>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector Welcome to the cubes Coverage of AWS 2020. This is specialized programming for the worldwide public sector. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by Mick Boccaccio, the security advisor at Splunk Met. Welcome to the Q Virtual Oh, >>thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >>So you have a really interesting background that I wanted to share with our audience. You were the first see so in the history of U. S presidential campaigns with Mayor Pete, you were also branch shape of Threat intelligence at the executive office of the President. Tell us something about about your background is so interesting. >>Uh, yeah, those and I'm a gonna Def con and I teach lock picking for funds. Ease working for Mayor Pete A. C. So the campaign was really, really unique opportunity and I'm glad I did it. I'm hoping that, you know, on both sides of the aisle, no matter what your political preference, people realize that security and campaigns can only be married together. That was an incredible experience and worked with Mayor P. And I learned so much about how campaigns work and just the overall political process. And then previous to that being at the White House and a threat intelligence, role of branch chief they're working over the last election, the 2016 election. I think I learned probably more than any one person wants Thio about elections over that time. So, you know, I'm just a security nerd. That kind of fell into those things. And and and here I am and really, really, really just fortunate to have had those experiences. >>Your phone and your email must have been blowing up the last couple of weeks in the wake of the US presidential election, where the word fraud has brought up many times everyday. But election security. When I saw that you were the first, see so for Pete Buddha Judge, that was so recent, I thought, Really, Why? Why are they just now getting folks like yourself? And you are a self described a cybersecurity nerd? Why are they Why were they just recently starting to catch on to this? >>I think it's, uh like security on the campaign and security anywhere else on credit to the Buddha Judge campaign. There is no federal or mandate or anything like that that says your campaign has toe have a security person at the head of it or any standards to implement those security. So you know that the Buddha Judge campaign kind of leaned into it. We wanna be secure. We saw everything that happened in 2016. We don't want that to be us. And I think Mawr campaigns are getting on that plane. Definitely. You know, you saw recently, uh, Trump's campaign, Biden's campaign. They all had a lot of security folks in, and I think it's the normal. Now people realize how important security is. Uh, not only a political campaign, but I guess the political process overall, >>absolutely. We've seen the rise of cyber attacks and threats and threat vectors this year alone, Ransomware occurring. Everyone attack every 11 seconds or so I was reading recently. So give me an other view of what the biggest threats are right now. >>Two elections and I think the election process in general. You know, like I said, I'm just a security nerd. I've just got a weird background and done some really unique things. Eso I always attack the problems like I'm a security nerd and it comes down to, you know that that triumvirate, the people process and technology people need had to have faith in the process. Faith in the technology. You need to have a a clear source to get their information from the process. To me, I think this year, more than previous elections highlighted the lack of a federal uniforms standard for federal elections. State the state. We have different, different standards, and that kind of leads to confusion with people because, hey, my friend in Washington did it this way. But I'm in Texas and we do it this way. And I think that that standard would help a lot in the faith in the system. And then the last part of that. The technology, uh, you know, voting machines campaigns like I mentioned about campaigns. There's nothing that says a campaign has toe have a security person or a security program, and I think those are the kind of standards for, you know, just voting machines. Um, that needs to be a standard across the board. That's uniforms, so people will will have more faith because It's not different from state to state, and it's a uniformed process. >>E think whole country could have benefited from or uniformed processes in 2020. But one of the things that I like I did my first male and fellow this year always loved going and having that in person voting experience and putting on my sticker. And this year I thought in California we got all of our But there was this massive rise in mainland ballots. I mean, think about that and security in terms of getting the public's confidence. What are some of the things that you saw that you think needs to be uniforms going forward >>again? I think it goes back to when When you look at, you know, you voted by mail and I voted absentee and your ballot was due by this date. Um, you know where I live? Voting absentee. It's Dubai. This state needs we received by the state. Andi, I think this year really highlighted the differences between the states, and I'm hoping that election security and again everyone has done a super fantastic job. Um, sister has done incredible. If you're all their efforts for the working with election officials, secretaries of states on both sides of the aisle. It's an incredible work, and I hope it continues. I think the big problem election security is you know, the election is over, so we don't care again until 2022 or 2024. And I think putting something like a federalized standard, whether it be technology or process putting that in place now so that we're not talking about this in two or four years. I'm hoping that moment, um, continues, >>what would your recommendation be from building security programs to culture and awareness? How would you advise that they start? >>So, uh, one of the things that when I was on the Buddha Judge campaign, you know, like I said, we was the first person to do security for a campaign. And a lot of the staffers didn't quite have the background of professional background of work with security person. No, you know why? What I was doing there Eso my hallmark was You know, I'm trying to build a culture heavy on the cult. Um, you got to get people to buy in. I think this year when you look at what What Krebs and siesta and where the team over there have done is really find a way to tell us. Security story and every facet of the election, whether it be the machines themselves, the transporting the votes, counting the votes, how that information gets out to people websites I started like rumor control, which were were amazing amazing efforts. The public private partnerships that were there I had a chance to work with, uh, MJ and Tanya from from AWS some election project. I think everyone has skin in the game. Everyone wants to make it better. And I hope that moment, um, continues. But I think, you know, embracing that there needs to be a centralized, uniformed place, uh, for every state. And I think that would get rid of a lot of confusion >>when you talk about culture and you mentioned specifically called Do you think that people and agencies and politicians are ready to embrace the culture? Is there enough data to support that? This is really serious. We need to embrace this. We need to buy in a You said, um >>I hope right. I don't know what it could take. I'm hoping so after seeing everything you know, being at the White House from that aperture in 2016. Seeing all of that, I would, you know, think right away. Oh, my gosh. 2018, The midterms, We're gonna be on the ball. And that really didn't happen like we thought it would. 2020. We saw a different kind of technical or I guess, not as technical, uh, security problem. And I think I'm kind of shifting from that to the future. People realize. And I think, uh, both sides of the aisle are working towards security programs and security posture. I think there's a lot of people that have bought into the idea. Um, but I think it kind of starts from the top, and I'm hoping it becomes a standard, so there's not really an option. You will do this just for the security and safety of the campaigns and the electoral process. But I do see a lot more people leaning into it, and a lot more resource is available for those people that are >>talk to me about kind of the status of awareness of security. Needing to combat these issues, be able to remediate them, be able to defend against them where our folks in that awareness cycle, >>I think it ebbs and flows like any other process. Any other you know, incident, event. That happens. And from my experience in the info SEC world, normally there's a compromise. There's an incident, a bunch of money gets thrown at it and then we forget about it a year or two later. Um, I think that culture, that awareness comes in when you have folks that would sustain that effort. And again, you know, on the campaign, um, even at the White House, we try to make everyone apart of security. Security is and all the time thing that everyone has a stake in. Um, you know, I can lock down your email at work. I can make sure this system is super super secure, but it's your personal threat model. You know, your personal email account, your personal social media, putting more security on those and being aware of those, I think that's that awareness is growing. And I Seymour folks in the security community just kind of preaching that awareness more and more and something I'm really, really excited about. >>Yeah, the biggest thing I always think when we talk about security is people that were the biggest threat vector and what happened 89 months ago when so many businesses, um, in any, you know, public sector and private went from on site almost maybe 100% on site to 100% remote people suddenly going, I've got to get connected through my home network. Maybe I'm on my own personal device and didn't really have the time of so many distractions to recognize a phishing email just could come in and propagate. So it's that the people challenge e always seems to me like that might be the biggest challenge. Besides, the technology in the process is what do you think >>I again it goes back. I think it's all part of it. I think. People, um, I've >>looked at it >>slightly. Ah, friend of mine made a really good point. Once he was like, Hey, people gonna click on the link in the email. It's just I think 30% of people dio it's just it's just the nature of people after 20 some odd years and info sec, 20 some odd years and security. I think we should have maybe done a better job of making that link safer, to click on, to click on to make it not militias. But again it goes back, Thio being aware, being vigilant and to your point. Since earlier this year, we've seen a tax increase exponentially specifically on remote desktop protocols from Cove. It related themes and scams and, you know, ransomware targeting healthcare systems. I think it's just the world's getting smaller and we're getting more connected digitally. That vigilance is something you kind of have to building your threat model and build into the ecosystem. When we're doing everything, it's just something you know. I quit a lot, too. You've got junk email, your open your mailbox. You got some junk mail in there. You just throw it out. Your email inbox is no different, and just kind of being aware of that a little more than we are now might go a long way. But again, I think security folks want to do a better job of kind of making these things safer because malicious actors aren't going away. >>No, they're definitely not going away that we're seeing the threat surfaces expanding. I think it was Facebook and TIC Tac and Instagram that were hacked in September. And I think it was unsecured cloud database that was the vehicle. But talking about communication because we talk about culture and awareness communication from the top down Thio every level is imperative. How how do we embrace that and actually make it a standard as possible? >>Uh, in my experience, you know, from an analyst to a C So being able to communicate and communicate effectively, it's gonna save your butt, right? It's if you're a security person, you're You're that cyber guy in the back end, something just got hacked or something just got compromised. I need to be able to communicate that effectively to my leadership, who is gonna be non technical people, and then that leadership has to communicate it out to all the folks that need to hear it. I do think this year just going back to our elections, you saw ah lot of rapid communication, whether it was from DHS, whether it was from, you know, public partners, whether was from the team over Facebook or Twitter, you know, it was ah, lot of activity that they detected and put out as soon as they found it on it was communicated clearly, and I thought the messaging was done beautifully. When you look at all the work that you know Microsoft did on the block post that came out, that information is put out as widely as possible on. But I think it just goes back to making sure that the people have access to it whenever they need it, and they know where to get it from. Um, I think a lot of times you have compromised and that information is slow to get out. And you know that DeLay just creates a confusion, so it clearly concisely and find a place for people, could get it >>absolutely. And how do you see some of these challenges spilling over into your role as the security advisor for Splunk? What are some of the things that you're talking with customers about about right now that are really pressing issues? >>I think my Rolex Plunkett's super super weird, because I started earlier in the year, I actually started in February of this year and a month later, like, Hey, I'm hanging out at home, Um, but I do get a chance to talk to ah, lot of organizations about her security posture about what they're doing. Onda about what they're seeing and you know everything. Everybody has their own. Everybody's a special snowflakes so much more special than others. Um, credit to Billy, but people are kind of seeing the same thing. You know, everybody's at home. You're seeing an increase in the attack surface through remote desktop. You're seeing a lot more fishing. You're singing just a lot. People just under computer all the time. Um, Zoom WebEx I've got like, I don't know, a dozen different chat clients on my computer to talk to people. And you're seeing a lot of exploits kind of coming through that because of that, people are more vigilant. People are adopting new technologies and new processes and kind of finding a way to move into a new working model. I see zero trust architecture becoming a big thing because we're all at home. We're not gonna go anywhere. And we're online more than we're not. I think my circadian rhythm went out the window back in July, so all I do is sit on my computer more often than not. And that caused authentication, just, you know, make sure those assets are secure that we're accessing from our our work resource is I think that gets worse and worse or it doesn't. Not worse, rather. But that doesn't go away, no matter what. Your model is >>right. And I agree with you on that circadian rhythm challenge. Uh, last question for you. As we look at one thing, we know this uncertainty that we're living in is going to continue for some time. And there's gonna be some elements of this that air gonna be permanent. We here execs in many industries saying that maybe we're going to keep 30 to 50% of our folks remote forever. And tech companies that air saying Okay, maybe 50% come back in July 2021. As we look at moving into what we all hope will be a glorious 2021 how can businesses prepare now, knowing some amount of this is going to remain permanent? >>It's a really interesting question, and I'll beyond, I think e no, the team here. It's Plunkett's constantly discussions that start having are constantly evaluating, constantly changing. Um, you know, friends in the industry, it's I think businesses and those executives have to be ready to embrace change as it changes. The same thing that the plans we would have made in July are different than the plans we would have made in November and so on. Andi, I think, is having a rough outline of how we want to go. The most important thing, I think, is being realistic with yourself. And, um, what, you need to be effective as an organization. I think, you know, 50% folks going back to the office works in your model. It doesn't, But we might not be able to do that. And I think that constant ability Thio, adjust. Ah, lot of company has kind of been thrown into the fire. I know my backgrounds mostly public sector and the federal. The federal Space has done a tremendous shift like I never well, rarely got to work, uh, vert remotely in my federal career because I did secret squirrel stuff, but like now, the federal space just leaning into it just they don't have an option. And I think once you have that, I don't I don't think you put Pandora back in that box. I think it's just we work. We work remote now. and it's just a new. It's just a way of working. >>Yep. And then that couldn't be more important to embrace, change and and change over and over again. Make. It's been great chatting with you. I'd love to get dig into some of that secret squirrel stuff. I know you probably have to shoot me, so we will go into that. But it's been great having you on the Cube. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on election security. People processes technology, communication. We appreciate it. >>All right. Thanks so much for having me again. >>My pleasure for McClatchy. Oh, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube virtual.

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news.

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! (upbeat electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I want to share with you some recent survey data that talks to the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, which closed today. It's always really valuable to go out, talk to practitioners, see what they're doing, and it's a hard thing to do. It's very expensive to get this type of survey data. A lot of times, it's very much out of date. You might remember. Some of you might remember a company called the InfoPro. Its founder and CEO was Ken Male, and he raised some money from Gideon Gartner, and he had this awesome survey panel. Well, somehow it failed. Well, friends of mine at ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, have basically created a modern version of the InfoPro. It's the InfoPro on steroids with a modern interface and data science behind it. They've now been at this for 10 years. They built a panel of 4,500 users, practitioners that they can go to, a lot of C level folks, a lot of VP level and then some doers down at the engineering level, and they go out and periodically survey these folks, and one of the surveys they did back in October was what do you think of the IBM-Red Hat acquisition? And then they've periodically gone out and talked to customers of both Red Hat and IBM or both to get a sense of the sentiment. So given that the acquisition closed today, we wanted to share some of that data with you, and our friends at ETR shared with us some of their drill down data with us, and we're going to share it with you. So first of all, I want to summarize something that they said. Back in October, they said, "We view this acquisition as less of an attempt "by IBM to climb into the cloud game, cloud relevance, "but rather a strategic opportunity "to reboot IBM's early 1990s IT services business strategy." I couldn't agree with that more. I've said all along this is a services play connecting OpenShift from Red Hat into the what Ginni Rometty talks about as the 80% of the install base that is still on prem with the workloads at the backend of mission critical systems that need to be modernized. That's IBM's opportunity. That's why this is a front end loaded cashflow deal 'cause IBM can immediately start doing business through it services organization and generate cash. They went on to say, ETR said, "Here, IBM could position itself "as the de facto IT services partner "for Fortune 100 to Global 2000 organizations "and their digital transformations. "Therefore, in theory, this could reinvigorate "the global services business for IBM "and their overlapping customer bases "could alow IBM to recapture and accelerate a great deal "of service revenues that they have lost "over the past few years." Again, I couldn't agree more. It's less about a cloud play. It is definitely about a multi-cloud play, which is how IBM's positioning this, but services de-risks this entire acquisition in my opinion even though it's very large, 34 billion. Okay, I'm show you some data. So pull up this slide. So what ETR does is they'll go out. So this is a survey of right after the acquisition of about 132 Global 2000 practitioners across a bunch of different industries, energy, utilities, financial services, government, healthcare, IT, telco, retail consumers, so a nice cross section of industries and largely in North America but a healthy cross section of AMIA and APAC. And again, these are large enterprises. So what this slide shows is conditioned responses, which I love conditioned responses. It sort of forces people to answer which of the following best describes. But this says, "Given IBM's intent to acquire Red Hat, "do you believe your organization will be more likely "to use this new combination "or less likely in your digital transformation?" You can see here on the left hand side, the green, 23% positive, on the right hand side, 13% negative. So, the data doesn't necessarily support ETR's original conclusions and my belief that this all about services momentum because most IT people are going to wait and see. So you can see the fat middle there is 64%. Basically you're saying, "Yeah, we're going to wait and see. "This really doesn't change anything." But nonetheless, you see a meaningfully more positive sentiment than negative sentiment. The bottom half of this slide shows, the question is, "Do you believe that this acquisition "makes or will make IBM a legitimate competitor "in the cloud wars between AWS and Microsoft Azure?" You can see on the left hand side, it says 45% positive. Very few say, all the way on the left hand side, a very legitimate player in the cloud on par with AWS and Azure. I don't believe that's the case. But a majority said, "IBM is surely better off "with Red Hat than without Red Hat in the context of cloud." Again, I would agree with that. While I think this is largely a services play, it's also, as Stu Miniman pointed out in an earlier video with me, a cloud play. And you can see it's still 38% is negative on the right hand side. 15% absolutely not, IBM is far behind AWS and Azure in cloud. I would tend to agree with that, but IBM is different. They're trying to bring together its entire software portfolio so it has a competitive approach. It's not trying to take Azure and AWS head on. So you see 38% negative, 45% positive. Now, what the survey didn't do is really didn't talk to multi-cloud. This, to me, puts IBM at the forefront of multi-cloud, right in there with VMware. You got IBM-Red Hat, Google with Anthos, Cisco coming at it from a network perspective and, of course, Microsoft leveraging its large estate of software. So, maybe next time we can poke at the multi-cloud. Now, that survey was done of about over 150, about 157 in the Global 2000. Sorry, I apologize. That was was 137. The next chart that I'm going to show you is a sentiment chart that took a pulse periodically, which was 157 IT practitioners, C level executives, VPs and IT practitioners. And what this chart shows essentially is the spending intentions for Red Hat over time. Now, the green bars are really about the adoption rates, and you can see they fluctuate, and it's kind of the percentage on left hand side and time is on the horizontal axis. The red is the replacement. We're going to replace. We're not going to buy. We're going to replace. In the middle is that fat middle, we're going to stay flat. So the yellow line is essentially what ETR calls market share. It's really an indication of mind share in my opinion. And then the blue line is spending intentions net score. So what does that mean? What that means is they basically take the gray, which is staying the same, they subtract out the red, which is we're doing less, and they add in the we're going to do more. So what does this data show? Let's focus on the blue line. So you can see, you know, slightly declining, and then pretty significantly declining last summer, maybe that's 'cause people spend less in the summer, and then really dropping coming into the announcement of the acquisition in October of 2018, IBM announced the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. Look at the spike post announcement. The sentiment went way up. You have a meaningful jump. Now, you see a little dip in the April survey, and again, that might've been just an attenuation of the enthusiasm. Now, July is going on right now, so that's why it's phased out, but we'll come back and check that data later. So, and then you can see this sort of similar trend with what they call market share, which, to me, is, again, really mind share and kind of sentiment. You can see the significant uptick in momentum coming out of the announcement. So people are generally pretty enthusiastic. Again, remember, these are customers of IBM, customers of Red Hat and customer of both. Now, let's see what the practitioners said. Let's go to some of the open endeds. What I love about ETR is they actually don't just do the hardcore data, they actually ask people open ended questions. So let's put this slide up and share with you some of the drill down statements that I thought were quite relevant. The first one is right on. "Assuming IBM does not try to increase subscription costs "for RHEL," Red Hat Enterprise Linux, "then its organizational issues over sales "and support should go away. "This should fix an issue where enterprises "were moving away from RHEL to lower cost alternatives "with significant movement to other vendors. "This plus IBM's purchase of SoftLayer and deployment "of CloudFoundry will make it harder "for Fortune 1000 companies to move away from IBM." So a lot implied things in there. The first thing I want to mention is IBM has a nasty habit when it buys companies, particularly software companies, to raise prices. You certainly saw this with SPSS. You saw this with other smaller acquisitions like Ustream. Cognos customers complained about that. IBM buys software companies with large install bases. It's got a lock in spec. It'll raise prices. It works because financially it's clearly worked for IBM, but it sometimes ticks off customers. So IBM has said it's going to keep Red Hat separate. Let's see what it does from a pricing standpoint. The next comment here is kind of interesting. "IBM has been trying hard to "transition to cloud-service model. "However, its transition has not been successful "even in the private-cloud domain." So basically these guys are saying something that I've just said is that IBM's cloud strategy essentially failed to meet its expectations. That's why it has to go out and spend $34 billion with Red Hat. While it's certainly transformed IBM in some respects, IBM's still largely a services company, not as competitive as cloud as it would've liked. So this guys says, "let alone in this fiercely competitive "public cloud domain." They're not number one. "One of the reasons, probably the most important one, "is IBM itself does not have a cloudOS product. "So, acquiring Red Hat will give IBM "some competitive advantage going forward." Interesting comments. Let's take a look at some of the other ones here. I think this is right on, too. "I don't think IBM's goal is to challenge AWS "or Azure directly." 100% agree. That's why they got rid of the low end intel business because it's not trying to be in the commodity businesses. They cannot compete with AWS and Azure in terms of the cost structure of cloud infrastructure. No way. "It's more to go after hybrid multi-cloud." Ginni Rometty said today at the announcement, "We're the only hybrid multi-cloud, opensource vendor out there. Now, the third piece of that opensource I think is less important than competing in hybrid and multi-cloud. Clearly Red hat gives IMB a better position to do this with CoreOS, CentOS. And so is it worth 34 billion? This individual thinks it is. So it's a vice president of a financial insurance organization, again, IBM's strong house. So you can here some of the other comments here. "For customers doing significant business "with IBM Global Services teams." Again, outsourcing, it's a 10-plus billion dollar opportunity for IBM to monetize over the next five years, in my opinion. "This acquisition could help IBM "drive some of those customers "toward a multi-cloud strategy "that also includes IBM's cloud." Yes, it's a very much of a play that will integrate services, Red Hat, Linux, OpenShift, and of course, IBM's cloud, sprinkle in a little Watson, throw in some hardware that IBM has a captive channel so the storage guys and the server guys can sell their hardware in there if the customer doesn't care. So it's a big integrated services play. "Positioning Red Hat, and empowering them "across legacy IBM silos, will determine if this works." Again, couldn't agree more. These are very insightful comments. This is a largely a services and an integration play. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud is complex. IBM loves complexity. IBM's services organization is number one in the industry. Red Hat gives it an ingredient that it didn't have before other than as a partner. IBM now owns that intellectual property and can really go hard and lean in to that services opportunity. Okay, so thanks to our friends at Enterprise Technology Research for sharing that data, and thank you for watching theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante signing off for now. Talk to you soon. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon 2018. Part of the CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with co-host, with Lauren Cooney, founder of Spark Labs, helping me out as analyst this week, great to have our next guest, shared acquaintance, Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cube alumni, welcome back! >> Thanks for having me back again. >> Got your voice, you're losing your voice from all the talking you're doing here on Cloud Foundry. >> Cloud cloud cloud all the time. >> So we were talking yesterday, I want to get you on because you guys have done some research. >> Yeah. >> On cloud, and we were chatting about, I should give you a plug on the opening segment yesterday about some of the things you're finding about Kubernetes. Certainly in our bubble, it's so passe now, we're moving on to STO and CUBE Flow, but you have research that, you know, is mainstream tech, outside of the bubble we live in, is actually now evolving into the first inning of Kubernetes, if you will. What does the research say, what's that all about? >> Well, the research says, trying not to apologize already, my voice is all over the place, so we've been tracking containers for now almost three years and I remember three years ago, everyone's like, "Okay, well we've talked about Docker for years now, "it's so passe," but when you got beyond the bubbles where tech is, people were just like starting to think about it. And so containers are just now getting to where people are either using them or using them as proof of concept. But Kubernetes has become a really big part of the conversation the last year, and it's continuing to take it by storm, and so we're starting to see organizations that are interested in it, but in terms of adoption and awareness beyond just the core central, there's still a massive education gap there. And a really big opportunity to educate people, not only on these tools, but what they really want to know is how do these tools help them get through their day and accomplish their work? >> So essentially, there's a lag of sequence of early adopters, fast followers, and now mainstream. Mainstream are getting accustomed to containers, now hitting up on Kubernetes, we're still pushing the front line. >> Well I think, you know, we are, and I think this is one of my observations as well, Abby, is that we look at these technologies, right? And I'm in the hallways, and I'm talking to folks in the cab line and things along those lines, and they're just here to actually learn about the technology, about Kubernetes, they actually don't understand it fully yet, and they're trying to figure out really what to do with it, and their companies have sent them here. And then it's, you know, you talk to the folks that are, you know, kind of were here for the long haul and were there at the beginning of CNCF and things along those lines, and they're like, "Oh yeah, everyone's adopted it," right? So you've got these two spectrums and I think my question to you is, what do you think is needed for this to really cross the chasm? >> Well, I'll actually answer that with another piece of data We do global research, and one of the things we found, we ask about, "What are your priorities for the next "couple of years?" and resoundingly across every persona, so developers, operators, IT decision makers, executives, their top three priorities for the next two years is continuous delivery. So let's think about that: continuous delivery for me is a priority; building that culture change is a priority; and so the tech is there to supplement that. But the real work, the hard work, is a priority, and I think that's exactly where it should be. So as these organizations really implement that continuous delivery methodology, they're going to pull these technologies in to supplement that. >> So it's not a technology problem, it's a people problem. But your point is, to the industry, let's be realistic and understand the segments that are adopting at what pace, matching education or evangelism or transformation at the right piece of the journey. >> Yeah, I mean all this tech, even Cloud Foundry, is a supplemental tool. >> Yeah. >> The hard work is really continuous delivery, building in that culture change, making software a core part of your business, making technology part of your day-to-day conversation, and that heavy lift has to come in order for any of these technologies to be successful. >> You guys have done a great job, I just want to say, Cloud Foundry, I want to give you some props. Congratulations on the work you've done. Take a minute to talk about some of the success. You're an ingredient in a lot of successful applications out there; what are some of the stats? How many people are using Cloud Foundry? What's some of the uptick, share some of the numbers of the performance with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, I mean we're in use of over half the Fortune 500 across every industry; what's been so phenomenal and so awesome about Cloud Foundry, and we really saw this at Summit, is all the industries that are using this to change. But what was interesting about our last summit, which we just had a couple of weeks ago, is all of these companies want to get on stage and not talk about the tech; they want to talk about the culture change. You know, hearing Boeing get on stage and say, "Actually, you know what the real work is "is the transformation we had to undergo "in order to do this work," and hear that over and over again, and it's so awesome to be part of that change because technology needs to be there to supplement that change and be part of that. But it's really great to see this come into fruition, like hearing the stories from Home Depot and Comcast and US Air Force and how it's fundamentally changing their businesses and helping them get out the door at scale, I mean that's really where the cool stuff happens. >> You've had great success there, and a lot of end users too, it's not like a bunch of one-offs. >> No. >> So how's the summit last week in Boston? >> It was amazing. We had half of our attendees at our summit are end users. And you know, the big high I get is like, hearing everyone talk about what they're doing and "This is what I did!" and stuff you've never heard of. Like, "Oh, I didn't realize you were using that," and "Oh, that's a really great way to use it "in very inventive ways," and so it really just refreshes you, like "Oh, this is what matters." The users and how they're using it and what they're going to do with the tech, I mean, isn't that why we're all here, right? And it's great, and they're creating such amazing technologies that it makes you energized about what's going on. >> Yeah, and I think it's amazing to me, cause I was actually at the Cloud Foundry summit as well, and there was one customer, I can't remember the name that got on stage, and they were using like, they had 2100 end users or something like that, developers, their company actually using Cloud Foundry, and I think that was the number, and I think it was really tremendous to see how many people inside of one company are actually using the technology across the board. It was really great. >> I mean, this is all about, I mean we're at a modern software era, and this is a whole new guard coming on board, and it's a whole new architecture. >> And it's a whole new way of thinking about it. Like, you know right now, we talk about how tech and there's a gap and we're pushing the tech and people are going to get there, but it's not going to be too long before the enterprises are pushing back and saying, "Hey, this is what I need, here's where I am, "I'm running at a scale you didn't think about yet." You know we're running, we have a lot of users that are running tens of thousands and thousands of applications: what about when they're in the hundreds of thousands of applications, and what does that look like? And they're saying, "Well I'm going to do this, "and here's what I need to do." >> There are going to be a lot of microservices. Abby, I got to ask you to end the segment. Thanks for coming on, I know you were rushed to come on, I appreciate you taking the time, you're super busy. What's your priorities for next year? Obviously you got a lot of successes under your belt. What's next, what are you going to check off the list this year? >> Well, inner operability is a big theme for me this year. And what does that mean, that means building bridges to other technologies and other projects, like the amazing work that's happening in CNCF and all those great technologies, so making sure that when those technologies mature, how do we bring those to the enterprise, and then really continuing to work on an ecosystem and work with our members and to really get more contributors around the table. >> Awesome, developers and contributors, dev plus contribute, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure. >> Thanks Abby. >> You're contributing your insight and I know you've got the voice going, but appreciate you taking the time, so Kube conversations here at theCUBE here in Denmark for KubeCon 2018, part of CNCF. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, we'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, it's theCube. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SilconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's continuing coverage of our event, Big Data SV in downtown San Jose. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Dave Vellante. Hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Good. >> Doing a great job here, by the way. >> Well thank you, sir. >> Keeping the trains going. >> Yeah. >> Well done. >> We've had a really interesting couple of days, we started here yesterday interviewing lots of great guys and gals on Big Data and everything in between. A lots of different topics there, opportunities, challenges, digital transformation, how can customers really evolve on this journey? We're excited to welcome back to theCube, one of our distinguished alumni, Matt Maccaux, the Global Big Data Practice Lead from Dell EMC. Welcome back. >> Well thanks for having me, appreciate it, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, so lots of stuff going on. We've been here, as I mentioned, we're down the street from the Strata Data Conference and we've had a lot of great conversations, very educational, informative. You've been with the whole Dell EMC family for a while now. We'd love to get your perspective on, kind of, what's going on from your team's standpoint. What are you seeing in the enterprises with respect to Big Data and being able to really leverage data across the business as a value driver and a revenue generator? >> Yeah, it's interesting that what we see across the business in terms of, especially in the big enterprises, there, many organizations, even the more mature ones, are still struggling to get that extra dollar, that extra level of monetization out of their data assets. They, everyone talks about monetizing data and using data, treating it as an asset, but organizations are struggling with that, not because of the technology, the technology's been put in, they've ramped up their teams, their skills. It's, what we tend to see inhibiting this digital transformation growth is process. It's organizational strife and it's not looking to best practices, even within own, their own organization, we're doing things like DevOps. So, why would we treat the notion of creating a data model any different than we would regular application development? Well, organizations still carry that weight, that inertia, they still treat Big Data and analytics like they do the data warehouse, and the most effective organizations are starting to incorporate that agile methodology and agile thinking, no snowflakes, infrastructure's code, these concepts of quickly and rapidly repeatedly doing these things, those are the organizations that are really starting to pull away from their competitors in industry. So, Dell EMC, our consulting group and our product lines are all there to support that transformation journey by taking those best practices and DevOps DataOps and bringing that to the analytical space. >> Do you think that companies, Matt, have a pretty good sense as to how applications that they develop are going to affect, create value, creating value is, let's simplify it, increasing revenue or cutting cost? Generally people can predict with the impact, they can write a business case around it. My observation was that certainly in the early days of so-called Big Data, people really didn't have an understanding as to the relationship between their data and that value, and so, many companies mistakenly thought, "Well I need to figure out how to sell my data," versus understand how data affects monetization. I wonder if you could comment on that and how has that progressed throughout the years? >> Yeah, that's a good point, we, from a consulting practice, used to do a lot of, what we call, proof of values, where organizations, after they kicked the tires and covered some use cases, we took them through a very slow, methodical business case RY analysis. You're going to spend this much on infrastructure, you're going to hire these people, you're going to take this data, and poof, you're going to make this much money, you're going to save this much money. Well, we're doing less and less of that these days because organizations have a good feel for where they want to go and the potential upside for doing this where they're now tend to struggle is, "Well, how do I actually get there?" "There's still a lot of tools and a lot of technologies and which is right for my business?" "What is the right process and how do I build that consensus in the organization?" And so, from a business consulting perspective, we're doing less of the RY work and more of the governance, the sort of, governance work by aligning stakeholders, getting those repeatable patterns and architectures in place to help organizations take that first few wins and then scale it. >> Where do you see the action these days? I mean there's somehow I profile use cases, obviously getting people to click on ads, Big Data has helped with that, fraud detection has come such a long way in the last 10 years, ya know, no doubt, certainly risk assessment, ya know, from the financial services industry. Those are the obvious ones, where else do you see Big Data analytics to the changing the world, if you will? >> Yeah, so I'd say those static or batch-type workloads are well understood. That, hey, is there fraud on transactions that occurred yesterday or last night? What is the customer score, lifetime value score for customer? Where we see more trends in the enterprise space is streaming. So, what can we catch in real time and help our people make real time decisions? So, and that is dealing with unstructured data. So, I've got a call center and I'm listening to the voice that's coming in, putting some sentiment analysis on that and then providing a score or script to the customer call agent in real time. And those, sort of, streaming use cases, whether it's images or voice, that, I think, is the next paradigm for use cases that organizations want to tackle. 'Cause if you can prevent a customer from leaving in real time, right, say, you know what, it sounds like you're upset, what if we did X to help retain you, it's going to be significant. All these organizations have a good idea of the cost it takes to acquire a new customer and the cost of losing a customer, so if they can put that intelligence in upstream, they no longer have to spend so much money trying to capture new customers 'cause they can focus on the ones they have. So, I think that, sort of, time between customer and streaming is where the next set of, I think, money's to be found. >> So customer experience is critical for businesses in any organization, I'm wondering, kind of, what the juxtaposition is of businesses going, "Yes, we have to be able "to do things in real time, in enterprise, "we have to be agile, yet we have, in order "to really facilitate a really effective, relevant, "timely customer experience, many departments "and organizations in a business need access to data." From a political perspective, how does Dell EMC, how does your consulting practice help an enterprise be able to start opening up these barriers internally to be able to enable data sharing so that they can drive and take advantage of things like real-time streaming to ultimately improve the customer experience, revenue, et cetera? >> Yeah, it's going to sound really trite, but the first step is getting everyone in a room and talking about what good looks like, what are the low-hanging... And everyone's going to agree on those use cases, there going to say, "These are the things we have to do," right, "We want to lose fewer customers, we want to..." You know, whatever the case may be, so everyone will agree on that. So, the politics don't come into play there. So, "Well, what data do we require for that?" "Okay, well, we've got all this data, great, "no disagreement there." Well, where is the data located? Who's the owner or the steward of that data? And now, who's going to be responsible for monetizing that? And that's where we tend to see the breakdown because when these things cross the line of business and customer always crosses the line of business, you end up with turf wars. And so this, the emergence of the Chief Data Officer, who's responsible for the policy and the prioritization and the ownership of these things is such a key role now, that, and it's not a CIO responsible for data, it is a business aligned executive reporting to the chief, CEO, COO, CFO. Again, business alignment, that tends to be the decision maker or at least the thing that solves for those conflicts across those BUs. And when that happens, then we see real change. But, if there's not that role or that person that can put that line in the sand and say, "This is how we're going to do it," you end up with that political strife and then you end up with silos of information or point solutions across the enterprise and it doesn't serve anyone. >> What are you seeing in terms of that CDO role? I mean, initially the Chief Data Officer was really within regulated businesses, financial services, healthcare, government. And then you've seen it permeate, ya know, to more mainstream. Do you see that role as having legs? A lot of people have questioned that role. What Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer is encroaching on the CIO territory? I'm inferring from your comments that you're optimistic about that role going forward. >> I am, as long as it's well-defined as having unique capabilities that's different than the CIO. Again, I think the first generation of Chief Data Officers were very CIO-liked or CIO-for-data and that's when you ended up with the turf wars. And then it was like, "Okay, well this is "what we're doing." But then you had someone who was sort of a peer for infrastructure and so, it just didn't seem to work out. And so, now we're seeing that role being redefined, it's less about the technology and the tools and the infrastructure, and it's more about the policies, the consistency, the architectures. >> You know I'd observe, I wonder if we can talk about this for a little bit, it's the CDO role. To me, one of the first things a CDO has to do is understand how a company gets value out of its data, what is the, and if it's a full profit company, what's the monetization, where does that come from? Not selling the data, as we were talking about earlier. And then there is what data, what data, where are, what data architecture, data sources, how do we give access to that? And then quality, data quality seems to be something that they worry about. And then skills, not, none, no technology in here. And then somehow they're going to form relationships with the line of business and it's simultaneous to figuring that out. Does that seem like a reasonable framework for the CIO, CDOs job? >> It does, and you call them Chief Data Governance Officer, I mean, it really falls under the umbrella of governance. It's about standards and consistency, but also these policies of, there are finite resources, whether we're talking people or computes. What do you do when there's not enough resources and more demand? How do you prioritize the things that the business does? Well, do you have policies and matrices that say, "Okay, well, is it material, actionable, timely?" "Then yes, then we'll proceed with this." "No, it doesn't pass." And it doesn't have to be about money. However the organization judges itself is what it should be based on. So, whether we're talking non-profit, we helped a school system recently better align kids with schedules and also learning abilities by sitting them next to each other in classes, there's no profit in that other than the education of children, so every organization judges itself or measures itself a little differently, but it comes back to those KPIs. What are your KPIs, how does that align to business initiatives? And then everything should flow from there. Now, I'm not saying it's easy work. Data governance is the hardest thing to do in this space and that's why I think so few organizations take it on 'cause it's a long, slow process and, ya know, you should've started 10 years ago on it and if you haven't, it feels like this mountain that is really high to climb. >> What you're saying is outcome driven. >> Yeah. >> Independent of the types of organizations. I want to talk about innovation, I've been asking a lot of people this week, do you feel like Big Data, ya know, the meme of Big Data that was created eight, 10 years ago, do you feel like it lived up to its promises? >> That's a loaded question. I think if you were to ask the back office enterprises, I would say yes. In terms of customers feeling it, probably not, because when you use an Uber app to hail a cab and pay $3.75 to go across town, it feels like a quality of life, but you don't know that that's a data-driven decision. As a consumer, your average consumer, you probably don't feel that. As you're clicking through Amazon and they know, sort of, the goods that you need, or the fact that they know what you're going to need and they've got it in a warehouse that they can get to you later that day, it doesn't feel like a Big Data solution, it just feels like, "Hey, the people I'm doing business with, they know me better." People don't really understand that that's a Big Data and analytics concept, so, has it lived up to the hype? Externally, I think the perception is that it has not, but the businesses that really get it, feel that absolutely it has. That's 'cause you, do you agree it's kind of bifurcated? >> Matt Maccaux: Yeah, it is. >> The Spotify's and the Ubers and the Airbnb's that are crushing it and then there's a lot of traditional enterprises that are still stove pipe and struggling. >> Yeah, it's funny, when we talk to customers, we've got our introductory power points, right, it always talks about the new businesses and the old businesses and, and I'm finding that that doesn't play very well anymore with enterprise customers. They're like, "We're never going to be the Uber "of our industry, it's not going to happen "if I'm a fortune 100 legacy, it's not going to happen." "What I really want to do, though, "is help my customers or make more money here, "I'm not going to be the Uber, it's just not going to happen." "We're not the culture, we're not the, we're not set up "that way, we have all of this technical legacy stuff, "but I really want to get more value out of my data, "how do I do that?" And so that message resonates. >> Isn't that in some ways, though, how do you feel about this, is it a recipe for disruption, where that's not going to happen, but something could happen where somebody digitizes your business? >> Yes, absolutely, if there are organizations, if you're in the fortune 500 and you are not worried about someone coming along and disrupting you, then you are probably not doing the right job. I would be kept awake every night, whether it was financial services or industrial manufacturing. >> Dave Vellante: Grocery. >> Nobody thought that the taxis, who the hell would come in and disrupt the cab industry? Ya got to hire all these people, the cars are junk, the customer experience is awful. Well, someone has come along and there's been an industry related to this, now they have their bumps in the road, so are they going to be disrupted again or what's the next level of disruption? But, I think it is technology that fuels that, but it's also the cultural shift as part of that, which is outside the technologies, the socioeconomic trends that I think drive that, as well. >> But even, ya know, and we've got just a few seconds left, the cultural shift internally. It sounds like, from what you're describing, if an enterprise is going to recognize, "I'm not going to compete with an Uber or an Airbnb "or a Netflix, but I've got to be able to compete "with my existing peers of enterprise organizations," the CDO role sounds like it's a matter of survivability. >> Yes. >> Without putting that in place, you can't capitalize on the value of data monetized and et cetera. Well guys, I wish we had more time 'cause I think we're opening a can of worms here, but Dave, Matt thanks so much for having this conversation. Thank you for stopping by. >> Thanks for having me here, it was a real pleasure. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube. We are continuing our coverage of our event, Big Data SV in downtown San Jose. For Dave Vellante, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Good morning, welcome to day three of VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE's continuing coverage of this big event in Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host, Stu Miniman, and we're very excited to be joined by a couple of gals in tech. We have Phoummala Schmitt, you are the infrastructure lead for Independence Blue Cross, and Theresa Miller, the founder of the 24x7 IT Connection. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Phoummala, let's start with you. You are a very leading female in the technology and software space. Tell us about yourself. What do you do, what inspires you as a female leader in technology? >> I'm currently in infrastructure lead at Independence Blue Cross. I manage unified communications applications, Exchange, Skype for Business. What excites me is the ability to show young women that you can do anything. When I was younger, I was told that I didn't understand math very well, so I couldn't be in IT, well, look at me here. So, it's inspiring. I feel inspired when little girls tell me, I want to do something technical. >> That's awesome, Theresa, what about you? What's your journey been like? >> My journey started over 20 years ago by accident, while I was studying at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There was an opportunity to study IT. It made sense to me, and I dropped my accounting major just like that as soon as IT came to the forefront. I've been doing technology ever since, and today, now, I have 24x7 IT Connection. We do writing, we do webinars, and we also do IT consulting. >> So, you guys work together with the 24x7 IT Connection. Tell us a little bit more about that. I know that, Phoummala, you mentioned Microsoft, and here we are at VMworld. Tell us about what kind of topics you cover on that 24x7 IT Connection. >> We cover a broad range of topics. I usually cover the Microsoft, Exchange, Skype world. I actually blog for Theresa, but we do a podcast together, the Current Status, and we talk about all sorts of technology, storage, networking, and just the current trends. And we actually do it on video, through YouTube, and we have a glass of wine. We make it so it's like a casual conversation with your friends, you know, you're just chattin' and talkin' tech, like here at the conference. >> Uh-- >> Just to add to that, so, from the blogging and like the approach we use, it really is about what's relevant to us. So, like she said, we're covering end-user computing, it might be Microsoft, it might be Linux. It just depends. We have several female writers and one male, and it's really about what's relevant, what's going on in their world, because then you know it's going on in someone else's. >> Yeah, Phoummala, you've been in the center of a really interesting transition we've been seeing in the marketplace. You know, I think about my career in tech, you know, deploying servers for email, and that whole push. Microsoft, huge push to get everybody onto Office 365. >> Phoummala: Yes. >> You know, where that lives, we talk about, you know, software's eating the world. You know, so, give us that journey of applications for you. How's that change your role, some of the dynamics? Sounds like you might need a glass of wine after talking through some of these topics, yeah. >> Yeah, I actually started in the server world, server and infrastructure. I was racking and stacking servers, deploying VMs, and then, at the same time, I was also managing Exchange, but as my career progressed, I kind of left that storage and server background and decided, you know what, applications. I wanted to focus a little bit more and really embrace the application world. Since I had that server background, that was my job, it just seems I could actually deploy these applications a lot better, because I understand the underlying foundations behind it, Exchange, and the cloud, so, right now, you know the push is to be in the cloud. Where I work, and a lot of organizations like ourselves, we don't go to the cloud yet. We're just not there. So, there is a very strong push. Eventually, I suspect we'll all be in the cloud. I mean, that's just, it's not if, it's when. >> Yeah, so, but I want to dig down just a tiny bit more, because, you know, most people in the VMware community know Microsoft pretty well. The relationship with Microsoft and their applications with virtualization, and now with cloud, is a really interest dynamic, so you've gone against some of what Microsoft said in the past, kind of do what's best for your organization, why don't you explain some of that to our audience, yeah. >> Yeah, so, Exchange. The preferred architecture for Exchange is, or Exchange 2016, 2013, is to be physical servers, with DAS, direct-attached storage, which is, you know, not what most people are. I mean, it's a virtualized world now. I don't know any company that isn't virtualized. So, I've taken the approach, what is the best situation or deployment for your organization. Yes, there is the preferred architecture, but it's not, I don't look at it as the Holy Grail, or the Bible. I look at what is best for the organization. What are your requirements? So, if the requirement is to reduce data center cost, reduce some rack space, and you can't go to the cloud yet, due to other requirements, let's look at alternative solutions that still follow some of the guidance. So, you know, yes, I break away from it, but it's what's best for your business, because not everybody can deploy physical. >> Yeah, Theresa, I have to imagine you cover a lot of this. You know, what's really happening with customers versus, you know, no offense to our friends on the vendor side, but, you know, they always think its what's right, as opposed to the person doing it, knows what is right for their environment. That's one of the challenges of IT, right? There is no one way to do things, so. >> Every organization is going to take a different path and journey, and that might be to the cloud, that might not be yet. That might be a combination, that could be hybrid IT, I think is another term that we keep hearing where, maybe I have some applications in the cloud, and some that will always remain on prem, but it has to match the culture and the fit of the business, or you won't be successful with any IT project. >> So, ladies, we're at VMworld 2017, given both of your thoughts in terms of, we need to do what's best for the business, Phoummala, let me start with you. What are some of the things that you're hearing, are you hearing other peers of yours echo the same feelings and sentiments? >> Yes, when we're out in the field, you know, I'm talkin' to people, and it's, yeah, it's we're not there yet, we want to go there, yeah, but we can't do it, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the resources. And oftentimes, you know, our vendors, they, they forget that budgets, there's constraints, you know, resourcing. So, you know, my word to them is be patient with us. We want to go there, we like your products, but there's so many other factors in play, especially when you work for a large enterprise. You know, there's politics, and large enterprises just take time to do things, especially certain industries, healthcare, financial sectors. You have certain regulations that you have to follow, and in order to get to the cloud, or whatever, you know, the latest trend is, we may have to modify certain policies that are in place and then there's a downward effect, because let's say we want to go to the cloud, then you have to go to, you know, your security department. What regulations or what retention policies do you have to change? And that may, you know, that may take time. So, it's not like it's going to' happen today. >> Theresa, same question, but I guess, maybe, no, maybe a different question. In terms of your podcast, have you heard anything here that's inspired the next conversation that you guys want to have with your glass of wine? >> So, I really think, it's probably going to revolve around cloud again, and in terms of, the other thing I keep seeing is analytics. Everybody's talking about analytics. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And I think that's a really interesting conversation, 'cause it means so many different things. The depth, what are you going to analyze? How do you manage that data? So I could see it being a combination of those topics, and even maybe separate. >> Yeah, yeah, Phoummala, you and I were talking before the interview. Think about this community here. It used to be, you know, it was like hypervisor, virtualizing, we were all in this journey to virtualize. Now, it's a little bit fragmented because there's so many different areas. Analytics, absolutely huge people. Security, lots of people going there. This whole cloud discussion, on all the different apps. What are you seeing in the community? What are the topic areas? Is that, you know, is that a challenge to the community? VMware, the VMworld community was a pretty tight-knit community, and now it feels, you know, while there's great connections and great people, it's broken into a few different pieces. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I do feel there's sort of a, not a disconnect, but there's so many different aspects, and I think that's just the evolution of IT. We've evolved to the point where it's beyond IT, it's beyond the technical approaches. It is, um, it's almost like it's, IT's just another business department. We're a business. We provide services to the other business units, and it's just that evolution of, we're service providers, all of us. Whether we are in the data center, or we are an apps develop, we are providing a service to somebody, and we have customers. >> Do you find that that's an advantage? We were talking to some guests earlier this week that, I think it was an analyst from ESG that was saying, you know, you can show that certain problems with storage, certain costs, aren't IT's problem, it's a business problem. Is that an advantage what you just kind of talked about, Phoummala, in terms of getting eyes and ears of the business to provide, okay, this is a business challenge, we need to provide the right expertise, the right funding, to support these services that are needed? >> I definitely think so. I mean, just from my own experience. Understanding what the business wants and needs is huge. And then just puttin' yourself in their shoes. What do they need, what can we do to make their jobs better? So that person, you know, clicking the button of submitting our payroll, or, you know, putting a purchase order in, what can we do to make that better? So, you know, it's one of the things I always do when I'm looking at projects. What value is this going to bring for our business? And, I think, that's just the way IT has evolved to. We're not the programmers in the basement anymore, you know, with the lights turned off and just coding away. We're all business analysts now. Because, at the end of the day, it's our paycheck, too. So, these products that we're hearing about, at the end of the day, it affects us, it affects our business, and the bottom line. >> And what is the website of 24x7 IT Connection that people can see and hear the value that you bring to the community? >> It's 24x7, so that's the 24 by 7, and then itconnection.com. And so, like I said, we share a lot of really great stuff. We have something new every week, so it's definitely worth checking out. >> Well, ladies, thank you so much for joining Stu and myself this morning and sharing your journeys into IT, as well as your insights, what you've learned from the show, what excites you, and where people can go to find more information about the expertise that you bring to the community. We want to thank you for watching again. We are theCUBE live from day three of VMworld 2017. I am Lisa Martin, for my esteemed co-host, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back inside the San Jose Convention Center here at the Cube, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, appreciate you joining us here as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016, live here on SiliconANGLE TV. This is the flagship broadcast where we extract the signal from the noise. And Jeff, we're on the home stretch here through the second day, I could stay here for a few more days. Great guests, great lineups, great keynotes, and a lot of energy here on the floor I like. >> Lot of energy, I love these kinds of shows because it's really about helping people be successful and we're talking about real things, and again we keep coming back to products and solutions in technology but for most small businesses it's about cash. It's about cash flow. >> Being successful, Rania Succar, is now joining us, she's a QuickBooks Financing and Director there at QuickBooks, and we appreciate your time here, Rania. >> Great. >> So tell us about just the overarching mission, right, cause as Jeff said, helping people, giving them access to capital, badly needed, small businesses, it's a critical need, and what QuickBooks does on that, with that, on the financing platform. >> Well you guys have seen it here for the last few days. The QuickBooks team is absolutely focused on helping small businesses survive and thrive. Everyone here's trying to crack that, and you just said it, cash is one of the biggest pain points that small businesses face. Whenever we talk to small businesses, the first thing they tell us is the thing that keeps them up at night is cash flow, and we also know one of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is they can't get access to cash flow, and to cash, and so the team a couple years back said we've got to crack this in order to help more small businesses survive past the five year mark and be able to put their dreams into action. So with that in mind, we took a look at financing and for small businesses, it's a fairly broken process, so we're working to reinvent small business lending. It's broken for a couple of reasons, one is, if you have ten businesses that go into a bank to apply for a loan, only three get approved, and it takes over 30 hours of work for a small business to do that application to a bank, so it's right for innovating and improving the experience for small businesses, so what we do, is we're hyper focused on making the experience better in three ways, first, we're trying to drive up the approval rate, and we do that with the incredible clarity and we do that with the incredible clarity with which we can understand the small business based on the data that we have. We understand the small business ecosystem better than anyone, and we understand the full picture of a small business' credit worthiness, and financial health better than everyone, anyone. We can give them access to-- we can help them get credit for all the future invoices that they have coming in, we understand the strength of their customer base, you put that together, we can drive approval rates up. The other thing we're focused on is the time it takes to apply. You need to put together tax returns, and interim financial reports if it's the middle of the year, and bank statements, it's very frustrating. We have most of that information in the Intuit space, and our vision is rather than even applying it's just available for you in QuickBooks when you need it, and the third thing, so approval rates, the time it takes, the third thing we're very focused on is the guidance. Small businesses need advice, most of them didn't get into running their own small business because they knew anything about finances, they had a dream and they wanted to put it into place, and so we're very focused on taking the insights we have about a small business to help them get lending that's right for them with confidence that they're getting the right financing for their business. So we can help them predict when they're going to need financing, and we can connect them to an accountant because we know over a million of our small businesses are connected to accountants. So that's what we do, and this week as you heard, we just announced we crossed the half a billion dollar mark in financing in small businesses. >> Now, say that again. >> Half a billion dollars. >> Half a billion dollars of financing. >> Congratulations. >> We're incredibly proud, we're incredibly proud. >> Let me ask you a couple details, so my kids are going, they're applying for college right now, so the CommonApp-- >> So, Jeff will need somewhere shy of half a million of that money. (Rania laughs) >> Do you have like a CommonApp inside QuickBooks which is a defined kind of definition that then gets shared with the lenders that want to participate in the market, or do you have like a defined QuickBooks FICO score, if you will, based on these other parameters that you have that then get shared with the lenders, how do you kind of, you've got all this data, it's my data, but I'm allowing you to use in such a way to help me get this loan in this market place. How does the actual mechanics work. >> I love that, we're a platform, almost like an Amazon in a sense, where you go to Amazon, you have one thing that you want to get and you get access to multiple different providers, so we're a platform. Right now, the way that it works, there is a CommonApp, but the amazing thing is you don't have to fill it out because we have all the information inside QuickBooks so we pre-fill it for you and ask you just for a couple of things but we do all the work and then we figure out which of our lending partners based on what you need, we've got about a dozen, are best suited for your needs, and then we send the information to the lenders with your permission and then you get all your offers right there, and the really neat thing about what we do is we compare the offers apples to apples, this is pretty incredible, we're super focused on transparency, this is a big part of our value proposition, we always disclose the APR of the loan, we always show the loan cost apples to apples so that you know exactly what you're getting, we show you things like what are the fees, what are the pre-payment penalties, so it's super clear, super transparent, and you know what you're getting. >> It's like the comparison shopping table. >> Exactly. >> You lay it all out and I can make my decisions. >> Exactly. >> And then how long does it usually take on a relatively smooth process given the fact you're already pre-populating the data, it goes out, what does it usually take? >> A lot of our lenders fund within the same day. >> Jeff: Within the same day? >> So you literally with a lot of our lenders, if everything goes right, you can apply within minutes and get funding in your bank account the same business day. >> The money goes through the same system as well. (Jeff chuckles) >> There are lenders, and we have a portfolio of offerings, so we'll work with, we have an SBA lender, we've got work in capital lenders, if you're going through the SBA process it's a lot faster through our process than it would be if you applied through a traditional bank, but it still could take a couple of months in that case, so we make that very clear, when you choose the offering that you want, if you're in need for financing right away, it can happen very quickly, if you're willing to wait a couple more months, in the worst case, in the case of an SBA loan, on average, it's less than a week. >> Well it seems like you have so many pieces in place to make it much more convenient and much more reliable and I guess much more predictable for a small business, what about approval rates then, what, you said three out of ten? >> That's the current. >> On average, is that the current, is that your average? >> Ours is better than that, it's not quite there, you know, we have a really high aspiration on that, where we'd like to be able to get, you know, we'd like to get it closer to 60 or 70 percent over time, the approval rate, so we're still moving in that direction, we've got a great team, we've got tons of innovation and R&D happening right now back in Mountain View, we've got a ton of data scientists that are combing through this data and improving the approval rates all the time, so that's an area where we're innovating and really pushing for our small businesses. >> And so, nice announcement this week, well better than nice, great announcement this week, but you're always looking, as you said, for the next best thing. >> Rania: Yep. >> And so what have you heard from your client base that says okay, we've addressed this, now this is where we need to pivot, this is where we need to go, like what's the next big hurdle or next big challenge that you think you need to handle? >> It's innovating on those three areas I told you, and on each of those three we've made quite a lot of work and quite a lot of headway in the last few years, but there's so much more room, and so like I've said we have this team of phenomenal data scientists working to find those areas of advantage for small businesses where we can help them get approved more often. We've got the team that's trying to really make it to a point where you're in QuickBooks and you can see your financing offer before you even apply. We want to get rid of the application altogether and just service the best offer for you, and then all the prediction for when you're going to need financing and that cash flow prediction, looping in the accountant so the accountant can immediately see all the options you were given and they can talk through them with you. >> And your clients can find out right away, the customers, if they did not get approved. >> Right. >> Where's the trouble area, where did the red light come on? >> That's right. >> Because of the figures you're able to consult with them and help them maybe shore up their bottom line? >> We don't do enough of that today, it's absolutely in our road map, so that's a huge opportunity because we have a relationship with small businesses, it's not like a transaction where you go to a website and you apply for a loan, we're in it for the long term to help small businesses grow and so you can imagine, and this is where we're headed, when you start, you know, you get your first financing, it could be a credit card, and then a year or two later we see that you're financials have improved and we consult you on the next offering and all the way you get better terms because you've been with us for a while and we can help make sure you're getting better financing deals over time. >> It's a really interesting situation, because, you know, hopefully over time, really it becomes, we always talk about kind of looking back, and then predictive and then prescriptive, so in theory, as you're moving down your path, as you're growing your business, it should actually flag you, right, hey, by the way you've got a big event, seasonalities coming up, oh we just noticed you just locked in a big purchase order, somebody's late to pay et cetera, it might be a good time to get actually ahead of the curve before you even know that this event is coming to go ahead and make even up to in making the offer. >> Absolutely, you know, you're getting ready to, you know, for the holidays and have you thought about making sure you've got enough financing to buy as much inventory as you want this year so you can take advantage of the seasonal trends we're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of retailers, you know, really heavying up on inventory, have you thought about doing that as apart of your strategy, it looks like it could be a good year, so there's so much opportunity there, we can pair every small business owner with a line of credit so that they can manage payroll at any given time and never have to worry about the cash flow ups and downs that come. >> Right, and then I would imagine too, within like those different offers, not only apples to apples across the same type of loan, but maybe you should consider, you know, a factoring on your receivables, versus a capital loan that's capitalized against some equipment or something, cause there's also options within the types of financing that you may want to do. >> So on that we've done quite bit of work. We have lenders in our portfolio that do invoice financing. We've got lenders in our portfolio, Amex working capital terms, that do vendor bill payment through, you know, paying all of your bills that are coming up, we've got as I said SBA loans that will help with long term expansion, we've got that, and we're just continuing to innovate on that too. >> And from the lender point of you, you said you have about a dozen, you're bringing in more, you know, for the opportunity, cause a lot of them probably already have existing relationships with many of these clients, how do they see kind of the opportunity to interface for those clients in this different way through QuickBooks as an intermediary? >> Oh, they love it, because it's very hard for these lenders to go out and acquire new customers, often times they don't have a relationship with these existing customers and they have to go out and do the hard work to acquire customers whereas they're in the QuickBooks ecosystem and, you know, customers really love the opportunity to work with these lenders because we can provide the right advice to them paired with the loan offering, so it works out very well. >> It should be cheaper for them to actually provide those too, cause again you're taking a lot of the headache out. So, before we went live, you talked about some of the numbers, I just want to go through some of the numbers, so you shared the big number 500 million. >> Yep. >> But in terms of kind of an average loan size that you see, in a lifetime value of the loans to some of the customers, I was wondering if you could share some of those statistics. >> Sure, so we see two very different needs for financing from our customer base, there's the work and capital loans, and there's the expansion capital loans, and our customers typically are split between the need for both and at any given time, a business is actually looking for both. They need to smooth over the work and capital and then the expansion capital as well, but our average loan size is about 35,000 dollars today, and it ranges from as little as 2,500 dollars to just smooth a very small cashflow bump that you have, all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the bigger expansions that small businesses are looking to do, and it's really wonderful to be able to help small businesses on both sides of the spectrum because if you're a small business owner, seasonality is really a major pain point. Often times, they'll have most of their business concentrated in the summer months, or potentially the summer months and the winter months, but not the spring and the fall, and so you need, you still have tons of bills, you have employees you need to cover in those off months, and having access to financing where you can get it fairly quickly cause you don't know when those bumps are going to hit, is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the expansion side, every business owners dream is to expand and it's been amazing to be here over the past few days and hear these stories, you know, Alli Webb on stage yesterday, the founder of Drybar, talking about how she went from one location to 66 in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch and convince them of your grand idea to expand. >> Jeff: Especially if they don't have hair. >> Especially if they don't have hair, she had a hard time... (everyone laughs) >> Her husband and her brother are business partners and they're both bald. >> Yeah, they're sitting with them, they don't have hair either, so. >> So for that reason, it's hard to convince people, and so it's wonderful to be able to help the expansion side of things too. >> Hopefully this has been, if nothing else, a great opportunity for Frick Inc. to find out about the small business college fund. >> Jeff: It's already gone through. >> That quick. >> John: Right, so we'll find out in less than 24 hours. The kids are going to Stanford. >> Alright. >> Or you're going to work at the community college for a bit. Rania we appreciate the time. >> Sure, it was great. >> Very much, thank you for being here. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on the Amex announcement, and so many other great things you have in the pipeline now to make small business dreams come true. >> Wonderful, thank you very much, it was great to chat with you. >> Thank you very much Rania. Back with more here on the Cube from San Jose in just a moment. (hip tech music)