(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE as to continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent '22. We're in the Venetian. Out in Las Vegas, it is Wednesday. And the PaaS is still happening. I can guarantee you that. We continue our series of discussions as part of the "AWS Startup Showcase". This is the "Global Startup Program", a part of that showcase. And I'm joined by two gentlemen today who are going to talk about what CoreStack is up to. One of them is Ez Natarajan, who is the Founder and CEO. Good to have you- (simultaneous chatter) with us today. We appreciate it. Thanks, EZ. >> Nice to meet you, John. >> And Brad Winney who is the area Sales Leader for startups at AWS. Brad, good to see you. >> Good to see you, John. >> Thanks for joining us here on The Showcase. So Ez, first off, let's just talk about CoreStack a little bit for people at home who might not be familiar with what you do. It's all about obviously data, governance, giving people peace of mind, but much deeper than that. I'll let you take it from there. >> So CoreStack is a governance platform that helps customers maximize their cloud usage and get governance at scale. When we talk about governance, we instill confidence through three layers: solving the problems of the CIO, solving the problems of the CTO, solving the problems of the CFO, together with a single pin of class,- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> which helps them achieve continuous holistic automated outcomes at any given time. >> John: Mm-hmm. So, Brad, follow up on that a little bit- >> Yeah. because Ez touched on it there that he's got a lot of stakeholders- >> Right. >> with a lot of different needs and a lot of different demands- >> Mm-hmm. >> but the same overriding emotion, right? >> Yeah. >> They all want confidence. >> They all want confidence. And one of the trickiest parts of confidence is the governance issue, which is policy. It's how do we determine who has access to what, how we do that scale. And across not only start been a process. This is a huge concern, especially as we talked a lot about cutting costs as the overriding driver for 2023. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> The economic compression being what it is, you still have to do this in a secure way and as a riskless way as possible. And so companies like CoreStack really offer core, no pun intended, (Ez laughs) function there where you abstract out a lot of the complexity of governance and you make governance a much more simple process. And that's why we're big fans of what they do. >> So we think governance from a three dimensional standpoint, right? (speaks faintly) How do we help customers be more compliant, secure, achieve the best performance and operations with increased availability? >> Jaohn: Mm-hmm. >> At the same time do the right spend from a cost standpoint. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. So when all three dimensions are connected, the business velocity increases and the customer's ability to cater to their customers increase. So our governance tenants come from these three pillars of finance operations, security operations and air operations at cloud operations. >> Yeah. And... Yeah. Please, go ahead. >> Can I (indistinct)? >> Oh, I'm sorry. Just- >> No, that's fine. >> So part of what's going on here, which is critical for AWS, is if you notice a lot of (indistinct) language is at the business value with key stakeholders of the CTO, the CSO and so on. And we're doing a much better job of speaking business value on top of AWS services. But the AWS partners, again, like CoreStack have such great expertise- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> in that level of dialogue. That's why it's such a key part for us, why we're really interested partnering with them. >> How do you wrestle with this, wrestle may not be the right word, but because you do have, as we just went through these litany, these business parts of your business or a business that need access- >> Ez: Mm-hmm. >> and that you need to have policies in place, but they change, right? I mean, and somebody maybe from the financial side should have a window into data and other slices of their business. There's a lot of internal auditing. >> Man: Mm-hmm. >> Obviously, it's got to be done, right? And so just talk about that process a little bit. How you identify the appropriate avenues or the appropriate gateways for people to- >> Sure. >> access data so that you can have that confidence as a CTO or CSO, that it's all right. And we're not going to let too much- >> out to the wrong people. >> Sure. >> Yeah. So there are two dimensions that drive the businesses to look for that kind of confidence building exercise, right? One, there are regulatory external requirements that say that I know if I'm in the financial industry, I maybe need to following NIST, PCI, and sort of compliances. Or if I'm in the healthcare industry, maybe HIPAA and related compliance, I need to follow. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> That's an external pressure. Internally, the organizations based on their geographical presence and the kind of partners and customers they cater to, they may have their own standards. And when they start adopting cloud; A, for each service, how do I make sure the service is secure and it operates at the best level so that we don't violate any of the internal or external requirements. At the same time, we get the outcome that is needed. And that is driven into policies, that is driven into standards which are consumable easily, like AWS offers well-architected framework that helps customers make sure that I know I'm architecting my application workloads in a way that meets the business demands. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And what CoreStack has done is taken that and automated it in such a way it helps the customers simplify that process to get that outcome measured easily so they get that confidence to consume more of the higher order services. >> John: Okay. And I'm wondering about your relationship as far with AWS goes, because, to me, it's like going deep sea fishing and all of a sudden you get this big 4, 500 pound fish. Like, now what? >> Mm-hmm. >> Now what do we do because we got what we wanted? So, talk about the "Now what?" with AWS in terms of that relationship, what they're helping you with, and the kind of services that you're seeking from them as well. >> Oh, thanks to Brad and the entire Global Startup Ecosystem team at AWS. And we have been part of AWS Ecosystem at various levels, starting from Marketplace to ISV Accelerate to APN Partners, Cloud Management Tools Competency Partner, Co-Sell programs. The team provides different leverages to connect to the entire ecosystem of how AWS gets consumed by the customers. Customers may come through channels and partners. And these channels and partners maybe from WAs to MSPs to SIs to how they really want to use each. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the ecosystem that AWS provides helps us feed into all these players and provide this higher order capability which instills confidence to the customers end of the day. >> Man: Absolutely. Right. >> And this can be taken through an MSP. This can be taken through a GSI. This can be taken to the customer through a WA. And that's how our play of expansion into larger AWS customer base. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Brad, from your side of the fence. >> Brad: No, its... This is where the commons of scale come to benefit our partners. And AWS has easily the largest ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> Whether or not it's partners, customers, and the like. And so... And then, all the respective teams and programs bring all those resources to bear for startups. Your analogy of of catching a big fish off coast, I actually have a house in Florida. I spend a lot of time there. >> Interviewer: Okay. >> I've yet to catch a big 500 pound fish. But... (interviewer laughs) >> But they're out there. >> But they're definitely out there. >> Yeah. >> And so, in addition to the formalized programs like the Global Partner Network Program, the APN and Marketplace, we really break our activities down with the CoreStacks of the world into two major kind of processes: "Sell to" and "Sell with". And when we say "Sell to", what we're really doing is helping them architect for the future. And so, that plays dividends for their customers. So what do we mean by that? We mean helping them take advantage of all the latest serverless technologies: the latest chip sets like Graviton, thing like that. So that has the added benefit of just lowering the overall cost of deployment and expend. And that's... And we focus on that really extensively. So don't ever want to lose that part of the picture of what we do. >> Mm-hmm. >> And the "Sell with" is what he just mentioned, which is, our teams out in the field compliment these programs like APN and Marketplace with person-to-person in relationship development for core key opportunities in things like FinTech and Retail and so on. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> We have significant industry groups and business units- >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> in the enterprise level that our teams work with day in and day out to help foster those relationships. And to help CoreStack continue to develop and grow that business. >> Yeah. We've talked a lot about cost, right? >> Yeah. >> But there's a difference between reducing costs or optimizing your spend, right? I mean there- >> Brad: Right. >> Right. There's a... They're very different prism. So in terms of optimizing and what you're doing in the data governance world, what kind of conversations discussions are you having with your clients? And how is that relationship with AWS allowing you to go with confidence into those discussions and be able to sell optimization of how they're going to spend maybe more money than they had planned on originally? >> So today, because of the extra external micro-market conditions, every single customer that we talk to wanting to take a foster status of, "Hey, where are we today? How are we using the cloud? Are we in an optimized state?" >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And when it comes to optimization, again, the larger customers that we talk to are really bothered about the business outcome and how their services and ability to cater to their customers, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> They don't want to compromise on that just because they want to optimize on the spend. That conversation trickled down to taking a poster assessment first, and then are you using the right set of services within AWS? Are the right set of services being optimized for various requirements? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And AWS help in terms of catering to the segment of customers who need that kind of a play through the patent ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We've talked a lot about confidence too, cloud with confidence. >> Brad: Yeah. Yeah. >> What does that mean to different people, you think? I mean, (Brad laughing) because don't you have to feel them out and say "Okay. What's kind of your tolerance level for certain, not risks, but certain measures that you might need to change"? >> I actually think it's flipped the other way around now. I think the risk factor- >> Okay. >> is more on your on-prem environment. And all that goes with that. 'Cause you... Because the development of the cloud in the last 15 years has been profound. It's gone from... That's been the risky proposition now. With all of the infrastructure, all the security and compliance guardrails we have built into the cloud, it's really more about transition and risk of transition. And that's what we see a lot of. And that's why, again, where governance comes into play here, which is how do I move my business from on-prem in a fairly insecure environment relatively speaking to the secure cloud? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> How do I do that without disrupting business? How do I do that without putting my business at risk? And that's a key piece. I want to come back, if I may, something on cost-cutting. >> Interviewer: Sure. >> We were talking about this on the way up here. Cost-cutting, it's the bonfire of the vanities in that in that everybody is talking about cost-cutting. And so we're in doing that perpetuating the very problem that we kind of want to avoid, which is our big cost-cutting. (laughs) So... And I say that because in the venture capital community, what's happening is two things: One is, everybody's being asked to extend their runways as much as possible, but they are not letting them off the hook on growth. And so what we're seeing a lot of is a more nuanced conversation of where you trim your costs, it's not essential, spend, but reinvest. Especially if you've got good strong product market fit, reinvest that for growth. And so that's... So if I think about our playbook for 2023, it's to help good strong startups. Either tune their market fit or now that they good have have good market fit, really run and develop their business. So growth is not off the hook for 2023. >> And then let me just hit on something- >> Yeah. >> before we say goodbye here that you just touched on too, Brad, about. How we see startups, right? AWS, I mean, obviously there's a company focus on nurturing this environment of innovation and of growth. And for people looking at maybe through different prisms and coming. >> Brad: Yeah. >> So if you would maybe from your side of the fence, Ez from CoreStack, about working as a startup with AWS, I mean, how would you characterize that relationship about the kind of partnership that you have? And I want to hear from Brad too about how he sees AWS in general in the startup world. But go ahead. >> It's kind of a mutually enriching relationship, right? The support that comes from AWS because our combined goal is help the customers maximize the potential of cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And we talked about confidence. And we talked about all the enablement that we provide. But the partnership helps us get to the reach, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> Reach at scale. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. We are talking about customers from different industry verticals having different set of problems. And how do we solve it together so that like the reimbursement that happens, in fact healthcare customers that we repeatedly talk to, even in the current market conditions, they don't want to save. They want to optimize and re-spend their savings using more cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So that's the partnership that is mutually enriching. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. To me, this is easy. I think the reason why a lot of us are here at AWS, especially the startup world, is that our business interests are completely aligned. So I run a pretty significant business unit in a startup neighbor. But a good part of my job and my team's job is to go help cut costs. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So tell me... Show me a revenue responsibility position where part of your job is to go cut cost. >> Interviewer: Right. >> It's so unique and we're not a non-profit. We just have a very good long-term view, right? Which is, if we help companies reduce costs and conserve capital and really make sure that that capital is being used the right way, then their long-term viability comes into play. And that's where we have a chance to win more of that business over time. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And so because those business interests are very congruent and we come in, we earn so much trust in the process. But I think that... That's why I think we being AWS, are uniquely successful startups. Our business interests are completely aligned and there's a lot of trust for that. >> It's a great success story. It really is. And thank you for sharing your little slice of that and growing slice of that too- >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> from all appearances. Thank you both. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Appreciate your time. >> This is part of the AWS Startup Showcase. And I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here at AWS re:Invent '22. And theCUBE, of course, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Oracle continues to enhance my sequel Heatwave at a very rapid pace. The company is now in its fourth major release since the original announcement in December 2020. 1 of the main criticisms of my sequel, Heatwave, is that it only runs on O. C I. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and as a lock in to Oracle's Cloud. Oracle recently announced that heat wave is now going to be available in AWS Cloud and it announced its intent to bring my sequel Heatwave to Azure. So my secret heatwave on AWS is a significant TAM expansion move for Oracle because of the momentum AWS Cloud continues to show. And evidently the Heatwave Engineering team has taken the development effort from O. C I. And is bringing that to A W S with a number of enhancements that we're gonna dig into today is senior vice president. My sequel Heatwave at Oracle is back with me on a cube conversation to discuss the latest heatwave news, and we're eager to hear any benchmarks relative to a W S or any others. Nippon has been leading the Heatwave engineering team for over 10 years and there's over 100 and 85 patents and database technology. Welcome back to the show and good to see you. >>Thank you. Very happy to be back. >>Now for those who might not have kept up with the news, uh, to kick things off, give us an overview of my sequel, Heatwave and its evolution. So far, >>so my sequel, Heat Wave, is a fully managed my secret database service offering from Oracle. Traditionally, my secret has been designed and optimised for transaction processing. So customers of my sequel then they had to run analytics or when they had to run machine learning, they would extract the data out of my sequel into some other database for doing. Unlike processing or machine learning processing my sequel, Heat provides all these capabilities built in to a single database service, which is my sequel. He'd fake So customers of my sequel don't need to move the data out with the same database. They can run transaction processing and predicts mixed workloads, machine learning, all with a very, very good performance in very good price performance. Furthermore, one of the design points of heat wave is is a scale out architecture, so the system continues to scale and performed very well, even when customers have very large late assignments. >>So we've seen some interesting moves by Oracle lately. The collaboration with Azure we've we've covered that pretty extensively. What was the impetus here for bringing my sequel Heatwave onto the AWS cloud? What were the drivers that you considered? >>So one of the observations is that a very large percentage of users of my sequel Heatwave, our AWS users who are migrating of Aurora or so already we see that a good percentage of my secret history of customers are migrating from GWS. However, there are some AWS customers who are still not able to migrate the O. C. I to my secret heat wave. And the reason is because of, um, exorbitant cost, which was charges. So in order to migrate the workload from AWS to go see, I digress. Charges are very high fees which becomes prohibitive for the customer or the second example we have seen is that the latency of practising a database which is outside of AWS is very high. So there's a class of customers who would like to get the benefits of my secret heatwave but were unable to do so and with this support of my secret trip inside of AWS, these customers can now get all the grease of the benefits of my secret he trip without having to pay the high fees or without having to suffer with the poorly agency, which is because of the ws architecture. >>Okay, so you're basically meeting the customer's where they are. So was this a straightforward lifted shift from from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to AWS? >>No, it is not because one of the design girls we have with my sequel, Heatwave is that we want to provide our customers with the best price performance regardless of the cloud. So when we decided to offer my sequel, he headed west. Um, we have optimised my sequel Heatwave on it as well. So one of the things to point out is that this is a service with the data plane control plane and the console are natively running on AWS. And the benefits of doing so is that now we can optimise my sequel Heatwave for the E. W s architecture. In addition to that, we have also announced a bunch of new capabilities as a part of the service which will also be available to the my secret history of customers and our CI, But we just announced them and we're offering them as a part of my secret history of offering on AWS. >>So I just want to make sure I understand that it's not like you just wrapped your stack in a container and stuck it into a W s to be hosted. You're saying you're actually taking advantage of the capabilities of the AWS cloud natively? And I think you've made some other enhancements as well that you're alluding to. Can you maybe, uh, elucidate on those? Sure. >>So for status, um, we have taken the mind sequel Heatwave code and we have optimised for the It was infrastructure with its computer network. And as a result, customers get very good performance and price performance. Uh, with my secret he trade in AWS. That's one performance. Second thing is, we have designed new interactive counsel for the service, which means that customers can now provision there instances with the council. But in addition, they can also manage their schemas. They can. Then court is directly from the council. Autopilot is integrated. The council we have introduced performance monitoring, so a lot of capabilities which we have introduced as a part of the new counsel. The third thing is that we have added a bunch of new security features, uh, expose some of the security features which were part of the My Secret Enterprise edition as a part of the service, which gives customers now a choice of using these features to build more secure applications. And finally, we have extended my secret autopilot for a number of old gpus cases. In the past, my secret autopilot had a lot of capabilities for Benedict, and now we have augmented my secret autopilot to offer capabilities for elderly people. Includes as well. >>But there was something in your press release called Auto thread. Pooling says it provides higher and sustained throughput. High concerns concerns concurrency by determining Apple number of transactions, which should be executed. Uh, what is that all about? The auto thread pool? It seems pretty interesting. How does it affect performance? Can you help us understand that? >>Yes, and this is one of the capabilities of alluding to which we have added in my secret autopilot for transaction processing. So here is the basic idea. If you have a system where there's a large number of old EP transactions coming into it at a high degrees of concurrency in many of the existing systems of my sequel based systems, it can lead to a state where there are few transactions executing, but a bunch of them can get blocked with or a pilot tried pulling. What we basically do is we do workload aware admission control and what this does is it figures out, what's the right scheduling or all of these algorithms, so that either the transactions are executing or as soon as something frees up, they can start executing, so there's no transaction which is blocked. The advantage to the customer of this capability is twofold. A get significantly better throughput compared to service like Aurora at high levels of concurrency. So at high concurrency, for instance, uh, my secret because of this capability Uh oh, thread pulling offers up to 10 times higher compared to Aurora, that's one first benefit better throughput. The second advantage is that the true part of the system never drops, even at high levels of concurrency, whereas in the case of Aurora, the trooper goes up, but then, at high concurrency is, let's say, starting, uh, level of 500 or something. It depends upon the underlying shit they're using the troopers just dropping where it's with my secret heatwave. The truth will never drops. Now, the ramification for the customer is that if the truth is not gonna drop, the user can start off with a small shape, get the performance and be a show that even the workload increases. They will never get a performance, which is worse than what they're getting with lower levels of concurrency. So this let's leads to customers provisioning a shape which is just right for them. And if they need, they can, uh, go with the largest shape. But they don't like, you know, over pay. So those are the two benefits. Better performance and sustain, uh, regardless of the level of concurrency. >>So how do we quantify that? I know you've got some benchmarks. How can you share comparisons with other cloud databases especially interested in in Amazon's own databases are obviously very popular, and and are you publishing those again and get hub, as you have done in the past? Take us through the benchmarks. >>Sure, So benchmarks are important because that gives customers a sense of what performance to expect and what price performance to expect. So we have run a number of benchmarks. And yes, all these benchmarks are available on guitar for customers to take a look at. So we have performance results on all the three castle workloads, ol DB Analytics and Machine Learning. So let's start with the Rdp for Rdp and primarily because of the auto thread pulling feature. We show that for the IPCC for attended dataset at high levels of concurrency, heatwave offers up to 10 times better throughput and this performance is sustained, whereas in the case of Aurora, the performance really drops. So that's the first thing that, uh, tend to alibi. Sorry, 10 gigabytes. B B C c. I can come and see the performance are the throughput is 10 times better than Aurora for analytics. We have done a comparison of my secret heatwave in AWS and compared with Red Ship Snowflake Googled inquiry, we find that the price performance of my secret heatwave compared to read ship is seven times better. So my sequel, Heat Wave in AWS, provides seven times better price performance than red ship. That's a very, uh, interesting results to us. Which means that customers of Red Shift are really going to take the service seriously because they're gonna get seven times better price performance. And this is all running in a W s so compared. >>Okay, carry on. >>And then I was gonna say, compared to like, Snowflake, uh, in AWS offers 10 times better price performance. And compared to Google, ubiquity offers 12 times better price performance. And this is based on a four terabyte p PCH workload. Results are available on guitar, and then the third category is machine learning and for machine learning, uh, for training, the performance of my secret heatwave is 25 times faster compared to that shit. So all the three workloads we have benchmark's results, and all of these scripts are available on YouTube. >>Okay, so you're comparing, uh, my sequel Heatwave on AWS to Red Shift and snowflake on AWS. And you're comparing my sequel Heatwave on a W s too big query. Obviously running on on Google. Um, you know, one of the things Oracle is done in the past when you get the price performance and I've always tried to call fouls you're, like, double your price for running the oracle database. Uh, not Heatwave, but Oracle Database on a W s. And then you'll show how it's it's so much cheaper on on Oracle will be like Okay, come on. But they're not doing that here. You're basically taking my sequel Heatwave on a W s. I presume you're using the same pricing for whatever you see to whatever else you're using. Storage, um, reserved instances. That's apples to apples on A W s. And you have to obviously do some kind of mapping for for Google, for big query. Can you just verify that for me, >>we are being more than fair on two dimensions. The first thing is, when I'm talking about the price performance for analytics, right for, uh, with my secret heat rape, the cost I'm talking about from my secret heat rape is the cost of running transaction processing, analytics and machine learning. So it's a fully loaded cost for the case of my secret heatwave. There has been I'm talking about red ship when I'm talking about Snowflake. I'm just talking about the cost of these databases for running, and it's only it's not, including the source database, which may be more or some other database, right? So that's the first aspect that far, uh, trip. It's the cost for running all three kinds of workloads, whereas for the competition, it's only for running analytics. The second thing is that for these are those services whether it's like shit or snowflakes, That's right. We're talking about one year, fully paid up front cost, right? So that's what most of the customers would pay for. Many of the customers would pay that they will sign a one year contract and pay all the costs ahead of time because they get a discount. So we're using that price and the case of Snowflake. The costs were using is their standard edition of price, not the Enterprise edition price. So yes, uh, more than in this competitive. >>Yeah, I think that's an important point. I saw an analysis by Marx Tamer on Wiki Bond, where he was doing the TCO comparisons. And I mean, if you have to use two separate databases in two separate licences and you have to do et yelling and all the labour associated with that, that that's that's a big deal and you're not even including that aspect in in your comparison. So that's pretty impressive. To what do you attribute that? You know, given that unlike, oh, ci within the AWS cloud, you don't have as much control over the underlying hardware. >>So look hard, but is one aspect. Okay, so there are three things which give us this advantage. The first thing is, uh, we have designed hateful foreign scale out architecture. So we came up with new algorithms we have come up with, like, uh, one of the design points for heat wave is a massively partitioned architecture, which leads to a very high degree of parallelism. So that's a lot of hype. Each were built, So that's the first part. The second thing is that although we don't have control over the hardware, but the second design point for heat wave is that it is optimised for commodity cloud and the commodity infrastructure so we can have another guys, what to say? The computer we get, how much network bandwidth do we get? How much of, like objects to a brand that we get in here? W s. And we have tuned heat for that. That's the second point And the third thing is my secret autopilot, which provides machine learning based automation. So what it does is that has the users workload is running. It learns from it, it improves, uh, various premieres in the system. So the system keeps getting better as you learn more and more questions. And this is the third thing, uh, as a result of which we get a significant edge over the competition. >>Interesting. I mean, look, any I SV can go on any cloud and take advantage of it. And that's, uh I love it. We live in a new world. How about machine learning workloads? What? What did you see there in terms of performance and benchmarks? >>Right. So machine learning. We offer three capabilities training, which is fully automated, running in France and explanations. So one of the things which many of our customers told us coming from the enterprise is that explanations are very important to them because, uh, customers want to know that. Why did the the system, uh, choose a certain prediction? So we offer explanations for all models which have been derailed by. That's the first thing. Now, one of the interesting things about training is that training is usually the most expensive phase of machine learning. So we have spent a lot of time improving the performance of training. So we have a bunch of techniques which we have developed inside of Oracle to improve the training process. For instance, we have, uh, metal and proxy models, which really give us an advantage. We use adaptive sampling. We have, uh, invented in techniques for paralysing the hyper parameter search. So as a result of a lot of this work, our training is about 25 times faster than that ship them health and all the data is, uh, inside the database. All this processing is being done inside the database, so it's much faster. It is inside the database. And I want to point out that there is no additional charge for the history of customers because we're using the same cluster. You're not working in your service. So all of these machine learning capabilities are being offered at no additional charge inside the database and as a performance, which is significantly faster than that, >>are you taking advantage of or is there any, uh, need not need, but any advantage that you can get if two by exploiting things like gravity. John, we've talked about that a little bit in the past. Or trainee. Um, you just mentioned training so custom silicon that AWS is doing, you're taking advantage of that. Do you need to? Can you give us some insight >>there? So there are two things, right? We're always evaluating What are the choices we have from hybrid perspective? Obviously, for us to leverage is right and like all the things you mention about like we have considered them. But there are two things to consider. One is he is a memory system. So he favours a big is the dominant cost. The processor is a person of the cost, but memory is the dominant cost. So what we have evaluated and found is that the current shape which we are using is going to provide our customers with the best price performance. That's the first thing. The second thing is that there are opportunities at times when we can use a specialised processor for vaccinating the world for a bit. But then it becomes a matter of the cost of the customer. Advantage of our current architecture is on the same hardware. Customers are getting very good performance. Very good, energetic performance in a very good machine learning performance. If you will go with the specialised processor, it may. Actually, it's a machine learning, but then it's an additional cost with the customers we need to pay. So we are very sensitive to the customer's request, which is usually to provide very good performance at a very low cost. And we feel is that the current design we have as providing customers very good performance and very good price performance. >>So part of that is architectural. The memory intensive nature of of heat wave. The other is A W s pricing. If AWS pricing were to flip, it might make more sense for you to take advantage of something like like cranium. Okay, great. Thank you. And welcome back to the benchmarks benchmarks. Sometimes they're artificial right there. A car can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds. But I might not be able to experience that level of performance. Do you? Do you have any real world numbers from customers that have used my sequel Heatwave on A W s. And how they look at performance? >>Yes, absolutely so the my Secret service on the AWS. This has been in Vera for, like, since November, right? So we have a lot of customers who have tried the service. And what actually we have found is that many of these customers, um, planning to migrate from Aurora to my secret heat rape. And what they find is that the performance difference is actually much more pronounced than what I was talking about. Because with Aurora, the performance is actually much poorer compared to uh, like what I've talked about. So in some of these cases, the customers found improvement from 60 times, 240 times, right? So he travels 100 for 240 times faster. It was much less expensive. And the third thing, which is you know, a noteworthy is that customers don't need to change their applications. So if you ask the top three reasons why customers are migrating, it's because of this. No change to the application much faster, and it is cheaper. So in some cases, like Johnny Bites, what they found is that the performance of their applications for the complex storeys was about 60 to 90 times faster. Then we had 60 technologies. What they found is that the performance of heat we have compared to Aurora was 100 and 39 times faster. So, yes, we do have many such examples from real workloads from customers who have tried it. And all across what we find is if it offers better performance, lower cost and a single database such that it is compatible with all existing by sequel based applications and workloads. >>Really impressive. The analysts I talked to, they're all gaga over heatwave, and I can see why. Okay, last question. Maybe maybe two and one. Uh, what's next? In terms of new capabilities that customers are going to be able to leverage and any other clouds that you're thinking about? We talked about that upfront, but >>so in terms of the capabilities you have seen, like they have been, you know, non stop attending to the feedback from the customers in reacting to it. And also, we have been in a wedding like organically. So that's something which is gonna continue. So, yes, you can fully expect that people not dressed and continue to in a way and with respect to the other clouds. Yes, we are planning to support my sequel. He tripped on a show, and this is something that will be announced in the near future. Great. >>All right, Thank you. Really appreciate the the overview. Congratulations on the work. Really exciting news that you're moving my sequel Heatwave into other clouds. It's something that we've been expecting for some time. So it's great to see you guys, uh, making that move, and as always, great to have you on the Cube. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>All right. And thank you for watching this special cube conversation. I'm Dave Volonte, and we'll see you next time.

>>Everyone wants a cloud operating model. Since the introduction of the modern cloud. Last decade, the entire technology landscape has changed. We've learned a lot from the hyperscalers, especially from AWS. Now, one thing is certain in the technology business. It's so competitive. Then if a faster, better, cheaper idea comes along, the industry will move quickly to adopt it. They'll add their unique value and then they'll bring solutions to the market. And that's precisely what's happening throughout the technology industry because of cloud. And one of the best examples is Amazon's nitro. That's AWS has custom built hypervisor that delivers on the promise of more efficiently using resources and expanding things like processor, optionality for customers. It's a secret weapon for Amazon. As, as we, as we wrote last year, every infrastructure company needs something like nitro to compete. Why do we say this? Well, Wiki Bon our research arm estimates that nearly 30% of CPU cores in the data center are wasted. >>They're doing work that they weren't designed to do well, specifically offloading networking, storage, and security tasks. So if you can eliminate that waste, you can recapture dollars that drop right to the bottom line. That's why every company needs a nitro like solution. As a result of these developments, customers are rethinking networks and how they utilize precious compute resources. They can't, or won't put everything into the public cloud for many reasons. That's one of the tailwinds for tier two cloud service providers and why they're growing so fast. They give options to customers that don't want to keep investing in building out their own data centers, and they don't want to migrate all their workloads to the public cloud. So these providers and on-prem customers, they want to be more like hyperscalers, right? They want to be more agile and they do that. They're distributing, networking and security functions and pushing them closer to the applications. >>Now, at the same time, they're unifying their view of the network. So it can be less fragmented, manage more efficiently with more automation and better visibility. How are they doing this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to changing the game for cloud networking made possible by pluribus networks. My name is Dave Vellante and today on this special cube presentation, John furrier, and I are going to explore these issues in detail. We'll dig into new solutions being created by pluribus and Nvidia to specifically address offloading, wasted resources, accelerating performance, isolating data, and making networks more secure all while unifying the network experience. We're going to start on the west coast and our Palo Alto studios, where John will talk to Mike of pluribus and AMI, but Donnie of Nvidia, then we'll bring on Alessandra Bobby airy of pluribus and Pete Lummus from Nvidia to take a deeper dive into the technology. And then we're gonna bring it back here to our east coast studio and get the independent analyst perspective from Bob Liberte of the enterprise strategy group. We hope you enjoy the program. Okay, let's do this over to John >>Okay. Let's kick things off. We're here at my cafe. One of the TMO and pluribus networks and NAMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing, and developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. >>Thank you. Thanks. >>So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into it. >>Yeah, it really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, um, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies. And second, they need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Um, really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. Um, we're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. Um, it's, it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah. So, um, basically what we see is, uh, that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, um, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. >>You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all of these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cube a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. Um, the first is a unified cloud networking vision, and that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. Um, and that is about, uh, deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds. Um, and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server, um, hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. Um, the first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. Um, and what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have a, a, an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. Um, and in particular, uh, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade, uh, networking infrastructure, what we're doing now, um, to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We know there's a, >>Hold that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And, um, uh, you know, what we're doing, uh, fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision. >>I mean, Nvidia has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DPU networking and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and, uh, what pluribus is trying to build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads that is, uh, accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engines. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric, uh, is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have, um, isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>You know, what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the customer? >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield. Um, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, um, what Bluefields, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to, uh, last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, four X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, uh, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. Um, so that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the, you know, faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, what's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say, custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be, um, deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have DPS right away, some servers will have use and a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. Um, so that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right. >>Um, and by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open. Um, and that drives, uh, cost efficiencies. And then, um, uh, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can, uh, create tremendous cost efficiencies and, and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oppor, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer guy, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively, um, that, so there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is, um, I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating. Uh CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. Um, the next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor, penetrates a perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want and wreak havoc. Right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. Um, and the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having, uh, uh, uh, an operating model across switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single villain, for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge. Um, new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. >>Right. >>That seems to be the killer feature here, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with, uh, allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>This is super exciting. This is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I gotta ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. Um, I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership, obviously we're here together. Um, we think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. Um, uh, you know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open. Um, that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the, in the future, but right now, um, we're, we feel like we're partnered with the number one, uh, provider of DPS in the world and, uh, super excited about, uh, making a splash with it. >>I'm in get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, uh, well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, uh, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. Uh, so that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, uh, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are Doka one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three, uh, in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, um, security libraries, that's all packed into this STK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows, um, Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once, and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, um, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So, uh, later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers, uh, releasing Bluefield enabled servers. So, um, more to come >>Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. >>Yeah. And, and, and, uh, one thing I'll add is, um, we are, um, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment, um, that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our, uh, early field trial starting late April early may. Um, we are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T a. If you're interested in signing up for, um, uh, being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to look deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage, >>Cloud networking is complex and fragmented slowing down your business. How can you simplify and unify your cloud networks to increase agility and business velocity? >>Pluribus unified cloud networking provides a unified simplify and agile network fabric across all clouds. It brings the simplicity of a public cloud operation model to private clouds, dramatically reducing complexity and improving agility, availability, and security. Now enterprises and service providers can increase their business philosophy and delight customers in the distributed multi-cloud era. We achieve this with a new approach to cloud networking, pluribus unified cloud fabric. This open vendor, independent network fabric, unifies, networking, and security across distributed clouds. The first step is extending the fabric to servers equipped with data processing units, unifying the fabric across switches and servers, and it doesn't stop there. The fabric is unified across underlay and overlay networks and across all workloads and virtualization environments. The unified cloud fabric is optimized for seamless migration to this new distributed architecture, leveraging the power of the DPU for application level micro-segmentation distributed fireball and encryption while still supporting those servers and devices that are not equipped with a DPU. Ultimately the unified cloud fabric extends seamlessly across distributed clouds, including central regional at edge private clouds and public clouds. The unified cloud fabric is a comprehensive network solution. That includes everything you need for clouds, networking built in SDN automation, distributed security without compromises, pervasive wire speed, visibility and application insight available on your choice of open networking switches and DP use all at the lowest total cost of ownership. The end result is a dramatically simplified unified cloud networking architecture that unifies your distributed clouds and frees your business to move at cloud speed, >>To learn more, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. >>Okay. We're back I'm John ferry with the cube, and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Clovis and Nvidia. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandra Burberry, VP of product management and pullovers networks and Pete Bloomberg who's director of technical marketing and video remotely guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Yeah. >>So deep dive, let's get into the what and how Alexandra we heard earlier about the pluribus Nvidia partnership and the solution you're working together on what is it? >>Yeah. First let's talk about the water. What are we really integrating with the Nvidia Bluefield, the DPO technology, uh, plugable says, um, uh, there's been shipping, uh, in, uh, in volume, uh, in multiple mission critical networks. So this advisor one network operating systems, it runs today on a merchant silicone switches and effectively it's a standard open network operating system for data center. Um, and the novelty about this system that integrates a distributed control plane for, at water made effective in SDN overlay. This automation is a completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds is not enclosed them. And this is actually what we're now porting to the Nvidia DPO. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into Nvidia hardware and specifically how has pluribus integrating its software with the Nvidia hardware? >>Yeah, I think, uh, we leverage some of the interesting properties of the Bluefield, the DPO hardware, which allows actually to integrate, uh, um, uh, our software, our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card that is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OSTP layer running on, uh, on the host even more, um, uh, we can also independently manage this network, know that the switch on a Neek effectively, um, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system, running on x86 to control this network node. So you throw yet the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for, uh, Kubernetes bots, where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with the analogy instead of connecting a server knee directly to a switchboard, now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an ache. >>And, uh, also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in, uh, accelerating the entire, uh, data plane for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, Nvidia DACA API to program the accelerators. And these accomplished two things with that. Number one, uh, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance. They're running the same network services on an x86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up, I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to, uh, additional workloads to run your cloud applications, or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20%, if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach, >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero code from running on the x86, and this is what we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So Pete, I gotta get, I gotta get you in here. We heard that, uh, the DPU is enabled cleaner separation of dev ops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps right now, you've got net ops, net, net sec ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little, a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the dev ops stuff and that, uh, mentality and philosophy, there's a natural fit there. Right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we, we in the networking industry have gotten closer together, but there's still a gap there's still some distance. And I think in that distance, isn't going to be closed. And so, you know, again, it comes down to pragmatism and I think, you know, one of my favorite phrases is look good fences, make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >>Yeah. That's a great point because dev ops has become kind of the calling card for cloud, right. But dev ops is as simply infrastructure as code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will, this is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where, um, one from, from the policy, the security that the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you, you can totally open up that those capabilities. And so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage at scale becomes absolutely critical. >>I'll Sandra, this is really the why we're talking about here, and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up, you know what you know, so this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, dev ops, net ops, all coming together, clean separation, um, help us understand how this joint solution with Nvidia fits into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision, because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One is, uh, operation of, uh, cloud networking. And the second is a distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about the first water. We really unifying. If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or this jointed and the, what is this joint that is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically, how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers, you'll build your IP clause fabric leaf in spine typologies. This is actually a well understood the problem. I, I would say, um, there are multiple vendors, uh, uh, with, uh, um, uh, let's say similar technologies, um, very well standardized, whether you will understood, um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint, two services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called builders, have to instrument the, a separate, uh, network virtualization layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. >>And this is where the complication arise. These high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other. And they are very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API to be between an GSXI environment or an hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And when, and then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this, in this, in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs, which is a prevalent approach, you actually just stacking up multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the nights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any workloads, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch, which can be con connected to a bare metal workload, or can span all the way inside the DPU, uh, where, um, you have, uh, your multi hypervisor compute environment. >>It's one API, one common network control plane, and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably the number one, >>You know, it's interesting you, man, I hear you talking, I hear one network month, different operating models reminds me of the old serverless days. You know, there's still servers, but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the day, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This, this is a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not, I'm just joking server listen network list, but the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we are trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operation, across physical networking and server networking server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the, uh, as much as you have standardized the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that kind of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, um, um, uh, operational efficiency, uh, at the server layer. And, uh, this is what we're trying to attack first. The, with this technology, the second aspect we're trying to attack is are we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure, more efficiently, whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services, or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field, uh, uh, the Butte technology and, uh, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the nettle Fabrica, uh, limiting dramatically, at least for east-west traffic, the sprawl of, uh, security appliances, whether virtual or physical, that is typically the way the people today, uh, segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >>Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network lists and serverless kind of fun, fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think what's, what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings. That's new to this model is a completely isolated compute environment inside. So, you know, it's the, uh, yo dog, I heard you like a server, so I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, uh, you know, armed CPU's memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the, the actual x86 host just thinks it has a regular Nick in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch, and we're just shooting them now. >>And, you know, as time has gone on we've, we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that of aliens good enough, or we hope that if the excellent tunnel is good enough and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, you know, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer. I real quick, cause I think this is interesting point. You mentioned policy, everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing and it adds, you hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot, all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility, relative to security policies and application enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement. >>It comes down to, uh, taking again the capabilities that were in that top of rack switch and asserting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller blast radiuses for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks, and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So just as in say, a VX land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer. And so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. Um, you know, to me, the, the possibilities are endless. Yes, >>It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key. And, and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandra, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customers has been, uh, the most, uh, encouraging and, uh, exciting, uh, for, uh, for us to, uh, to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to tier two tier three cloud providers. Uh, we talked to, uh, SP um, software Tyco type of networks, uh, as well as a large enterprise customers, um, in, uh, one particular case. Um, uh, one, uh, I think, um, let me, let me call out a couple of examples here, just to give you a flavor. Uh, there is a service provider, a cloud provider, uh, in Asia who is actually managing a cloud, uh, where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also are on ramp into the cloud, uh, workloads based on, uh, ESI and, uh, uh, and KVM, depending on what the customer picks from the piece on the menu. >>And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with the Zen center with vSphere, uh, with, uh, open stack to coordinate these multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of costs, complication, and eats up into the server CPU. The problem is that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity of in a single network and distribute the micro-segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it, uh, uh, tremendous, uh, um, opics, uh, benefit and overall, um, uh, operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one potent a use case. Uh, another, uh, large enterprise customer global enterprise customer, uh, is running, uh, both ESI and hyper V in that environment. And they don't have a solution to do micro-segmentation consistently across hypervisors. >>So again, micro-segmentation is a huge driver security looks like it's a recurring theme, uh, talking to most of these customers and in the Tyco space, um, uh, we're working with a few types of customers on the CFT program, uh, where the main goal is actually to our Monet's network operation. They typically handle all the VNF search with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also as low and inefficient, and then they have a physical network to manage the, the idea of having again, one network, uh, to coordinate the provision in our cloud services between the, the take of VNF, uh, and, uh, the rest of the infrastructure, uh, is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability of the, by the bluefin DPOs. Those are just some examples. >>That was a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, feed, shout out to you guys at Nvidia had been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and pluribus here with the unified networking, kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff. Great to have you guys on. And again, software keeps driving the innovation again, networking is just a part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in, in this, uh, new architecture and solution, uh, learn more because this is an architectural shift. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds of trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility, uh, to their teams. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so, uh, all Sandra and I have a talk at the upcoming Nvidia GTC conference. Um, so that's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video.com/at GTC. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you ended up watching us on YouTube a little bit after the fact. Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >>Alexandra, how can people learn more? >>Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the pluribus, a website, www boost networks.com/eft, and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact durables to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program, which starts at the end of April. >>Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You both for joining. Appreciate it up next. You're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John ferry with the >>Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Okay. We've heard from the folks at networks and Nvidia about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now let's get the perspective from an independent analyst and to do so. We welcome in ESG, senior analysts, Bob LA Liberte, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming into our east coast studios. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be >>Here. Yeah. So this, this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's what's driving it. >>Yeah, there's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the, it pendulum tends to swing back and forth. And we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it and all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked in one of our last surveys and last year about network complexity, more than half 54% came out and said, Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be. >>And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and, you know, really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, you know, nine out of 10 organizations today are either beginning in process or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, it probably shouldn't be a surprise. The number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility, but I've created a lot of complexity. So now I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experience. >>I mean, I love how you bring in the data yesterday. Does a great job with that. Uh, questions is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink kind of a do-over network, how networks are built? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point because certainly unifying networks helps right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers are driving a lot more east west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier in north south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now you've got hundreds, if not thousands of microservices communicating with each other users communicating to them. So there's a lot more traffic and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you starting to see as well from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter based legacy, you know, castle and moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. >>When everything's spread out that that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing, um, organizations trying to, trying to make a shift. And, and I think much, like if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers and the sassy framework to enable a secure framework there, this it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're, they're fully protected. Uh, and that's really driving a lot of the, you know, the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is, is, is really secure micro-segmentation is another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're, they're fully segmented out. And that's again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >>You know, you mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword, and now it's like become a mandate. And I love the mode analogy. You know, you build a moat to protect the queen and the castle, the Queens left the castles, it's just distributed. So how should we think about this, this pluribus and Nvidia solution. There's a spectrum, help us understand that you've got appliances, you've got pure software solutions. You've got what pluribus is doing with Nvidia, help us understand that. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services to closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, you know, from a security perspective, they've got these centralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server up through the rack, usually to in different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers. Okay. So that's a, it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications, but the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility, which they >>Don't want to >>Do, they don't want to do right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Um, plus when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there, isn't going to, isn't going to do it. So, you know, when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly the other side effects of that is the impact of the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers because your CPU's are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what, what Nvidia and pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a smart Nick, right? >>To be able to deploy the DPU based smart SMARTNICK into the servers themselves. And then pluribus has come in and said, we're going to unify create that unified fabric across the networking space, into those networking services all the way down to the server. So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPU's are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every trip round trip to the, to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important. Plus the fact that you're going to see from a, an organizational aspect, we talked about the dev ops and net ops teams. The network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies. So that they've dev ops teams. Don't have to worry about that. So essentially they just create the guardrails and let the dev op team run. Cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >>Yeah. Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or, or networking or security offload. And, you know, I've said many times everybody needs a nitro like Amazon nugget, but you can't go, you can only buy Amazon nitro if you go into AWS. Right. Everybody needs a nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >>Yeah. That's a great analogy to think about this. Um, and I think I would take it a step further because it's, it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum because pluribus and video are doing this in a very open way. And so pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So leverage working with Nvidia, who's also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations can not only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric across that environment from the server across the switches, the other key piece of what pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now, and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, um, you know, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications supported by a unified cloud fabric from pluribus. >>So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure, right? >>Yeah. Well, think what it does for, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications. Okay. >>So your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right. I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >>So yeah, I think obviously with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said, at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right in different cloud environments is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency. It's going to help them save money for visibility, for security and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers who are trying to build that hyperscaler like environment. You mentioned the nitro card, right? This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >>Bob, thanks so much for, for coming in and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>You're welcome. Thanks. >>Thanks for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available on demand@thekey.net. You can check out all the news from today@siliconangle.com and of course, pluribus networks.com many thanks diplomas for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Dave Volante. Thanks for watching. Be well, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jay Theodore who's the CTO of Enterprise and AI at Esri and he's joined by Dave Cardella, who's the Principal Product Manager for Developer Technologies also at Esri. Guys, thanks for coming on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Jay, maybe you could give us a little background on Esri. What do you guys do? What are you all about? >> Sure. Esri is an old timer, we are a 50-year old software company. We are the pioneers in GIS and the world leader in GIS - geographic information system. We build geospatial infrastructure that's built for the cloud, built for the edge, built for the field also, you can say. So, we do mapping and analytics. We help our customers solve very complex challenges by bringing location intelligence into the mix. Our customers sort of like run the world, transform the world and we sort of like empower them with the technology we have. So, that's what we do. >> The original edge, and now of course, AWS is coming to you. >> Yeah. (both interviewees chuckling) >> Who are your customers, your main customers? Maybe share that. >> Yeah. We've got over 350,000 customers in... (Dave Cardella chuckling) Yeah. We're all- >> Dave Vellante: Scale. >> Yeah. (Dave Vellante laughing) In the public sector, especially, commercial businesses, non-profit organizations, and that really represents tens of millions of users globally. >> So, let's talk a little bit more about how things are changing. As they say, the edge is coming to you. Maybe AI, you know, 50 years ago... Actually, 50 years ago is probably a lot of talk about AI. When I came into the business, you know, it was a lot of chatter about it. But now, it's real. All this data that we have and the compute power, the cost is coming down. So, AI is in your title? >> Jay: Yes. >> Tell us more about that. >> I think that AI's come to age. When I went to grad school, AI was still in theory because we didn't have the compute and of course we didn't have all the data that was collected, right? Now, there's a lot of observation data coming in through IOT and many senses and so on. So, what do you do with that? Like, human interpretation is pretty challenged, I would say. So, that's where AI comes in, to augment the intelligence that we have in terms of extracting information. So, geospatial AI, specifically which we focus on, is to try to take location that's embedded with this kind of information and sort of like extract knowledge and information out of them, right? Intelligence out of them. So, that's what we focus on: to compliment location intelligence with AI, which we call geospatial AI. >> So, you can observe how things are changing, maybe report on that and that's got to be a huge thing that we can talk about. So, maybe talk about some of the big trends that are driving your business. What are those? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I was listening to Sandy Carter's 'Keynote' yesterday and she really emphasized the importance of data. And, data is crucial to what we do as a technology company, and we curate data globally and we get our data from best of breed sources, and that includes commercial data providers, it includes natural mapping agencies, and also a community maps program where we get data from our customers, from our global network of distributors and partners, and we take that data, we curate it, we host it and we deliver it back. And so, just recently for example, we're really excited 'cause we released the 2020 Global Land Cover. And so, Esri is the first company to release this data at 10 meter resolution for the entire planet, and it's made up of well over 400,000 earth observations from various satellites. So, you know data is a... It's not only a nice-to-have anymore, it's actually a must-have. And so, so is location when we talk about data. They go hand in hand. >> 10 meters so I can look at the hole in the roof of my barn... >> Well... (Dave Cardella chuckling) >> Dave Vellante: Pretty much. >> It depends on what you're trying to do, right? So, I think you know, to talk about it, it's within context. GIS is all about context, right? It's bringing location into context in your decision-making process. It's sort of like the where along with the when, what, how and why. That's what GIS brings in. So, a lot of problems are challenging because we need to bring these things together. It's sort of like you're tearing various layers of data that you have and then bringing them within context. Very often, the context that human minds understand and reflected in the physical world is geographic location, right? So, that's what you bring in. And I would say that there's various kinds of data, also. Various types of data, formats of data: structured data, unstructured data, data captured from extraterrestrial, you know, like, you can say, satellite imagery from drones, from IOT. So, it's like on the ground, above the ground, under the ground. All these sensors are bringing in data, right? So, what GIS does is try of map that data to a place on the earth at very high precision, if you're looking at it locally, or at a certain position if it's regionally, trying to find patterns, trying to understand what's emerging, and then, as you take this and infuse geospatial layer into this, you can even predict what is going to happen based on the past. So, that's sort of like... You could say GIS being used for real world problems, like if you take some examples, COVID... The pandemic is one example. Being able to first discover where it happened, where it's spreading, you know, that's the tracking aspect and then how you respond to that and then how you recover, you know, recovering as humans, as businesses and so on. So, we have widespread use of that. The most popular would be the John Hopkins' Dashboard, >> Dave Vellante: Board, yeah. >> that everyone's seen. >> Vellante: We all use it... >> It's gotten trillions of hits and so on, right? That's one example. Another example is addressing racial equity by using location information. Similarly, social justice. Now, these are all problems that we face today, right? So, GIS is extensively used by our customers to solve such problems. And then of course, you have the climate change challenge itself, right? Where you're hovering all kinds of complex data that we can't comprehend because you have to go back decades and try to bring all that together to compute. So, all of this together comes in the form of a geospatial cloud that we have as an offering. >> So, okay. That's amazing. I mean, you're building a super cloud, we call it. You know, and... So, how do you deal with... How do you work with AWS? What's the relationship there? Where do developers fit in? Maybe you can talk about a little bit. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So, we've got two main integration points with AWS. A lot of our location services that we expose data and capabilities through are built on AWS. So, we use storage, we use cloud caching and AWS's various data sets across the world quite heavily. So, that's one integration point. The other is a relatively new product that Amazon has released called Amazon Location Service. And so, what it does is it brings location and spatial intelligence directly into a developer's AWS dashboard. So, the experience that they're already used to, they now get the power of Esri services and location intelligence right at their fingertips. >> So, you're .. We started talking about the edge, your data architecture is very distributed, right? But, of course, you're bringing it back. So, how does that all work? You process it locally and then sending some data back? Are you sending all data back? What does that flow look like? >> I think the key thing is that our customers work with data of all kinds, all formats, all sizes and some are in real-time, some are big data and archive, right? So, most recently, just to illustrate that point, this year, we released RGS Enterprise on Kubernetes. It's the entire geospatial cloud made available for enterprise customers, and that's made available on AWS, on EKS. Now, when it's available on EKS, that means all these capabilities are microservices, so, they can be massively scaled. They're DevOps friendly and you've got the full mapping and analytics system that's made available for this. >> Dave Vellante: Oh. >> And we sort of like built it, you know, cloud native from the ground up and the more important thing that we have now is connectivity with Redshift. Why is that important? Because a lot of our customers have geospatial data in these cloud data warehouses. Redshift is very important for them. And so, you can connect to that, you can discover these massive petabytes of data sets and then you can set up what we call the query layer. It's basically pushing analytics into Redshift and being able to bring out that data for mapping, visualization, for AI workflows and so on. It's pretty amazing and it's pretty exciting at this time. >> And, I mean... So much data. And then... What, do you tear it down into glacier of just to save some cost, or is it going to all stay in S3 or is it... >> So, we already work with S3, we've worked with RDS, we support Amazon Aurora, our customers are very happy with that. So, Redshift is a new offering for us to connect to Redshift. >> Dave Vellante: AOK. >> So, the way the query layer works is all of your observation data is in Redshift, your other kinds of data... Your authoritative data sets could come from various other sources including in Amazon Aurora, for example, okay? And then, you overlay them and use them. Now, the data in Redshift is usually massive, so, when you run the analytic query, we let you cache that as a materialized view or as a snapshot that you can refresh and you can work against that. This is really good because it compliments our ability to actually take that data, to put it on a map image which we render service side, it's got very complex cartographic ready symbology and rendering and everything in there. And you get these beautiful rendering of maps that comes out of Redshift data. >> And you're pushing AI throughout your stack, is that, you know? >> Yeah. AI is just like infused, right? I mean, it's... I would say, human intelligence augmented for data scientists, for everyone, you know. Whether you're using it through notebooks or whether you're using it through applications that we have or the developer APIs themselves. >> So, what are some of the big initiatives you're working on near-term, mid-term? >> Yeah. So, you mentioned what's really driving innovation and it's related to the question that you just asked right now and I really believe developers drive innovation. They're force multipliers in the solutions that they build. And so, that's really the integration point that Esri has with AWS, it's developers. And earlier this year, we released the RGS platform which is our platform as a service offering that exposes these powerful location services that Jay just explained. There's a set of on-demand services that developers can bring in their applications as they want and they can bring in one, they can bring in two or three, whatever they need, but they're there when they need them. And also, developers have their client API of choice. So, we have our own client APIs that we offer but you're not pigeonholed into that when you're working with RGS platform. A developer can bring their own API. >> Okay, so he called the platform as a service. Are you making your data available as well? Your data, your tooling and then selling that as a service? >> Our data has always been available as a service, I would say. >> Okay, yeah. >> Everything that we do, our GIS tools, are accessible as a web service. >> Vellante: Is that new, or... that's always been the way? >> No, that's always been there. That's always been that way. The difference now is everything is built from the ground up to be cloud native. >> Dave Vellante: Okay. >> From the ground up to be connected to every data set that's available on AWS, every compute that can be exploited from small to massive in terms of compute, and also reaching out to bring all the apps and the developer experiences, pushing out to customers. >> So, 50 years ago, you weren't obviously using the cloud, but so, you were running everything on-prem now you're all in the cloud, or you're kind of got a mix? What is the clearer picture of that? >> So, we have two major offerings. There's RGS Online, where obviously it's offered as a service and it's GIS as a service provider for everyone. And that's available everywhere. The other offering we have is actually RGS Enterprise where some customers run them on premises, some run it in the cloud, especially AWS. Many run it on the edge, some in the field and there's connectivity between this. A lot of our customers are hybrid. So, they make the best of both. Depending on the kinds of data- >> Dave Vellante: You give them a choice. >> the kinds of workflows... Giving them the choice, exactly. And I would say, you know, taking Werner's 'Keynote' this morning, he talked about what's the next frontier, right? The next frontier could very well be when AWS gets to space and makes compute available there. It's sitting alongside the data that's captured and we've always, like I said, for 50 years, worked with satellite imagery, >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> or worked with IOT, or worked with drone data. It's just getting GIS closer to where the data is. >> So, the ultimate edge space. >> Yes. >> All right, I'll give you guys... Give us a quick wrap if you would. Final thoughts. >> I think its... Go ahead. >> Go, ahead Dave. >> Yeah. I really resonate with data and content. We're a technology company- there's no doubt about that- but without good data, not only supplied by ourselves, but our customers, Jay mentioned it earlier, our customers bring their own data to our platform and that's really what drives the analytics and the accuracy in the answers to the problems that people are trying to solve. >> Bring their first-party data with your data and then one plus one is... >> Yes. Yeah, and the key thing about that (Cardella chuckling) is not some of the data, it's all of the data that you have. You don't more need to be constrained. >> Yeah, you're not sampling. >> Yes, exactly. >> Yeah. >> All right, guys. Thanks so much. Really interesting story. Congratulations. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, thank you. >> Nice meeting you. >> Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here with Amanda Silver, corporate vice president, product developer division at Microsoft. Amanda, Great to see you you were on last year, Dr khan. Great to see you again a full year later were remote. Thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy with build happening this week as well. Thanks for making the time to come on the cube for Dr khan. >>Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm joining you like many developers around the globe from my personal home office, >>developers really didn't skip a beat during the pandemic and again, it was not a good situation but developers, as you talked about last year on the front lines, first responders to creating value quite frankly, looking back you were pretty accurate in your prediction, developers did have an impact this year. They did create the kind of change that really changed the game for people's lives, whether it was developing solutions from a medical standpoint or even keeping systems running from call centres to making sure people got their their their goods or services and checks and and and kept sanity together. So. >>Yeah absolutely. I mean I think I think developers you know get the M. V. P. Award for this year because you know at the end of the day they are the digital first responders to the first responders and the pivot that we've had to make over the past year in terms of supporting remote telehealth, supporting you know online retail, curbside pickup. All of these things were done through developers being the ones pushing the way forward remote learning. You know my kids are learning at home right behind me right now so you might hear them during the interview that's happening because developers made that happen. >>I don't think mom please stop hogging the band with, they've got a gigabit. Stop it. Don't be streaming. My kids are all game anyway, Hey, great to have you on and you have to get the great keynote, exciting to see you guys continue the collaboration with Docker uh with GIT hub and Microsoft, A great combination, it's a 123 power punch of value. You guys are really kind of killing it. We heard from scott and dan has been on the cube. What's your thoughts on the partnership with the developer division team at Microsoft with Doctor, What's it all about this year? What's the next level? >>Well, I mean, I think, I think what's really awesome about this partnership is that we all have, we all are basically sharing a common mission. What we want to do is make sure that we're empowering developers, that we're focused on their productivity and that we're delivering value to them so they can do their job better so that they can help others. So that's really kind of what drives us day in and day out. So what we focus on is developer productivity. And I think that's a lot of what dana was talking about in her session, the developer division. Specifically, we really try to make sure that we're improving the state of the art from modern developers. So we want to make sure that every keystroke that they take, every mouse move that they make, it sounds like a song but every every one of those matter because we want to make sure that every developers writing the code that only they can write and in terms of the partnership and how that's going. You know my team and the darker team have been collaborating a ton on things like dr desktop and the Doctor Cli tool integrations. And one of the things that we do is we think about pain points and various workflows. We want to make sure that we're shaving off the edges of all of the user experience is the developers have to go through to piece all of these applications together. So one of the big pain points that we have heard from developers is that signing into the Azure cloud and especially our sovereign clouds was challenging. So we contributed back to uh back to doctor to actually make it easier to sign into these clouds. And so dr developers can now use dr desktop and the Doctor Cli to actually change the doctor context so that its Azure. So that makes it a lot easier to connect the other. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just >>going to say, I love the reference of the police song. Every breath you take, every >>mouth moving. Great, >>great line there. Uh, but I want to ask you while you're on this modern cloud um, discussion, what is I mean we have a lot of developers here at dr khan. As you know, you guys know developers in your ecosystem in core competency. From Microsoft, Kublai khan is a very operator like focus developed. This is a developer conference. You guys have build, what is the state of the art for a modern cloud developer? Could you just share your thoughts because this comes up a lot. You know, what's through the art? What's next jan new guard guard? It's his legacy. What is the state of the art for a modern cloud developer? >>Fantastic question. And extraordinarily relevant to this particular conference. You know what I think about often times it's really what is the inner loop and the outer loop look like in terms of cycle times? Because at the end of the day, what matters is the time that it takes for you to make that code change, to be able to see it in your test environment and to be able to deploy it to production and have the confidence that it's delivering the feature set that you need it to. And it's, you know, it's secure, it's reliable, it's performance, that's what a developer cares about at the end of the day. Um, at the same time, we also need to make sure that we're growing our team to meet our demand, which means we're constantly on boarding new developers. And so what I take inspiration from our, some of the tech elite who have been able to invest significant amounts in, in tuning their engineering systems, they've been able to make it so that a new developer can join a team in just a couple of minutes or less that they can actually make a code change, see that be reflected in their application in just a few seconds and deploy with confidence within hours. And so our goal is to actually be able to take that state of the art metric and democratize that actually bring it to as many of our customers as we possibly can. >>You mentioned supply chain earlier in securing that. What are you guys doing with Docker and how to make that partnership better with registries? Is there any update there in terms of the container registry on Azure? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we we have definitely seen recent events and and it almost seems like a never ending attacks that that you know, increasingly are getting more and more focused on developer watering holes is how we think about it. Kind of developers being a primary target um for these malicious hackers. And so what it's more important than ever that every developer um and Microsoft especially uh really take security extraordinarily seriously. Our engineers are working around the clock to make sure that we are responding to every security incident that we hear about and partnering with our customers to make sure that we're supporting them as well. One of the things that we announced earlier this week at Microsoft build is that we've actually taken, get have actions and we've now integrated that into the Azure Security Center. And so what this means is that, you know, we can now do things like scan for vulnerabilities. Um look at things like who is logging in, where things like that and actually have that be tracked in the Azure security center so that not just your developers get that notification but also your I. T. Operations. Um In terms of the partnership with dR you know, this is actually an ongoing partnership to make sure that we can provide more guidance to developers to make sure that they are following best practices like pulling from a private registry like Docker hub or at your container registry. So I expect that as time goes on will continue to more in partnership in this space >>and that's going to give a lot of confidence. Actually, productivity wise is going to be a big help for developers. Great stuff is always good, good progress. They're moving the needle. >>Last time we >>spoke we talked about tools and setting Azure as the doctor context duty tooling updates here at dot com this year. That's notable. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's one major thing that we've been working on which has a big dependency on docker is get help. Code space is now one of the biggest pain points that developers have is setting up a new DEV box, which they often have to do when they are on boarding a new employee or when they're starting a new project or even if they're just kicking the tires on a new technology that they want to be able to evaluate and sometimes creating a developer environment can actually take hours um and especially when you're trying to create a developer environment that matches somebody else's developer environment that can take like a half a day and you can spend all of your time just debugging the differences in environment variables, for example, um, containers actually makes that much easier. So what you can do with this, this services, you can actually create death environment spun up in the cloud and you can access it in seconds and you get from there are working coding environment and a runtime environment and this is repeatable via containers. So it means that there's no inadvertent differences introduced by each DEV. And you might be interested to know that underneath this is actually using Docker files and dr composed to orchestrate the debits and the runtime bits for a whole bunch of different stacks. And so this is something that we're actually working on in collaboration with the with the doctor team to have a common the animal format. And in fact this week we actually introduced a couple of app templates so that everybody can see this all in action. So if you check out a ca dot m s forward slash app template, you can see this in action yourself. >>You guys have always had such a strong developer community and one thing I love about cloud as it brings more agility, as we always talk about. But when you start to see the enterprise grow into, the direction is going now, it's almost like the developer communities are emerging, it's no longer about all the Lennox folks here and the dot net folks there, you've got windows, you've got cloud, >>it's almost >>the the the solidification of everyone kind of coming together. Um and visual studio, for instance, last year, I think you were talking about that to having to be interrogated dr composed, et cetera. >>How do you see >>this melting pot emerging? Because at the end of the day, you pick the language you love and you got devops, which is infrastructure as code doesn't matter. So give us your take on where we are with that whole progress of of making that happen. >>Well, I mean I definitely think that, you know, developer environments and and kind of, you know, our approach to them don't need to be as dogmatic as they've been in the past. I really think that, you know, you can pick the right tool and language and stand developer stack for your team, for your experience and you can be productive and that's really our goal. And Microsoft is to make sure that we have tools for every developer and every team so that they can build any app that they want to want to create. Even if that means that they're actually going to end up ultimately deploying that not to our cloud, they're going to end up deploying it to AWS or another another competitive cloud. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that we've been doing to make that really much easier. We have integrated container tools in visual studio and visual studio code and better cli integrations like with the doctor context that we had talked about a little bit earlier. We continue to try to make it easier to build applications that are targeting containers and then once you create those containers it's much easier to take it to another environment. One of the examples of this kind of work is now that we have WsL and the Windows subsystem for Lennox. This makes it a lot easier for developers who prefer a Windows operating system as their environment and maybe some tools like Visual Studio that run on Windows, but they can still target Lennox with as their production environment without any impedance mismatch. They can actually be as productive as they would be if they had a Linux box as their Os >>I noticed on this session, I got to call this out. I want to get your reaction to it interesting. Selection of Microsoft talks, the container based development. Visual studio code is one that's where you're going to show some some some container action going on with note and Visual Studio code. And then you get the machine learning with Azure uh containers in the V. S. Code. Interesting how you got, you know, containers with V. S. And now you've got machine learning. What does that tell the world about where Microsoft's at? Because in a way you got the cutting edge container management on one side with the doctor integration. Now you get the machine learning which everyone's talking about shifting, left more automation. Why are these sessions so important? Why should people attend? And what's the what's the bottom line? >>Well, like I said, like containers basically empower developer productivity. Um that's what creates the reputable environments, that's what allows us to make sure that, you know, we're productive as soon as we possibly can be with any text act that we want to be able to target. Um and so that's kind of almost the ecosystem play. Um it's how every developer can contribute to the success of others and we can amor ties the kinds of work that we do to set up an environment. So that's what I would say about the container based development that we're doing with both visual studio and visual studio code. Um in terms of the machine learning development, uh you know, the number of machine learning developers in the world is relatively small, but it's growing and it's obviously a very important set of developers because to train a machine learning uh to train an ml model, it actually requires a significant amount of compute resources, and so that's a perfect opportunity to bring in the research that are in a public cloud. Um What's actually really interesting about that particular develop developer stack is that it commonly runs on things like python. And for those of you who have developed in python, you know, just how difficult it is to actually set up a python environment with the right interpreter, with the right run time, with the right libraries that can actually get going super quickly, um and you can be productive as a developer. And so it's actually one of the hardest, most challenging developer stacks to actually set up. And so this allows you to become a machine learning developer without having to spend all of your time just setting up the python runtime environment. >>Yeah, it's a nice, nice little call out on python, it's a double edged sword. It's easier to sling code around on one hand, when you start getting working then you gotta it gets complicated can get well. Um Well the great, great call out there on the island, but good, good, good project. Let me get your thoughts on this other tool that you guys are talking about project tie. Uh This is interesting because this is a trend that we're seeing a lot of conversations here on the cube about around more too many control planes. Too many services. You know, I no longer have that monolithic application. I got micro micro applications with microservices. What the hell is going on with my services? >>Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, containers brought an incredible amount of productivity in terms of having repeatable environments, both for dev environments, which we talked about a lot on this interview already, but also obviously in production and test environments. Super important. Um and with that a lot of times comes the microservices architecture that we're also moving to and the way that I view it is the microservices architecture is actually accompanied by businesses being more focused on the value that they can actually deliver to customers. And so they're trying to kind of create separations of concerns in terms of the different services that they're offering, so they can actually version and and kind of, you know, actually improve each of these services independently. But what happens when you start to have many microservices working together in a SAS or in some kind of aggregate um service environment or kind of application environment is it starts to get unwieldy, it's really hard to make it so that one micro service can actually address another micro service. They can pass information back and forth. And you know what used to be maybe easy if you were just building a client server application because, you know, within the server tear all of your code was basically contained in the same runtime environment. That's no longer the case when every microservices actually running inside of its own container. So the question is, how can we improve program ability by making it easier for one micro service that's being used in an application environment, be to be able to access another another service and kind of all of that context. Um and so, you know, you want to be able to access the service is the the api endpoint, the containers, the ingress is everything, make everything work together as though it felt just as easy as as um you know, server application development. Um And so what this means as well is that you also oftentimes need to get all of these different containers running at the same time and that can actually be a challenge in the developer and test loop as well. So what project tie does is it improves the program ability and it actually allows you to just write a command like thai run so that you can actually in stan she ate all of these containers and get them up and running and basically deploy and run your application in that environment and ultimately make the dev testing or loop much faster >>than productivity gain. Right. They're making it simple to stand up. Great, great stuff. Let me ask you a question as we kind of wrap down here for the folks here at Dakar Con, are >>there any >>special things you'd like to talk about the development you think are important for the developers here within this space? It's very dynamic. A lot of change happening in a good way. Um, but >>sometimes it's hard to keep >>track of all the cool stuff happening. Could you take a minute to, to share your thoughts on what you think are the most important develops developments in this space? That that might be interesting to ducker con attendees. >>I think the most important things are to recognize that developer environments are moving to containerized uh, environments themselves so that they can be repeated, they can be shared, the work, configuring them can be amortized across many developers. That's important thing. Number one important thing. Number two is it doesn't matter as much what operating system you're running as your chrome, you know, desktop. What matters is ultimately the production environment that you're targeting. And so I think now we're in a world where all of those things can be mixed and matched together. Um and then I think the next thing is how can we actually improve microservices, uh programming development together um so that it's easier to be able to target multiple micro services that are working in aggregate uh to create a single service experience or a single application. And how do we improve the program ability for that? >>You know, you guys have been great supporters of DACA and the community and open source and software developers as they transform and become quite frankly the superheroes for the transformation, which is re factoring businesses. So this has been a big thing. I'd love to get your thoughts on how this is all coming together inside Microsoft, you've got your division, you get the developer division, you got GIT hub, got Azure. Um, and then just historically, and he put this up last year army of an ecosystem. People who have been contributing encoding with Microsoft and the partners for many, many decades. >>Yes. The >>heart Microsoft now, how's it all working? What's the news? I get Lincoln, Lincoln, but there's no yet developer model there yet, but probably is soon. >>Um Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty broad question, but in some ways I think it's interesting to put it in the context of Microsoft's history. You know, I think when I think back to the beginning of my career, it was kind of a one stack shop, you know, we was all about dot net and you know, of course we want to dot net to be the best developer environment that it can possibly be. We still actually want that. We still want that need to be the most productive developer environment. It could we could possibly build. Um but at the same time, I think we have to recognize that not all developers or dot net developers and we want to make sure that Azure is the most productive cloud for developers and so to do that, we have to make sure that we're building fantastic tools and platforms to host java applications, javascript applications, no Js applications, python applications, all of those things, you know, all of these developers in the world, we want to make sure it can be productive on our tools and our platforms and so, you know, I think that's really kind of the key of you know what you're speaking of because you know, when I think about the partnership that I have with the GIT hub team or with the Azure team or with the Azure Machine learning team or the Lincoln team, um A lot of it actually comes down to helping empower developers, improving their productivity, helping them find new developers to collaborate with, um making sure that they can do that securely and confidently and they can basically respond to their customers as quickly as they possibly can. Um and when, when we think about partnering inside of Microsoft with folks like linkedin or office as an example, a lot of our partnership with them actually comes down to improving their colleagues efficiency. We build the developer tools that office and lengthen are built on top of and so every once in a while we will make an improvement that has, you know, 5% here, 3% there and it turns into an incredible amount of impact in terms of operations, costs for running these services. >>It's interesting. You mentioned earlier, I think there's a time now we're living in a time where you don't have to be dogmatic anymore, you can pick what you like and go with it. Also that you also mentioned just now this idea of distributed applications, distributed computing. You know, distributed applications and microservices go really well together. Especially with doctor. >>Can you share >>your thoughts on the framework that you guys released called Dapper? >>Yeah, yeah. We recently released Dapper. It's called D A P R. You can look it up on GIT hub and it's a programming model for common microservices pattern, two common microservices patterns that make it really easy and automatic to create those kinds of microservices. So you can choose to work with your favorite state stores or databases or pub sub components and get things like cloud events for free. You can choose either http or g R B C so that you can get mesh capabilities like service discovery and re tries and you can bring your own secret store and easily be able to call it from any environment variable. It's also like I was talking about earlier, multi lingual. Um so you don't need to embrace dot net, for example, as you're programming language to be able to benefit from Dapper, it actually supports many programming languages and Dapper itself is actually written and go. Um and so, you know, all developers can benefit from something like Dapper to make it easier to create microservices applications. >>I mean, always great to have you on great update. Take a minute to give an update on what's going on with your division. I know you had to build conference this week. V. S has got the new preview title. We just talked about what are the things you want to get to plug in for? Take a minute to get to plug in for what you're working on, your goals, your objectives hiring, give us the update. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, we we built integrated container tools in visual studio uh and the Doctor extension and Visual Studio code and cli extensions. Uh and you know, even in this most recent release of our Visual Studio product, Visual Studio 16 10, we added some features to make it easier to use DR composed better. So one of the examples of this is that you can actually have uh Oftentimes you need to be able to use multiple doctor composed files together so that you can actually configure various different container environments for a single single application. But it's hard sometimes to create the right Yeah. My file so that you can actually invoke it and invoke the the container and the micro services that you need. And so what this allows you to do is to actually have just a menu of the different doctor composed files so that you can select the runtime and test environment that you need for the subset of the portion of the application that you're working on at the end of the day. This is always about developer productivity. You know, like I said, every keystroke matters. Um and we want to make sure that you as a developer can focus on the code that only you can Right. >>Amanda Silver, corporate vice president product development division of Microsoft. Always great to see you and chat with you remotely soon. We'll be back in in real life with real events soon as we come out of the pandemic and thanks for sharing your insight and congratulations on your success this year and and congratulations on your announcement here at Dakar Gone. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>Okay Cube coverage for Dunkirk on 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm

(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

(digital music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The storage business as we know it has changed forever. On-prem storage was once a virtually unlimited and untapped bastion of innovation, VC funding and lucrative exits. Today it's a shadow of its former self and the glory days of storage will not return. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll lay out our premise for what's happening in the storage industry, and share some fresh insights from our ETR partners, and data that supports our thinking. We've had three decades of tectonic shifts in the storage business. From the simplified history of this industry shows us there've been five major waves of innovation spanning five decades. The dominant industry model has evolved from what was first the mainframe centric vertically integrated business, but of course by IBM and it became a disintegrated business that saw between like 70 or 80 Winchester disk drive companies that rose and then fell. They served a booming PC industry in this way it was led by the likes of Seagate. Now Seagate supplied the emergence of an intelligent controller based external disc array business that drove huge margins for functions that while lucrative was far cheaper than captive storage from system vendors, this era of course was led by EMC and NetApp. And then this business was disrupted by a flash and software defined model that was led by Pure Storage and also VMware. Now the future of storage is being defined by cloud and intelligent data management is being led by AWS and a three letter company that we'll just call TBD, otherwise known as Jump Ball Incorporated. Now, let's get into it here, the impact of AWS cannot be overstated now while legacy storage players, they're sick and tired of talking about the cloud, the reality cannot be ignored. The cloud has been the most disruptive force in storage over the past 10 years, and we've reported on the spending impact extensively. But cloud is not the only factor pressuring the on-prem storage business, flash has killed what we call performance by spindles. In other words, the practice of adding more disk drives to keep performance from tanking. So much flash has been injected into the data center that that no longer is required. But now as you drill down into the cloud, AWS has been by far the most significant factor in our view. Lots of people talked about object storage before AWS, but there sure wasn't much spending going on, S3 changed that. AWS is getting much more aggressive about expanding its storage portfolio and its offerings. S3 came out in 2006 and it was the very first AWS service and then Elastic Block Service EBS came out a couple of years later, nobody really paid much attention. Well last fall at storage day, we saw AWS announce a number of services, many fire-related and this year we saw four new announcements of Amazon at re:Invent. We think AWS' storage revenue will surpass 8 billion this year and could be as high as 10 billion. There's not much data out there, but this would mean that AWS' storage biz is larger than that of a NetApp, which means AWS is larger than every traditional storage player with the exception of Dell. Here's a little glimpse of what's coming at the legacy storage business. It's a clip of the vice-president of AWS storage, her name is Mahlon Thompson Bukovec, watch this. Okay now, you may say Dave, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Yeah, I don't know, but as an older white guy, that's been in this business for awhile, I just think it's badass that this woman boxes and runs a business that we think is approaching $10 billion. Now let's take a quick look at the storage announcements AWS made at re:Invent. The company made four announcements this year, let me try to be brief, the first is EBS io2 Block Express Volumes, got to love the names. AWS was claims this is the first storage area network or sand for the cloud and it offers up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 megabytes per second throughput and 64 terabytes of capacity. Hey, sounds pretty impressive right, Well let's dig in a little bit okay, first of all, this is not the first sand in the cloud, at least in my view there may be others but Pure Storage announced cloud block store in 2019 at its annual accelerate customer conference and it's pretty comparable here. Maybe not so much in the speeds and feeds, but the concept of better block storage in the cloud with higher availability. Now, as you may also be saying, what's the big deal? The performance come on, we can smoke that we're on-prem vendor We can bury that. Compared to what we do, AWS' announcement is really not that impressive okay, let me give you a point of comparison there's a startup out there called VAST Data. Just there for you and closure with bundled storage and compute can do 400,000 IOPS and 40,000 megabytes per second and that can be scaled, so yeah, I get it. And AWS also announced that io2 two was priced at 20% less than previous generation volumes, which you might say is also no big deal and I would agree 20% is not as aggressive as the average price decline per gigabyte of any storage technology. AWS loves to make a big deal about its price declines, it's essentially following the industry trends but the point is that this feature will be great for a lot of workloads and it's fully integrated with AWS services meaning for example, it will be very convenient for AWS customers to invoke this capability for example Aurora and other AWS databases through its RDS service, just another easy button for developers to push. This is specially important as we see AWS rapidly expanding its machine learning in AI capabilities with SageMaker, it's embedding ML into things like Redshift and driving analytics, so integration is very key for its customers. Now, is Amazon retail going to run its business on io2 volumes? I doubt it. I believe they're running on Oracle and they need much better performance, but this is a mainstream service for the EBS masses to tap. Now, the other notable announcement was EBS Gp3 volumes. This is essentially a service that lets let you programmatically set SLAs for IOPS and throughput independently without needing to add additional storage. Again, you may be saying things like, well atleast I remember when SolidFire let me do this several years ago and gave me more than 3000 IOPS and 125 megabytes per a second performance, but look, this is great for mainstream customers that want more consistent and predictable performance and that want to set some kind of threshold or floor and it's integrated again into the AWS stack. Two other announcements were made, one that automatically tiers data to colder storage tiers and a replication service. On the former, data migrates to tier two after 90 days of inaccess and tier three, after 180 days. AWS remember, they hired a bunch of folks out of EMC years ago and they put them up in the Boston Seaport area, so they've acquired lots of expertise in a lot of different areas I'm not sure if tiering came out of that group but look, this stuff is not rocket science, but it saves customers money. So these are tried and true techniques that AWS is applying but the important thing is it's in the cloud. Now for sure we'd like to see more policy options than say for example, a fixed 90 day or 180 day policy and more importantly we'd like to see intelligent tiering where the machine is smart enough to elevate and promote certain datasets when they're needed for instance, at the end of a quarter for comparison purposes or at the end of the year, but as NFL Hall of Fame Coach Hank Stram would have said, AWS is matriculating the ball down the field. Okay, let's look at some of the data that supports what we're saying here in our premise today. This chart shows spending across the ETR taxonomy. It depicts the net score or spending velocity for different sectors. We've highlighted storage, now don't put too much weight on the January data because the survey was just launched, but you can see storage continues to be a back burner item relative to some other spending priorities. Now as I've reported, CIOs are really focused on cloud, containers, container orchestration, automation, productivity and other key areas like security. Now let's take a look at some of the financial data from the storage crowd. This chart shows data for eight leading names in storage and we put storage in quotes because as we said earlier, the market is shifting and for sure companies like Cohesity and Rubrik, they're not positioning as storage players in fact, that's the last thing they want to do. Rather they're category creators around data management or intelligent data management but their inadjacency to storage, they're partnering with all the primary storage companies and they're in the ETR taxonomy. Okay, so as you can see, we're showing the year over year, quarterly revenue growth for the leading storage companies. NetApp is a big winner, they're growing at a whopping 2%. They beat expectations, but expectations were way down so you can see in the right most column upper right, we've added the ETR net score from October and net score of 10% says that if you ask customers, are you spending more or less with a company, there are 10% of the customers that are essentially spending more than are spending less, get into that a little further later. For comparison, a company like Snowflake, it has a net score approaching 70% Pure Storage used to be that high several years ago or high sixties anyway. So 10% is in the red zone and yet NetApp, is the big winner this quarter. Now Nutanix isn't really again a storage company, but they're an adjacency and they sell storage and like many of these companies, it's transitioning to a subscription pricing model, so that puts pressure on the income statement, that's why they went out and did a deal with Bain, Bain put in $750 million to help Bridge that transition so that's kind of an interesting move. Every company in this chart is moving to an annual recurring revenue model and that as a service approach is going to be the norm by the end of the decade. HPE's doing it with GreenLake, Dell has announced Apex, virtually every company is headed in this direction. Now speaking of HPE, it's Nimble business that has momentum, but other parts of the storage portfolio are quite a bit softer. Dell continues to see pressure on its storage business although VxRail is a bright spot. Everybody's got a bright spot, everybody's got new stuff that's growing much faster than the old stuff, the problem is the old stuff is much much bigger than the new stuff. IBM's mainframe storage cycle, well that's seems to have run its course, they had been growing for the last several quarters that looks like it's over. And so very very cyclical businesses here now as you can see, The data protection data management companies, they are showing spending momentum but they're not public so we don't have revenue data. But you got to wonder with all the money these guys have raised and the red hot IPO and tech markets, why haven't these guys gone public? The answer has to be that they're either not ready or maybe their a numbers weren't where they want them to be, maybe they're not predictable enough, maybe they don't have their operational act together or maybe they need to you get that in order, some combination of those factors is likely. They'll tell you, they'll give other answers if you ask them, but if they had their stuff together they'd be going out right now. Now here's another look at the spending data in terms of net score, which is again spending velocity. The ETR here is measuring the percent of respondents that are adopting new, spending more, spending flat, spending less or retiring the platform. So net score is adoptions, which is the lime green plus the spending more, which is the forest green. Add those two and then subtract spending less, which is the pink and then leaving the platform, which is the bright red, what's left over is net score. So, let's look at the picture here, Cohesity leads all players in the storage taxonomy, the ETR storage taxonomy, again they don't position that way, but that's the way the customers are answering. They've got 55% net score which is really solid and you can see the data in the upper right-hand corner, it's followed by Nutanix. Now they're really not again in the scope of Pure play storage play but speaking of Pure, its net score has come down from its high of 73% in January, 2016. It's not going to climb back up there, but it's going to be interesting to see if Pure net scorecard rebound in a post COVID world. We're also watching what Pure does in terms of unifying file and object and how it's fairing in cloud and what it does with the Portworx acquisition which is really designed to bring forth a new programming model. Now, Dell is doing fine with VxRail, but VSAN is well off its net score highs which we're in the 60% plus range a couple of years ago, VSAN is definitely been a factor from VMware, but again that's come off its highs, HPE with Nimble still has some room to improve, I think it actually will I think that these figures that we're showing here they're are somewhat depressed by the COVID factor, I expect Nimble is going to bounce back in future surveys. Dell and NetApp are the big leaders in terms of presence or market share in the data other than VMware, 'cause VMware has a lot of instances, it's software defined that's why they're so prominent. And with VMware's large share you'd expect them to have net scores that are tepid and you can see a similar pattern with IBM. So Dell, NetApp, tepid net scores as is IBM because of their large market share VMware, kind of a newer entry into the play and so doing pretty well there from a net score standpoint. Now Commvault like Cohesity and Rubrik is really around intelligent data management, trying to go beyond backup into business recovery, data protection, DevOps, bringing that analytics, bringing that to the cloud, we didn't put Veeam in here and we probably should have. They had pre-COVID net scores well in to the thirties and they have a steadily increasing share of the market, so we expect good things from Veeam going forward. They were acquired earlier this year by Insight, capital private equity firm. So big changes there as well, that was their kind of near-term exit maybe more to come. But look, it's all relative, this is a large and mature market that is moving to the cloud and moving to other adjacencies. And the core is still primary storage, that's the main supreme prerequisite and everything else flows from there, data protection, replication, everything else. This chart gives you another view of the competitive landscape, it's that classic XY chart it plots net score in the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis, market share remember is a measure of presence in the dataset. Now think about this from the CIO's perspective, they have their on-prem estate, got all this infrastructure and they're putting a brick wall around their core systems. And what do they want out of storage for that class of workload? They want it to perform consistently, they want it to be efficient and they want it to be cost-effective, so what are they going to do? they're going to consolidate, They're going to consolidate the number of vendors, they're going to consolidate the storage, they're going to minimize complexity, yeah, they're going to worry about the blast radius, but there's ways to architect around that. The last thing they want to worry about is managing a zillion storage vendors this business is consolidating, it has been for some time, we've seen the number of independent storage players that are going public as consolidated over the years, and it's going to continue. so on-prem storage arrays are not giving CIOs the innovation and strategic advantage back when things like storage virtualization, space efficient snapshots, data de-duplication and other storage services were worth maybe taking a flyer on a feature product like for example, a 3PAR or even a Data Domain. Now flash gave the CIOs more headroom and better performance and so as I said earlier, they're not just buying spindles to increase performance, so as more and more work gets pushed to the cloud, you're seeing a bunkering in on these large scale mission-critical workloads. As you saw earlier, the legacy storage market is consolidating and has been for a while as I just said, it's essentially becoming a managed decline business where RnD is going to increasingly get squeezed and go to other areas, both from the vendor community and on the buy-side where they're investing on things like cloud, containers and in building new layers in their business and of course the DX, the Digital Transformation. I mentioned VAST Data before, it is a company that's growing and another company that's growing is Infinidat and these guys are traditional storage on-prem models they don't bristle If I say traditional they're nexgen if you will but they don't own a cloud, so they were selling to the data center. Now Infinidat is focused on petabyte scale and as they say, they're growing revenues, they're having success consolidating storage that thing that I just talked about. Ironically, these are two Israeli founder based companies that are growing and you saw earlier, this is a share shift the market is not growing overall the part of that's COVID, but if you exclude cloud, the market is under pressure. Now these two companies that I'm mentioning, they're kind of the exception to the rule here, they're tiny in the grand scheme of things, they're really not going to shift the market and their end game is to get acquired so they can still share, but they're not going to reverse these trends. And every one on this chart, every on-prem player has to have a cloud strategy where they connect into the cloud, where they take advantage of native cloud services and they help extend their respective install bases into the cloud, including having a capability that is physically proximate to the cloud with a colo like an Equinix or some other approach. Now, for example at re:Invent, we saw that AWS has hybrid strategy, we saw that evolving. AWS is trying to bring AWS to the edge and they treat the data center as just another edge note, so outposts and smaller versions of outposts and things like local zones are all part of bringing AWS to the edge. And we saw a few companies Pure, Infinidant, Veeam come to mind that are connecting to outpost. They saw the Qumulo was in there, Clumio, Commvault, WekaIO is also in there and I'm sure I'm missing some so, DM me, email me, yell at me, I'm sorry I forgot you but you get the point. These companies that are selling on-prem are connecting to the cloud, they're forced to connect to the cloud much in the same way as they were forced to join the VMware ecosystem and try to add value, try to keep moving fast. So, that's what's going on here, what's the prognosis for storage in the coming year? Well, where've of all the good times gone? Look, we would never bet against data but the days of selling storage controllers that masks the deficiencies of spinning disc or add embedded hardware functions or easily picking off a legacy install base with flash, well, those days are gone. Repatriation, it ain't happening it's maybe tiny little pockets. CIOs are rationalizing their on-premises portfolios so they can invest in the cloud, AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, automation and they're re-skilling their teams. Low latency high bandwidth workloads with minimal jitter, that's the sweet spot for on-prem it's becoming the mainframe of storage. CIOs are also developing a cloud first strategy yes, the world is hybrid but what does that mean to CIOs? It means you're going to have some work in the cloud and some work on-prem, there's a hybrid We've got both. Everything that can go to the cloud, will go to the cloud, in our opinion and everything that can't or shouldn't won't. Yes, people will make mistakes and they'll "repatriate" but generally that's the trend. And the CIOs they're building an abstraction layer to connect workloads from an observability and manageability standpoint so they can maintain control and manage lock-in risk, they have options. Everything that doesn't go to the cloud will likely have some type of hybridicity to it, the reverse won't likely be the case. For vendors, cloud strategies involve supporting your install basis migration to the cloud, that's where they're going, that's where they want to go, they want your help there's business to be made there so enabling low latency hybrids in accommodating subscription models, well, that's a whole another topic, but that's the trend that we see and you rethink the business that you're in, for instance, data management and developing an edge strategy that recognizes that edge workloads are going to require new architecture and that's more efficient than what we've seen built around general purpose systems, and wow, that's a topic for another day. You're seeing this whole as a service model really reshape the entire cultures in the way in which the on-prem vendors are operating no longer is it selling a box that has dramatically marked up controllers and disc drives, it's really thinking about services that could be invoked in the cloud. Now remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcasts and please subscribe, I'd appreciate that checkout etr.plus for all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. A lot of ways to get in touch. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. you could DM me @dvellante on Twitter, comment on our LinkedIn posts, I always appreciate that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCube virtual coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. VMworld's not in person this year, it's on the virtual internet. A lot of content, check it out, vmworld.com, a lot of great stuff, online demos, and a lot of great keynotes. Here we got a great conversation to unpack, the NVIDIA, the AI and all things Cloud Native. With Krish Prasad, who's the SVP and GM of Cloud Platform, Business Unit, and Manuvir Das head of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. Gentlemen, great to see you virtually. Thanks for joining me on the virtual Cube, for the virtual VMworld 2020. >> Thank you John. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Quite a world. And I think one of the things that obviously we've been talking about all year since COVID is the acceleration of this virtualized environment with media and everyone working at home remote. Really puts the pressure on digital transformation Has been well discussed and documented. You guys have some big news, obviously on the main stage NVIDIA CEO, Jensen there legend. And of course, you know, big momentum with with AI and GPUs and all things, you know, computing. Krish, what are your announcements today? You got some big news. Could you take a minute to explain the big announcements today? >> Yeah, John. So today we want to make two major announcements regarding our partnership with NVIDIA. So let's take the first one, and talk through it and then we can get to the second announcement later. In the first one, as you well know, NVIDIA is the leader in AI and VMware as the leader in virtualization and cloud. This announcement is about us teaming up, deliver a jointly engineered solution to the market to bring AI to every enterprise. So as you well know, VMware has more than 300,000 customers worldwide. And we believe that this solution would enable our customers to transform their data centers or AI applications running on top of their virtualized VMware infrastructure that they already have. And we think that this is going to vastly accelerate the adoption of AI and essentially democratize AI in the enterprise. >> Why AI? Why now Manuvir? Obviously we know the GPUs have set the table for many cool things, from mining Bitcoin to really providing a great user experience. But AI has been a big driver. Why now? Why VMware now? >> Yes. Yeah. And I think it's important to understand this is about AI more than even about GPUs, you know. This is a great moment in time where AI has finally come to life, because the hardware and software has come together to make it possible. And if you just look at industries and different parts of life, how is AI impacting? So for example, if you're a company on the internet doing business, everything you do revolves around making recommendations to your customers about what they should do next. This is based on AI. Think about the world we live in today, with the importance of healthcare, drug discovery, finding vaccines for something like COVID. That work is dramatically accelerated if you use AI. And what we've been doing in NVIDIA over the years is, we started with the hardware technology with the GPU, the Parallel Processor, if you will, that could really make these algorithms real. And then we worked very hard on building up the ecosystem. You know, we have 2 million developers today who work with NVIDIA AI. That's thousands of companies that are using AI today. But then if you think about what Krish said, you know about the number of customers that VMware has, which is in the hundreds of thousands, the opportunity before us really now is, how do we democratize this? How do we take this power of AI, that makes every customer and every person better and put it in the hands of every enterprise customer? And we need a great vehicle for that, and that vehicle is VMware. >> Guys, before we get to the next question, I would just want to get your personal take on this, because again, we've talked many times, both of you've been on theCube on this topic. But now I want to highlight, you mentioned the GPU that's hardware. This is software. VMware had hardware partners and then still software's driving it. Software's driving everything. Whether it's something in space, it's an IOT device or anything at the edge of the network. Software, is the value. This has become so obvious. Just share your personal take on this for folks who are now seeing this for the first time. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll give you my take first. I'm a software guy by background, I learned a few years ago for the first time that an array is a storage device and not a data structure in programming. And that was a shock to my system. Definitely the world is based on algorithms. Algorithms are implemented in software. Great hardware enables those algorithms. >> Krish, your thoughts. we live we're living in the future right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I would say that, I mean, the developers are becoming the center. They are actually driving the transformation in this industry, right? It's all about the application development, it's all about software, the infrastructure itself is becoming software defined. And the reason for that is you want the developers to be able to craft the infrastructure the way they need for the applications to run on top of. So it's all about software like I said. >> Software defined. Yeah, just want to get that quick self-congratulatory high five amongst ourselves virtually. (laughs) Congratulations. >> Exactly. >> Krish, last time we spoke at VMworld, we were obviously in person, but we talked about Tanzu and vSphere. Okay, you had Project Pacific. Does this expand? Does this announcement expand on that offering? >> Absolutely. As you know John, for the past several years, VMware has been on this journey to define the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, right? Essentially is the software stack that we have, which will enable our customers to provide a cloud operating model to their developers, irrespective of where they want to land their workloads. Whether they want to land their workloads On-Premise, or if they want it to be on top of AWS, Google, Azure, VMware stack is already running across all of them as you well know. And in addition to that, we have around, you know, 4,000, 5,000 service providers who are also running our Platform to deliver cloud services to their customers. So as part of that journey, last year, we took the Platform and we added one further element to it. Traditionally, our platform has been used by customers for running via VMs. Last year, we natively integrated Kubernetes into our platform. This was the big re architecture of vSphere, as we talked about. That was delivered to the market. And essentially now customers can use the same platform to run Kubernetes, Containers and VM workloads. The exact same platform, it is operationally the same. So the same skillsets, tools and processes can be used to run Kubernetes as well as VM applications. And the same platform runs, whether you want to run it On-Premise or in any of the clouds, as we talked about before. So that vastly simplifies the operational complexity that our customers have to deal with. And this is the next chapter in that journey, by doing the same thing for AI workload. >> You guys had great success with these Co-Engineering joined efforts. VMware and now with NVIDIA is interesting. It's very relevant and is very cool. So it's cool and relevant, so check, check. Manuvir, talk about this, because how do you bring that vision to the enterprises? >> Yeah, John, I think, you know, it's important to understand there is some real deep Computer Science here between the Engineers at VMware and NVIDIA. Just to lay that out, you can think of this as a three layer stack, right? The first thing that you need is, clearly you need the hardware that is capable of running these algorithms, that's what the GPU enable. Then you need a great software stack for AI, all the right Algorithmics that take advantage of that hardware. This is actually where NVIDIA spends most of its effort today. People may sometimes think of NVIDIA as a GPU company, but we have much more a software company now, where we have over the years created a body of work of all of the software that it actually takes to do good AI. But then how do you marry the software stack with the hardware? You need a platform in the middle that supports the applications and consumes the hardware and exposes it properly. And that's where vSphere, you know, as Krish described with either VMs or Containers comes into the picture. So the Computer Science here is, to wire all these things up together with the right algorithmics so that you get real acceleration. So as examples of early work that the two teams have done together, we have workloads in healthcare, for example. In cancer detection, where the acceleration we get with this new stack is 30X, right? The workload is running 30 times faster than it was running before this integration just on CPUs. >> Great performance increase again. You guys are hiring a lot of software developers. I can attest to knowing folks in Silicon Valley and around the world. So I know you guys are bringing the software jobs to the table on a great product by the way, so congratulations. Krish, Democratization of AI for the enterprise. This is a liberating opportunity, because one of the things we've heard from your customers and also from VMware, but mostly from the customer's successes, is that there's two types of extremes. There's the, I'm going to modernize my business, certainly COVID forcing companies, whether they're airlines or whatever, not a lot going on, they have an opportunity to modernize, to essentially modern apps that are getting a tailwind from these new digital transformation accelerated. How does AI democratize this? Cause you got people and you've got technology. (laughs) Right? So share your thoughts on how you see this democratizing. >> That's a very good question. I think if you look at how people are running AI applications today, like you go to an enterprise, you would see that there is a silo of bare metal sun works on the side, where the AI stack is run. And you have people with specialized skills and different tools and utilities that manage that environment. And that is what is standing in the way of AI taking off in the enterprise, right? It is not the use case. There are all these use cases which are mission critical that all companies want to do, right? Worldwide, that has been the case. It is about the complexity of life that is standing in the way. So what we are doing with this is we are saying, "hey, that whole solution stack that Manuvir talked about, is integrated into the VMware Virtualized Infrastructure." Whether it's On-Prem or in the cloud. And you can manage that environment with the exact same tools and processes and skills that you traditionally had for running any other application on VMware infrastructure. So, you don't need to have anything special to run this. And that's what is going to give us the acceleration that we talked about and essentially hive the Democratization of AI. >> That's a great point. I just want to highlight that and call that out, because AI's every use case. You could almost say theCube could have AI and we do actually have a little bit of AI and some of our transcriptions and work. But it's not so much just use cases, it's actually not just saying you got to do it. So taking down that blocker, the complexity, certainly is the key. And that's a great point. We're going to call that out after. Alright, let's move on to the second part of the announcement. Krish Project Monterey. This is a big deal. And it looks like a, you know, kind of this elusive, it's architectural thing, but it's directionally really strategic for VMware. Could you take a minute to explain this announcement? Frame this for us. >> Absolutely. I think John, you remember Pat got on stage last year at Vmworld and said, you know, "we are undertaking the biggest re architecture of the vSphere platform in the last 10 years." And he was talking about natively embedding Kubernetes, in vSphere, right? Remember Tanzu and Project Pacific. This year we are announcing Project Monterrey. It's a project that is significant with several partners in the industry, along with NVIDIA was one of the key partners. And what we are doing is we are reimagination of the data center for the next generation applications. And at the center of it, what we are going to do is rearchitect vSphere and ESX. So that the ESX can normally run on the CPU, but it'll also run on the Smart Mix. And what this gives us is the whole, let's say data center, infrastructure type services to be offloaded from running on the CPU onto the Smart Mix. So what does this provide the applications? The applications then will perform better. And secondly, it provides an extra layer of security for the next generation applications. Now we are not going to stop there. We are going to use this architecture and extended it so that we can finally eliminate one of the big silos that exist in the enterprise, which is the bare metal silo. Right? Today we have virtualized environments and bare metal, and what this architecture will do is bring those bare metal environments also under ESX management. So you ESX will manage environments which are virtualized and environments which are running bare metal OS. And so that's one big breakthrough and simplification for the elimination of silo or the elimination of, you know, specialized skills to keep it running. And lastly, but most importantly, where we are going with this. That just on the question you asked us earlier about software defined and developers being in control. Where we want to go with this is give developers, the application developers, the ability to really define and create their run time on the Fly, dynamically. So think about it. If dynamically they're able to describe how the application should run. And the infrastructure essentially kind of attaches computer resources on the Fly, whether they are sitting in the same server or somewhere in the network as pools of resources. Bring it all together and compose the runtime environment for them. That's going to be huge. And they won't be constrained anymore by the resources that are tied to the physical server that they are running on. And that's the vision of where we are taking it. It is going to be the next big change in the industry in terms of enterprise computing. >> Sounds like an Operating System to me. Yeah. Run time, assembly orchestration, all these things coming together, exciting stuff. Looking forward to digging in more after Vmworld. Manuvir, how does this connect to NVIDIA and AI? Tie that together for us. >> Yeah, It's an interesting question, because you would think, you know, okay, so NVIDIA this GPU company or this AI company. But you have to remember that INVIDIA is also a networking company. Because friends at Mellanox joined us not that long ago. And the interesting thing is that there's a Yin and Yang here, because, Krish described the software vision, which is brilliant. And what this does is it imposes a lot on the host CPU of the server to do. And so what we've be doing in parallel is developing hardware. A new kind of "Nick", if you will, we call it a DPU or a Data Processing Unit or a Smart Nick that is capable of hosting all this stuff. So, amusingly when Krish and I started talking, we exchanged slides and we basically had the same diagram for our vision of where things go with that software, the infrastructure software being offloaded, data center infrastructure on a chip, if you will. Right? And so it's a very natural confluence. We are very excited to be part of this, >> Yeah. >> Monterey program with Krish and his team. And we think our DPU, which is called the NVIDIA BlueField-2, is a pretty good device to empower the work that Krish's team is doing. >> Guys it's awesome stuff. And I got to say, you know, I've been covering Vmworld now 11 years with theCube, and I've known VMware since its founding, just the evolution. And just recently before VMworld, you know, you saw the biggest IPO in the history of Wall Street, Snowflake an Enterprise Data Cloud Company. The number one IPO ever. Enterprise tech is so exciting. This is really awesome. And NVIDIA obviously well known, great brand. You own some chip company as well, and get processors and data and software. Guys, customers are going to be very interested in this, so what should customers do to find out more? Obviously you've got Project Monterey, strategic direction, right? Framed perfectly. You got this announcement. If I'm a customer, how do I get involved? How do I learn more? And what's in it for me. >> Yeah, John, I would say, sorry, go ahead, Krish. >> No, I was just going to say sorry Manuvir. I was just going to say like a lot of these discussions are going to be happening, there are going to be panel discussions there are going to be presentations at Vmworld. So I would encourage customers to really look at these topics around Project Monterey and also about the AI work we are doing with NVIDIA and attend those sessions and be active and we will have a ways for them to connect with us in terms of our early access programs and whatnot. And then as Manuvir was about to say, I think Manuvir, I will give it to you about GTC. >> Yeah, I think right after that, we have the NVIDIA conference, which is GTC, where we'll also go over this. And I think some of this work is a lot closer to hand than people might imagine. So I would encourage watching all the sessions and learning more about how to get started. >> Yeah, great stuff. And just for the folks @vmworld.com watching, Cloud City's got 60 solution demos, go look for the sessions. You got the EX, the expert sessions, Raghu, Joe Beda amongst other people from VMware are going to be there. And of course, a lot of action on the content. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations on the news, big news. NVIDIA on the Bay in Virtual stage here at VMworld. And of course you're in theCube. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. Okay. >> Thank you very much. >> This is Cube's coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube virtual, here in Palo Alto, California for VMworld 2020. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the queue with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome, welcome, welcome to DockerCon 2020. We got over 50,000 people registered so there's clearly a ton of interest in the world of Docker and Eddie's as I like to call it. And we've assembled a power panel of Open Source and cloud native experts to talk about where things stand in 2020 and where we're headed. I'm Shawn Conley, I'll be the moderator for today's panel. I'm also a proud alum of JBoss, Red Hat, SpringSource, VMware and Hortonworks and I'm broadcasting from my hometown of Philly. Our panelists include; Michelle Noorali, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, joining us from Atlanta, Georgia. We have Kelsey Hightower, Principal developer advocate at Google Cloud, joining us from Washington State and we have Chris Aniszczyk, CTO CIO at the CNCF, joining us from Austin, Texas. So I think we have the country pretty well covered. Thank you all for spending time with us on this power panel. Chris, I'm going to start with you, let's dive right in. You've been in the middle of the Docker netease wave since the beginning with a clear focus on building a better world through open collaboration. What are your thoughts on how the Open Source landscape has evolved over the past few years? Where are we in 2020? And where are we headed from both community and a tech perspective? Just curious to get things sized up? >> Sure, when CNCF started about roughly four, over four years ago, the technology mostly focused on just the things around Kubernetes, monitoring communities with technology like Prometheus, and I think in 2020 and the future, we definitely want to move up the stack. So there's a lot of tools being built on the periphery now. So there's a lot of tools that handle running different types of workloads on Kubernetes. So things like Uvert and Shay runs VMs on Kubernetes, which is crazy, not just containers. You have folks that, Microsoft experimenting with a project called Kruslet which is trying to run web assembly workloads natively on Kubernetes. So I think what we've seen now is more and more tools built around the periphery, while the core of Kubernetes has stabilized. So different technologies and spaces such as security and different ways to run different types of workloads. And at least that's kind of what I've seen. >> So do you have a fair amount of vendors as well as end users still submitting in projects in, is there still a pretty high volume? >> Yeah, we have 48 total projects in CNCF right now and Michelle could speak a little bit more to this being on the DOC, the pipeline for new projects is quite extensive and it covers all sorts of spaces from two service meshes to security projects and so on. So it's ever so expanding and filling in gaps in that cloud native landscape that we have. >> Awesome. Michelle, Let's head to you. But before we actually dive in, let's talk a little glory days. A rumor has it that you are the Fifth Grade Kickball Championship team captain. (Michelle laughs) Are the rumors true? >> They are, my speech at the end of the year was the first talk I ever gave. But yeah, it was really fun. I wasn't captain 'cause I wasn't really great at anything else apart from constantly cheer on the team. >> A little better than my eighth grade Spelling Champ Award so I think I'd rather have the kickball. But you've definitely, spent a lot of time leading an Open Source, you've been across many projects for many years. So how does the art and science of collaboration, inclusivity and teamwork vary? 'Cause you're involved in a variety of efforts, both in the CNCF and even outside of that. And then what are some tips for expanding the tent of Open Source projects? >> That's a good question. I think it's about transparency. Just come in and tell people what you really need to do and clearly articulate your problem, more clearly articulate your problem and why you can't solve it with any other solution, the more people are going to understand what you're trying to do and be able to collaborate with you better. What I love about Open Source is that where I've seen it succeed is where incentives of different perspectives and parties align and you're just transparent about what you want. So you can collaborate where it makes sense, even if you compete as a company with another company in the same area. So I really like that, but I just feel like transparency and honesty is what it comes down to and clearly communicating those objectives. >> Yeah, and the various foundations, I think one of the things that I've seen, particularly Apache Software Foundation and others is the notion of checking your badge at the door. Because the competition might be between companies, but in many respects, you have engineers across many companies that are just kicking butt with the tech they contribute, claiming victory in one way or the other might make for interesting marketing drama. But, I think that's a little bit of the challenge. In some of the, standards-based work you're doing I know with CNI and some other things, are they similar, are they different? How would you compare and contrast into something a little more structured like CNCF? >> Yeah, so most of what I do is in the CNCF, but there's specs and there's projects. I think what CNCF does a great job at is just iterating to make it an easier place for developers to collaborate. You can ask the CNCF for basically whatever you need, and they'll try their best to figure out how to make it happen. And we just continue to work on making the processes are clearer and more transparent. And I think in terms of specs and projects, those are such different collaboration environments. Because if you're in a project, you have to say, "Okay, I want this feature or I want this bug fixed." But when you're in a spec environment, you have to think a little outside of the box and like, what framework do you want to work in? You have to think a little farther ahead in terms of is this solution or this decision we're going to make going to last for the next how many years? You have to get more of a buy in from all of the key stakeholders and maintainers. So it's a little bit of a longer process, I think. But what's so beautiful is that you have this really solid, standard or interface that opens up an ecosystem and allows people to build things that you could never have even imagined or dreamed of so-- >> Gotcha. So I'm Kelsey, we'll head over to you as your focus is on, developer advocate, you've been in the cloud native front lines for many years. Today developers are faced with a ton of moving parts, spanning containers, functions, Cloud Service primitives, including container services, server-less platforms, lots more, right? I mean, there's just a ton of choice. How do you help developers maintain a minimalist mantra in the face of such a wealth of choice? I think minimalism I hear you talk about that periodically, I know you're a fan of that. How do you pass that on and your developer advocacy in your day to day work? >> Yeah, I think, for most developers, most of this is not really the top of mind for them, is something you may see a post on Hacker News, and you might double click into it. Maybe someone on your team brought one of these tools in and maybe it leaks up into your workflow so you're forced to think about it. But for most developers, they just really want to continue writing code like they've been doing. And the best of these projects they'll never see. They just work, they get out of the way, they help them with log in, they help them run their application. But for most people, this isn't the core idea of the job for them. For people in operations, on the other hand, maybe these components fill a gap. So they look at a lot of this stuff that you see in the CNCF and Open Source space as number one, various companies or teams sharing the way that they do things, right? So these are ideas that are put into the Open Source, some of them will turn into products, some of them will just stay as projects that had mutual benefit for multiple people. But for the most part, it's like walking through an ion like Home Depot. You pick the tools that you need, you can safely ignore the ones you don't need, and maybe something looks interesting and maybe you study it to see if that if you have a problem. And for most people, if you don't have that problem that that tool solves, you should be happy. No one needs every project and I think that's where the foundation for confusion. So my main job is to help people not get stuck and confused in LAN and just be pragmatic and just use the tools that work for 'em. >> Yeah, and you've spent the last little while in the server-less space really diving into that area, compare and contrast, I guess, what you found there, minimalist approach, who are you speaking to from a server-less perspective versus that of the broader CNCF? >> The thing that really pushed me over, I was teaching my daughter how to make a website. So she's on her Chromebook, making a website, and she's hitting 127.0.0.1, and it looks like geo cities from the 90s but look, she's making website. And she wanted her friends to take a look. So she copied and paste from her browser 127.0.0.1 and none of her friends could pull it up. So this is the point where every parent has to cross that line and say, "Hey, do I really need to sit down "and teach my daughter about Linux "and Docker and Kubernetes." That isn't her main goal, her goal was to just launch her website in a way that someone else can see it. So we got Firebase installed on her laptop, she ran one command, Firebase deploy. And our site was up in a few minutes, and she sent it over to her friend and there you go, she was off and running. The whole server-less movement has that philosophy as one of the stated goal that needs to be the workflow. So, I think server-less is starting to get closer and closer, you start to see us talk about and Chris mentioned this earlier, we're moving up the stack. Where we're going to up the stack, the North Star there is feel where you get the focus on what you're doing, and not necessarily how to do it underneath. And I think server-less is not quite there yet but every type of workload, stateless web apps check, event driven workflows check, but not necessarily for things like machine learning and some other workloads that more traditional enterprises want to run so there's still work to do there. So server-less for me, serves as the North Star for why all these Projects exists for people that may have to roll their own platform, to provide the experience. >> So, Chris, on a related note, with what we were just talking about with Kelsey, what's your perspective on the explosion of the cloud native landscape? There's, a ton of individual projects, each can be used separately, but in many cases, they're like Lego blocks and used together. So things like the surface mesh interface, standardizing interfaces, so things can snap together more easily, I think, are some of the approaches but are you doing anything specifically to encourage this cross fertilization and collaboration of bug ability, because there's just a ton of projects, not only at the CNCF but outside the CNCF that need to plug in? >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of this happens organically. CNCF really provides of the neutral home where companies, competitors, could trust each other to build interesting technology. We don't force integration or collaboration, it happens on its own. We essentially allow the market to decide what a successful project is long term or what an integration is. We have a great Technical Oversight Committee that helps shepherd the overall technical vision for the organization and sometimes steps in and tries to do the right thing when it comes to potentially integrating a project. Previously, we had this issue where there was a project called Open Tracing, and an effort called Open Census, which is basically trying to standardize how you're going to deal with metrics, on the tree and so on in a cloud native world that we're essentially competing with each other. The CNCF TC and committee came together and merged those projects into one parent ever called Open Elementary and so that to me is a case study of how our committee helps, bridges things. But we don't force things, we essentially want our community of end users and vendors to decide which technology is best in the long term, and we'll support that. >> Okay, awesome. And, Michelle, you've been focused on making distributed systems digestible, which to me is about simplifying things. And so back when Docker arrived on the scene, some people referred to it as developer dopamine, which I love that term, because it's simplified a bunch of crufty stuff for developers and actually helped them focus on doing their job, writing code, delivering code, what's happening in the community to help developers wire together multi-part modern apps in a way that's elegant, digestible, feels like a dopamine rush? >> Yeah, one of the goals of the(mumbles) project was to make it easier to deploy an application on Kubernetes so that you could see what the finished product looks like. And then dig into all of the things that that application is composed of, all the resources. So we're really passionate about this kind of stuff for a while now. And I love seeing projects that come into the space that have this same goal and just iterate and make things easier. I think we have a ways to go still, I think a lot of the iOS developers and JS developers I get to talk to don't really care that much about Kubernetes. They just want to, like Kelsey said, just focus on their code. So one of the projects that I really like working with is Tilt gives you this dashboard in your CLI, aggregates all your logs from your applications, And it kind of watches your application changes, and reconfigures those changes in Kubernetes so you can see what's going on, it'll catch errors, anything with a dashboard I love these days. So Yali is like a metrics dashboard that's integrated with STL, a service graph of your service mesh, and lets you see the metrics running there. I love that, I love that dashboard so much. Linkerd has some really good service graph images, too. So anything that helps me as an end user, which I'm not technically an end user, but me as a person who's just trying to get stuff up and running and working, see the state of the world easily and digest them has been really exciting to see. And I'm seeing more and more dashboards come to light and I'm very excited about that. >> Yeah, as part of the DockerCon just as a person who will be attending some of the sessions, I'm really looking forward to see where DockerCompose is going, I know they opened up the spec to broader input. I think your point, the good one, is there's a bit more work to really embrace the wealth of application artifacts that compose a larger application. So there's definitely work the broader community needs to lean in on, I think. >> I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Compose is something that I should have mentioned and I'm glad you bring that up. I want to see programming language libraries, integrate with the Compose spec. I really want to see what happens with that I think is great that they open that up and made that a spec because obviously people really like using Compose. >> Excellent. So Kelsey, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on your January post on changelog entitled, "Monoliths are the Future." Your post actually really resonated with me. My son works for a software company in Austin, Texas. So your hometown there, Chris. >> Yeah. >> Shout out to Will and the chorus team. His development work focuses on adding modern features via micro services as extensions to the core monolith that the company was founded on. So just share some thoughts on monoliths, micro services. And also, what's deliverance dopamine from your perspective more broadly, but people usually phrase as monoliths versus micro services, but I get the sense you don't believe it's either or. >> Yeah, I think most companies from the pragmatic so one of their argument is one of pragmatism. Most companies have trouble designing any app, monolith, deployable or microservices architecture. And then these things evolve over time. Unless you're really careful, it's really hard to know how to slice these things. So taking an idea or a problem and just knowing how to perfectly compartmentalize it into individual deployable component, that's hard for even the best people to do. And double down knowing the actual solution to the particular problem. A lot of problems people are solving they're solving for the first time. It's really interesting, our industry in general, a lot of people who work in it have never solved the particular problem that they're trying to solve for the first time. So that's interesting. The other part there is that most of these tools that are here to help are really only at the infrastructure layer. We're talking freeways and bridges and toll bridges, but there's nothing that happens in the actual developer space right there in memory. So the libraries that interface to the structure logging, the libraries that deal with rate limiting, the libraries that deal with authorization, can this person make this query with this user ID? A lot of those things are still left for developers to figure out on their own. So while we have things like the brunettes and fluid D, we have all of these tools to deploy apps into those target, most developers still have the problem of everything you do above that line. And to be honest, the majority of the complexity has to be resolved right there in the app. That's the thing that's taking requests directly from the user. And this is where maybe as an industry, we're over-correcting. So we had, you said you come from the JBoss world, I started a lot of my Cisco administration, there's where we focus a little bit more on the actual application needs, maybe from a router that as well. But now what we're seeing is things like Spring Boot, start to offer a little bit more integration points in the application space itself. So I think the biggest parts that are missing now are what are the frameworks people will use for authorization? So you have projects like OPA, Open Policy Agent for those that are new to that, it gives you this very low level framework, but you still have to understand the concepts around, what does it mean to allow someone to do something and one missed configuration, all your security goes out of the window. So I think for most developers this is where the next set of challenges lie, if not actually the original challenge. So for some people, they were able to solve most of these problems with virtualization, run some scripts, virtualize everything and be fine. And monoliths were okay for that. For some reason, we've thrown pragmatism out of the window and some people are saying the only way to solve these problems is by breaking the app into 1000 pieces. Forget the fact that you had trouble managing one piece, you're going to somehow find the ability to manage 1000 pieces with these tools underneath but still not solving the actual developer problems. So this is where you've seen it already with a couple of popular blog posts from other companies. They cut too deep. They're going from 2000, 3000 microservices back to maybe 100 or 200. So to my world, it's going to be not just one monolith, but end up maybe having 10 or 20 monoliths that maybe reflect the organization that you have versus the architectural pattern that you're at. >> I view it as like a constellation of stars and planets, et cetera. Where you you might have a star that has a variety of, which is a monolith, and you have a variety of sort of planetary microservices that float around it. But that's reality, that's the reality of modern applications, particularly if you're not starting from a clean slate. I mean your points, a good one is, in many respects, I think the infrastructure is code movement has helped automate a bit of the deployment of the platform. I've been personally focused on app development JBoss as well as springsSource. The Spring team I know that tech pretty well over the years 'cause I was involved with that. So I find that James Governor's discussion of progressive delivery really resonates with me, as a developer, not so much as an infrastructure Deployer. So continuous delivery is more of infrastructure notice notion, progressive delivery, feature flags, those types of things, or app level, concepts, minimizing the blast radius of your, the new features you're deploying, that type of stuff, I think begins to speak to the pain of application delivery. So I'll guess I'll put this up. Michelle, I might aim it to you, and then we'll go around the horn, what are your thoughts on the progressive delivery area? How could that potentially begin to impact cloud native over 2020? I'm looking for some rallying cries that move up the stack and give a set of best practices, if you will. And I think James Governor of RedMonk opened on something that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I think it's all about automating all that stuff that you don't really know about. Like Flagger is an awesome progressive delivery tool, you can just deploy something, and people have been asking for so many years, ever since I've been in this space, it's like, "How do I do AB deployment?" "How do I do Canary?" "How do I execute these different deployment strategies?" And Flagger is a really good example, for example, it's a really good way to execute these deployment strategies but then, make sure that everything's happening correctly via observing metrics, rollback if you need to, so you don't just throw your whole system. I think it solves the problem and allows you to take risks but also keeps you safe in that you can be confident as you roll out your changes that it all works, it's metrics driven. So I'm just really looking forward to seeing more tools like that. And dashboards, enable that kind of functionality. >> Chris, what are your thoughts in that progressive delivery area? >> I mean, CNCF alone has a lot of projects in that space, things like Argo that are tackling it. But I want to go back a little bit to your point around developer dopamine, as someone that probably spent about a decade of his career focused on developer tooling and in fact, if you remember the Eclipse IDE and that whole integrated experience, I was blown away recently by a demo from GitHub. They have something called code spaces, which a long time ago, I was trying to build development environments that essentially if you were an engineer that joined a team recently, you could basically get an environment quickly start it with everything configured, source code checked out, environment properly set up. And that was a very hard problem. This was like before container days and so on and to see something like code spaces where you'd go to a repo or project, open it up, behind the scenes they have a container that is set up for the environment that you need to build and just have a VS code ID integrated experience, to me is completely magical. It hits like developer dopamine immediately for me, 'cause a lot of problems when you're going to work with a project attribute, that whole initial bootstrap of, "Oh you need to make sure you have this library, this install," it's so incredibly painful on top of just setting up your developer environment. So as we continue to move up the stack, I think you're going to see an incredible amount of improvements around the developer tooling and developer experience that people have powered by a lot of this cloud native technology behind the scenes that people may not know about. >> Yeah, 'cause I've been talking with the team over at Docker, the work they're doing with that desktop, enable the aim local environment, make sure it matches as closely as possible as your deployed environments that you might be targeting. These are some of the pains, that I see. It's hard for developers to get bootstrapped up, it might take him a day or two to actually just set up their local laptop and development environment, and particularly if they change teams. So that complexity really corralling that down and not necessarily being overly prescriptive as to what tool you use. So if you're visual code, great, it should feel integrated into that environment, use a different environment or if you feel more comfortable at the command line, you should be able to opt into that. That's some of the stuff I get excited to potentially see over 2020 as things progress up the stack, as you said. So, Michelle, just from an innovation train perspective, and we've covered a little bit, what's the best way for people to get started? I think Kelsey covered a little bit of that, being very pragmatic, but all this innovation is pretty intimidating, you can get mowed over by the train, so to speak. So what's your advice for how people get started, how they get involved, et cetera. >> Yeah, it really depends on what you're looking for and what you want to learn. So, if you're someone who's new to the space, honestly, check out the case studies on cncf.io, those are incredible. You might find environments that are similar to your organization's environments, and read about what worked for them, how they set things up, any hiccups they crossed. It'll give you a broad overview of the challenges that people are trying to solve with the technology in this space. And you can use that drill into the areas that you want to learn more about, just depending on where you're coming from. I find myself watching old KubeCon talks on the cloud native computing foundations YouTube channel, so they have like playlists for all of the conferences and the special interest groups in CNCF. And I really enjoy talking, I really enjoy watching excuse me, older talks, just because they explain why things were done, the way they were done, and that helps me build the tools I built. And if you're looking to get involved, if you're building projects or tools or specs and want to contribute, we have special interest groups in the CNCF. So you can find that in the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, TOC GitHub repo. And so for that, if you want to get involved there, choose a vertical. Do you want to learn about observability? Do you want to drill into networking? Do you care about how to deliver your app? So we have a cig called app delivery, there's a cig for each major vertical, and you can go there to see what is happening on the edge. Really, these are conversations about, okay, what's working, what's not working and what are the next changes we want to see in the next months. So if you want that kind of granularity and discussion on what's happening like that, then definitely join those those meetings. Check out those meeting notes and recordings. >> Gotcha. So on Kelsey, as you look at 2020 and beyond, I know, you've been really involved in some of the earlier emerging tech spaces, what gets you excited when you look forward? What gets your own level of dopamine up versus the broader community? What do you see coming that we should start thinking about now? >> I don't think any of the raw technology pieces get me super excited anymore. Like, I've seen the circle of around three or four times, in five years, there's going to be a new thing, there might be a new foundation, there'll be a new set of conferences, and we'll all rally up and probably do this again. So what's interesting now is what people are actually using the technology for. Some people are launching new things that maybe weren't possible because infrastructure costs were too high. People able to jump into new business segments. You start to see these channels on YouTube where everyone can buy a mic and a B app and have their own podcasts and be broadcast to the globe, just for a few bucks, if not for free. Those revolutionary things are the big deal and they're hard to come by. So I think we've done a good job democratizing these ideas, distributed systems, one company got really good at packaging applications to share with each other, I think that's great, and never going to reset again. And now what's going to be interesting is, what will people build with this stuff? If we end up building the same things we were building before, and then we're talking about another digital transformation 10 years from now because it's going to be funny but Kubernetes will be the new legacy. It's going to be the things that, "Oh, man, I got stuck in this Kubernetes thing," and there'll be some governor on TV, looking for old school Kubernetes engineers to migrate them to some new thing, that's going to happen. You got to know that. So at some point merry go round will stop. And we're going to be focused on what you do with this. So the internet is there, most people have no idea of the complexities of underwater sea cables. It's beyond one or two people, or even one or two companies to comprehend. You're at the point now, where most people that jump on the internet are talking about what you do with the internet. You can have Netflix, you can do meetings like this one, it's about what you do with it. So that's going to be interesting. And we're just not there yet with tech, tech is so, infrastructure stuff. We're so in the weeds, that most people almost burn out what's just getting to the point where you can start to look at what you do with this stuff. So that's what I keep in my eye on, is when do we get to the point when people just ship things and build things? And I think the closest I've seen so far is in the mobile space. If you're iOS developer, Android developer, you use the SDK that they gave you, every year there's some new device that enables some new things speech to text, VR, AR and you import an STK, and it just worked. And you can put it in one place and 100 million people can download it at the same time with no DevOps team, that's amazing. When can we do that for server side applications? That's going to be something I'm going to find really innovative. >> Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I could definitely relate. I was Hortonworks in 2011, so, Hadoop, in many respects, was sort of the precursor to the Kubernetes area, in that it was, as I like to refer to, it was a bunch of animals in the zoo, wasn't just the yellow elephant. And when things mature beyond it's basically talking about what kind of analytics are driving, what type of machine learning algorithms and applications are they delivering? You know that's when things tip over into a real solution space. So I definitely see that. I think the other cool thing even just outside of the container and container space, is there's just such a wealth of data related services. And I think how those two worlds come together, you brought up the fact that, in many respects, server-less is great, it's stateless, but there's just a ton of stateful patterns out there that I think also need to be addressed as these richer applications to be from a data processing and actionable insights perspective. >> I also want to be clear on one thing. So some people confuse two things here, what Michelle said earlier about, for the first time, a whole group of people get to learn about distributed systems and things that were reserved to white papers, PhDs, CF site, this stuff is now super accessible. You go to the CNCF site, all the things that you read about or we used to read about, you can actually download, see how it's implemented and actually change how it work. That is something we should never say is a waste of time. Learning is always good because someone has to build these type of systems and whether they sell it under the guise of server-less or not, this will always be important. Now the other side of this is, that there are people who are not looking to learn that stuff, the majority of the world isn't looking. And in parallel, we should also make this accessible, which should enable people that don't need to learn all of that before they can be productive. So that's two sides of the argument that can be true at the same time, a lot of people get caught up. And everything should just be server-less and everyone learning about distributed systems, and contributing and collaborating is wasting time. We can't have a world where there's only one or two companies providing all infrastructure for everyone else, and then it's a black box. We don't need that. So we need to do both of these things in parallel so I just want to make sure I'm clear that it's not one of these or the other. >> Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. So we'll just hit the final topic. Chris, I think I'll ask you to help close this out. COVID-19 clearly has changed how people work and collaborate. I figured we'd end on how do you see, so DockerCon is going to virtual events, inherently the Open Source community is distributed and is used to not face to face collaboration. But there's a lot of value that comes together by assembling a tent where people can meet, what's the best way? How do you see things playing out? What's the best way for this to evolve in the face of the new normal? >> I think in the short term, you're definitely going to see a lot of virtual events cropping up all over the place. Different themes, verticals, I've already attended a handful of virtual events the last few weeks from Red Hat summit to Open Compute summit to Cloud Native summit, you'll see more and more of these. I think, in the long term, once the world either get past COVID or there's a vaccine or something, I think the innate nature for people to want to get together and meet face to face and deal with all the serendipitous activities you would see in a conference will come back, but I think virtual events will augment these things in the short term. One benefit we've seen, like you mentioned before, DockerCon, can have 50,000 people at it. I don't remember what the last physical DockerCon had but that's definitely an order of magnitude more. So being able to do these virtual events to augment potential of physical events in the future so you can build a more inclusive community so people who cannot travel to your event or weren't lucky enough to win a scholarship could still somehow interact during the course of event to me is awesome and I hope something that we take away when we start all doing these virtual events when we get back to physical events, we find a way to ensure that these things are inclusive for everyone and not just folks that can physically make it there. So those are my thoughts on on the topic. And I wish you the best of luck planning of DockerCon and so on. So I'm excited to see how it turns out. 50,000 is a lot of people and that just terrifies me from a cloud native coupon point of view, because we'll probably be somewhere. >> Yeah, get ready. Excellent, all right. So that is a wrap on the DockerCon 2020 Open Source Power Panel. I think we covered a ton of ground. I'd like to thank Chris, Kelsey and Michelle, for sharing their perspectives on this continuing wave of Docker and cloud native innovation. I'd like to thank the DockerCon attendees for tuning in. And I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the conference. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Male Voiceover: Live, from San Diego, California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live US 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are day one of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. We're going to be here for three days of coverage but a great day so far and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni Kent Christensen the Practice Director from Insight with the Cloud & Data Center at Transformation Group. Kent, welcome back! >> Thank you. It's been a little while. >> It has been a little while. So give our audience a little overview of Insight your partnership with Cisco and some of the history of how you got to Insight. >> Yeah so you remember us as Data Link we were a smaller company than we are now. Focusing on Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked at Dell events, CFC events things like that. But we were a Cisco partner for about 10 years and recently we were acquired and we did what the name sounds like, Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked about Cloud on the channel and all these other things. Insight acquired us. Insight has kind of four major service solution sets if you would. Some people look at them as a supply chain company and it's a great, large supply chain company. Microsoft's largest global partner. Some people understand it for the device and use the devices that's called Connective Workforce. Each of these are pretty big businesses you know, compared to where we are. What was Data Link is now what's called Cloud and Data Center Transformation. So we're helping people with the journey to the Cloud and the Hybrid Cloud and all that other stuff. And Cisco is right dead center in the middle of that and then the fourth one is really exciting. It's called Data and Digital Innovation and that's a couple of companies. Blue Metal, Cardinal etc. Again, a thousand people. Microsoft ILT and AI partner of the year. So all of that is a pretty large channel organization if you would. >> That's great stuff Kent. We love to talk to the channel as the folks in Wall Street do. It like you know, we do a channel check. Okay, You know, Cisco's got a few areas that have you know, stronger growth in the market over all. Security's doing well, a few other spaces on that are you know growing faster over all than the market and helping >> Kent: Absolutely >> grow where Cisco's going, so give us the reality. What's happening with your customers? What's driving you know the most growth in your business and you know, where is Cisco kind of leading the pack? >> So we're doing really well with Cisco and I don't know if it's because we're helping clients build solutions that truly lead to business outcomes. We're not order takers. So we're actually moving up we're now Cisco's fourth largest partner. We're growing well high single digits growth which is pretty phenomenal on such a big number. We're talking a billion dollars now in growing that level and there's a number of reasons. You know, some of it is there's a lot of great technology we can get into some of those. We see the economy as being pretty good not bad yet. You know everybody's worried about what might happen. You mentioned security, we can get into a little bit of that. That's driving a lot of network refresh and stuff like that. You know and a little bit of intra-company you know that word getting our stuff together so this large company with 15000 customers acquires a company with 2000 customers and now we're getting introduced into the 15000 with less friction. So that's helping us and that's helping our Cisco Business. >> Lisa: See here we are at Cisco Live. The thirtieth time that they had done a customer partner event. The network has not only changed dramatically since their first event in '89 which was called Networkers I believe. >> KENT: Yeah. >> But networking technology has also massively changed you mentioned security. And now in this multi-cloud world no longer can you just put a firewall around a data center right? Obviously that doesn't work. We have this core Cloud edge very amorphous environments. Proliferation of mobile, of mobile data traversing the networks. Talk to us about when you're talking with customers who need to transform their data centers where do you start from a networking conversation perspective? Where automation comes in, where security comes in? >> You know, a lot of the Cloud native transformation tends to be the edge of the network. You know conversion, infrastructure, stuff like that that's on the edge. The network security guys which I'm not, you know, I work with them very closely but we almost separate ourselves out from a data center networking and security. But security's end to end to your point, right? I've got software to find access. I've got mobile access points. I've got you know, Tetration. I've got all of these products that are helping people that in the past they were just patching holes in the dyke. You know, hey this happened let's put this software product in. This happened, let's put this in. We actually built a security practice like the last 3 or 4 years ago, it's growing. You know the number of people that are, whether it's regulation, compliance, you know. "I got some real problem. I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is." Our ability to come back and sit down and say let's evaluate what your situation is. So I was talking to the networking guys and said wow. Enterprise networking's up, way up. What's driving that, the need to transform or is that, you know what is it? And they're like a lot of times it's something along security that's making them step back and re-evaluate and then sometimes that translates into an entire network refresh. >> Stu: So Kent you mentioned Cisco Tetration and that's one I've heard a number of times having some growth. What else, what are some of the you know hot products out there in your customer base? >> ISE, Software to Find, SD Wan, SD Access. >> Stu: Yeah, so one of the things I just want to understand Cisco actually has a few solutions in some of those areas. Any specific products that you call out or you know or that'd be mentioned? >> Kent: In the enterprise networking I wouldn't go through each and every individual one. I think, this is my view as the laymen right? 'Cause I'm the data center guy and here's the security guy and here's the networking guy. I think when Cisco started acquiring all these security companies 3 years ago and you know watched it and it looked like a patchwork quilt and said this stuff doesn't fit together? Now it fits together that story is really solid. And so we've got clients that had the luxury of either saying I'm going to do a refresh because I don't want to keep plugging holes and maybe my technology was ready for it anyway. And there's a lot of reasons to refresh right? My technology's due. Digital transformation, I need to get my network ready for IoT etc. But I keep hearing security over and over right? I've got compliance and regulations and all of this other stuff. >> Yeah but in your core space the data center world and any products that are kind of leading the charge right now? >> You know one of the things that's happening in data center from a Cisco perspective 'cause they're babies right? Ten years old in data center. They didn't really have data center before that. And we were there at the beginning and that's really how CDCT built our data center practice so you know when you talk multi-cloud at the end of the day even if I'm Cloud first I'm going to end up with some of these mission-critical workloads. They might be boring but they're running the company. They're not the innovative Dev-Ops, IoT, AI thing that seems cool. They're running the company and that's still a converged or a hyper-converged play. And some of those you know there's a lot of opportunities we've been talking about all day with the Cisco BU's. Some of those are ready for refresh right so there's a great opportunity to just to go in and say okay what's next? You know, we've added you know the latest server technology. We've added all these things in the server technology. Obviously all flash and the storage technologies and all of that so that's huge. And then you know Cisco continues to innovate in data center solutions with things like HyperFlex which we've talked a little bit about. And it started off a little slow because again just like they were in servers why are they here? Why are they in hyper-converge? So I get it. And now that product is fully improved and improved and improved and we're seeing tremendous growth there and I think the luxury they have on a data center solution is that some of the other guys have to do a or. "Hey, I'm the leading hyper-converge technology but it's me or everybody else." Right? And then Cisco's an end that I can connect those things together. >> So let's talk about some customer examples you can feel free to anonymize these. I'm seeing a smile on your face. When you come into an organization whether it's a 100 year old bank or it's a born of the Cloud or maybe a smaller more nimble organization that needs to undergo transformation data center transformation. What is the conversation like with respect to helping them take all of these disparate presumably disparate solutions? Whether they're 10-15 different security solutions. How does Insight come in and help them I don't want to say integrate but almost plug these things in together to extract value and help them make sure that what they're implementing from a technology perspective is necessary and also an accelerator of their business? >> Yeah, there's a lot there. So we have this... A year ago everybody wanted to talk about Cloud and then you had the security guys but now you have a lot of change agents with transformation in their title right? And so we have this belief. You're not going to digitally transform. Now there are people that are born digital but companies that were buying Cisco 10 years ago need to go through a digital transformation and you can't go through a digital transformation until you have a data center transformation or an IT transformation. So we've done studies. What slows people down? What makes these fail? Legacy stuff, security concerns I mean these are the top 3 things right. Budget. I was just running the company. And so we start there. Where do you want to get to? And then most of it is let's understand what you have. What your objectives are as an organization. "I want to get to this. I want to get to that." Well before we start talking about technologies. It's very, it's very services oriented. I can't just go in there and throw you a bomb and say this is going to fix your problem 'cause everybody's different. So it is very custom and very services oriented. >> Lisa: But you're saying... >> Stu: I was just going to say it's a pattern I've seen quite a bit for the last couple of years. Step 1 is modernize the platform and then step 2 you can worry about your data and application story on top of that in that multi-cloud world that you live in. >> And step 1 admit you have a problem. >> Yeah. >> (Lisa laughs) >> So we actually did a study you know we do this and we're like. Why does everybody keep stalling why have we been stuck in this nobody's refreshing things and stuff like that? Well there's a lot of new technology they don't get it. But you know do you want to digitally transform? Understand what you need to do. But we ask questions like rate your IT infrastructure just rate it B-minus. Across a lot of large companies that was the grade they gave themselves. So there's a lot of opportunity to say: Okay where do you want to be and where do we start? >> Yeah, 90 percent of people think they are above average drivers. So... >> Drivers? But they think they have a B-Minus in IT infrastructure and it's like Do you consider that a problem? >> Yeah. >> So once you as we wrap here in the next minute or so. Once you get them to admit yeah there's problems here that Insight and other partners come in and improve. Data center transformation, modernizing that infrastructure but it's got to be concurrent with starting to modernize and transform other areas right? >> Absolutely. So you know there's so many places you could start. Sometimes you just go and say well what's your appetite? Every once in a while you get somebody who's ready to go through an entire transformational process. You know 20 million dollars or more of whatever and we get those opportunities those are awesome. Now we get to start back and figure out where you want to be and how to get there most efficiently. A lot of people have to pick and choose. You know, what's your concern right now? And so we'll help them figure that out and again it could be security it could be you know how many people... We have over a thousand enterprise customers running Sequel 2008. That's a problem right? Because that's end of support within a year. That's a problem that's an opportunity. You know so they are still trying to figure out these things. And then a picture of where I want to get to. Which we've kind of always said and that's where that Digital Innovation Group they've got all these AI projects and as we sit here and talk about those things that are kind of born in the Cloud but they're coming towards the infrastructure. It was easy to get a GPU in the Cloud but I'm going to have to start... And so we have actually have all the latest Cisco technology and storage technology of AI stuff in our labs and stuff like that so there's a lot going on. Our CEO would say "It's a really exciting time to be in this business." >> It sounds like it! I wish we had more time to start digging through that but you'll have to come back Kent. >> Okay. >> Alright thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> With Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live. Day 1 of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco, our exclusive coverage, day four, four days of coverage events winding down, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest, Eric Herzog, CUBE alumni, CMO of IBM storage and VP of storage channels, Eric great to see you wearing the Hawaiian shirt as usual. >> Great, I can't come to theCUBE and not wear the Hawaiian shirt. You guys give me too much of a heart attack. >> Love getting you on to get down and dirty on storage and the impact of Cloud and infrastructure. First, you gave a great talk yesterday to a packed house, I saw that on social media, great response, what's going on for you at the show, tell us. >> So the big focuses for us are around four key initiatives. One is multi-cloud particularly from a hybrid perspective and in fact, I had three presenters with me, panelists and users, all of them were using multiple public cloud providers and all of them had a private cloud. One of them also was a software as a service vendor, so clearly they're really monetizing it. So that's one, the second one is around AI, both AI that we use inside of our storage to make it more efficient and more cost effective for the end user, but also as the platform for AI work loads and applications. Cyber resiliency is our other big theme, we've got all kinds of security, yes everyone is used to of course the Great Wall of China protecting you and then of course chasing the bad guy down when they breach you, but when they breach you it'd sure be nice if everything had data at rest encryption, or when you tiered out to the cloud you knew that it was being backed up or tiered out fully encrypted or how about something that can help you with ransomware and malware. So we have that, and that's a storage product not a regular, you know what you think of from a security vendor. So those are the big things that we've been harking on at the show. >> One of the things that I've observed, you've been very active out in the field, we've seen you at a lot of different events, Cisco Live, others, you guys have had an interesting storage product portfolio, very broad and specific leadership categories, but you also have the ability to work with other partners. This has been a big part of your strategy, you get the channels. What is, how would you summarize the current story around IBM storage and systems, because it's now an ingredient part of other people's infrastructure with cloud storage then becomes a key equation, how would you describe the IBM storage posture, product portfolio, what are the key things? >> So I think the key thing from a portfolio perspective, while it looks broad it's really four things. Software defined storage which we also happened to have bet on on array so theoretically that's one product line, same exact software. Other vendors don't do that, they have an array pack and you buy the array but if you buy their software defined storage it's actually different software, for us it's the same software. Then we have modern data protection and then we have management playing. That's kind of it. I do think one of the big differentiator for us, is even though we're part of IBM, we have already been working with everyone any way. So as we talked about at Cisco Live, for Spectrum Protect alone, our modern data protection platform, we have 400 small and medium cloud service providers all over the world that their back up service is based on it, so even though IBM Cloud has their own cloud division theoretically, we're enabling the competition but we've had that story at IBM storage now for four years. >> So storage anywhere basically is the theme here, AI anywhere storage anywhere, I mean it's not the official tagline but that's the philosophy with software. >> And that's yeah, so even if you think look at AI. We have an AI reference architecture with the power product line, we also have an AI reference architecture with the Nvidia product line, and we're working on a third one right now with another major server vendor because we want our storage to be anywhere there's AI and anywhere there's a cloud, big medium or small. >> Alright, Eric let's tease that out a little bit because I had a great conversation with an IBM fellow yesterday and we think back ten years ago, when you talked about hybrid and multi cloud, when you talked about an application it's "Am I spanning between environments? "Am I bursting between environments?" And architectures just didn't work that way. Today microservices architecture, there's pieces of the solution that can live in lots of environments, Compute I can spin up almost anywhere at any time, data doesn't move and I need to worry about my data, I need to worry about security so there's certain things that multi cloud like data protection, cyber resiliency, those kind of ones need to live everywhere, but when I talk about storage, I'm not moving my storage and my persistent database all over the place. So help us kind of tease out as to what is the multi everywhere and what is the you know the data that the Compute's going to actually move to that data, help us squint through that a little bit. >> So let's do the storage part first. So most applications, workloads, and use cases that are either business critical or mission critical are going to stay on prem, doesn't mean you can't use a public cloud provider for overflow whether that be IBM or Amazon or Microsoft or like I said the 400 cloud providers that we sell to that are not IBM, so but you're still going to have this hybridness where the data is partially on prem and off prem, in that case you're going to be using the public cloud provider, and by the way we did a survey, IBM did, and when you're looking enterprise, so let's say companies that are three or four billion US and up, anywhere in the world, you're seeing that most of them are using five or six different public clouds, whether that be salesforce.com which really is sales enablement software as a service. We have a startup that we work with who uses IBM's flash system and they do cyber security as a service, that's their whole business. So all of this software vendors that now deliver not on prem but you know over the cloud. Then you've got regular public cloud providers for file, block, and object for example we not only support IBM Cloud object storage protocol, but S3. So we have customers that put data out in S3, we have customers that put it out on other clouds because as you know S3's become the de facto standard so all the mid to small cloud providers use it. So I think what you've got is hybrid cloud is a sort of a subset of multi cloud and then multi cloud what you're seeing is because of software as service could even be geographic issues, we have a lot of data centers at IBM Cloud so do the three major cloud providers, but we are not in all 212 countries so if you have the law like in Canada where the data has to physically stay within the premises of Canada, now we all happen to have data centers that are big enough, but that doesn't mean we have data centers in every country, so you have legal issues, you have applications what applications are good, that make sense, what about pricing, and as you know some big companies still buy regionally. >> Eric, one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is the SAS providers because if we look at the storage market in many ways, you know there was like the threat of public cloud, but really you got to follow the application, follow the data and as SAS proliferation happens, your data is going to go with that, you know you have them as customers in a lot of environments, what are you seeing from the SAS providers, how do they choose what offerings they have and how do they look at their data center versus public cloud mix? >> So when you look at a SAS provider, they've got a couple of different parameters that they look at which is why we've been very successful. One is performance, they already know their subject to the vicissitudes of the cloud so you can't have any bottle neck in your core data center because you're serving that app up, and if it's too slow or it doesn't work right, then of course the end user will go buy a different piece of software from another SAS provider. Second one is availability, because you have no idea when wiki bomb theCUBE is going to turn on that service, it could be the middle of the night right? If you guys expand to Asia, you guys will be asleep but your guy in Australia will be using that software, so it can't ever go down, so availability. Resiliency, can it handle pounding. If CUBE wiki bomb becomes ginormous, and you buy all these other analyst firms and the next thing you know the biggest analyst firm in the world, if you have thousands of people guess what now you're hammering on that software, so it's got to be able to take that workload abuse, right? And that's the kind of thing, so they look for that. >> That's scale basically, scale is critical. >> Right, they cannot have any issues of resiliency or availability and performance so A: they're usually going all flash, some of them will buy like a tape or the older all hard drive arrays as a backup store, ideal for IBM cloud object storage but again the main thing they focus on is flash because they're serving up that software. >> Let me ask you a question, so I know you've been in this business for a long time, storage you know everything about the speeds and fees but also you've been a historian too, you're on the front edge. IBM has got a killer strategy with cloud private, doing very well with Openshift and Redhat acquisition, you're now poised to essentially bring cloud scale across multiple clouds and with AI, it really puts storage at the center of the action. How is storage now positioned and how should customers think about storage, because scale is table stakes, enabling developers to program infrastructure as code, how does storage and how has it changed and how are you guys positioned to take advantage of that? How would you kind of explain that to a customer? >> Yeah so I think there's a couple of changes, first of all you're looking for a storage vendor which should be us, but you're looking for a storage vendor that is always making sure, for example when micro services first came out and containers, okay great except when containers came out and it's still a problem, you don't have storage consistency whereas in a VM ware or a hyper V or you know KVM environment, you do. So when you move things around, you don't lose the dataset, well we have persistency storage. So the key thing that you want to look for is a storage vendor that will stay on that leading edge as you move. Our copy data manager has an API so the developers can spit up their own environments but use real data, so as you guys know well from your pasts that the last thing you want to do is have the dev ops guy be developing things on faux datasets, try to put it in production, and then the real dataset doesn't work, at the same time if they put it out to a public cloud provider you could have a legal or security breach, right? So by being able to take modern data protection, as an example, and not just to have grandfather, father son back up, we all remember that I remember it better than you guys since I'm older, but that's back up right? It's not back up any more, it's modern data protection. You need to be able to take the snapshot, the replica or the back up dataset and use it for development, so you want a storage vendor that's going to be on the leading edge of that. We've done that at IBM on the Kenner side, the modern data protection side, and we'll continue to the do that. The whole multi cloud thing, IBM as you know is now all about multi cloud, what Redhat's been in, the storage division of IBM has been working with Redhat for 15 years. Going to the Redhat summit every year, I know you guys do theCUBE from there sometimes. >> You're on, but this is software defined so at the end of the day a software defined bet with arrays have paid off. >> Yes. >> You'd say that would be kind of a key linchpin. >> I would argue that, while there's some hardware aspects to it, so for example our flash core modules give us a big differentiator from a flash perspective, in general the number one differentiator for a strong, powerful array vendor is actually the underlying software code. The RAID stack, what you can wrap around it, file block and object support, what could you enhance, our Spectrum discover, allowing you to use metadata about unstructured data whether that be in the file space of the object store. That allows the data scientist to dramatically reduce the time it takes to prep the data when they're doing either AI or an analytic workload, so we just saved them money but we're really a storage company that came up with something that a data scientist could use because we understand how storage is at the central foundation and how you could literally use the metadata for something actually valuable, not to a storage person because a data scientist is not the storage guy of course. >> Yeah and Eric I would love to get your feedback, what are some of those key discussions you're having with customers here at the show? We've been talking a lot this week digital transformation, AI into everything there, are those some of the themes? What are the struggles that really the enterprises of today are facing and how your group's helping them? >> So one of the big things is understanding that it's going to be multi cloud and so because we've already been the Switzerland of the storage industry and working with every cloud provider, all the big ones, including ones that compete with our own sister division, but all the little small ones too, right? And all the software as service vendors we work with that we're the safe bet, you don't have to worry about it. Because whoever you pick, or for a big enterprise, in fact I had Aetna on stage with me and he said he's using seven different clouds, one of which is their private cloud and then six different cloud providers they use, and he said not counting salesforce.com and I forgot the other name, so really if you count the softwares there, she really got like nine clouds. She said I use IBM cause I know it's going to work with whoever, and you're not going to say oh I don't work with this one or that one. So that's been obviously making sure everyone realizes that, the whole company is embracing it as you saw and what we're going to do obviously with Redhat and continue for them to participate with all of their existing customer base that they've been doing for years. >> So you see multi cloud and sweet spot, that highlights your value proposition, would you say that to be true? >> I would say that and then the second one is around AI. All the storage vendors including us have had AI sort of inside, what I'll call inside of the box, inside of the array and use that to make the array better, but now with AI being ubiquitous from a work load perspective, you have to have the right foundation underneath that, again performance resiliency availability, if you're going to use AI in a giant car factory, and it's going to run all of those machines, you better make sure the thing never fails because then the assembly line goes down and those things are hundreds of millions of dollars of build every day. So that's the kind of thing you got to look for, so AI's got to have the right platform underneath it as well. >> Eric you have some reporting from the field as you're out in the, doing a lot of talks a lot of customers, give it a couple of anecdotal examples of where the leading edge is in storage and where are use cases that would be a good tell sign of where this kind of multi cloud is going. Can you just give some examples of the use cases, situation, and kind of why is that relevant for where everyone will be going? Where is the puck going to be, so I can skate to where the puck is, as they say. >> So from a multi cloud perspective, A: you've got to deal with how your company is structured, if you have a divisionalized company or one that really lets the regions make their own buy decisions, then you may have NTT Cloud in Japan, you may have Ali Baba in China, you may have IBM Cloud Australia, and then you might have Amazon in Latin America. And as IT guys you got to make sure you're dealing with that, and embrace it. One of the things I think from an IT perspective is why I'm wearing the Hawaiian shirt, you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. And that's what everyone's got to realize so, they're going to use multi cloud, and remember the cloud was the web was the internet, it's actually all the same stuff from a long time ago, the mid 90's, which also means now procurement's involved and when procurement's involved, what are they going to say to you? Did you get a bid from IBM Cloud, did you see that bid from Amazon and Microsoft? So it's changed the whole thing of, I can just go to any cloud I want to, now procurement's involved that even mid-size companies procurement says you did get another bid right, did you not? Which for server, storage, and network vendors that's been the way it's been for 35, 40 years. >> The bids are changing too, so what are the requirements now? Amazon has a cloud, they have storage, you have storage, but people have on premise they have multiple environments. If the world is one big data center, with multiple regions and locations, this is the resilience you spoke of, what's the new requirements as procurement gets involved because procurement isn't dictating the requirements, they're getting the requirements from the application work loads and the infrastructure, so what are the new requirements that you see? >> So I think the thing you're seeing is if you take cloud just a couple years ago, I'm going to put my storage out there, okay great, I need this kind of availability, ooh that's extra money, sorry Mr. Wikibomb, Mr. CUBE we got to charge you a little extra for that. Oh we need a certain amount of performance, oh that's a little extra. And then for heavy transactional work loads the data's constantly moving back and forth, oh we forgot to tell you that we're charging you every time you move the data in and every time you move the data out. So as you're putting together these RFPs you needs to be aware of that. >> Those are hidden costs. >> Those are hidden costs that are, I think the reason you're seeing such the ride of the hybrid is people went to public cloud and then someone in finance, or maybe even in the IT group sat down with a spread sheet and said "Oh my god, we could've just bought an IBM array "or someone else's array" and actually had less money even counting support, because all every time we're moving the data, but for archive, for back up we don't move the data around a lot, it's a great solution for anything. Then you have the whole factoring of software as a service, so part of that is the software itself, if you're going to go up against salesforce.com then whoever does, they better make sure the software's good, then on top of that again you negotiate with the software vendor, I need it globally, okay what's the fee for that? So I think the IT guys need to understand that with the ubiquity of the cloud, you've got to ask way more questions, in the storage array business, everyone's got five nines and almost everybody's got six nines, well way back when it was four nines then it was five and now it's six, so you don't ask anymore because you know it just changes right? And the cloud is still new enough and the whole software as a service is a different angle, and a lot of people don't even realize software as a service is cloud, but when you say that they go, what are you talking about, it's just I'm getting it over a service. Where do you think it comes from? A cloud data center. >> Well the trend is software defined, you guys are on that early. Congratulations, and don't forget the hardware, the high performance hardware as well, arrays and what not. So great job. Eric thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Great, thank you very much. >> CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day four of our live coverage here in Moscone North, in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. Great packed house here at IBM Think, back for more coverage after this short break. (electronic outro music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are with NetApp in their booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Welcoming Mike McGibbney to theCUBE, from SAP. You're the SVP of SuccessFactors Service, Delivery and Operations. Welcome. >> Well, thank you. >> So, SuccessFactors, largest people cloud in the world. So you probably a little bit busy. >> Just a little bit. >> Tell us about what you're doing at SuccessFactors. >> So I'm responsible for the delivery and operation of the cloud service. So we service all of our customers and continue to introduce new capabilities into that cloud. We support them from payroll, all the way through recruitment. Basically, from hire to retire. >> So Mike, not your first cloud. Little background and history. Me and Mike have been on the, well probably one of the toughest projects, politically, I've ever been on. >> Yes, definitely. >> So there's history, but great history. We deliver success. This isn't your first cloud. >> No. >> You've built clouds before. What's fundamentally different about the SAP people cloud versus clouds you've built in the past? >> I think the speed. The way this is accelerating, both the breadth of the capabilities that we're offering when you think about the integrations into SAP, and the growth. So this is moving truly at cloud speed. The things that we're shooting for today are already past. So we constantly have to be focused out there on the horizon. We've gotta adapt very quickly. And we've gotta implement very quickly. Our customers need it to accelerate their business. And our services need that support underneath them as well. >> So you guys, as you said, have this, have this long history, so I'll let you guys chat in a minute. But in terms of customer experience, customer engagement, customer influence, that was kind of a lot of undertone in the keynote this morning. 50 million business users on SuccessFactors and 60 industries. How do you, needing to get to the speed that you just mentioned how do you get that customer feedback to drive evolution of the product as fast as they're demanding it? >> Well, so the product and engineering team have a whole system around customer engagements with delivery panels and steering committees. But from an operations side, we felt that it was important as well. We have a whole organization that is focused on engaging the customer. We built our operational centers. And we do probably about 60 customer tours a year through our operational centers. We also do about 200 customer calls from the operational team a month. So globally, we work with the pre-sales, the CEE groups, and some of the other SAP support groups, to make sure that we have boots on the ground, understanding what our customers want, understanding what their experience is, so we can continue to adjust and reset the bar where it needs to be. >> So Lisa, I'm not gonna dominate the conversation. Me and Mike can probably, we'll crack open a beer in a minute, (laughter) and we'll continue. But there's other hero numbers on the stage. Let's talk about the high level first and then me and Mike can geek out. What are some of the other Xers reveals? >> Oh, good question. I think just some of the industries. I always like to see which industries are kind of leading edge here. So he mentioned 23,000 HANA users and 25 different industries. And I'm curious, that's a lot. And I'm curious to see what some of the key use cases are that you guys are driving with helping some customers in many industries that hire to retire. What are some of the key use cases that you're helping those customers to drive? >> Well, I think we have a good presence in about every vertical, from both the public and the private sector. The suite of tools that we have, service the entire, each of those use cases. I think when you start to think about the SAP suite and the integration story that they talked about, with the intelligence and the analytics on top, that just takes it to another level. And I think that's really underlying important message. I think and that's what's gonna help, not only SuccessFactors, but SAP continue to drive and lead across the board. >> So can we talk a little bit about customer interaction? I think traditionally, you've served up infrastructures to developers directly. But a lot of cases, your direct customer may be your actual business user looking to transform digitally. Talk about the experience, the difference in experience of running the cloud that was consumed by other technologies, to potentially running a cloud that's centered on people who are thinking about people and customers. >> Yeah, that's a great question because these are business-critical activities. You think about something like learning, right? That's used to certify pilots before they can take off. So we can actually, the availability and the delivery of that service, is critical. Large amusement parks have to certify all the ride handlers. So this thing has to be available 24 by seven, 365 days a week. And that's just something like learning. When you think about some of the other facets, they are entrenched in our customers' modern business processes. And they're all critical. So when we look at these, we have to look at 'em like we used to, some of the most critical functions in the backend. So we run them like you would, from an operational perspective, like a bank, okay? With that resilience, those practices, that focus. But we also have to do it at the speed of cloud. (laughs) >> I was just gonna ask that question. You have two competing episodes. You know, I like to, well, people. Well, SAP process is 70 percent of the transactions in the world. It is called, has been called, the cash register of the cloud. It is the ultimate system of record. Therefore, it should never be touched. However, we have to move fast. We have to digitally transform their commercial entities that want to build cool new applications on Fiori, et cetera. There are other business integrations. How do you weigh those two, what seems like competing interests? >> I think Bert laid out the data strategy and how we're gonna integrate the data across the suite. And that's gonna be the key, right? Instead of integrating and porting to, we're gonna have single sources of data where data is gonna reside. We're gonna use that as a system of record, as the suite evolves. That'll give it the data integrity that it needs, also the performance and integration perspective. >> So we're sponsored by the data driven company, NetApp, who is powering one of the most powerful data platforms on the planet, SAP. Talk about the relationship and importance of NetApps, NetApp vision in supporting your vision. >> So NetApp was here at SAP long before I started, but I have a, probably a 20 year, probably 17 to 20 year history, with that app. And you know, data is critical. The storage, the access, the performance. And they've been a critical part of almost every architecture I've worked on today. Rock solid performance, rock solid reliability, but more important to me, is the partnership with the company, and the support that we get. Not just on the stuff that we're doing today, but thinking about how we're gonna change in the future, and supporting us as we evolve, and helping us plan and think through that as well. >> One of the things that Bill talked about this morning, as well, is getting to this 4th gen of customer experience. That these expectations, we've talked about speed. That it's, everything has to be done yesterday, right? How are you guys working with NetApp delivering that 4th generation customer experience, internally and to your 50 million business users? >> Well, I think you touched on bits and pieces of it. It's a whole suite of-- It's a whole program of plans, right? Between Fiori, you know, all those things in the front end, where the customer touches. But in the backend, it's about speed and reliability to their data, right? So our architectures are getting simplified. Our data's getting condensed. We need the compliance pieces and that's where NetApp kinda play a core role in, in those pieces. >> So back in traditional infrastructures and operations, we could tell speeds and feeds as one of the best features of why you should use one service over another. As you describe the way, everyone expects speeds and feeds. What are some of the value props or KPIs for your new environment? >> So, we've really shifted. So one of the things that we've done is we've actually added operational intelligence. So we have basically a brain that sits on top of our cloud environment. It looks at all of the transactions. It filters out all the noise. So the speeds and feeds are part of a, now a service or a business function, that we're delivering. That metric down by itself is important. But unless you can correlate it to some business impact, or something happening, it doesn't really have the weight that it needs. >> Right. >> So now what we're looking at is we've ingested and mapped all of the business transactions. We can proactively focus on the ones. So we filter out 99 and change percent of the noise. And then we prorate the things that we need to kinda pivot and focus on. We have three global operational centers around the world. One in Budapest. One in Bangalore. And one in Reston. And then we have a global operation center that sits on the top, so the regionals sit in the region. And they look at all of that feedback from that intelligence. >> So getting those key performance indicators out of the system As I looked at LinkedIn, I looked at some of the common folks we have. You have a pretty consistent core team that support you over the past two or three different major iterations you've done. Talk through how collectively your team has looked at new innovations and operation deliveries such as DevOps. And you've changed the way that your core team approaches these challenges and the outcomes that you've been able to realize. >> So for us, it's about, you know the architecture and technology evolves. As it evolves, it makes a few things simpler. And also, introduces some usually more complex challenges. But it's mitigating risk, delivering performance and reliability, and maturing your actions. So if we do those basic things as we mature the technology underneath, we can drive that. So the team has been focused on, when we think about DevOps, we think about delivering seamlessly new capabilities, features into the cloud. How do we do that with a minimized risk, through automation, and seamless, right? So it's how we segmented the application, how we built the resilience in, how our processes understand and validate and be able to stand in if something happens. >> I'm wondering on that, from maybe a pivot is, we talk about often times, at different events. Whether we're talking about advanced analytics or data science skills gap. Or I think Bill even said like, upskilling. Think I heard that term this morning. I'm curious, as you were saying that, that the folks that you've been working with for a long time on different projects. What are some of the skills that they're able to, you may be able to enable them to learn, by being part of SAP? Is it something that helps accelerate their ability to develop even better, more competitive products? >> Yeah, so SAP has one of the best talent pools I've ever seen across. Some very brilliant people in every business line. So there's best practices that can be learned from everything that we do. All you have to do is be able to have the conversations and look around. When we brought the team in, about two years ago, we did a whole skills analyses, gap analyses, of the skills that we had. We looked at our operating model, created a new operating model that was enabling us to evolve from an operational perspective. And then put plans in place, and use the tools that we sell to help deliver development to the team. So basically, we became our own customer. We drove development of our, upskilling our existing resources, and we supplemented where needed. And we also pulled from the collective knowledge of SAP. So doing those three things, helped us really accelerate and execute something that typically would take three years in less than 12 months. >> Last question, Mike, for you. This morning's energetic keynote, we've talked about it a number of times already today. Really, I think somebody on the show earlier said, likened Bill McDermott to kind of, really an evangelist, which is really refreshing. You don't see a lot of C-levels that are that, where you can feel and kinda see their passion. The SAP has been very vocal for a while about really wanting to disrupt the marketplace for CRM. Some big news coming out today. I'm just wondering, kind of culturally, to wrap this up, what excites you about this train that you're on at SAP? >> I think that the message is electrifying. And inside of SAP, you feel that. So we've been feeling it as these bits and pieces have been coming out over the last year. So this is just a culmination of all the little pieces that we've known inside and we're able to share externally. So I'm extremely excited about where we're at and where we're going. And obviously, anytime I get to hear Bill speak, it just amplifies it. >> Yeah, that energy was really, you can feel it from wherever you were. It was awesome. Mike, thanks so much for stopping by and catching up with your old buddy Keith and me and sharing what you guys are doing with SuccessFactors. >> Excellent, excellent. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for -- Oh sorry, and thanks for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP SAPPHIRE in the NetApp booth. Thanks for watching. (fast tempo music)