of how to do all the virtualization with Windows, obviously back then we'd done Linux. And getting Windows up and running, and working through some of the challenges that Windows had as an operating system in the early days. And it was October 2008 that we actually launched Windows as an operating system. And it's just been, we've had many, many happy Windows customers since then. >> Why is Amazon so peak to run workloads from Windows so effectively? >> Well, I think, sorry what did you say peaked? >> Why is Amazon so in well positioned to run the Windows workloads? >> Well, firstly, I mean, I think Windows is really just the operating system, right? And so if you think about that as the very last little bit of your sort of virtualization stack, and then being able to support your applications. What you really have to think about is, everything below that, both in terms of the compute, so performance you're going to get, the price performance you're going to get. With our Nitro Hypervisor, and the Nitro System that we developed back in 2018, or launched in 2018. We really are able to provide you with the best price performance, and have the very least overhead from a hypervisor point of view. And then what that means is you're getting more out of your machine, for the price that you pay. And then you think about the rest of the ecosystem, right? Think about all the other services, and all the features, and just the breadth, and the extensiveness of AWS. And that's critically important for all of our Windows customers as well. And so you're going to have things like Active Directory, and these sort of things that are very Windows specific, and we can absolutely support all of those, natively. And in the Windows operating system as well. We have things like various agents that you can run inside the Windows box to do more maintenance and management. And so I think we've done a really good job in bringing Windows into the larger, and broader ecosystem of AWS. And it really is just a case of making sure that Windows runs smoothly. And that's just the last little bit on top of that, and so many customers enterprises run Windows today. When I started out my career, I was developing software in the banking industry, and it was a very much a Windows environment. They were running critical applications. And so we see it's critically important for customers who run Windows today, to be able to bring those Windows workloads to AWS. >> Yeah, and that's certainly-- >> We are seeing a trend. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. >> Well, they're certainly out there from a market share standpoint, but this is a cost driver, you guys are saying, and I want you to just give an example, or just illustrate why it costs less. How is it a cost savings? Is it just services, cycle times on EC2? I mean what's the cost savings? I'm a customer like, "Okay, so I'm going to go to Amazon with my workloads." Why is it a cost saving? >> I think there are a few things. The one I was referring to in my previous comment was the price performance, right? And so if I'm running on a system, where the hypervisor is using a significant portion of the physical CPU that I want to use as well. Well there's an overhead to that. And so from a price performance point of view, I look at, if I go and benchmark a CPU, and I look at how much I pay for that per unit of that benchmark, it's better on AWS. Because with our natural system, we're able to give you 100% of the floor. And so you get a performance then. So that's the first thing is price performance, which is different from this price. But there's a saving there as well. The other one is a large part, and getting into the migration program as well. A large part of what we do with our customers, when they come to AWS, is supposed to be, we take a long look at their license strategy. What licenses do they have? And a key part of bringing in Windows workloads AWS, is license optimization. What can we do to help you optimize the licenses that you're using today for Windows, for SQL Server, and really try and find efficiencies in that. And so we're able to secure significant savings for many of our customers by doing that. And we have a number of tools that they use as part of the migration program to do that. And so that helps save there. And then finally, we have a lot of customers doing what we call modernization of their applications. And so it really embraced Cloud, and some of the benefits that you get from Cloud. Especially elasticities, so being able to scale for demand. It's very difficult to do that when you bound by license for your operating system, because every box you run, you have to have a license for it. And so tuning auto scaling on, you've got to make sure you have enough licenses for all these Windows boxes you've seen. And so the push the Cloud's bringing, we've seen a lot of customers move Windows applications from Windows to Linux, or even move SQL Server, from SQL server to SQL Server on Linux, or another database platform. And do a modernization there, that already allows them to benefit from the elasticity that Cloud provides, without having to constantly worry about licenses. >> So final question on this point, migration service implies migration from somewhere else. How do they get involved? What's the onboarding process? Can you give a quick detail on that? >> Absolutely, so we've been helping customers with migrations for years. We've launched a migration program, or Migration Acceleration Program, MAP. We launched it, I think about 2016, 2017 was the first part of that. It was really just a bringing together of the various, the things we'd learned, the tools we built, the best strategies to do a migration. And we said, "How do we help customers looking "to migrate to the Cloud." And so that's what MAP's all about, is just a three phase, we'll help you assess the migration, we'll help you do a lot of planning. And then ultimately, we help you actually do the migration. We partner with a number of external partners, and ISVs, and GSIs, who also worked very closely with us to help customers do migrations. And so what we launched in April of this year, with the Windows migration program, is really just more support for Windows workload, as part of the broader Migration Acceleration Program. And there's benefits to customers, it's a smoother migration, it's a faster migration in almost all cases, we're doing license assessments, and so there's cost reduction in that as well. And ultimately, there's there's other benefits as well that we offer them, if they partner with us in bringing the workload to AWS. And so getting involved is really just reaching out to one of our AWS sales folks, or one of your account managers, if you have an account manager, and talk to them about workloads that you'd like to bring in. And we even go as far as helping you identify which applications are easiest to migrate. And so that you can kind of get going with some of the easier ones, while we help you with some of the more difficult ones. And strategies' about removing those roadblocks to bring your services to AWS. >> Takes the blockers away, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, the crown jewel of AWS, breaking down AppFlow, and the migration to Windows services. Great insights, appreciate the time. >> Thanks. >> We're here with Dave Brown, VP of EC2, as part of the virtual Cube coverage. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on an industry topic. Given what you've done with EC2, and the success, and with COVID-19, you're seeing that scale problem play out on the world stage for the entire population of the global world. This is now turning non-believers into believers of DevOps, web services, real time. I mean, this is now a moment in history, with the challenges that we have, even when we come out of this, whether it's six months or 12 months, the world won't be the same. And I believe that there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of applications. And an architecture that's going to look a lot like Cloud, Cloud-native. You've been doing this for many, many years, key architect of EC2 with your team. How do you see this playing out? Because a lot of people are going to be squirreling in rooms, when this comes back. They're going to be video conferencing now, but when they have meetings, they're going to look at the window of the future, and they're going to be exposed to what's failed. And saying, "We need to double down on that, "we have to fix this." So there's going to be winners and losers coming out of this pandemic, really quickly. And I think this is going to be a major opportunity for everyone to rally around this moment, to reset. And I think it's going to look a lot like this decoupled, this distributed computing environment, leveraging all the things that we've talked about in the past. So what's your advice, and how do you see this evolving? >> Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think, just the speed at which it happened as well. And the way in which organizations, both internally and externally, had to reinvent themselves very, very quickly, right? We've been very fortunate within Amazon, moving to working from home was relatively simple for the vast majority of us. Obviously, we have a number of our employees that work in data centers, and performance centers that have been on the front lines, and be doing a great job. But for the rest of us, it's been virtual video conferencing, right? All about meetings, and being able to use all of our networking tools securely, either over the VPN, or the no VPN infrastructure that we have. And many organizations had to do that. And so I think there are a number of different things that have impacted us right now. Obviously, virtual desktops has been a significant sort of growth point, right? Folks don't have access to the physical machine anymore, they're now all having to work remote, and so service like Workspaces, which runs on EC2, as well, has being a critical service data to support many of our largest customers. Our client VPN service, so we have within EC2 on the networking side, has also been critical for many large organizations, as they see more of their staff working everyday remotely. It has also seen, been able to support a lot of customers there. Just more broadly, what we've seen with COVID-19, is we've seen some industries really struggle, obviously travel industry, people just aren't traveling anymore. And so there's been immediate impact to some of those industries. They've been other industries that support functions like the video conferencing, or entertainment side of the house, has seen a bit of growth, over the last couple of months. And education has been an interesting one for us as well, where schools have been moving online. And behind the scenes in AWS, and on EC2, we've been working really hard to make sure that our supply chains are not interrupted in any way. The last thing we want to do is have any of our customers not be able to get EC2 capacity, when they desperately need it. And so we've made sure that capacity is fully available, even all the way through the pandemic. And we've even been able to support customers with, I remember one customer who told me the next day, they're going to have more than hundred thousand students coming online. And they suddenly had to grow their business, by some crazy number. And we were able to support them, and give them the capacity, which is way outside of any sort of demand--. >> I think this is the Cambrain explosion that I was referring to, because a whole new set of new things have emerged. New gaps in businesses have been exposed, new opportunities are emerging. This is about agility. It's real time now. It's actually happening for everybody, not just the folks on the inside of the industry. This is going to create a reinvention. So it's ironic, I've heard the word reinvent mentioned more times now, over the past three months, than I've heard it representing to Amazon. 'Cause that's your annual conference, Reinvent, but people are resetting and reinventing. It's actually a tactic, this is going on. So they're going to need some Clouds. So what do you say to that? >> So, I mean, the first thing is making sure that we can continue to be highly available, continue to have the capacity. The worst scenario is not being able to have the capacity for our customers, right? We did see that with some providers, and that honesty on outside is just years and years of experience of being able to manage supply chain. And the second thing is obviously, making sure that we remain available, that we don't have issues. And so, you know, with all of our stuff going remote and working from home, all my teams are working from home. Being able to support AWS in this environment, we haven't missed a beat there, which has been really good. We were well set up to be able to absorb this. And then obviously, remaining secure, which was our highest priority. And then innovating with our customers, and being able to, and that's both products that we're going to launch over time. But in many cases, like that education scenario I was talking about, that's been able to find that capacity, in multiple regions around the world, literally on a Sunday night, because they found out literally that afternoon, that Monday morning, all schools were virtual, and they were going to use their platform. And so they've been able to respond to that demand. We've seen a lot more machine learning workloads, we've seen an increase there as well as organizations are running more models, both within the health sciences area, but also in the financial areas. And also in just general business, (mumbles), yes, wherever it might be. Everybody's trying to respond to, what is the impact of this? And better understand it. And so machine learning is helping there, and so we've been able to support all those workloads. And so there's been an explosion. >> I was joking with my son, I said, "This world is interesting." Amazon really wins, that stuff's getting delivered to my house, and I want to play video games and Twitch, and I want to build applications, and write software. Now I could do that all in my home. So you went all around. But all kidding aside, this is an opportunity to define agility, so I want to get your thoughts, because I'm a bit a big fan of Amazon. As everyone knows, I'm kind of a pro Amazon person, and as other Clouds kind of try to level up, they're moving in the same direction, which is good for everybody, good competition and all. But S3 and EC2 have been the crown jewels. And building more services around those, and creating these abstraction layers, and new sets of service to make it easier, I know has been a top priority for AWS. So can you share your vision on how you're going to make EC2, and all these services easier for me? So if I'm a coder, I want literally no code, low code, infrastructure as code. I need to make Amazon more programmable and easier. Can you just share your vision on, as we talk about the virtual summits, as we cover the show, what's your take on making Amazon easier to consume and use? >> It's been something we thought a lot over the years, right? When we started out, we were very simple. The early days of EC2, it wasn't that rich feature set. And it's been an interesting journey for us. We've obviously become a lot more, we've written, launched local features, which narrative brings some more complexity to the platform. We have launched things like Lightsail over the years. Lightsail is a hosting environment that gives you that EC2 like experience, but it's a lot simpler. And it's also integrated with a number of other services like RDS and ELB as well, basic load balancing functionality. And we've seen some really good growth there. But what we've also learned is customers enjoy the richness of what ECU provides, and what the full ecosystem provides, and being able to use the pieces that they really need to build their application. From an S3 point of view, from a board ecosystem point of view. It's providing customers with the features and functionality that they really need to be successful. From the compute side of the house, we've done some things. Obviously, Containers have really taken off. And there's a lot of frameworks, whether it's EKS, or community service, or a Docker-based ECS, has made that a lot simpler for developers. And then obviously, in the serverless space, Landers, a great way of consuming EC2, right? I know it's serverless, but there's still an EC2 instance under the hood. And being able to bring a basic function and run those functions in serverless is, a lot of customers are enjoying that. The other complexity we're going after is on the networking side of the house, I find that a lot of developers out there, they're more than happy to write the code, they're more than happy to bring their reputation to AWS. But they struggle a little bit more on the networking side, they really do not want to have to worry about whether they have a route to an internet gateway, and if their subnets defined correctly to actually make the application work. And so, we have services like App Mesh, and the whole mesh server space is developing a lot. To really make that a lot simpler, where you can just bring your application, and call it on an application that just uses service discovery. And so those higher level services are definitely helping. In terms of no code, I think that App Mesh, sorry not App Mesh, AppFlow is one of the examples for already given organizations something at that level, that says I can do something with no code. I'm sure there's a lot of work happening in other areas. It's not something I'm actively thinking on right now , in my role in leading EC2, but I'm sure as the use cases come from customers, I'm sure you'll see more from us in those areas. They'll likely be more specific, though. 'Cause as soon as you take code out of the picture, you're going to have to get pretty specific in the use case. You already get the depth, the functionality the customers will need. >> Well, it's been super awesome to have your valuable time here on the virtual Cube for covering Amazon Summit, Virtual Digital Event that's going on. And we'll be going on throughout the year. Really appreciate the insight. And I think, it's right on the money. I think the world is going to have in six to 12 months, surge in reset, reinventing, and growing. So I think a lot of companies who are smart, are going to reset, reinvent, and set a new growth trajectory. Because it's a Cloud-native world, it's Cloud-computing, this is now a reality, and I think there's proof points now. So the whole world's experiencing it, not just the insiders, and the industry, and it's going to be an interesting time. So really appreciate that, they appreciate it. >> Great, >> Them coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's been good. >> I'm John Furrier, here inside theCUBE Virtual, our virtual Cube coverage of AWS Summit 2020. We're going to have ongoing Amazon Summit Virtual Cube. We can't be on the show floor, so we'll be on the virtual show floor, covering and talking to the people behind the stories, and of course, the most important stories in silicon angle, and thecube.net. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (techno music) Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020, has really been multi-cloud and as the customers as they're really going through their own transformations understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they use, and all the services that fit amongst them. Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Of course data protection, a big piece. A big buzz in the industry for a number of years, in one of those areas, in multi-cloud, that's definitely of big importance. Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me back on, it's exciting to be here. >> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update. >> Sure. >> It's 2020. We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to. You're based in Boston, so not to far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here. You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so, >> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU. >> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very very convenient actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, HYCU has been growing fast and furiously, you know we started out with the world's first purpose built backup and recovery product for Nutanix Of course, we added VMware we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that HYCU Protege. Well I am so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protege, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight, "I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you, "I can now migrate to the cloud, "bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service, "and it's all part of HYCU?" and we say yes, you know, and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?" Yes, "and it's natively integrated "into all the platforms that I'm using?" Yes. And I think so customers today, are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that HYCUs providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before, at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud, and they want to make sure that, that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. >> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early in my career that you know that data protection layer was like, "well, this is what I'm running "and don't change it." Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape as a technology it was, you know, "I don't want to have to change my backup "because that is just something that runs "and I don't do it." For last five years or so it feels like customers. There's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible, you talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change, is it just that changes their daily business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that. Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, "you guys have a perpetual license model, "what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry, it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription," which was super important for the market is, I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service, I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread, is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as a service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption, is something the market has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. >> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand in discussion with data protection is security. Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation the last few years, how does that fit into your conversations with customers, what are you saying? >> That's a great question. So you know one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College cyber security program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently at a large scale event at Boston College, and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem, and it was incredible you know he said, "cyber crime as a service "is becoming a major issue," you're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases, they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job. We believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them, and they've been told, "you've got to deposit, "$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight, "or we're deleting the data." Right? Because HYCU is Linux based because HYCU is not Windows Server based because HYCU is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support. We were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, "God I'm glad I'm in this business here," we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer, >> You know it's great to hear their success stories there, you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like well you know what if I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that, well maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it but I've never really tested it, but there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed, and it's nice to know that they're there. You know it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right. So I started off our discussion time in talking about multi-cloud So you talked about earlier we first first met it was at the Nutanix shows in their environments, and some of that you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging. >> Sure. >> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed. What have your big customers doing with cloud where does HYCU fit in and what are the updates on your product. >> Yeah, sure. And I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery. >> And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes. >> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely. >> That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. >> Perfectly said as always sir, yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know we use to came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, "we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great "and we're going to back it up." And that's really paid off in spades for us, which was wonderful, but we also recognize that customers needed that VMware backups. We built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud, and we said we're going to build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous you know some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running HYCU specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because you know the industry watchers out there it's like, "well you know Google they're number three," and you know we know that Google has some really strong data products Where they're very well known but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers. Is there anything that's kind of commonalities to why customers are using Google and you know what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there. >> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this, we've polled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we polled all of them and we just said, "how many data silos do you have, "how many platforms, how many clouds?" The average was five. Right, so the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers in public sector and private sector are really using all of them, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem. we can argue and debate but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important "to make cloud customers comfortable "that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud, "as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft and Azure, very large ecosystem there, trying to emphasize, maybe against others and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google >> Sure. >> you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side as AWS is I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So, how about the Microsoft relationship? >> It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, with our initial purpose built backup recovery products. We added Google Cloud. You know I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native, it is purpose built into the Azure Marketplace. All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup. The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based. The fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point et cetera. All of those levels of configuration are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built backup and recovery as a service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful wonderful new addition to our portfolio. Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, we call this the year of migration, because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner, to the cloud. So remember after we built out these purpose built backup recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with the touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud, and then bring it back again for disaster recovery, and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud, some things are moving back from the environment edge, of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places, and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that so you're giving customers some optionality there, so that this isn't just a one way, you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing and get it to that environment but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today but also knowing that you know six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different >> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these some of those environments. >> Absolutely. We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility, and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration. And what I hear time and time again is, "oh but Azure has a tool," or "Google has a tool for migration." Of course they have tools for migration, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency, how do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload. Moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud. And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there, and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services. Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity, we want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor, when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. >> All right, I want to click down one layer >> Please. >> in here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talk about simplicity. >> Sure. >> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there but it absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment so you know your partners, Google with GKE, Azure with AKS and >> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix everyone now, I say it's not about distributions it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments you've tested it got customers using it? >> It's a great question it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time. I think it's something that is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes, we ourselves have over 100 customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using HYCU so there's no question in my mind that HYCU is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic, how the platform is supporting Kubernetes, so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU that they're getting from the platform provider itself. >> All right, Simon want to give you the final word. Bring us inside your customers what they're doing with multi-cloud and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020. Sure, we talked about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about, but have been really dipping their toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years, is a massive massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. (laughing) We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud, it's understanding that every customer today is to is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration, or disaster recovery readiness. That's the name of the game and that's how HYCU wants to help. >> All right, Simon Taylor. Always a pleasure to catch up with you thank you so much for the HYCU updates, >> Stu thanks so much for having us on. >> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at the videos we've done, you can even search on keywords in companies, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (Techno Music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren. And you are watching theCUBE. We have two sets, three days, here at VMWorld 2019. Our 10th year of the show. And happy to welcome back to our program, two of our theCUBE Alumni. We were at VeeamON earlier this year down in Miami, but sitting to my right is Ratmir Timashev, who is the co-founder and executive vice president of global sales and marketing with Veeam, and joining us also is Danny Allan, who's the vice president of product strategy also at Veeam. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right so, Ratmir, let's start. Veeam has been very transparent as to how the company is doing. You know, there's all this talks about unicorns and crazy evaluations or anything like that? But give us the update on, you know, actual dollars and actually what's happening in your business. >> Ratmir: Absolutely, we're always transparent. So actually, there's this term, unicorn, right? So does it mean one billion in valuation, or one billion in revenue (chuckles)? >> Stu: It is valuation. >> Yeah, I know that. So, Veeam is not unicorn anymore, right? Veeam is one billion in bookings. So, yeah, the major trend in the industry, is that we're moving from perpetual to subscription, because we're moving on-prem to hybrid cloud. And Veeam is actually leading that wave. So where we've been always known to be very customer friendly to do business with, easy to do business with, from the channel, from the customer perspective, and that's the major trend. If the customers are moving to hybrid cloud, we have to move to there, from our business model to a hybrid cloud. So we're changing our business model, to make it very easy for customers. >> Ratmir, that's not an easy adjustment. We've watched some public companies go through a little bit of challenges as you work through, you know there's the financial pieces, there's the sales pieces of that, since... Give us a little bit of the, how that works? You know, you just retrain the sales force and go or-- >> That is awesome, awesome question. That that is awesome point, that it's extremely painful. Extremely painful, and for some company, like everybody says Adobe is the best example of moving from perpetual or traditional business model to a subscription, right. So annual, even monthly subscription. For us it's even ten times more difficult than Adobe, because, we're not only moving from perpetual to subscription. We're moving, we're changing our licensing unit, per socket which is VMware traditional to pure VM or pure workload or pure instance, right. What we call instance, basically means, so it's extremely painful, we have to change how we do business, how we incentivize our sales people, how we incentivize our channel, how we incentivize our customers. But that's inevitable, we're moving to a hybrid cloud where sockets don't exist. Sockets, there are no sockets in the hybrid cloud. There are workloads and data. Data and applications. So we have to change our business model, but we also have to keep our current business model. And it's very difficult in terms of the bookings and revenue, when we give a customer an option to buy this way or that way. Of course they will choose the way that is the less expensive for them, and we're ready to do that. We can absorb that, because we're a private company, and we're approachable and we're fast growing. So we can afford that, unlike some of the public companies or companies that, venture capital finance. >> So how do you make that kind of substantial change to the... I mean changing half your company, really. To change that many structures. How do do you do that without losing the soul of the company? And like Veeam, Veeam is famous for being extremely Veeamy. How do you make all those sorts of changes and still not lose the soul of the company like that? How do you keep that there? >> That's an awesome question, because that's 50% of executive management discussions, are about that questions, right. What made Veeam successful? Core value, what we call, core values, there are family values, there are company core values every company has. So that's the most important. And one of them is, be extremely customer friendly, right. So easy to do business with. That's the number one priority. Revenue, projects, number two, number three, being doing the right things for the customer is number one. That's how we're discussing, and we're introducing a major change on October 1st. >> Ah yes. >> Another major change. We've done this major changes in the last two years, moving to subscription. So we started that move, two, two-and-a-half years ago, by introducing our product for Office 365, backup, when that was available only for, on subscription basis, not perpetual. So we're moving in subscription, to the subscription business model in the the last three years. On October 1st, 2019, in one month, we introducing another major change. We are extremely simplifying our subscription licensing and introducing, what we will call Veeam Universal License. Where you can buy once and move or close everywhere. From physical to VMware to Hyper-V to a double SS, ash or back to VMware and back to physical. I'm joking. (lauging) >> All right, Danny, bring us inside the product. We've watched the maturity, ten years of theCUBE here, Veeam was one of the early big ecosystems success stories, of course it went into Multi-Hypervisor, went into Multicloud. You know Ratmir, just went through all of the changes there. Exciting the VUL I guess we'll call it. >> Ratmir: VUL >> VUL, absolutely. So on the product piece, how's the product keeping in line with all these things. >> So our vision is to be the most trusted provider, backup solutions that enable high data management. So backup is still a core of it and it's the start of everything that we do. But if you look what we've done over the course of this year, it's very much about the cloud. So we added the ability, for example, to tier things into object storage in the hyperscale public cloud and that has been taking off, gang busters into S3 and into Azure Blob storage. And so that's a big part of it. Second part of it, in cloud data management is the ability to recover, if you're sending your data into the cloud, why not recover there? So we've added the ability to recover workloads in Azure, recover workloads in EC2. And lastly of course, once your workloads are in the cloud, then you want to protect it, using cloud-native technology. So we've addressed all of these solutions, and we've been announcing all these exciting things over the course of 2019. >> The product started off as being VM-centrical, VM Only back in the day. And then you've gradually added different capabilities to it as customers demanded, and it was on a pretty regular cadence as well. And you've recently added, added cloud functionality and backups there. What's the next thing, customers are asking for? 'Cause we've got lots of workloads being deployed in edge, we've got lots of people doing things with NoSQL backups, we've got Kubernetes, is mentioned every second breath at this show. So where are you seeing demand for customers that you need to take the product next? So we've heard a lot about Kubernetes obviously, the shows, the containers it's obviously a focus point. But one of the things we demoed yesterday. We actually had a breakout session, is leveraging an API from VMR called the VCR API for IO filtering. So it basically enables you to fork the rights when you're writing down to the storage level, so that you have continuous replication in two environments. And that just highlights the relationship we have with VMware. 80% of our customers are running on VMware. But that's the exciting things that we're innovating on. Things like making availability better. Making the agility and movement between clouds better. Making sure that people can take copies of their data to accelerate their business. These all areas that we are focusing on. >> Yeah, a lot of companies have tried to, multiple times have tried to go away from backup and go into data management. I like that you don't shy away from, ah, yeah we do backup and it's an important workload, and you're not afraid to mention that. Where's some other companies seem to be quite scared of saying, we do backup, 'cause it's not very cool or sexy. Although well, it doesn't have to be cool and sexy to be important. So I like that you actually say that yes we do backup. But we are also able to do some of these other bits and pieces. And it's enabled by that backup. So you know, copy, data management, so we can take copies of things and do this. Where is some of the demand coming around what to do with that data management side of things. I know there's, people are interested in things like, for example, data masking, where you want to take a copy of some data and use it for testing. There's a whole bunch of issue and risks around in doing that. So companies look for assistance from companies like Veeam to do that sort of thing. Is that where you're heading with some of that product? >> It is, there's four big use cases, DevOps is certainly one of them, and we've been talking about Kubernetes, right, which is all about developers and DevOps type development, so that's a big one. And one of the interesting things about that use case is, when you make copies of data, compliance comes into play. If you need to give a copy of the data to the developer, you don't want to give them credit card numbers or health information, so you probably want to mask that out. We have the capability today in Veeam, we call it, Staged Restore, that you could actually open the data in the sandbox to manipulate it, before you give it to the developer. But that's certainly one big use case, and it's highlighted at conferences like this. Another one is security, I spent a decade in security. I get passionate about it, but pentesting or forensics. If you do an invasive test on a production system, you'll bring the system down. And so another use case of the data is, take a copy, give it to the security team to do that test without impacting the production workload. A third one would be, IT operations, patching and updating all the systems. One of the interesting things about Veeam customers. They're far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily, by taking a copy. Test the patch, test the update and then roll it forward. And then a forth huge use case that we can not ignore is the GDPR in analytics and compliance. There's just this huge demand right now. And I think there's going to be market places opened in the public cloud, around delegating access to the data, so that they can analyze it and give you more intelligence about it. So GDPR is just a start, right. Were is my personally identifiable information? But I can imagine workload where a market place or an offering, where someone comes in and says, hey, I'll pay you some money and I'll classify your data for you, or I'll archive it smartly for you. And the business doesn't have to that. All they have to do is delegate access to the data, so that they can run some kind of machine learning algorithm on that data. So these are all interesting use cases. I go back, DevOps, security IT operations and analytics, all of those. >> So Ratmir, when I go to the keynote, it did feel like it was Kubernetes world? When I went down the show floor it definitely felt like data protection world. So it's definitely been one of the buzzier conversations the last couple of years at this show. But you look, walk through the floor, whether it be some of the big traditional vendors, lots of brand new start ups, some of the cloud-native players in this space. How do you make sure that Veeam gets the customers, keeps the customers that they have and can keep growing on the momentum that you've been building on? >> That's a great question, Stu. Like Pat Gelsinger mention that, number of applications has grown in the last five years, from 50 million to something like 330 million, and will grow to another almost 800 million in the next five years, by 2024. Veeam is in the right business, Veeam is the leader, Veeam is driving the vision and the strategy, right. Yeah, we have good competition in the form of legacy vendors and emerging vendors, but we have very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we're providing a good vision for how the hybrid cloud data management, not just data protection, which just Danny explained, should be done, right. I think we're in a good position and I feel very comfortable for the next five, ten years for Veeam. >> It's a good place to be. I mean feeling confident about the future is... I don't know five to ten years, that's a long way out. I don't know. >> Yeah I agree, I agree, it used to be like that, now you cannot predict more than six moths ahead, right. >> Justin I'm not going to ask him about Simon now, it's-- >> Six months is good yeah, six months maximum, what we can predict-- >> We were asking Michael Dell about the impact of China these days, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these day. >> Ratmir: Totally. >> Anything macro economic, you know that, you look at your global footprint. >> No we're traditional global technology company that generates most of the revenue between Europe and North America and we have emerging markets like Asia-Pac and Latin. We're no different than any other global technology company, in terms of the revenue and our investment. The fastest growing region of course is Asia-Pac, but our traditional markets is North America and Europe. >> Hailing from Asia-Pac, I do know the region reasonably well and Veeam is, yeah Veeam is definitely, has a very strong presence there and growing. Australia used to be there, one of our claims to fame, was one of the highest virtualized workload-- >> And Mohai is the cloud adapter. >> Cloud adoption. >> Yes, we like new shiny toys, so adopt it very, very quickly. Do you see any innovation coming out of Asia-Pac, because we use these things so much, and we tend to be on that leading edge. Do you see things coming out of the Asia-Pac teams that notice how customers are using these systems and is that placing demand on Veeam. >> Absolutely, but Danny knows better because he just came back from the Asia-Pacific trip. >> Justin: That's right, you did. >> Yeah, I did, I always say you live in the future, because you're so many hours ahead. But the reality is actually, the adoption of things like Hyper-convergence infrastructure, was far faster in areas like NZ, the adoption of the cloud. And it's because of New Zealand is part of the DAid, Australia is very much associated with taking that. One of the things that we're seeing there is consumption based model. I was just there a few weeks ago and the move to a consumption and subscription based model is far further advanced in other parts of the world. So I go there regularly, mostly because it gives me a good perspective on what the US is going to do two years later, And maybe AMEA three years later. It gives us a good perspective of where the industry is going-- >> It's not to the US it comes to California first then it spreads from there. (lauging) >> Are you saying he's literally using the technology of tomorrow in his today, is what we're saying. >> Maybe me I can make predictions a little bit further ahead there. >> Well you live in the future. >> All right I want to give you the both, just a final word here, VMWorld 2019. >> It's always the best show for us. VMWorld is the, I mean like Danny said, 80% of our customers is VMware, so it's always the best. We've been here for the last 12 years, since 2007. I have so many friends, buddies, love to come here, like to spend three, four days with my best friends, in the industry and just in life. >> I love the perspective here of the Multicloud worlds, so we saw some really interesting things, the moving things across clouds and leveraging Kubernetes and containers. And I think the focus on where the industry is going is very much aligned with Veeam. We also believe that, while it starts with backup up, the exciting thing is what's coming in two, three years. And so we have a close alignment, close relationship. It's been a great conference. >> Danny, Ratmir, thank you so much for the updates as always and yeah, have some fun with some of your friends, in the remaining time that we have. >> We have a party tonight Stu, so Justin too. >> Yeah, I think most people that have been to VMWorld are familiar with the Veeam party, it is famous, definitely. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here, from VMWorld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT, 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host John Furrier. Here we are, we're at day two, John, this conference, I gotta say it's pretty cool. 6500 people, we're steps away from Disneyland, and, you go to a lot of these things every year. I also do about a dozen or so for theCUBE. So in other words, we're veterans of this kind of thing. This does seem to have a different vibe and I think it really gets to the kind of company Nutanix is, and where it is in its journey. >> Nutanix is still a small company even though they're 10 years old, as Dheeraj talks about. The numbers aren't massive, I mean, we go to a lot of other shows where it's 15,000, Amazon Web Services just had an event in London, Dave Vellante was out there covering, Stu was covering Red Hat summit in Boston this week, tons of events going on. Amazon Web Services' summit in comparison was 12,500 people, 22,000 registered, that's a summit in London. It's not the re:Invent main conferences like 30,000 people. And that's always sold out, so they got a lot, in terms of attendees numbers they're still in the entry level, mid range growth. But I think that's okay, they like that culture and I think the story here at this show is intimacy, they would rather err on the side of better content and more intimate opportunities for their customers to really get the straight scoop. And I think it's less of a conference slash trade show, more of an intimate relationships where they can provide feedback, for customers to give feedback, and for Nutanix to figure out with the customers how to connect to them. So, I think the story here is, Nutanix is growing up as a company, they're 10 years old and they gotta go the next level and the management team has technical chops, and they have a long term view. They have that 20 mile stare, they can see out and they're trying to figure it out. I still think that the numbers are light on their forecast I still think that there's some sandbagging going on there, I'm not saying they're sandbagging, but I mean, I think, you look at Essentials, which is the enterprise and then multi-cloud, the numbers that we're seeing at Wikibon are much bigger, and Amazon reflects that. So I think they're being cautious but smart about how they execute off their success they've had in the first 10 years to go the next 10 to 20 years and I think that's clear in the management team, that they wanna build a durable company. >> Well exactly, and I think that that's what's really coming through, is that this is, as you said, they're growing up. This is a real coming of age moment for them, they've celebrated the 10 years. Okay, so what kind of company are we? Who do we want to be? And what's coming through is that from the technology side, they get it. They say, I'm sort of reminded of the Henry David Thoreau quote, our life is frittered away by detail, simplify simplify simplify, that's what customers want. They want this one click data recovery, they want their credentials to be assumed. You know who I am, I'm safe to be in here. Fixing things, dealing with that. So I think that they get that, that simplicity is key. They also get customer service. I mean their Net Promoter scores, as we've noted, are in the 90s, that's just unheard of. >> It's monster, monster numbers. >> It really is and so they get it. We need to be responsive to customers, we need to have a personal relationship with these, because it's not just organizations, it's people at the other end of these transactions. >> I mean, I think Nutanix, one of the stories that's popping out in the hallways as I walk around and talk to customers and people and the company and partners, is that Nutanix has a lot of headroom in their growth. I think Wall Street is interesting and you heard Dheeraj talk about that yesterday, about having a new customer, you asked him about his management style and he said quote, I have a new customer called Wall Street. And I have to balance that against mainstream enterprise which is his core business. And so he as a CEO and the company are dealing with this new stakeholder called public company customer retail stock buyers. That's a short term cycle and I think, if you look at their stock, they had a big knife edge drop in the past quarter. And I think the shorts are circling, it's a whole nother dynamic, it's a whole nother theater for Nutanix to deal with, and I think that's something that they gotta get used to. And he was clear, he said I'm addressing it, we're gonna balance it, but they gotta be thinking long term because this company has a lot more to do and their customer base are risk takers. Because everyone we talk to has this different style or persona. They're smart, they're usually engineering oriented, they love engineered solutions. And they're taking chances. And everyone who's taken the chance with Nutanix, has paid off. That seems to be the theme. And as we were talking before we came on camera, Mark Hamill, Jedi knight, you know, Star Wars, was on stage giving the keynote, their customer base, is a lot like the Jedi order, right? I mean they see themselves as, elite, technically, they're not afraid to take organizational risks and push that DevOps culture. And we heard that from Sunil, the chief product officer that they're really looking at, this new way to do things, like they did with hyperconvergence, they pioneered that, set the table on that and foundationally built that. They wanna take that same playbook of HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, and apply it to the cloud. And provide an abstraction layer advantage and I think that is clearly their strategy and that's, to me, the top story here. >> I couldn't agree more and I also think that, what is also coming through is this idea of we don't wanna be safe. What's clear is that, consumer technologies have leapfrogged IT enterprise vendors. The things that we hold in our pockets are so much more sophisticated than what businesses and organizations, multi-billion dollar businesses and organizations, are using, what their employees are using on a day to day basis. So we expect a certain kind of design and ease of use, in our personal lives and they're bringing it to enterprises and think that that is really what's exciting and interesting about this company. >> What's interesting about their story is that, the consistent theme about the customers is that it's kind of a consolidation story but that's not the real story because back in the old days of IT, consolidation was the strategy. Consolidate vendors, consolidate footprint to reduce cost, clearly a cost reduction. With Nutanix what they get is they get consolidation, and they enable advantages so the real value of Nutanix is to be positioned for those new kinds of app developers, so. This is like, you get consolidation as a side benefit for enabling the value, and that's the theme that's coming out of all the customer testimonials and interviews is, we gotta do more, we gotta create more enablement for the app developers and we gotta provide more performant storage servers and software for the customers. And that's their main focus and they consolidation as a benefit. That's gonna scare a lot of people and customers that I've talked to said, hey I got all the stuff but I can't just throw it away tomorrow, I gotta move it out over time, so, this is the Nutanix sales challenge, how do you move faster with all that incumbent, legacy stuff in these datacenters, while enabling the multi-cloud capability? >> And we're gonna be talking about that more today with Chris Kaddaras on the show. We have a lot of great guests, we have the CIO, Wendy Pfeiffer, I was reading an article about her today, she answered an ad as a teenager to work for NASA. She had an idea for NASA and so we're gonna hear much more about her story, we've got a lot of great guests. >> Well what's your take? I mean, you've been here, you're getting immersed in. What's your take of the show, what's your analysis? >> Well, what's really interesting to me is that we're having this conversation against this backdrop where, the technology industry is really under fire. I mean, we heard Ayanna Howard here on the show yesterday and then she was up on the main stage today, talking about the good, the bad, and then the really scary elements of AI and how it really has these powers that can do a lot of wonderful things and help children with special needs and help workers be more productive and engaged and collaborate. But yet, there's also this much darker side that AI's really only as good as its creators. And then the other difficulty is that, because we have become so trusting of these machines, we disregard our own intuition. And that is a really scary element, so. What I think is exciting, and it goes back to this risk taking mentality, that Nutanix has, is, we're gonna talk about these things. We're just going to forget about them or they're gonna be a sideshow, this is really on the main stage, let's talk about our values, let's talk about the humanity of technology and this is really an important part of the conversation. >> It's interesting, the culture, we talked about the culture a lot yesterday. And you can see from the mix of the guests we've had here and how they're putting their content together across the show portfolio, it's not just speeds and feeds. There's a lot of tech for good angle but they're not tech for good stories like hey, look, here's a tech for good story. Look how good we are because we promote it. They're authentic people that have a great story that has a tech involvement. But it's not a pure Nutanix messaging kind of thing. >> Right, and it goes to back to their values, the humble, hungry, honest, and have a lot of heart. I mean I think that that is, you really see how important culture is, when it is top down. When Dheeraj embodies certain characteristics and traits, you see that employees then look up and they say okay, this is what we're about, this is who we are. >> You know, we also talked yesterday about our analysis in the keynote, what's interesting about culture is, there's also a culture shift going on inside their customer base. And again, it's back to this kind of Star Wars theme, Jedi knights and the revolution continuing for Nutanix, their opportunity is to continue to stay on the course, and this is gonna be a big bet for them, they gotta make some big bets on the technology side, which they're making, but also they have an opportunity because a lot of their installed base are rebels, right? So you have this rebellion IT guy, generational shift where you have DevOps coming in and Gene Kim who wrote the book on DevOps, runs the biggest DevOps event in the world, series of events, DevOps Enterprise Summit, he's even saying it's about 3% changeover. So I think there's a big tailwind coming for Nutanix. Around DevOps, operating models, in the enterprise and cloud where, the convergence of those two worlds coming together, and it's gonna be a younger generation, it's gonna be a different world. If that happens, I think that's gonna be something that Wall Street might not see. I think that's kind of an area. And that's gonna be a good tailwind for Nutanix. The other notable thing that I would point out from this show is, the presence of VMware visibly in the conversation. And I think Dheeraj was talking about, hey we don't mind talking about VMware because they validate the marketplace, they're the big 800 pound gorilla. And we're gonna continue to innovate around them. We don't need their Hypervisor, customers don't need to pay their vTax, that's his messaging, so that was a key notable. The other one was the challenge that Nutanix has, this is, again, might be a Wall Street insight for some of the Wall Street folks out there is that, their challenge has been getting new logos. Their cost to sales is a little bit high because they require POCs and once they get in there they usually win. And then their cost per sales, cost per order dollar on the sales side once they have a customer, is very low, they get more renewals and they have more net contract value so they have great customer economics on that side. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal for them, could bring them a tsunami of new logos. That could give them a lot of leverage and bring their customer base well above their 12,000 number now. And bring them up into a whole nother level. So I think the HPE deal will be a tell sign on the numbers, and if they can get more new logos in there, the big accounts that HP has through their channel, that's a big story. So VMware, HPE, culture, all the main story here. >> And of course we had HPE on the show yesterday, talking about that very development, so. We have lots more great content, great guests to come today, this has been just a ball hosting with you, so I'm really for another day. >> Very intimate show, I mean, Nutanix are a very intimate show they don't really care about the big numbers, they want the right numbers and that speaks to their culture. >> And they know their people. Because as we talked about many times, Mark Hamill, up on the stage yesterday, so, they know their community. Please stay tuned for more of the coverage from theCUBE of .NEXT here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. And it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's a big show, the 10th year that theCUBE is at this show. I'm Rebecca Knight, this is my cohost Stu Miniman. We've got two sets, and joining us now is Matt Liebowitz. He is the global lead multicloud infrastructure at Dell Technologies, thank you for returning to theCUBE. >> Yeah, like I was saying before we came on, I've been a fan of the show for years so it's great to actually be on it for once. >> Well, welcome. >> Well, for twice. (Rebecca laughing) We're going to talk about the stresses of cloud sprawl right now. And there're so many different possibilities, solutions. It's a multicloud world. How do you even make sense of it all, and how do you help customers make sense of it? >> Well, I think the first thing that we typically do is just try to get customers to understand what they have. You know, they've got workloads in private cloud, they've got workloads in public cloud, and we try to do an analysis, figure out what's where, what's the best fit, what cloud is most appropriate for each application, and then just build a plan to build that infrastructure and get them where they need to be. >> Matt, I love that, and I want to hear what you're seeing from customers, 'cause when we look at it, and we hear what's described is really, when we talk about HyperCloud, and when we talk about multicloud it's, I have a bunch of pieces and it wasn't necessarily a key strategy. The customer was just like oh, I'm doing cloud stuff all over the place, and in many ways we've got the silos that we've spent the decade or so trying to get rid of even more. So how do we help get their arms around it? There're so many different layers of the solution, to make this innovative and a wholesome solution rather than just, oh my Gosh, I've got the things all over here and I'm spinning plates, as a company. >> Right, I think you said it. The most common thing we see from customers when they say, I'm doing multicloud, is they're actually using more than one cloud, but that's really multicloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that's API enabled, that's you know, they can programmatically access resources. So when customers tell us they've got multicloud, but they're really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS, they've just like you said Stu, just created more IT silos, and so we're trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together on that common control plane, so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it. >> So it sounds as though customers, I mean we're sort of painting this picture of customers really, really at a loose end here. I mean, how would you describe the customer mindset today? I mean, obviously some customers have a strategy and know exactly where they're going, but the vast majority really don't. >> I think most customers are responding, and the needs of the business are changing. They need need to respond more quickly, and so they just consume cloud resources as they can. And that often leads, like you said Stu, due to the sprawl. And so again, like we try to just wrap it together. Do an analysis, figure out what's out there, and help them not only understand where the application should live, but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. Understand what they're going to advertise in their service catalogs. So Matt, one of the reasons I loved him to talk to into consulting people, is you're not trying to push a product. It's like, certain ones it's like okay, management's really important, but we understand as an industry we're never going to get to that mythical single pane of glass. So is there a framework, is there maturity model? How are you measuring where they are, and how to move them gently along? I guess the journey is what we've said to kind of a holistic solution of that. >> Yeah I mean there's tons of, we take what analysts do. We also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we kind of digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. And what we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they're just starting out. Maybe they've made some loose investments, but they haven't walked the path that far. And so it's like you said earlier, there's stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don't often know where to start, but I think they're responding to the needs of the business. I don't think it's anything that they're doing that's wrong, but it's a little bit of the Wild West for sure. >> So what best practices have emerged when you're talking about the digital leader versus the digital laggards? You said they've made some investments. They have an idea of where they want to be. What're some of the other things that you've seen that really separates them from the pack? >> Yeah well, so I'm going to be a consultant just like you said, and it's all about business value and business outcome. The customers are the most successful. Have a business reason for what they're trying to do. They're not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should. They're doing it because they know they're going to get an outcome. They're going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster, deploy applications faster, things like that. And those are the ones that are further down the line, that I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peaking under the covers of what they should do. They're just starting out, they've got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it, but they're just starting. >> All right, so in the keynote this morning there's a lot of talk about cloud. VMware is at the center of the strategy there, but partnering with a lot of different players out there, of course AWS wasn't talked on the stage much this morning, but we know how important that is in the VMware environment. And Microsoft was up on today. How do these new announcements fit into the discussions that you'll be having with customers? >> You know I think, customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but also an easy button for cloud. If they, often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, it's really difficult to do that integration work. And like you said Stu, I'm in consulting so we're all about the outcome. But this product is Dell Technology's cloud, I think is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud they can start consuming. And then we can help them with the day two, to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing. But yeah I mean, I think VMware's doing a great job of reading the landscape and understanding that people are consuming AWS, they're consuming Azure. And VMware owns the data center, I think that's crystal clear. So they need to work with what the customers are using today, and I think they're doing a really nice job of that. >> I'm curious as a consultant how you are helping companies really implement these new things, because as we know, digital transformation doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. It's really about getting employees onboard and customers onboard, and thinking differently about how they get their jobs done. So how are you helping your customers think through these things? >> Yep, so we have a framework on how we approach these for multicloud and for lots of other things, where we use a methodology that we call kind of as is to be, where we kind of determine their current state, project where they're going to be in the future, build a roadmap that's actually actionable. But then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome, so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They're going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick in three to six weeks. That's actually actionable, we build consensus, and that's how we get started. >> All right, Matt are you doing some sessions here at the show this week? >> I did one bright and early at 8:30 this morning. >> All right, love to hear about it, especially any good questions from customers. >> Yeah, so my sessions are on migrating workloads to modern data centers. So I think the way I started that was just hey, let's define the modern data center. And I said kind of, quick show of hands, who thinks your modern data center ends with the four walls of your infrastructure? And thankfully not many people raised their hands, because the modern data center is composed of your on-premise's resources, whether that's private or hybrid, but also public. So I think a lot of the questions that I've got is just how do I get there? How do I convince IT leaders to buy into this? And that's, like I said, we use our methodology to build consensus and help them get there. >> I'm curious, when you talk about the modernization, what's the role of data in there? >> Say it one more time. >> Data, how does that fit into the cloud strategy overall? >> Well, a data's another service. One of the things we've started to look at, is we talk about infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, is big data as a service, as an application that you can build into your cloud and then automatic it and orchestrate it just like anything else. So when customers or end users need to consume a data lake or something like that, they can do so using the same tools that's in frameworks that they do for other resources. >> When you're thinking about the challenges that customers face today and sort of looking ahead in terms of what you see are the future challenges, what is it that keeps you up at night? >> Ah, future, you know, cloud sprawl. The way we started this keeps me up at night because when every, and I talked to customer this morning actually, who was talking about their yearly Azure or yearly AWS spend, and the numbers were staggering and they're getting higher and higher. And at this point it's not shadow IT, this is IT leadership saying we want to drive more and more to the cloud, and they think it's quick and it's easy, and you can take your credit card and do it. But a lot of IT is not prepared to operate as a kind of OpEx instead of CapEx, and so this is a big change for him. And that's what keeps me, that's what gets me worried, is that in consulting when we come in really late to that conversation, and they're already consuming millions and millions of dollars a year in AWS or Azure services. It can be hard to right that ship. It can be hard to say okay, that's fine, you've made that investment, but let's look at what makes sense to run on premises. Let's look at what makes sense to run in different kinds of clouds and do it at an application level. >> All right, what other things at the show this week? You've been to the show for a number of years. What's exciting you, what're some of the conversations you're already hearing? So as cloud person for me, where I focus on multicloud, the announcements today were really exciting, specifically I'm kind of interested in your opinions too on the Dell EMC cloud, or the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. I think giving customers the option to consume cloud in a way that is just like public cloud, but using the same tool sets and frameworks they've been using for years, I think is compelling. You know, Virtustream has proved that that works, that that model works. And so I'm excited about that, although I'm kind of interested in your opinion, what others have said on that. >> Yeah so actually, if you listen to the keynote analysis we did this morning I'll do, but I'll frame it back as a question for you to get your thing. >> Well done. (Matt and Rebecca laughing) >> It's our show, you're not allowed to ask us questions. Chad tried to do that once. But so when the VMware and AWS partnership happened, the question we all had as industry watchers was oh my gosh, what does that mean for Dell? I feel today really started to answer that. I'm curious how you position it with customers. I'm sure you must be getting the question from customers being like, on the Dell EMC side, hey VMware and Amazon, where do you guys fit in this whole puzzle? >> Yeah, well it's funny. Someone made a comment today that the keynote today sort of answered the question of who won the Hypervisor awards? They're over, at this point I think we've conceded VMware has won that battle. And so when you think about VMware partnering with something like Amazon, to me and to Microsoft too form the announcement today, it makes perfect sense because customers that have large investments in on-premise's VMware deployments, it's a lot of work to convert that to something like a public cloud in Amazon or in Azure. So to be able to consume public cloud using AWS services on the network so it's operating at LAN speeds, but doing it with the same tools I think is compelling. So to customers that say, does this compete with you? Does this compete with Dell? I say no, this is part of the story. Multicloud is all about bringing pieces together in a common framework that we can consume all together, so. Now that doesn't concern me at all, but well done reflecting it back to me. >> (laughs) That's his specialty. >> He's been doing this a long time. >> Yeah, this is not his first rodeo. Matt Liebowitz, thank you so much for coming on the theCUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell's World Technologies coming up just after this. (relaxing music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman, who's been doing interviews with us all week, our next guest is Roland Acra, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group. He's in charge of that core business of data center now, at the center of cloud and the edge. Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns are out there for Cisco, you got the data center, you got the networking group, and you got IoT, and then cloud center suite was part of the big announcement, your team had a big piece of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves. Give us a quick update on the news, the key points, what was the announcements? >> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere, and we captured them under a common moniker of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore, because both of these speak to things going outside the data center. ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI, our software-defined networking solution, into two of the most prominent public cloud providers out there, Amazon and Azure, and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center, to the edge of the enterprise, specifically branch offices and remote locations. >> And the other thing that came out of our conversation here on theCUBE and also on the keynote, is that the center of the value is the data center, as you guys pointed out with the slides, big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, but the network and the data and the security foundation has been a critical part of this new growth. >> Yes. >> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI, how it started, where are we? It's been a progression for you guys, certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended. What's the journey, take us through that. >> When ACI came into the market five years ago now, we have a five year anniversary, ACI brought a software-defined networking solution into the market. It brought an automated network fabric capability, which said you can no longer screw yourself up by having incoherence between one part of the network and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing, and it brought, to your point about security, what's called segmentation of applications. Today, applications have data, they have databases, they have different sensitive pieces, and it's important to be able to tell the network not only get the traffic from one place to the other, but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic that has no business getting there, and that's known as segmentation, which is a security concern, particularly when you have sensitive data like consumer data or things that have regulatory things around them. ACI has brought that to the market. That was the value proposition of ACI. We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale. Customers have two or more data centers for disaster recovery, for resiliency, we made that possible. We got to bigger and bigger footprints. Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise. What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability in a store, or in a logistics center. ACI then was expanded with that. Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds. Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations or bare metal clouds. We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches, which is the ACI hardware, and ACI became completely virtualized, and still able to be doing everything it does in hardware on premise, in software instead, in somebody's else's capability. And yesterday we announced the full combination of this, which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching or hard switching, can you use the native switching of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets go from A to B because they're part of the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets from C to D go because they're part of the blacklisted paths. And that was the full integration with these clouds-- >> Can you abstract that complexity? >> Completely, completely. One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator, the same one people have used on premise, that they've developed their policies around, so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity in that controller, it's where also they put their compliance, verification, and audit and assurance, and they use that thing even when something goes to Azure or it goes to AWS. >> So you mentioned the progression. So it's now your full progression, from core to the cloud, including edge-- >> Going through edge. >> What has been some of the results? You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that. How has ACI been used, what are some highlights that show the value, because people start looking at ACI, saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale, I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software, okay, check, so far, so good. Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that unfolding specifically in the cloud? >> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten, cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI, they've been able to shorten the speed of change, shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed of change of their network, because now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications. Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on hourly or daily basis, and it used to be that changing something in the network, you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks to reconfigure things. Now that software-defined capability means the network reconfigures and people can change generations of compute on the fly, and the network is in lockstep with that. The agility and speed has been great. The other value has been the value of automation, which is people can run a bigger and bigger and bigger network with a small number of people. You don't have to scale your people the more switches you have. Again, because programming and automation comes to the rescue with that. >> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house. We're in the dev net zone, which has been the massively growing organization within Cisco. Community's been growing very fast, people are developing on top of the networks, and these are network folks, and as well there's new talent coming in. So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing and changing, growing, existing base plus new people. Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts this intent-based networking, this notion of policy software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know what many people have been calling infrastructure as code, which is you go from scripting to actually coding and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities and change management capabilities, for an automatable system, which is what ACI is. It's made for people drawing on the strengths that they were doing in the application domain or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network. And that's a new and exciting thing, it brought the network within the purview of coders, people who know how to do Python and know how to do Go language and things which are modern and exciting for the younger generation. It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities, you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is a lot of logs, a lot of visibility, a lot of analytics running on, because they've done that on web servers, they've done that on applications that run in the cloud, and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data. If you think about, we see every packet, we see every flow, we see every pattern of how the traffic is changing, and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming because then from there you can extract anomaly detection, you can extract security signatures of malware, you can extract prediction of where the traffic is going to be going in six months. There's a lot of exciting potential from the telemetry and the visibility that we bring into that framework. >> And as you point out, devs love that. I mean Cisco, we've talked about this, is one of the few large established companies that has, in our view, figured out developers, right? There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here the dev crowd. I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from, for example, VMware NSX. What's the differentiation there? >> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system through which you manage the entire network, the overlay which is the virtual view of the network that the applications care about, as well as the underlay, which is the actual real delivery system that makes the packets get from A to B with quality of service and so forth. So that's first thing. It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope than NSX does. The other thing that's very unique about ACI is we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet and every container management framework on the planet, and ever bare metal system on the planet, which means that any workload, something sitting on a mainframe, something sitting on a Sun Oracle server, something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI. We're not wedded to one hypervisor, and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability, it's not a bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware's cloud strategy is to team up with AWS and let customers bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal. That's not EC2. And of course that's not Azure and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing. So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise, which means every hypervisor and every container framework, and bare metal, with one system. We're extending that into the cloud to give customers choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope. That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership. When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years when you guys sort of created that with partners and then multiple partners now, maybe talk about that journey a little bit. >> HyperFlex? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry. And really, HyperFlex started off with the hyperconverged infrastructure, started of being the notion of putting a mini-cloud in a box on-premise for application developers to rapidly deploy their applications, as if it was in the cloud. So speed and simplicity were really at a premium, and that's really what defines hyperconvergence. And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco to make speed and simplicity there, because we've integrated network compute storage and a cloud management system called Intersight to give that whole capability to customers. We then hardened it. We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads. So databases are now running on HyperFlex. ERP systems are running on HyperFlex, the real crown jewels of the enterprise are now running on HyperFlex. Then we made it multi-cloud. We opened it to all hypervisors and to all container frameworks. We announced OpenShift yesterday, we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX, so again, same spirit of openness. And yesterday's announcement was, what if I want to take hyperconvergence outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands of remote locations? Think a retailer. In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data is born outside the data center, it's born in a store. The data is center that follows the customer who's interested in a plasma TV, and that data has a perishable lifetime. You act on it on location and on time or you lose the value. So sending it over, taking two hours to do a machine learning job on it and come back, the customer's already back home watching a movie. And so the window of opportunity for the data is often right there and then, and that's why our customers are taking their computing environment off into where the data is, to act on it fast and on location. >> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts on this, because this is a critical data challenge. If data's stored in classic old ways, data warehouses and fenced off area, it's kind of in the internet, you're not going to have the latency to get that data in real time. Talking about real time data that's addressable for part of the application value. So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops and infrastructure as code. >> That's right. >> That's hard. How do you guys see that progressing, how should customers prepare to have that data centered properly for app addressability, discovery, whatever the uses of the data contextually is, time series data or whatever data it is, this is a critical thing. >> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer, because depending on what the data is, sometimes you only see the value when you concentrate it and consolidate it, because the patterns emerge from rolling out a thousand stores worth of data and seeing that people who buy this toothbrush tend to buy that toothpaste. There may be that value where you want to concentrate the data, but there are also many things where acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly without referring to the other thousand stores extracts 90% of the value of that data. So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing on that data. >> So this highlights network programmability, this means the applications driving the queries or the network for that data, if it's available... So there's two things, network programmability from the app, and availability of the data. >> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure, network, compute, and storage, and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center, because that's where, the application's going to want to go where the value is, and if the infrastructure can't follow it there, then you get a degraded ability to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge, but then as you describe, you got to bring data back, certain data, back to the cloud, do the modeling there and then push the models back down. So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have decision making distributed. >> And you've got to have low latency to be able to enable that. >> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations. For example, why is it important to do, allow people to put data both on their premises and in the cloud? For disaster recovery, for data replication, for resiliency. Sometimes for governance reasons. GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe. Somebody may not have a data center in Europe. Could they take advantage of a co-location ability or somebody else's cloud? >> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year, and certainly at the center of the news is, complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution, more devices are connected, diverse environments, scale for cloud and connectivity, but software driving that. So I got to ask you the question. Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s, multi-vendor was a big word. Now multi-cloud feels the same way. This is the openness thing. How would you describe multi-cloud strategy for Cisco in context of this notion of being open? >> It is really the new dimension of openness, right? We've been open in the past to multiple forms of physical networks. Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper or what have you, we need to give them an IP network that operate equally well over all media. That was one dimension of openness. Another dimension of openness was, does a product from vendor A work with a product from vendor B? My router, your router, my switch, your firewall, those are other dimensions. Hardware and software coupling. Can I buy the hardware from Peter and the software from Mary, will it work well? The new dimension of openness is, can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud, either because they like the tooling and how well their developers are more efficient on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy, or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo, which this one doesn't. All of those are business choices that if we make our technology, let them take advantage of them with no technical restriction, they will, because now they can shop on the merit of what they want to do, and not on, oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure, I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you. So that's-- >> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's floating all boats here within the company. What's your plan for the year, what's your goals, you'll be out there pounding the pavement with customers, what's your objective, what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019? >> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us, it's a very exciting year. It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side, we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second. We have our new silicon capability, our new optics, so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers who are heading the next frontier of speed and density and scale. So performance will always, always be there, and when we're done with 400, we're already going to be asking about 800. So that's an exciting new generation of switches. ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing. HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward to the potential in financial services, in logistics, in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed data at the edge. And then, security is a never finished journey, right? Everything with give our customers in the way of security, because there, there's an active actor who's trying to make you fail, right? It's not that you're only fighting physics to get to 400 gigabit, then you win. There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes and trying to foil their schemes. Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks are on the network. You guys have seen this movie before, so you know how critical, Roland thanks so much for spending the time, congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, intent-based networking at the core. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data, we have an intent here to bring you the best content from Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage, day two of three days of coverage here in the dev net zone, packed with developers learning new skills. We'll back with more after this short break.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live Barcelona, this is day two of theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. I'm Dave Vellante, my co-host Stu Miniman. Ben Nye is here, the CEO of Boston-based Turbonomic . Great to see you again, Ben. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, Dave, appreciate it. >> So, what a show for you guys. Everything is multi-cloud, I mean that's your sweet spot. You saw the keynotes yesterday, you've got to love the messaging here. It's really a tail wind for you guys. >> The fit and the strategic rationale, it makes you feel good about a partnership we established a year and a half ago when it was still nascent, right? They were just starting the change to becoming a software company, to becoming a multi-cloud vendor, not making a decision at the time not to have a cloud of their own. And boy, does it feel good now. But, boy it's been interesting to watch the changes in organization, people, all the different elements of this monster company, $200 billion public market value company going through this change in the public markets. >> Well, and you guys have really executed well. Obviously, you did some nice raises, you've got that velocity marketing thing down, and you're scrappy. And now you've got some resources behind you, and you've also got some partnerships that are starting to bear some fruit. So, let's get into the Cisco partnership specifically. What's that like, what's it all about? Give us some details there. >> So, Cisco sells our product under their name. It's called Cisco Workload Optimization Manager, the acronym is CWON. But, our thesis, and I think what they buy into enormously is that as we've decomposed the infrastructure and decomposed the applications, right? Think about it, we used to have monolithic applications all the way down now to VMs, and soon microservices, right? Containers and pods. You're going to need to think about how to resource those things at a scale that humans can't possibly manage. So the workload, the little humble workload becomes the centerpiece of everything. And Workload Optimization Manager is that. It's an AI Op's ability to assure the performance, manage the compliance policies, and make it cost effective all the time. And those are trade offs, so you can't do it once. As demand changes, you've got to be able to make those trade offs ongoing, and that's the uniqueness. So, the partnership was really embracing that concept. And what's fun is you can see how it's expanded with multi-cloud manager and the move to containers. Just that many more zeros when you think about the number of workloads, and the number of containers. >> Yep. Ben, I've loved watching this discussion of workloads and applications, 'cause I've worked with Cisco most of my career. But, you know, I spent a decade on the storage side looking at the network people. And it was just, oh well, the applications to the data is just bits that run over the pipe. And therefore, Cisco didn't really necessarily care that much. It was just, I want more traffic, yes. But maybe they do some things to optimize a little bit, but Workload Optimized Management seems a very new thing for Cisco to be able to embrace and understand and fits into that whole software strategy. Maybe give us a little bit about how you've seen the maturation and change, about how Cisco has data in the center of their keynote yesterday. >> Right. >> Where it was, wait, this is the networking company Cisco. And ports and gear and massive million dollar purchases that you roll out and get certified on as opposed to kind of the new software world. >> So, I think if you look at it, data without logic is data. Right? It's when you put the two together, and that's what a workload is, that you build all the way up. If you really say "Where did they get it?" They were always great at moving the data to service the logic in the application. Buying App D I think was a critical and decisive move to really put them at the top of the stack. Anchor the application, and you can then make sure everything else is brought along with it. So, App D gave them both the ability to look at the depology of the application, the response time of the application. It also gave them this thing called Business IQ, which is, the application runs your business, right? How do I take the data in the organization throughout, make sure I'm servicing it right, but also making sure that the application is running at all times well. And applications really, are just an aggregation of workloads. And so it goes back into the application, the workload, and then the infrastructure which shares it all. >> Ben, you talked about kind of what it is, the Workload Optimization Manager. What's the secret sauce behind it? Can you talk a little bit about the engineering and how it works. >> How C1 works? >> Yes. >> Yeah, I call it The three As. There's the Approach, then there's the Abstraction, and then there's the Analytics. The first one is the approach. Everything we're doing is about putting demand in charge of supply. So, we literally own the patent on using the principles of economics to manage IT. In other words, what's the best resource allocator we know? Markets. Let the workloads pick the resources on which they need to run, and do it in that way as opposed to us trying to us trying to service some ephemeral demand when we're actually managing supply. The way it works is you have to have an abstraction. And that means that I can't have every single vendor's product be different. So, to a workload, all the flavors of storage, it just looks like IOPs and DIS, so they can trade them. An abstraction we all use in everyday life? Currency, right? That's how markets work, we have to have a common currency. And then the last one is the Analytics. If you let the workload pick the resources it needs, it knows it because it knows how much demand. Demand goes up, more resources. Demand goes down, you leave resources. But then, we know the right order of the resourcing that it needs. All the way down the stack, from the application to the virtual to the physical. And that allows us to give exact right actions, not recommendations. Recommendations we think, are like opinions. You can't automate them. And alerts. But if you think about being able to be so accurate, and so exact in the analytics you produce, that you can actually automate them. That's the ah-ha. >> Well, it's brilliant. I mean, you've got the marketplace demand, and that decides. But, you've also got to do this is near real time, right? To have this impact. >> Continuously, correct. >> So, that's your analytics, that's some machine intelligence going on under the cover? >> So, people talk about AI ops, this is AI ops. We have a data model, the data model covers the customer's on prem environment as well as their off prem if it's Amazon or Azure. And now, I can see all the workloads I run, and all of the performance issues, all of the compliance exposure, and all of the efficiency opportunities inherent in each one workload. We show it to the customer, and then they can run What if Scenarios in offline, not with a synthetic, but with their actual workloads. Say, how would you like to see that workload in one of these other environments, in any direction? Now we're getting into multi-cloud management, right? >> Yeah, and abstract all that API complexity and all that diversity. And just one more follow up if I may, Stu. I want to understand the business impact. >> Sure. >> We covered kind of what it is and how it works. Why do customers buy? What's the business impact? >> So, the most important thing is you've got to have application performance. If your apps aren't running, your business isn't running. Fair? The second one though is, boy, compliance regulations just keep coming, right? And there's lots of different forms of compliance in policies. It could be a static one like HA, or data afinity, or an anti-afinity, things like that. But then there's also a myriad of raising level orders. People are trying to enforce all of these policies manually, which means they don't really know at any given time, whether they're in conformity with their own policies. Then you could ask, well, then why have them? So, that's a second big driver. The third one, is just cost. If we actually run the environments well, and we know that demand picks it, then actually you don't need to over provision the virtual, or the physical, or both environments, which is what most people have been doing for years. >> Then the area I want to drill into is that multi-cloud management that you mentioned there. Managing environments has always been a challenging situation for IT. You know, you think back ten years ago, you know V Center is the center of the world for anybody in virtualization. System center for Microsoft Shops, in the multi-cloud world, it's still a bit of a jump ball. You know, Cisco of course with their cloud center sweep, want to have a strong position to live in that multi-cloud world. Tell us, what are you seeing in the marketplace today? Where does, you know, your OEM solution with Cisco fit into this overall orchestration, and what are you hearing from customers? >> So, there's a couple of things. If you look in the customer side, when you go multi-cloud, you have to have different skill sets. They're different platforms, different vendors, right? And, by the way, so extreme in some cases, where one is principally a fixed cost environment, verus two that are variable expense based environments. Right? So, I have to think about which is the type of workload I want to run based on the demand parameters for each of those to make the most economic sense and the best performance attainable. If I have something that's going to scale massively, I want to leverage the elasticity of the public cloud, more likely than not. But, to do that, I better be ready to manage it in that fashion, right? And so somebody has to understand the nature of demand, and when to scale that up and when to scale it down. We've had customers literally take monthly change control windows, down to nightly in order to manage that because the savings are so material, right? So, it's really a matter of they need some level of automation, Stu, to be able to know which workloads should run in a given environment, in a given way consistent with what the platform vendor is offering. And that's what we do. >> I love stories like this, right? They harken back to Frank Sluteman, who's kind of a mini business hero of mine. He was the founder of David Domain, well CEO, and obviously helped service Now Gro. And he would say to me, "I love ROI stories." Like, going in, and just being able to show people bottom line impact. You clearly have that here. Application performance is very clear, how you affect that. When you talk to customers about the economic potential, what are you seeing? If you sort of scanned your customer base. You know, what kind of savings are you seeing? It sounds to me, I'm inferring 20% is kind of a no brainer, but I could imagine 30% plus savings. What are you seeing if you took an anecdotal scan of your customer base? >> So, very typically we can find, because the VM is over provisioned, the virtual layer, and the physical is over provisioned to manage the environment, try and assure performance. Typically we will find 40, 50% of a customer's data center available to be made more efficient, okay? When you then go, though, and this is really interesting. If you go to, let's say ECS and Amazon. There's 1.7 million combinations that you can pick from in ECS. So, Amazon refers to us as a customer control plane, because we understand the fundamental demand on the workloads, we'll pick the right instance family; so you don't have to go and try to pick and guess and allocate based on compute instance types, memory, network, storage, then whether or not to put an RI, Reserved Instance, against it, what region to run it in, all of those things, we could take care of, and help find and land that thing in the right order. When you don't have that, people will naturally allocate. They're going to do what's called a lift and shift, take an over provisioned VM on Prem, and bring it into the cloud. And that's the source of these incredible cloud bills. People go, wait a minute, this is too expensive, cloud was supposed to be cheaper. Well, that's because they didn't optimize it before they moved it. So, our strong preference is let's look at your workloads on Prem, let's find you the right home and the right instance family off Prem, to assure performance and then we'll manage it ongoing with that continuous actions that we do. >> And that changes the operating model. And, of course, when you talk to Amazon about this, they actually love that because they understand that there is price elasticity. If they're saving customer's money, that means the customer is going to buy more compute, they're going to buy more storage. >> Yep. >> Have you seen that in your customer base? >> Absolutely. So, Amazon is on record as having cut price in EC2 62 times. They have a retailer's mindset, and Microsoft has to match them and does. Okay? So they're both interested in taking costs down to serve the customer. When they don't, there's a problem. The problem is, the customer gets a cloud bill that was far in excess of what they expected to see. Gardener has some great data on this, about just how big those numbers can be. But what happens is two things. One, they go into a pause. And that pause can reduce the rate of migration for a year or better while they're trying to digest and get the skills and learn how to manage their workloads in that environment. The second thing is there's a loss, a slight erosion of trust. And then they want a dual source, and then they want to bring in other vendors and so forth. And the reason is they're just trying to figure out how to make this migration, which they know they have to, every CIO has a cloud MBO, but they have to have a way to know that they're not going to bleed themselves out in the process. Those are the two things that I see most frequently from customers. >> Yeah. Ben, as an observer, I want to get what you've seen from customers. How do they look at Cisco as a software provider in general, and as a partner in this multi-cloud world, specifically today? >> Well, I think Cisco has done a number of things. Again, I would go back to they really set a new direction with the direction that Chuck Robbins has provided as CEO, with the purchase of App D, with the services. If you go to the Innovation Hall, and you'll see the Solutions Hall. You'll see the Cloud services that they're offering, and then I think finding folks like Turbonomic. Literally, branding it under their name and selling it at CWAM. Those are pretty big de-marketers of their commitment to cloud, to multi-cloud, and to software. >> So, we were talking in our open about this whole multi-cloud, you know, marketplace. The horse is on the track. You know Cisco, clearly coming at it from a networking standpoint. Obviously, you've got VM Ware doing its thing, coming at it from what used to be purely Hypervisor, now expanding. You've got IBM and Red Hat, certainly Microsoft in the mix. It's a really interesting dynamic. You guys are a best of breed player, that's your strategy to keep ahead of the competition or the supposed competition, and partner with some of the big guys. What gives you confidence, Ben, that you guys can keep that technical lead and that market lead relative to both the competition and some of your partners? >> Because smaller companies have to focus, right? So we focus. We focus on workloads, and we're going to let those workloads run. We do not have a bias in our pricing model, in our infrastructure allegiances or anything. We have a bias on making sure the workload is always performant, compliant, and cost effective wherever it runs. So, our thesis is customers will always want to have multi-clouds. Not one provider, but multiple. And therefore, want the best workloads that will stay and grow with them. And so, that's why we have such good alliance with both Microsoft and Amazon. Because again, they're the net receivers of a lot of these workloads. One of the reasons we have such a good alliance with Cisco is because they're not going to be a cloud-vider. They're going to be a technology provider to those that want to provide services and technology to the Cloud providers. So, I think there's a nice match there in terms of our focus and our ability to continue to evolve. And let's just remember how dynamic this is. I mean, we were just talking about VMs in the last 10 years. Now, in the next five, you're going to see a complete shift over to containers, pods, and microservices. Different kinds of schedulers, different kind of IP stack; and that's the bed I think you mentioned that Red Hat and IBM are making as well. >> Well, your timing has been phenomenal. I mean obviously, coming out of the downturn, Cloud had a huge uptick. And now it's very clear, like you said, every CIO has an MBO on getting the Cloud. And you guys are well on your way to hitting escape velocity. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> And thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave; thank you, Stu, pleasure. >> Okay, you're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks. (electronic music)

Live from London England, it's the CUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome Back to the CUBE here from London. Our reporting Nutanix NEXT 2018 in Europe. Next to me is Frans Coppus. You are a manager at ICT Driessen? I'm very curious. Driessen, customer Nutanix? I understand you among other software make HRM? >> Tell me about Driessen. How does that work? How does that work? >> Yeah, uh well Driessen is a family business. We are a business service provider for the public sector in the Netherlands The Driessen Group is actually a group of companies that make work possible. We do that through the offering  of several different services. You should think of connecting people to work, so a staffing function, but next to this , we also develop software and services to take over processes for other companies or to make processes easier. >> That sounds a bit like you're on the edge. On the one hand you are a Employment Placement company, helping people get work, but on the other hand, you seem to do something with software and delivering your services as a software product. How does that work? >> Yeah, and do We indeed. That's right. We deliver services to other processes make companies easier. Think of payroll and things like that, but also all kinds of other processes and that's what  we mainly use the digital services and we develop these ourselves. For example, you should think of  a package like AFAS profit , where AFAS profit falls short in some functionality , but which customers  would like to make use of. We can we who help these customers  to provide that extra functionality to improve processes. >> Yeah, that sounds like you are software development house. you develops yes the software. >> That's right. >> How about that? Do your on-premises? If you do in the cloud? Where working with your developers? How does that work? How does that work? >> Well, we do it with a club of about 25 software developers we in private service to have. Spread across a number of different companies we have, and the software we Developing running Indeed, partly on prem and partly also in the cloud. >> Yes I understand that you do for a year or half do with Nutanix such as underlay for your infrastructure. Can you explain how how together is how the services which Nutanix products you use? What advantages do you have it? >> Well, we indeed the beginning of last year we look at our data center to actually modernize. That was the rise. When we have oriented ourselves. We already had some interest in Nutanix. Are there going deeper into deepen and finally we indeed decided to limit to Nutanix choose that. To actually the entire data center, we had slowly going to replace by Nutanix. Um, so we are there put down a piece of hardware, but then also chosen as the AHV hypervisor layer. We came from VMWare. We have it all petted or migrated to the implementation itself completely very quickly should say importing t soup boiler and was really a piece of cake and Then we started to one for our VMs to migrate to the platform. Uh, and that we have this year we found rounded. Currently running our entire data center running on actually uh uh on Nutanix indeed. Yes, because what were the problems you hoping to solve? of And, then you should think about a particular piece Scalability is not it? So for example we fine with Nutanix in any case, could reasonably small start, but if necessary, uh easy to be scales. Performance was an issue on the old surroundings. We actually have completely resolved. I think the biggest uh what we the biggest challenge we had was to make it easier. We had Yes quite a complex landscape been built up over the years. Uh and um, well that was actually the main why we express sible for Nutanix have chosen. Yes, simplification of the whole landscape. Easy to manage, especially since we thus actually have a mixed environment. Deel where I click ofthe cloud? Uh, well that's fine with Nutanix to manage, so eh. >> Yeah, exactly. I imagine when he hey you are IT manager. I can imagine your role uh too changed huh? First it was take I to really focus on infrastructure, What was difficult was that many friction. Um, what's your role in the course of changing time? >> Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That role is changing. uh in Initially at very busy to focus after the operation. To put it all in keep air. Uh sorts of things you actually yes it sounds I think you would not actually working with it wants to keep. Uhm, uhm, and we now see. We see Now just that with fewer people and a much more simple way that environment can manage. That means you some more time for free, and the time, even trying especially uh to stop uh along with the business see how we can provide our services improve? How can we availability improve? And say to equal or less cost and with less effort. >> Yeah, because I assume that you have to code word to use some digital transformation that I take for you are also an issue. Yes. You can also just wants to more to move the client. How do you do that if like, hey if IT department? How how you slide closer against the business and Driessen itself but also to the customer? How does that work with you? >> Uh well, uh, let's say, the customer needs to of course translated into the business Go to frequent the software developers. So what really us is very important is the time-to-market. Development course is very fast. We work a lot on the basis of Procurement and tendering often various demands we put than we meet to come. Yes. So, time to market is very important that, uh, that's why we uh um with Nutanix able to actually faster to deploy new features to provide direction our software developers then with them to get started. >> Yeah, yeah, because you say your software developers can thus closer So sit closer to that business. That requiring less time to UH to lay the groundwork, as it were. Um, I'm looking for, they not here .NEXT, uh we have the keynotes seen a lot announcements. Nutanix started as if modernization of infrastructure of What you had here. Meanwhile, are 15 products. It has become much more gigantic. If you people around here are looking grown. 3500 people, so therefore I am a bit like it? How do you doing that? Do you walk here too a few days around. You've seen the keynotes. You see the crowds. What is your impression of the event? >> Well I must say, very cool eh, I'm I last year in Nice, eh it was a very good conference. That was the reason I was thinking of now, I'm going this year definitely return. It was really cool to see the first keynote, how much greater it has now become, the whole event, but also the success of Nutanix. I uh, I spoke last year in Nice yet some of my peers still 't doubt was whether they would over Steps to Nutanix. Well I told him what our experiences were with it. And uh, and said, I it can definitely recommend. Also say the Using the AHV as Hypervisor. In the meantime brand just, it's so much matured. Uh uh, there's so much more added. I was really what really impressed me over the last two days have seen all new products and adulthood and the simplicity of such products. Yes. Really super cool to see, uh, what I was really stuck, I really of was impressed, was particularly Frame. Frame is uh uh uh uh really super cool. That is also something we definitely presently to look for to use it. In addition, Beam is something that very appealing. I must say, we have now uh uh uh uh all say data center on prem. So Also my DR environment we have on prem, because when we made the decision, there was no Beam. Yes, if I would again to choose, I would absolutely sure choose the DR uh using to solve beam. There too, the simplicity with which you can manage. Uh that's really cool to see. Well, we will in the future ensure that species continue to follow developments and uh I know sure that in the future to work uh continue with products such as a beam and a frame for example. >> Yeah, because what you see uh huh, they the announcement made by the core product. Heh, the core of the core products to essentials, which is a bit of the uplift heh? Those are the following small steps you can convert, yes, and then you get enterprise. Yes. There are now especially the really new projects uh Xi SaaS products de Xi Cloud and uh, and I am very curious to now is look I also know from Nutanix heh from that perspective? Infrastructure, and I have seen them grow. And watching all the announcements they done. All those products they ge done. What would really be for you the, you know, What was with you the light that went so you say yes I'll go you know when I uh home After the weekend, here I'm going to stroke. Here I would like to know more. What is the one product that you now say, I really want to get to work? >> I think if I had to choose it, then I would say, then I'm going to frame me definitely started to look at how we can put that to say uh uh uh uh our employees easier by a work to provide when they for instance remote work or things like that. >> Yes, is also one of the uh the issues which you who wants you solve by Nutanix Heh? Traditionally, did Nutanix many VDI. Still does much VDI. Is that something that uh, where you go when Driessen? >> Yeah, well at least for a part of our I'm sure a staff uh uh ways to deal deploy Frame say as a substitute for a VDI environment yes. >> Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Exactly. Yes. Exactly right. Uhm. >> And also I was really huh, and I did not think they were doing, but I understood so which uh Nutanix now we actually their own cloud is building. Yes. Yes that I am very curious what that is going to bring. Surely as say, seamlessly integrates with your back on prem omgeving. I actually find that to be the strength of this time of Nutanix heh? The that you you can switch easily between on your own prem Nutanix environment or a cloud environment. Yes. Well, if there is still a uh a Nutanix variation in the Cloud comes in, yes it is uh totally cool. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Yes. >> Last >> though demand. You have of course developers in dienst. We have today also in the keynote various announcements seen around cloud-native as nice hot. Heh? So Karbon, databases in the Cloud with Era with Buckets, S3, S3 storage. Uh, these are also things that you think of, hey, that my developers will also get to work? Yes. Yes. mac we stand on all to knock on the door. Who want to containers to work and that kind Affairs , Uh uh uh so that's very good to hear that Also there say Nutanix fully is doing, and how it integrates within uh Nutanix, so uh, yes, there will my Software developers will be very happy with it. Yes. >> Yeah, great! but congratulations. That sounds like really a top story. A very nice story about Driessen. how you Using Nutanix. Well, I wish you success with the following to step. Thank you. Which undoubtedly UH will come. uhm. And that was it for UH for now. Thanks for look at the Cube Together with Frans herein in London uh, and until next time.

(groovy music) >> Live from London, England. It's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 Europe. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer and happy to welcome to the program Tim Isaacs, who's the general manager of data services, which really is the core products of Nutanix underneath the Hypervisor, if I understand correct. >> That's right. >> With Nutanix. Tim, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. Very nice to be here. >> Alright, so, Tim. This is my 7th .NEXT and for a lot of 'em, it's like, okay, where are we with that HCI marketplace? A couple years ago, Nutanix expanded the marketing to enterprise cloud and now has, if I've got right, from two years it was about two products and today it's more like 14 products. >> Right. >> Some organically, some through M&A. As it was put out, there was Core, which is AOS, and to the HCI, AHV, Prism Management, and your stuff is what all of these customers that are attending here are using. I'd love to get a number sometime, as to how many Nutanix customers aren't running that in the future. We were hearing how many are doing more than that. But give us the state of your business. >> Sure. >> At the, no pun intended, core of what Nutanix does. >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I think you are referring to our most recent segmentation. You're talking about Core, then Core is basically AOS, which is synonymous with HCI, and then obviously that includes AHV built in and then Prism for management and then Essentials is a, several other things relating to operations management, automation, file storage, so on and so forth. So, I'll talk about Core and I'll talk about maybe a few things in the Essentials bucket. So, Core, obviously, is all of our customers today, right? It's a layered kick, clearly, so people start with Core, then they move up the stack, if you will, right? Into Essentials and then many into Enterprise as well. And Core, at its base, is softly defined storage technologies, right? Powering HCI. So what we realize quite early on is, look, you know, HCI is all about virtualization. Virtualized workload. So, you got virtual machines, they can be desktops, they can be servers, they can be databases. But then there's also the notion of unstructured data, right? So, what about all this file storage that I have? What about all this object storage that I have? And what we realized was, well, we have a platform, we have the infrastructure, softly defined storage, and it was simply a matter of expanding that. And if you think about files, it's just another use case on this infrastructure. So, we started on our files journey about two years ago and I think you might have seen some announcements, today as well as about six months ago, where we're getting ready to release our object storage solution. So, now, if I take stock of the portfolio. >> Buckets, I believe it's called. >> Buckets, it's called Buckets, exactly. What do you think of the name? >> I don't hate it. >> Okay, okay. (laughing) >> As an analyst, that's probably the most you're gonna get out of me. >> Got you, got you. Yeah, so if I take stock of the portfolios today, you got Core, right, which is hyperconvergence, virtual machines, multiple workloads. And then you got unstructured data. Real files as well as, soon it will be objects. And then we also provide just generic block storage for anybody who wants to, "Hey, I got a database, it's running on a bare metal server, "can you give me block storage? "I wanna consume it and I'm gonna run Oracle on it "in a RAC setting." Yeah, sure, go for it, right? So, even though most of our customers are indeed hyperconverged, there are some customers who use us as storage only, and that's okay. If that works for them, great. But the power of the whole thing is, now you can consolidate all of your workloads on a single platform. >> Yeah, one of the things we talked about with Dheeraj yesterday is, when Nutanix launched, there were certain waves that it kinda hit. It seemed to be the right time for things, so, you know, software defined before we called it software defined. What was there, flashes of technology, was really coming from a little niche project to broad adoption. A lot has changed in the about nine years since the solution went on and you had a major file system rewrite in 5.10. I've heard some people think of it almost as AOS 2.0. >> Right. >> To get ready for some of the modern things happening from a technology standpoint as well as the modern applications that will sit on top of it. >> Right. >> Dheeraj said it's like the plane flying at 35,000 feet, running at full speed, and we're gonna change the engine out. Gives a little bit of insight as to what goes into that, to what that took and what that prepares Nutanix and your customers for. >> Absolutely. So, there comes a time in every technologies lifespan where you have to re-architect significantly. And that's because things are changing. Applications are changing, the world is changing. There are a bunch of emerging technologies that come about, and we are sort of in an interesting time, where things like memory glass storage, NVMe, RDMA, all of these things are starting to get mainstream, and for good reason, right? They actually deliver a lot of value. So the file system that have developed nine years ago, yes, you can make incremental changes, but there comes a time where you have to say, "Look, I gotta make these big changes. "I have to rethink my data, metadata structure." And that's what you're seeing. And obviously, this will be in phases. Phase one was more about optimizing metadata. Phase two will be about rewriting the file system in a major way. What we're calling block store, to basically take advantage of things like memory glass storage. And then, result is two things. One is we'll be able to take better advantage of all of these new technologies. And by doing so, now you are delivering a very different kind of a, if you will, not just an experience, but value to your customers. So, somebody could be running a database today and there's certain expectations of performance and reliability and latency. In this new world, AOS 2.0, those expectations will be entirely different, right? >> So, looking at the adoption of it, so, AOS 2.0, basically, everyone's gonna run it at some point. You know, everybody is running it already, upgrading it is gonna be, in Nutanix style, pretty easy. But I'm wondering, the other storage products, you don't see adoption there. How many people are using it, what are they using it for? >> Sure, sure. And by the other storage products, you're referring to file storage and things like that, right? >> Yes. >> So, for all of them, files is the most mature. We released SSG about two years ago and we have close to 1,000 customers using files today. So not just purchased, but using. So 1,000 users as customers, so you know, pretty decent. Good adoption. And there's also been a bit of a journey here. You know, we started with files being a SMB protocol product. So, it had a bias towards Windows environments, user data. About a year ago, we released NFS support. So now, the game changes a little bit. You're talking machine data, machine generated data, right? So it's very different. And that's also forced us to rethink how we go about scalability, how we go about automation. You know, if there's a hot spot, the system should take care of itself. Does it go off and scale up? Does it go off and scale out? Does this happen automatically? So, a lot of those things started to get weaved into the fold of the product. So, that's files. I would say, the most mature outside of HCI. Objects is new. Just ready to get it ready to go GA. We've done a bunch of early access with a few customers, things are looking good, alright? So, looking forward to what we have there. Block storage, we also offer generic iSCSI-based block storage. That's also been in market for a while, and this has been use cases where somebody wants to run a bare metal database outside. Reasons of licensing or what have you. Maybe it's legacy databases. And I just want storage from the Nutanix cluster. So, what we said is, "You know what we'll do? "We'll carve off a portion of the Nutanix cluster, "logically speaking, serve it out as volumes, right? "Generic volumes, and you can use it for your databases." Performance and everything is very similar to what you would get if you were hyperconverged. So, you're not giving up anything by doing so, other than the fact that, obviously, you're not in a true hyperconverged form factor. >> Alright, since we're talking about storage, I wonder if you could drill a little deeper on some of the new stuff. So, in 5.10, you're ready for memory glass storage, things like NVMe. Where are we today? What is further down the road map? You know, the storage industry, NVMe, and NVMe over Fabrics is a pretty hot discussion. Everybody's getting ready for it. Is there anything that Nutanix is doing unique there? And give us what the customer expectations should be. >> Sure, sure, it makes sense. So, I think, at the more fundamental level, I think we all agree that, if you're in a hyperconverged form factor, because you have storage right with compute, that gives you an inherent advantage to begin with, versus three-tier storage that goes over the network. So, what we're trying to do is, hey, let's continue to milk that, so to speak. And you know, in 5.10, we released, I would say, one portion of what we call AOS 2.0. And here, what we did was we optimized heavily for metadata. So, our metadata versus data model changes with AOS 2.0. And then what we'll do, we'll follow this up with major changes to the data model itself. So, for example, now, when you're dealing with memory glass storage, you gotta be able to address it slightly differently. You have to be using low-level APIs. Things like SPDK to circumvent the kernel, for example, and go directly into storage. So, all those things are in the works, and the net result is going to be, well, I see higher performance, I see more consistent performance, I see lower latencies, right? And obviously more through-put as well. Now, you talked about NVMe over Fabrics. Now, the idea there is, look, you got the NVMe protocol Fabrics now, so what sort of a fabric are you building? Because we deal, essentially, with ethernet, ours will be an ethernet fabric, right? So, now we'll start to leverage RDMA more. We already do so in our systems today, but I would like to see end-to-end RDMA, where you start at the application, and then right through the pipeline, the data path, it's RDMA all the way down to storage. And even for your replicas, it's RDMA. And now you're talking a very different kind of latency, right? You're not talking, forget about a millisecond. We're talking about less than a hundred microseconds of latency end to end. >> So, that kind of sounds like the perfect use case for IoT, you know, heavy data processing. What are some of the efforts you're undertaking to optimize for Zi IoT? >> Right, so, IoT. You know, there's obviously two pieces to IoT, right? There's the computing I do on the Edge and then the computing I do after the fact, somewhere else, machine-building models that I can feed back to the Edge, right? So, this new technology would apply in both places. Now, when you're on the Edge itself, there's certain situations where your real-time processing needs to be real-time. It better be quick, right? So, the faster my storage, the faster my decision-making. And then, so let's say you're able to make decisions faster, inferencing decisions faster in real time. Now you go to the cloud, shall we say, where you're doing the long-time processing, and there, too, it's a matter of, okay, I'm doing all this machine learning. I have a bunch of, say, AI OML packages running here. There, too, there's an angle of time. If I do this in two weeks and feed it back versus two days, there's a big difference in business value that's being delivered, right? So, I think the applicability of all of these changes is across any use case. >> Alright, Tim, wanna give you the final word. You know, you've got the Core products there, but what are you hoping that customers walk away from as they leave the show this week? >> So, I mean, I would say, dear customers, we are ready for all use cases, all workloads. We are getting better and better. You will see us be on the bleeding edge when it comes to Core technologies. I think we are a first mover. All the things we talked about, we have been investing in. This is not the first time. It's released for the first time, but it's been around, we've been developing it for multiple years. So, you can think of Nutanix as someone who's on the forefront of all of these new technologies and, at the end of the day, it's all about your applications being ready for all of those applications, traditional as well as new, and in your choice of form factor. You wanna go hyperconverged? Great, you wanna go as storage only? It's up to you. >> Alright, well, Tim, really appreciate the updates. Congrats on all the progress and look forward to watching where things go in the future. >> Awesome, thank you guys. >> Alright, be sure to stay with us, got a couple more interviews left here from Nutanix. .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music) (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering WTG Transform 2018, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. We're excited, we've actually gotten to speak to quite a few end users here at the show which always is one of our favorite things to do on the Cube. Joining me, first time on the program, Todd McIlroy, who's Vice President and Systems Engineering Manager, Eastern Bank, thanks so much for joining me. >> You're welcome, glad to be here. >> All right, so first of all, how many of these shows have you been to. >> This is my first WTG event, but I tend to go to several smaller type conferences per year to keep on top of the technology, network, and with so much rapid innovation these days, you need to get out there and talk to people and learn little tidbits of information each one, do a couple of conferences each year. >> Yeah, you said, technology's changing really fast, which is great, my joke usually is like you're in financial, things don't change fast, there's nothing going on. What is happening in your role these days? >> Eastern Bank is a 200 year old bank, we're celebrating our 200th anniversary this month. >> Hey, congratulations. >> A big celebration next week. A lot of traditional architecture, it's a very large bank, it's a 11 billion dollar bank, but very small community feel as well. Even our team is very tight, and very close together. Even though it's an older bank, we have a lot of innovation and technology going on, in the last few years, especially. >> It's one of those things, if I was going to start a company, or had started a company in the last five or ten years, here's the technology I'd choose, here's the applications I'd roll out. It's a 200 year old bank, walk us through a little bit about the pros and cons of having that legacy if you will. >> We have been around for like I said 200 years and even a lot of the technology we have on premises has a lot of legacy applications. We have to keep supporting that for a long time. We're challenged with keeping those older systems up and running as well as providing new technology to the business so they can innovate and bring new and better products to the market. Both worlds. >> Tell me what's under your purview when it comes to the bank. >> When it comes to the bank, I manage the systems engineering team, I manage the team that does servers and virtualization, storage, we're getting into the cloud as well, this is a big push to start innovating in the cloud as well to allow our developers to use services to help them innovate faster and better. That sort of thing. >> Okay, so in the keynotes this morning, there's the discussion really of hybrid cloud. When you say in the cloud, that tends to make me think of public cloud, maybe some SAAS in there, tell me what cloud means to your organization. >> Well, right now our cloud footprint is primarily software and service type applications, like Office 365. We had a major migration to move our email and Skype and users facing applications to the cloud. But we're also trying to expand our footprint in the cloud so we can enable services to our customers, internal customers, to innovate as well. That's why we're looking at technology like Nutanix, the innovation that they're bringing to market to allow our developers to be more self-sufficient, provide the platform for them, allow them to innovate and develop on a platform, both on premises to keep it secure as well as in the cloud to keep it secure as well. >> Okay, it's interesting. I was actually talking to some of the Nutanix team here and been talking to customers that are doing development, playing with the containers, things like that, a couple years ago, if you talking about developers, you'd say, oh, okay, they're building something in the public cloud. >> Right. >> Because that's where it is. Help us understand how you decide, what do I start playing with in the cloud, where does the Nutanix fit into that discussion? >> We're a relatively new Nutanix customer, within the last year or two. We started with a small concept to give some of our workloads for the developers to work on, but now we've expanded upon that it's now become our primary production platform. It's going to take a lot of our older Hypervisor virtualization technology and move it to Nutanix so we're trying to grow that footprint because the amount of innovation that they're bringing with Calm and Flow and all those sorts of new services is going to enable us to build a platform that they can develop on a lot better. >> Great, what virtualization are you using on this? >> For? >> For the Nutanix, like are you using VMware, >> No, we're HV, Native HV. >> Using all HV? >> All HV, yup. >> Okay, were you VMware before? >> Not at Eastern, no. We have a small VMware footprint for specialized application, but the rest of our virtualization platform is Hyper-V. >> Okay, and you said you're running in production, does Nutanix run all of your on-premises applications? >> No it doesn't, we have a lot of still physical infrastructure as well, but anything that new is going towards Nutanix. We have some older hardware that we're aging out, as those age out and we have to expand the new hardware, we're going to go with Nutanix platform. >> You've got some I-series sitting in the back, I'm sure, the old AS/400, most banks have, things like that. >> Exactly, exactly, yeah. >> Great, tell us a little more from a cloud standpoint, how did you determine what goes where? >> We haven't really determined that yet, we're really in the early stages of our own adoption to the cloud. We're really taking the first steps and making sure we are governing it properly, and we're finding the right use case for it. Really we're trying to find the right use case for our developers. We had some meetings recently and we outlined a few things that we could target. So we're really taking our first steps, getting our own competencies up with our own engineers and our developers and making sure we, learning from the people that already done it, and maybe learning from some mistakes they've made and using partners like Winslow to help us get there. >> Great, can you speak a little about from an operational standpoint? You've talked about developers, you've got public cloud, you've got your infrastructure, how do those all play together? >> Well today I mean systems engineering and my department is really the go to department when they request a service, or request a new server, request a new application be built. We interface with a lot of different teams at the bank so we're really the go to team that is going to help them innovate. They know what applications they need to run, they need, they make requests for services. We're trying to reduce the time to fulfillment, allowing them to have a platform where they can build on, innovate and be more self-sufficient. >> Yeah, you bring up a really interesting thing. How long people think it will take from when I ask for something to where I get it. Used to be I put in a support ticket, 24, 48 hours that was great. Some things it's like ah, heck, we're going to have to buy a server, or allocate different pieces. Today it's come on, it's instantaneous. >> Yeah, everybody's ready to go. >> Talk to that, the good and the bad of that from your standpoint. >> That's what we want to be in the business of allowing them to self-sufficient, build the platform for them, we don't want to be managing building VMs over and over again. We want to templatize things and allow them to be on their own timeline, to be able to develop, deploy, break down, so we're really trying to innovate in that way. I think that's our job as an engineering team to provide that to the business so they can innovate more quickly. >> Love the idea of self-service. The concern always is sprawl. Used to be I stuck a server in the corner and then I forgot about it. Now VMs pop up and I forget about them all the time, doesn't the CFO ever come say, hey, am I really using all this stuff? >> That's the big driving factor is cost, making sure you don't going to drive over a huge cost in the cloud. I think governance and managing that and using tools and using some of the use cases and some of the knowledge others have been before to help you build that framework so you're not breaking the budget, or what not, you find the right use case, whether it's on premises cloud or in the public cloud. >> Great, last thing, Todd, as you look forward through the rest of 2018, any interesting new technologies you're looking at or other things coming down the pike other than celebrating the big 200th anniversary. >> Well I mean, I'm really excited about the bank has really made a commitment to move towards innovation and using cloud technology so I'm really excited to be part of the team that's going to help innovate and drive the business forward in that regard. >> Todd McIlroy, I really appreciate the updates here, Eastern Bank a 200 year old company driving innovation forward. This has been our live coverage here from WTG Transform 2018. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the shows we're going to be at, all the replays that we've been at before. Stu Miniman, once again thank you so much to Winslow Technology Group, their partners and of course all the customers, thanks so much, for the viewers also for watching, thank you. (techno music)