>>I'm john free with the Q we are here. It's exciting news around the next evolution switching, Sony jean Donny, co founder and chief business officer Pensando and David Hughes chief product and technology officer Aruba HP. Welcome back. We just heard from Antonio neary and john Chambers about the HPV Ruba partnership with Pensando and the new switching platform. Tell me more about the exciting news you're announcing? >>Yeah, I'm really excited today to be introducing the CX 10,000 distributed services switch. It's a brand new class of switch way bringing together the best of Aruba switching technology adding to R C X portfolio combining with Pence Sandoz technology that technology embedded in the platform. The problem we're solving is that in a traditional data center, all of those services like fire walling and low balancing provided by centralized appliances. And while that might be okay for north south traffic traffic that's going in and out of the data center. It's not scalable and it's not cost effective to apply to every service in every port to every flow traversing their data center As we all know with microservices more and more of the traffickers east west over 70% today and growing and so what we're doing here with the C X 10,000 is giving enterprises away to take the smart nick technology that's been proven out by hyper scholars and introduce it into their data centers in a very cost effective and easy to deploy way we're embedding that capability in the top of rack switch so that we can apply Fireable services, low balancing services to every port To every flow, delivering 100 times a scale in terms of a CLS 10 times of performance, in terms of encryption at a third of the cost of those traditional network architectures. So it's a super exciting time, >>love the speed, love the energy there. But I gotta ask what makes this a new category of switch. >>Well if you take a look at the journey we have been on as we have evolved our data centers and the applications have evolved for our customers. Uh and the world is now a bold new world of multi cloud. Uh the architecture is in the data center which are leaves spine architectures have become the new norm. Software defined, networking is pervasively deployed by our customers but as this journey began five or seven or even about 10 years ago uh and has culminated into a much more mature set of building blocks. We have taken the problem from one space of automating networks in the data center to then introducing lots and lots of expensive appliances to bring about security for example, or the state full services, whether it's load balancing or whether it's encryption and visibility and telemetry types of services. Now the customers had to try, you know, trombone all the traffic in and out of these appliances driving up the cost uh and the complexity and when time comes to troubleshoot these environments, it's extremely complex because you're trying to rationalize fabrics coming from one place appliances coming from four or five different vendors, maintaining all the software elements that need to be kept track off. Uh and as more and more customers want to aspire towards zero trust security model. Uh we need to start to embrace a lot of the principles that have been implemented by the hyper scholars and the cloud vendors, which is doing away with the appliances doing away with agent technology on servers, but instead to bring that technology for east west uh into play as well as to ensure that if there are bad actors that are landing inside of the data centers that they do not have the ability to, you know, create attack surfaces with complete lateral movement. Today, that is possible. Uh if you look at 70% of all the attacks that have been happening here in the past few years, it's as a result of having a attack surface which is pretty large in the data centers. And that gets further complicated when you move towards a multi cloud environment where the perimeter of the data center is now moving into the edge. Whether that edges, whether fleet resides for our customers or whether that edge happens to be a co location edge where you're building your own rampant off ramps. So I think the compelling event essentially is driven by the whole notion of distribution of services and having them available from a security and from a services point of view and these are state full services as close to the workload as you possibly can get them. >>So you guys really hit on some key points, their cloud, native microservices East west, north south, um no perimeter edge. These are topics that we would talk about kind of individually over the years, it's happening now all at the same time, this is causing a lot of complexities and then the security challenges you just laid out are everywhere. This brings up a big conversation around solving this. How does this new architecture, this solution solve the complexity and the security challenges in the data center. >>If you look at the use cases that our customers are talking about. The first, the initial use case really is to bring about security and state full security for east west traffic right into the fabric of their data centers. So having the ability to deliver that while eliminating the complex appliances only to do the job which they do very well, which is not South protection of services. Uh that also allows us the ability then to start to deliver visibility and telemetry at the same time that we're delivering state full security firewall and micro segmentation services because what I cannot see, I cannot secure. Uh so those two elements are initial use cases out of the box for our customers as we deliver this platform to them and then as more and more use cases that are becoming evident to us through customer interactions come into play. For example, the co location edge that I would like. David to walk you through a bit more in terms of how we help solve for that use case. >>So for the cooler use case, I think we're moving from a world where people talk about data centers to now talking about centers of data and those centers of data. Yes, they can be in a core private data center, they could be in the cloud but more and more they're going to be distributed around the edge in co location environments. And what we need to be able to do is extend those services that were provided in the data center to be provided in those Kahlo's at the edge And again we want to do that without having to deploy a whole rack of appliances that may be cost more than a computer itself and so with the CX- 10,000 we can have that as a top of rack switch for that polo. And from that switch deploy all of the encryption and firewall ng services that that polo requires. And what's important is that we're doing it with the same policy framework under the same management system across the whole enterprise in the data center as well as in these co location environments and out into the cloud. >>So you guys mentioned visibility and a quick follow up on this question because you mentioned visibility can't see it, you can't protect it. But also there's a lot of workloads that people are trying to automate. These are two factors. Can you guys just double down on that? I want to just get that out there because I think this becomes a big thing. >>I think policy having the ability to have an intent based policy that is a foundational technology building block that we are brought together is a very important element. And then when you map it back to tools that Aruba is extending support for including this platform, become very valuable. So David, why don't you walk us >>through? You know, I think one of the advantages that we bring is that this is an extension of the Aruba C X switching portfolio. So yeah, it's a cloud native microservices, very modern switch architecture and we have a comprehensive management platform, the Aruba fabric controller. And so what we are doing is making sure that everything fits together nicely, that we're delivering a complete solution to our customers. But one important thing to mention here is that we are thinking about how customers can do this step by step. So no, we're not requiring them to rebuild their entire data center, They can do this one rack at a time. We can work with their existing spine and deploy one leaf at a time in a very measured way. And so we think it's a great way for enterprises to be able to consume this modern distributed platform. >>That's a great segment. The next question. I mean I totally see this as you guys are talking about the cloud native trend, driving a cloud operational model to every edge. The data center is just another edge. It's a center of data. Love that. I love that line. So I have to kind of ask the operational side of the question, how would an enterprise customers manage all this take us through the nuts and bolts of deploying and managing of his gum? A customer >>That's a very good question. If you take a look at the customer's deployment models and let's let's take the example of they want to now bring in this technology and build a part or highly secure part with it for east west and to make sure that they're protecting 100% of that east west traffic. I think that leveraging all the building blocks that we have innovated between us and Aruba. We want to make sure that the ecosystem that the customer has built, they want whether they have built it with companies like Splunk and service now or Guardianco, they want integration points will be made available to them. If you take a look at, take a step back and say for these environments as you aspire to go toward zero trade security. The issues of inserting security appliances into network flows and having the ability to map it to the knowledge of applications and their dependencies for policy becomes an important function to tackle. So once you accept that, Okay, I have state full security functions built into this top of rack device available for my applications and all workloads, whether they're container workloads, bare metal workload, virtualized workloads uh and I have complete visibility into those workloads without compromising on connectivity and I can control through enforcement of policy where I need it because now security is part of the fabric, it's not a bolt on. Then comes the job of integration with an ecosystem. So whether you're looking at seem and sold companies where we are delivering in close collaboration with Splunk, A Pensando app for Splunk there's also going to be the availability of an elastic module, A plug in module. Uh then turn attention to what's more automation and devops and civil playbooks for the C X 10-K will be made available day one so that where you do not have the ability to deploy the A. F. C. You can use your existing answerable toolkit and they're making those playbooks available to our customers. Uh They want integration with application discovery mapping companies like Guardianco, allowing them to discover who's talking to whom and push and enforce that policy through the C X 10-K will allow for more automated deployments of those policies and finally, compliance integration with vendors like too thin for continuous security compliance monitoring becomes extremely important as the screen depicts a lot of lot of visualization capabilities with companies like Elk which are in beta today and answerable and Splunk and Elk will all be targeted at first customer shipment. So again, telemetry visibility with the integration of the ecosystem. Uh, it becomes a very powerful combination for the customers as they look to operationalize this for day to day three and they, you know, day one, day two, day three automation. >>That's awesome. David, I'd like to let you weigh in on this whole question of operations because you're hitting all the marks here that are relevant cloud, native microservices, apps, explosion and data volume and velocity, hyper scale operational cloud operations, performance, price point security all in this one solution. This is big. Um, it's not like you mentioned earlier, it's not a rip and replace but you can roll it out how how do you see a customer best operational izing this new, >>You know, I think the answer is a little bit different for each customer but you are very careful at the beginning, we introduced this. It's an evolution of switching. It's not a revolution where we have to replace everything and I think that's really exciting is that it builds on the foundational architecture of leaf and spine. And what we're able to do is let that customer introduced these new capabilities one leaf at a time. So maybe when they're upgrading from 10 gigs to 25 gigs, it's a great time for them to introduce this capability into their data center um and then depending on their application, you know, it may be, as Sony said that they've got one particular application, a crown jewel application and so they want to build out that in one rack and provide, you know, very, very robust East west as well as north south um security around that application, but there's so many different ways that customers can deploy this technology and what's really exciting is now is we're beginning to work with our customers, learning about these new use cases and then feeding that back into our roadmap and we all >>know, as you get down lower in the network layer, security is distributed architecture. So everything is paramount like security, super relevant, great conversation, I gotta ask what's next with this technology. Yeah, >>well, you know the teams, the two engineering teams are working together and this is step one on, on a really exciting new path, I don't know, Sony, what would you say? >>I think there's a lot more to come here. This is just a starting point. We have an incredibly strong partnership and go to market partnership here with Uber team with this platform. It is just the beginning uh and it will lead our customers onto the multi cloud journey. Uh and last but not least, I would like to say that you know, in closing uh that are seldom opportunities where you look at disrupting the way things are happening while fitting into customers existing models. So this is, as I said with everything being software defined, you will continue to see as delivering at great velocity more and more software defined services, whether it's encryption, Lord balancing and other state full services over time. Making this technology easier to deploy by fitting into the existing ecosystem and continuing to provide them with the 100 extra scale, 10 X. The performance as well as the ability to do it at a third of the same, you know, at the third of the cost of what they would need to if they had to build this uh today with disparate devices, >>exciting news in the industry. You guys are the pros you've seen all the waves of innovation over the years. I guess my final final question would be, how would you summarize this point in time right now? This is pretty um exciting all this is all happening At the same time, customers are having opportunity to innovate the pandemic has shown a lot of scale and and the need for stability and security. This is a special moment. How would you guys weigh in on that? >>Yeah, I think about it every decade, there's a change in how data centers a belt. And so this is the change that's happening this decade. Moving to a distributed services, switch. The other big mega trend that I see is this move, as I said from data centers to stand as a data and the opportunity for customers to use this technology as they move out to the edge. Have distributed compute and tell us, what do you think Sony? >>I think I couldn't agree more. I think there are so many various technology transitions occurring now. The cloud being the biggest one. Uh the explosion of data and uh, you know, the customers making decisions of having a distributed model And if indeed two thirds, if not 75% of all data will be processed at the edge over the next few years. This architecture is prime for the enterprise to go leverage their best practices of today while they can gradually move that architecture is for the future, which is a multi cloud future >>centers of data, large scale cloud operations automation. The speed of innovation has never seen this before. Uh It's exciting time. Sunny, thank you for coming on. And David, thanks for chatting about this exciting new announcement. Thank you very much. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>This is the power of and hp. Ruba and Pensando partnership. I'm john forward the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. 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(bright music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. 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>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red. Have some twenty nineteen. You buy bread. >> Oh, good morning. Welcome back to our live coverage here on the Cube of Red Hat Summit twenty nineteen, along with two men. Timon, I'm John Walls were in Boston. A delightful day here in Beantown. Even made more so by the presidents of Jim White, her's president, CEO, Red hat. Jim, Thanks for joining us. Number one. Number two. What else could go right for you here this week? This has just been a great show. Great keynotes. You had great regulatory news on Monday. I mean, you've got a four leaf clover in that pocket there. I think for him >> to tell you what the weather is holding up well, for us, you're right with great partnership announcements. Amazing product launches. You have been a red hat, but eleven years now and this is only my third rail launch, right? When we deliver it, we commit to long lives. And so But it's awesome to be a part of that. And we had all the engineers on stage. I can't imagine how it could get any better. >> You >> win the lottery >> Oh, yeah? Well, yes. This one step at a time here. Relate and open share for we'LL get to those just a little bit. Let's go back to the keynote last night. First life, you have CEOs of IBM and Microsoft. Very big statements, right? We know about the IBM situation. I think a lot of people got a charge out of that a little bit. You know, Jenny commenting about have a death wish for this company. And I have thirty four billion reasons why I wanted to succeed. But a very good message. I think about this. This linkage that's about to occur, most likely. And the thought going forward from the IBM side of the fence? >> Yeah. I thought it was really good toe have her there. Not only to say that, you know, we're obviously bought it toe to make it grow, but also really making a statement about how important open source is to the future of IBM, right? Yeah. What became clear to me early on when we were talking is this is a major major. I would say that the company might be too strong a word, but it is a major kind of largest possible initiative around open source than you can imagine. And so I can't imagine, uh, imagine a better kind of validation of open source with one large technology companies the world basically going all in with us on it >> to talk about validation of open source, such a nadella up on stage. If you had told me five years ago that within a week I would see Satya Nadella up on stage with the CEO of'Em wear and then a week later up on stage with the CEO, right hat, I'm like, Are we talking about the same Microsoft? This is not the Microsoft that I grew up with on and worked with soap. We're talking your team and walking around. It wasn't just, you know, he flew in from Seattle. I did. The casino left. He was meeting with customers. There's a lot of product pieces that are going together, explain a little bit, that kind of the depth of the partnership and >> what we've made. Just tremendous progress over the last several years with Microsoft, you know, started back in two thousand fifteen. Where were you across certified hyper visors, And that's kind of a basic you know, let's work together. Over the last couple of years, it's truly blossomed into a really good partnership where, you know, I think they've and we both gotten over this, you know, Lennox versus Windows thing. And you know, I say, we've gotten over. I think we both recognized, you know, we need to serve our customers in the best possible way on that clearly means is two of the largest infrastructure software providers working closely together and what's been interesting. As we've gone forward, we find more and more common ground about how we could better serve our customers. Whether that's you know what might sound mundane. That's a big deal sequel server on Realm and setting benchmarks around that or dot net running on our platforms. Now all the way to really be able to deliver a hybrid cloud with a seamless experience with open shift from, you know, on premise to to Azure and having Deutsche Bank on State's twenty five a thousand containers running in production, moving back and forth to your >> you know what getting customers to change is challenging. You know, it's a little surprising even after that this morning to be like Oh, yeah. Let me pull up windows and log in and do all this stuff. We've talked to you a lot over the years about culture, you know, loved your book. We've talked a lot about it, but I really enjoyed. Last night is I mean, you had some powerful customers stories talking about how red hats helping them through the transformation. And like the Lockheed one for me was like And here's how we failed at first because we tried to go from waterfall to scrum Fall on. Do you know he definitely had the audience you're after? >> Yeah, I really wanted to make Mikey No talking about it called How we have so many great What's to talk about your rela a open ship for bringing all those capabilities from for OS. But I really wanted Teo talk about the hell, because that actually is the hardest part for customers. And so having kind of customers back in back to back to back, talking about success stories and failures to get there, and it really is about culture. And so that's where we called the open source way, which we kind of coin, which is, you know, beyond the code. It's, you know, meritocracy and how you get people to work together and collaboration. That's what more and more our customers want to talk about. In fact, I'd say ninety percent of the customer meetings I'm in, which are, you know, more CIA level meetings they're all about. Tell me about culture. Tell me how you go about doing that. Yeah, We trust the technology's gonna work. We don't have that issue with open source anymore. Everybody assumes you're gonna have open source. It's really how do you actually make that effective? And so that's what I really wanted to tow highlight over the course of the evening. >> You know, there was a lot of conversation, too. And you have your talking to Jenny about culture last night that you have multiple discussions over the course of the negotiation or of the conversations. So it wasn't just some cursory attention This I mean, the both of you had a really strong realization that this has to work in terms of this, you know, merging basically of philosophies and whatever. But you've had great success, right with your approach. So if you can share a little bit about how those cops is ations How you went through what transpired? Kind of how we got to where we are Now that you know, we're on the cusp of successful moment for you. Yeah, >> sure. So, yeah. I mean, from day one, that was the center of the discussion, I think early on. So year Agos, um, IBM announced, contain arising their software on open shift. And I think that's when the technical light went off about Hey. Having the same bits running across multiple clouds is really, really valuable in open shifts. The only real way to do that. And yes. Oh, Arvind was here from IBM on stage talking about that. And so I think technically, it was like, OK, ding, this makes sense. Nobody else could do it. And IBM, with their capabilities and services integration center. Just lot of strategic logic, I think the difficult part. Even before they approached this. Now, kind of looking back on it, having all these discussions with him now it's okay. Well, culturally, how do we bring it together? Because, you know, we both have strong cultures, mean IBM has a famous culture. We do that air very, very, very different. And so from the moment Jenny first approached me literally, you know, Hey, we're instant this, But let's talk about cultural, how we're going to make this work because, you know, it is a lot of money to spend on a company with No I p. And so you know, I think as we started to work through it, I think what we recognized is we can celebrate the strength of each other's cultures, and you know the key. And this is to not assume that there's one culture that's right for everything. We have a culture hyper optimized for collaboration and co creation, whether that's upstream with our source communities or downstream with our customers or with our employees and how that works. And that's great. Let's celebrate that for what it is. And, you know, IBM kind of run some of those big, most mission critical systems in the world, you know, on mainframes and how you do that looks and feels different. And that's okay. And it's okay to be kind of different. But together, if we can share the same values if we can, you know, share the same desire to serve our customers and put them first how we go about doing it. It's okay if those aren't exact. And as we got more comfortable with that, um, that's when I got more comfortable with it. And then, most importantly for me is we talk about culture. But a lot of our culture comes from the fact that we're truly a mission kind of purpose driven company, right? We're all about making open source the default choice in the world. And you know, to some extent remember, have these conversations with senior teams like, Hey, we were going to think we're going to change the world. You know? How better can we propel this for? This is such a huge platform to do it, and yet it's going to be hard. But aren't we here to do hard things? >> So it talked about it, You know, it's it's always been difficult selling when you don't have the. There's been a lot of discussions in the ecosystem today, as companies that build I p with open source and some of the models have been changing and some of the interactions with some of the hyper scale companies and just curious when you look at that, it's you know, related to what you're doing, what feedback you have and what you're seeing. >> Yeah. Look, first, I'LL say, I can't talk about that as an interested observer because our model is different than a lot of open source software companies. You know, Paul talked about in his keynote today, and we talked a lot about you know, our models one hundred percent open source, where we take open source code, typically getting involved in existing communities in creating life cycles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that model's worked well for us. Other open source companies where I think this is more of a challenge with the hyper scale er's right more of the software themselves. And obviously they therefore need to monetize that in a more direct way. You know, our sins are businessmen always say it's a really bad business model the right software and give it away. You know, that's not what we do where hundreds and open source, but you know, if you look at our big communities were, you know, ten to twenty percent of the contribution, because we want to rely on communities. The issue for those companies that are doing Maur. The code contribution themselves is there's a leakage in the open source license, which is, you know, the open source, like the viral licenses. You know, if you make changes and you redistribute, you have toe also, you know, redistribute your code as well. And redistribution now is to find in a hyper scale is just different. So there's kind of a leakage in the model. I think that ultimately gets fixed by tweaks to the licenses. I know it's really controversial, and companies do it, but, you know, Mongo has done it. I think you'LL see continuing tweaks to the length the licenses would still allow broad use, but kind of close that loophole if you want to call that a loophole. >> Yeah, well, it's something that you know as observers. We've always watched this space and you know, when you talk about Lennox, you know, you've created over three billion dollar company, But the ripple effects of Lennox has been huge. And I know you've got some research that we want to hear about when we've looked at like the soup space. When you look at the impact of big data and now where is going you know, the hoodoo distribution was a very, very small piece of that. So, you know, talk a little bit about the ripples. Is some new research that >> way? Had some research that was that we commission to say, What is the impact of Lenin's right hand and press linens? And then we were all blown away. Ten trillion dollars. I mean, so this isn't our numbers or we had really experts do this and e. I mean, it really blew us away. But I think what happens is if you think about how pervasive it is in the economy, it's ultimately hard to have any transaction done that doesn't somehow ripple into technology and technology. Days primarily built around Lynn IQ. So in red headed President X is the leader, so it just pervades and pervades. When you look at the size in the aperture and you make a really good point around, whether it's a duper lennox, I mean, we could look a red hat, the leader and Lennox and we're, you know, less than four billion dollars of revenue. But we've created this massive ecosystem the same thing with the Duke. You think about how big an impactful. Big data and the analytics and built on it are massive. The company's doing are only a couple hundred million dollars, and I will say I've become comfortable with I'd say, five years ago, I used to say in my glass half empty day I'd be like we're creating all of this value yet we're just only getting this little tiny sliver. Um, I've now flip that around and say My glass Half full days I look and say Wow, with this lever we have with this little bit of investment were fundamentally changing the world. And so everybody's benefiting in a much larger scale around that. And when you think about it, that aperture is something really, really, really excited >> about. Well, you talk about, you know where the impact will be. Talk about Cloud, that the wave of container ization, you know, Where do you see that ending up? You know, I look, you know, Cooper Netease is one of those things. There's a lot of excitement and rightfully so. It was going to change the market, but it's not about a Cuban aunties distribution. It's going to be baked into every platform out there. Yeah, gunships doing quite well. And you know all the cloud providers, your partner with them and working with them. It's less fighting to see who leads and Maura's toe. How do we all work together on this? >> Well, you know, I think that's >> the great thing about ah well functioning, mature, open source projects is it behooves everybody to share. Now we'LL compete ultimately, you know, kind of downstream. But it who's everybody to share and build on this kind of common kind of component. And, you know, like any good open source project, it has a defined set of things that it does. I think you hit on a really important point. Cooper Netease is such an important layer. Doesn't work without Lennox, right? I mean, lyrics is, you know, containers or Lennox. And so how do you think about putting those pieces to gather manageability and automation thinks like answerable. And so, you know, at least from our perspective, it's How do you take these incredible technologies that are cadence ng, you know, at their own pace and are fundamentally different but can't work unless you put them all together? Which to us, you know, that creates a big opportunity to say, How do I take this incredible technology that thousands of, of really technically Swiss cave people are working on and make it consumable? Archer Traditional model has been like linnet, simply saying We're going to snap shot. We're going created to find life we're going back for, you know, do patching for what? And we still do that. But there's now an added sir sort of value, something like open shift, where you can say, Okay, we could put these pieces together in life cycle and together. And, you know, we see instances all the time where an issue with Cooper Netease requires, you know, a change analytics. And so being able to life cycle in together, I think we can really put out a platform where we literally now we're saying in the platform you're getting the benefits of millions of people working on overtime on Lenox with tens of thousands people working on Cooper, Netease and the Learnings are all been kind of wrapping back into a platform. So our ability to do that is it kind of open source continues to move up. The stack is really, really exciting. >> Now. You were talking about transformative technologies on DH. How great it is to be a part of that right now. You alluded to that last night in the keynote. So you're talking about this, You know your history lessons. You know how much you love doing that? Your ki notes and you know, the scientific method Industrial Revolution open source. Just without asking you to re can you are a recount. All that. Just give us an idea about how those air philosophically aligned it. How you think those air open source follows that lineage, if you will, where it is fundamentally changing the world. It is a true global game change. Yeah, And >> so the point last night was a really kind of illustrate how a change in thinking can fundamentally change the world we live in. And so what I talked about just kind of quickly is so the scientific method developed and kind of the fifteen hundreds ish time frame was a different way to discover knowledge. So it goes from kind of dictates coming down from, you know, on high, too. Very simple hypothesis, experiment, observation of the results of the things that go through that process and stand the test of time and become what we consider knowledge right? And that change lead immediately to an explosion of innovation, whether that with the underpinnings of the industrial revolution or enlightenment, what we've done in medicine, whole bunch of areas. And yeah, the analogy I came to was around well, the old way we just try to innovate constrains us in a more open approach is a fundamentally better way to innovate. But what I found so interesting in and I think you picked up on it if it didn't emphasize this much, wanted to excite and having a lot of time, its many of the same characteristics of scientific discovery. So the idea of you know, independence anybody could actually do this pinpoints the importance of experimentation and learning those Air Corps components of, you know, tef ops and agile and open source, right? It's very, uh, in the end, the characteristics are actually quite similar as well. I think that's just fascinating to see happen. >> So e think about that. And if you could bring it back to the customers you're talking to, you have a lot of executive conversation, said You focus a lot on the how is really challenging. We understand. You know, the organizational structure of most companies goes back over a hundred years to military. So you know, what you see is some of the one of the biggest challenges that, you know, executive thieves we're facing these days. And, you know, how are they getting past that? Stuck? >> Yeah. And so, you know, I think the simple is way to state. The problem, which I hear over and over again, is we tried an agile transformation, and it failed because our culture was already and cultures Mohr of, ah always tell the executor when they said to me, It's like, Okay, but recognized cultures and output, not an input. And it's an output of leadership behaviors, beliefs, values what's been rewarded over time. So if you want your culture to change, actually to think about changing the way that you lied and manage and broadly, the structures, the hierarchies, the bureaucratic systems that we have in place today are really good at driving efficiency in a static environment. So if you're trying to slightly take a little bit of cost out building a car, you start with what you did last year. You get a bunch of scientists are consultants to look at it, and then you direct some fairly small changes. So the structure were in places other wrong with them. When value creation was about standardization of economies of scale. The hierarchies work really, really well to distribute tasks and allow specialization and optimization. The problem is now most value creation. It's requiring innovation. It's how doe I innovate and how I engage with my customer. You know the example I used a couple years ago? Its summit was, you know, the average cars use ninety minutes today. So if you think about how to reduce the cost of transfer port ation, is it taking two percent out of the cost of building a car? Or is it figuring out whether it's ride sharing or other ways? Teo. A fractional ownership. Whether it is to increase the average utilization of the car, it's clearly the ladder. But you can't do that in about bureaucratic hierarchical system that requires creativity and innovation, and the model to do that requires injecting variants in. That's what allows innovation to happen. So as leaders, you have to show up and say, all right, how do I encourage descent, you know, how do I accept failure? Right. So this idea of somebody tries something and it fails. If you fire him, nobody's gonna try anything again. But experimentation by definition requires a lot of failures and how you learn from it. So how do you build that into the culture where as executives you say holding people accountable doesn't mean, you know, firing him or beating him up. If they make a mistake, it's how do I encourage the right level of risk taking in mistakes, you know, even down to the soft side. So you know, how do you hold somebody accountable in an agile scrum, right. Your leaders have to be mature enough to sit down, have a conversation. Not around here. The five things you were supposed to do and you did forum. So you get in eighty right now, you can't say exactly what they need to do because it's a little blurry. So you have to have leaders mature enough to sit down and have a conversation with somebody is I think you got an eighty. Thank you. Got an eighty because here's what you did well, and here's what you didn't. But it's subjective. And how do you build that skill and leaders? They oughta have those subjective conversations, right? That sounds really, really soft, but it's not gonna work if you don't have leaders who can do that right? And so that's why it's hard. Because, you know, changing peep people is hard. And so that's why I think so. Many CEOs and executives want to talk about it. But that's what I mean by it's a soft side. And how do you get that type of change to happen? Because if you do that, pick ours honestly, pick somebody else's, you know, agile Davis with methodologies. They'LL work if you have a culture, this accepting of it >> before they let you go. There were two things to our quick observations about last night. Number one rule Samant hitch up on the licensing, so I know you've got your hands full on that. Good luck with that. You mentioned licensing a little bit ago, and I learned that thirty four billion dollars is a good deal. Well, right, that's what you said I heard it from are absolutely well. Things >> were a separate entity. We don't have licenses. So I don't know how we would go into an l A >> given. We don't have a license to sell. So got some expectations setting >> we need to do with our customers and then, you know, but separately, You know, I think people do forget that Red Hat is a not only a really fast growing company were also really profitable company. Most of the other software companies that are growing at our pace on a gap basis makes little to no money. We have because we get the leverage of open source, we actually generate a very large amount of free cash flow. And if you actually not to get the details of the financials. But we look at our free cash flow generation in our growth, I would argue, was a smoking good deal. That thirty four. I was asking for a lot more than that. >> You could had smoking good the last night that was gonna work to give thanks for the time. >> It's great to be here. >> Thank you. Thank you for hosting us here. Great opportunities on this show for I know that's exciting to see two but continued success. We wish you all >> thanks. So much. Thank you for being here. It's great to have you, >> Jim. White House joining us back with more live coverage here on the Cube. You are watching our coverage here in Boston of Red Hat Some twenty nineteen. Well,

(upbeat music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful studios in beautiful Palo Alto, CA. Today we are going to be talking about new architectures, new disciplines required to really make possible the opportunities associated with digital business. And to do that, we've got Neil Vachharajani, who is the Technical Director at Pure Storage. Neil welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Peter. >> So Neil, we have spent a fair amount of time within Wikibon and within the CUBE community, talking a lot about what is digital business. So, give me a second, run something by ya, tell me if you agree. So we think that there is a difference between business and digital business. And specifically, we think that difference is, a digital business uses data assets differently, than a business does. Walmart beat Sears 'cause it used data differently. AWS is putting the pressure on Walmart, because it uses data differently. Or Amazon is putting the pressure on Walmart, because it uses data differently. So, that is at the centerpiece of a lot of these digital transformations. How are you using data to re-institutionalize your work, realign your resources, reestablish a new engagement model with your marketplace. Would you agree with that? >> Yeah, absolutely agree with that and I think a lot of it has to do with the volume of data, where the data is coming from. If you look at traditional business, it really was about just putting into computers what we used to do on paper. And digital business today I think is about generating huge volumes of data by really looking at every interaction we have no matter how small or how big. >> So, putting telemetry on as many things. So, IoT for machines, mobile for human beings, but it used to be as you said. It was a process, known process, unknown technology world for a long time. And now, these are data driven processes. We're actually using data to describe what their next best action should be, what the recommendation should be. >> That's right. >> So, as we think about this, you know, businesses has been around for a long time. There's this notion of evidence based management, which is the idea that we use data differently, from the boardroom all the way down to the drivers. How does a business start to bring forward the discipline required to really make possible this data driven world. >> Well you know I think the first thing is, to really recognize why does this new paradigm shift changes things? And I think in the old world, if you looked at a piece of data, you actually could articulate all the way from the boardroom down to the stockroom every use of the data. And that meant that you could build a lot of siloed applications and that wasn't a big deal. You got your money's worth out of the data. So for example, recording transactions in store number 17. >> That's right. But in the new world, you actually don't know what the value of the data is ahead of time. Right. You're, in some sense, you're trying to capture a lot of data and then use technology to correlate it with things, mix and mash, mix and match, mash it up, and then drive business decisions that you didn't even know you were making a decision a few weeks ago and that means that you can't really lock up your data, you can't constrain it, because that's going to limit your possibilities. It's going to limit your ROI on that data. >> Yeah, we like to say that data as an asset is different from all other assets, because it is inherently sharable, reusable, it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity. And so, in many respects what the IT organization has had to do is find new ways to privatize that data through things like security, but as you're saying, they don't want to introduce technologies that artificially constrain derivative and future uses of that data. >> And I think, that's where, really the big architectural shift is happening in the data center. Because if you look traditionally, we have siloed the data and it wasn't like this intentional thing that we want to put it into a silo. But that's how we packaged our applications and that's how we deployed our applications. And now, we need a new discipline inside the data center, that makes the data available, lets people put policies on it. Like security policies. But then also makes it available for the innovators all throughout the company to get access to that data. You know, we're trying to crystallize this whole philosophy into something we refer to as the data-centric architecture. Where data is at the center, people have access to the data, and then there's just applications all around it that are all hitting this common pool of data and doing different things, driving new business processes. >> Now, you're talking not about a physical pool of data, but rather a logical pool of data. Data is stil going to be very distributed, right? >> Well you know, data gets generated in a distributed way, data is very large. I think it would be a bit naive to be able to point to one rack and one data center and say all your data center is going to be right here in this one rack. >> Or in one cloud. >> Or in one cloud for that matter. But just from a philosophical perspective, you do want to pull your data out of anything that is, like you said a minute ago, that's constraining it. So, I think, one really good example of this is when we went, quote unquote, web scale, we saw a lot of applications move into direct attached storage, to dive deep into a technology. And that was great if you wanted to only come in the front door and access the data through the application that was managing that das. But, if you wanted to do anything else, you were kind of stuck. >> So as to summarize this point, we're moving from a world in which data is a place to data is a service. >> That's right. >> Have I got that right? >> That's absolutely right. I mean, the way I like to think about it is that data and storage need to really be different things and storage's job is to give you access to the data. Storage in its own right, you know, doesn't solve a business problem. It's the data that solves the business problem. Storage is the vehicle that gets you there. And so I think it's pretty exciting that there's new technologies that are coming out, or that honestly are here, that are enabling that. Things like Flash and NVMe, and you know, it's futures. >> Well let's talk about that because what, the observation that I made to clients for quite some time is that if you go back, disk, was a great technology for persisting data. So again, Store number 17, transaction at a certain time. It's already occurred, we have to record it. So, we record it, we persisted on disk. Now what we are trying to do is we're utilizing technologies that are inherently structured to deliver data so that we can have the data be very distributed, but still look at it from a logical standpoint. And have that data be delivered to a lot of applications whether that is local and as long as we don't undermine basic physics perhaps further away. But even more importantly, deliver it to different roles, different, same day of being delivered to developers, same day to being different, delivered to a new application. What are some of those core technologies that are going to be necessary to do this? You mentioned NVMe, let's start there. >> Yeah, if I just back up a little bit right, that in some sense, even that recording the data workflow that you talked about, we made disk work. But it was actually a pretty challenging media and so we put in a lot of optimizations and things in place, because we said, we know the usage pattern. And if we know the usage pattern, we know how to organize our data. And so as a step one, like the transformation that I think is, in pretty full swing these days was moving from disk to flash. And that was a huge transformation, because it meant that random access to the data was just as performant as this carefully crafted sequential access. That meant you could start accepting unknown workloads into your applications, but you were still stuck behind this very serial, very antiquated SCSI protocol. And NVMe is now bringing a lot more parallels, to play. And that's going to help us to drive things like just simple, plain old data center. Stuff like density, and performance density, and power, and that kind of thing. So, that's sort of step one in terms of the technology that you can package all of this stuff in a pretty dense package and put petabytes of storage with enough I/O to actually access that data. If that's the key that you can have pedabytes, but you can only have one I out for each gig, well you're not going to get a lot out of that data. >> So, just to stop right there, and that leads to a world, in which as long as your disciplined and architected, you do not have to know what workloads are going to access that data near term. >> Well, you know, that's only step one, right. >> Right. >> Because the other challenge is that very few people access storage directly, right. We hide this behind databases, and we hide this behind a whole bunch of other technologies. Now, those technologies might have have their own limitations in place. But we have a lot or really rich things we can do at the storage level to present the same data out multiple frontends. And so the simplest idea is, we don't have one copy of a database, we often will have the transactional database that's using, recording those transactions, but then we'll have an analytics copy of the database and now we need to keep the two of those things in sync. And this is where the discipline and the architecture really comes into place. And we kind of have a lot of that figured out for things like relational databases and best practices there. But in the meantime, the world also moved over to the new world of Node-SQL databases, Queue's, Kafka. Things of that nature. And those, brought direct attached storage as the best practice. And so I think where the discipline comes in and where some of the new technologies that we're talking about right now are: How do you bring those old disciplines that we figured out, on let's say the relational world, how you bring that to bear on the new technologies that are meeting the scale requirements that we have today? >> Well one of the more important workloads that are going to require scale is, for example, AI. So, how are we going to organize some of these technologies, add them to these new disciplines, to be able to make some of these AI workloads run really, really fast. >> You know, I think a lot of this really comes down to pulling the storage out and putting it into it's own tier. And so, Pure Storage has an offering which is called AIRI, which is packaging DGX and Video DGX boxes with FlashBlades. And we say, hey you don't need a whole bunch of direct attached storage which is siloing your data, you can go put it into this common shared pool. And I think that on, you know, the other side the house, our FlashArray business is doing something really similar with NVMe, the FlashArray/X is essentially commoditizing NVMe. It's saying, everybody has access to this high performance density. And looking into the future with technologies like NVMe over Fabric, what we're really saying is your apps that used to use direct attached storage, there's no reason why they can't go to a sand based architecture that offers rich data services and not compromise one iota on latency. >> Or access or any other number of activities as well. So we've got NVMe, NVMe over Fabric, Flash, new approaches for thinking about packaging some of these things. Are there any other technologies that you envision on the horizon that are going to be really important to customers and that Pure is going to take advantage of. >> Yeah, you know, I really think that the other thing is once you collect all this stuff, you need a way to tame the beast. You need a way to deploy your applications. You need a way to catalog everything. And honestly, things like Kubernetes and container orchestration is becoming this platform where you deploy all of this stuff. And some of the assumptions that are baked into that, really go back and tie in nicely with those other technologies. In particular, they assume that I can schedule this compute wherever I want and I have access to the data. So in that way of having a fabric if you will between your compute and your data is essential. And it's just another reason why siloing things off into particular units of compute is just really the architecture of the past. And the architecture going forward is going to be to logically centralize. And maybe put some smarts at that other layer, saying, hey if this data is in the public cloud, let me schedule up there. But if this data is in my data center, let me schedule the compute down there. But then not having to worry about the micro decisions about, does it have to be in this rack or, you know, or on this particular physical node. All your data is accessible. >> But increasingly, we're going to do things that move the compute both physically as well as logically closer to the data. >> You know, 100%. Right. But it's at what scale? That you really want to get the data center right. Your compute should be running in the correct data center. >> Or the center of data right? >> Or the center of data, right, you know. Get it in the right spot, but then you don't want to have to worry about all the other micro constraints. You don't want, you know, if you look on the networking side of the world, Leaf Spy networks are all about say, hey look they're really is a uniform fabric for networking. We're trying to do the same thing in storage and just say, look, the storage is so performant, there's no reason to silo. You can run your compute where ever you want. If you've got a good networking fabric and you've got a good storage fabric, the end of the day, all your data is accessible, to whatever new application you envision. And you just, there's no reason why you have to lock it up. You mentioned security before. You know, you should absolutely be able to orchestrate things like taking a snapshot of your data, putting it through, masking, or whatever anonymization you need to make it safely accessible to new applications and innovators inside of your company to drive that digital business. >> Yes, and we like to talk about moving from a world that is focused on infrastructure, taking cost out, making it static, by removing all uncertainty to a world where we've no workloads, and elastic capacity, or elastic scale to a plastic world. Where plastic, using of the physicals, you know, the physic sense is unknown workload, unknown scale. And just making sure that we have the option to use data any way we want as much as possible in the future. >> And I think that that's why you see the rise of service catalogs and self service coming up in IT, it's that plasticity that you have the brightest minds in your company trying to figure out what to do, and you don't want to have infrastructure be this bottleneck that's causing everything to go slower. Or for people to say no. You just always want to say, yes. And that's where I think it's always exciting to see, see these technologies, NVMe, come out and say, we've now got the performance to say yes. NVMe over Fabric to say there's no compromise over latency. And then honestly, having this stuff packaged in things like FlashArray/X, where the CIO or the CFO, doesn't complain about breaking the bank as well. Because now these technologies are the status quo. They're the standard. There's no premium for them. And if anyone is trying to charge you that premium, you should really, you know, ask them why. This is the new architecture, this should be, this should be, what, the only thing you offer >> Right. >> In some sense >> Yeah, we're bringing all these new technologies into economic envelope that IT has to be in for business today. >> That's right, and you know, you look at something like flash memory, right. It's not a new technology. I remember in college having a flash card to put into like a digital camera in the early days of digital cameras. But for it to make it into the data center, the thing that was critical was that economic aspect of it. So it's not just about being on the bleeding edge of technology, but it's packaging that in a way that's actually palatable for the entire C-Suite to consume inside your organization. >> And I remember my disk pack that I carried around in college from the PDP system that we had to use. (laughter) Alright, Neil Vachharajani, Technical Director of Pure Storage talking about the relationship between new technologies, data centeric architectures, and digital business. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much Peter. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, you've been participating in another CUBE conversation. 'Til we talk again. (upbeat music)