>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music plays) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MWC '23, my name is Dave Vellante. Just left a meeting with the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, to meet with Jeetu Patel, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. Good to see you. >> You never leave a meeting with Chuck Robbins to meet with Jeetu Patel. >> Well, I did. >> That's a bad idea. >> Walked right out. I said, hey, I got an interview to do, right? So, and I'm excited about this. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> So, I mean you run such an important part of the business. I mean, obviously the collaboration business but also security. So many changes going on in the security market. Maybe we could start there. I mean, there hasn't been a ton of security talk here Jeetu, because I think it's almost assumed. It was 45 minutes into the keynote yesterday before anybody even mentioned security. >> Huh. >> Right? And so, but it's the most important topic in the enterprise IT world. And obviously is important here. So why is it you think that it's not the first topic that people mention. >> You know, it's a complicated subject area and it's intimidating. And actually that's one of the things that the industry screwed up on. Where we need to simplify security so it actually gets to be relatable for every person on the planet. But, if you think about what's happening in security, it's not just important for business it's critical infrastructure that if you had a breach, you know lives are cost now. Because hospitals could go down, your water supply could go down, your electricity could go down. And so it's one of these things that we have to take pretty seriously. And, it's 51% of all breaches happen because of negligence, not because of malicious intent. >> It's that low. Interesting. I always- >> Someone else told me the same thing, that they though it'd be higher, yeah. >> I always say bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. >> Every single time. >> You can't beat it. But, you know, it's funny- >> Jeetu: Every single time. >> Back, the earlier part of last decade, you could see that security was becoming a board level issue. It became, it was on the agenda every quarter. And, I remember doing some research at the time, and I asked, I was interviewing Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary, and I asked him, yeah, but we're getting attacked but don't we have the best offense? Can't we have the best technology? He said, yeah but we have so much critical infrastructure the risks to United States are higher. So we have to be careful about how we use security as an offensive weapon, you know? And now you're seeing the future of war involves security and what's going on in Ukraine. It's a whole different ballgame. >> It is, and the scales always tip towards the adversary, not towards the defender, because you have to be right every single time. They have to be right once. >> Yeah. And, to the other point, about bad user behavior. It's going now beyond the board level, to it's everybody's responsibility. >> That's right. >> And everybody's sort of aware of it, everybody's been hacked. And, that's where it being such a complicated topic is problematic. >> It is, and it's actually, what got us this far will not get us to where we need to get to if we don't simplify security radically. You know? The experience has to be almost invisible. And what used to be the case was sophistication had to get to a certain level, for efficacy to go up. But now, that sophistication has turned to complexity. And there's an inverse relationship between complexity and efficacy. So the simpler you make security, the more effective it gets. And so I'll give you an example. We have this great kind of innovation we've done around passwordless, right? Everyone hates passwords. You shouldn't have passwords in 2023. But, when you get to passwordless security, not only do you reduce a whole lot of friction for the user, you actually make the system safer. And that's what you need to do, is you have to make it simpler while making it more effective. And, I think that's what the future is going to hold. >> Yeah, and CISOs tell me that they're, you know zero trust before the pandemic was like, yeah, yeah zero trust. And now it's like a mandate. >> Yeah. >> Every CISO you talk to says, yes we're implementing a zero trust architecture. And a big part of that is that, if they can confirm zero trust, they can get to market a lot faster with revenue generating or critical projects. And many projects as we know are being pushed back, >> Yeah. >> you know? 'Cause of the macro. But, projects that drive revenue and value they want to accelerate, and a zero trust confirmation allows people to rubber stamp it and go faster. >> And the whole concept of zero trust is least privileged access, right? But what we want to make sure that we get to is continuous assessment of least privileged access, not just a one time at login. >> Dave: 'Cause things change so frequently. >> So, for example, if you happen to be someone that's logged into the system and now you start doing some anomalous behavior that doesn't sound like Dave, we want to be able to intercept, not just do it at the time that you're authenticating Dave to come in. >> So you guys got a good business. I mentioned the macro before. >> Yeah. >> The big theme is consolidating redundant vendors. So a company with a portfolio like Cisco's obviously has an advantage there. You know, you guys had great earnings. Palo Alto is another company that can consolidate. Tom Gillis, great pickup. Guy's amazing, you know? >> Love Tom. >> Great respect. Just had a little webinar session with him, where he was geeking out with the analyst and so- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Learned a lot there. Now you guys have some news, at the event event with Mercedes? >> We do. >> Take us through that, and I want to get your take on hybrid work and what's happening there. But what's going on with Mercedes? >> Yeah so look, it all actually stems from the hybrid work story, which is the future is going to be hybrid, people are going to work in mixed mode. Sometimes you'll be in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere in the middle. One of the places that people are working more and more from is their cars. And connected cars are getting to be a reality. And in fact, cars sometimes become an extension of your home office. And many a times I have found myself in a parking lot, because I didn't have enough time to get home and I was in a parking lot taking a conference call. And so we've made that section easier, because we have now partnered with Mercedes. And they aren't the first partner, but they're a very important partner where we are going to have Webex available, through the connected car, natively in Mercedes. >> Ah, okay. So I could take a call, I can do it all the time. I find good service, pull over, got to take the meeting. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to be driving. I got to concentrate. >> That's right. >> You know, or sometimes, I'll have the picture on and it's not good. >> That's right. >> Okay, so it'll be through the console, and all through the internet? >> It'll be through the console. And many people ask me like, how's safety going to work over that? Because you don't want to do video calls while you're driving. Exactly right. So when you're driving, the video automatically turns off. And you'll have audio going on, just like a conference call. But the moment you stop and put it in park, you can have video turned on. >> Now, of course the whole hybrid work trend, we, seems like a long time ago but it doesn't, you know? And it's really changed the security dynamic as well, didn't it? >> It has, it has. >> I mean, immediately you had to go protect new endpoints. And those changes, I felt at the time, were permanent. And I think it's still the case, but there's an equilibrium now happening. People as they come back to the office, you see a number of companies are mandating back to work. Maybe the central offices, or the headquarters, were underfunded. So what's going on out there in terms of that balance? >> Well firstly, there's no unanimous consensus on the way that the future is going to be, except that it's going to be hybrid. And the reason I say that is some companies mandate two days a week, some companies mandate five days a week, some companies don't mandate at all. Some companies are completely remote. But whatever way you go, you want to make sure that regardless of where you're working from, people can have an inclusive experience. You know? And, when they have that experience, you want to be able to work from a managed device or an unmanaged device, from a corporate network or from a Starbucks, from on the road or stationary. And whenever you do any of those things, we want to make sure that security is always handled, and you don't have to worry about that. And so the way that we say it is the company that created the VPN, which is Cisco, is the one that's going to kill it. Because what we'll do is we'll make it simple enough so that you don't, you as a user, never have to worry about what connection you're going to use to dial in to what app. You will have one, seamless way to dial into any application, public application, private application, or directly to the internet. >> Yeah, I got a love, hate with my VPN. I mean, it's protecting me, but it's in the way a lot. >> It's going to be simple as ever. >> Do you have kids? >> I do, I have a 12 year old daughter. >> Okay, so not quite high school age yet. She will be shortly. >> No, but she's already, I'm not looking forward to high school days, because she has a very, very strong sense of debate and she wins 90% of the arguments. >> So when my kids were that age, I've got four kids, but the local high school banned Wikipedia, they can't use Wikipedia for research. Many colleges, I presume high schools as well, they're banning Chat GPT, can't use it. Now at the same time, I saw recently on Medium a Wharton school professor said he's mandating Chat GPT to teach his students how to prompt in progressively more sophisticated prompts, because the future is interacting with machines. You know, they say in five years we're all going to be interacting in some way, shape, or form with AI. Maybe we already are. What's the intersection between AI and security? >> So a couple very, very consequential things. So firstly on Chat GPT, the next generation skill is going to be to learn how to go out and have the right questions to ask, which is the prompt revolution that we see going on right now. But if you think about what's happening in security, and there's a few areas which are, firstly 3,500 hundred vendors in this space. On average, most companies have 50 to 70 vendors in security. Not a single vendor owns more than 10% of the market. You take out a couple vendors, no one owns more than 5%. Highly fractured market. That's a problem. Because it's untenable for companies to go out and manage 70 policy engines. And going out and making sure that there's no contention. So as you move forward, one of the things that Chat GPT will be really good for is it's fundamentally going to change user experiences, for how software gets built. Because rather than it being point and click, it's going to be I'm going to provide an instruction and it's going to tell me what to do in natural language. Imagine Dave, when you joined a company if someone said, hey give Dave all the permissions that he needs as a direct report to Chuck. And instantly you would get all of the permissions. And it would actually show up in a screen that says, do you approve? And if you hit approve, you're done. The interfaces of the future will get more natural language kind of dominated. The other area that you'll see is the sophistication of attacks and the surface area of attacks is increasing quite exponentially. And we no longer can handle this with human scale. You have to handle it in machine scale. So detecting breaches, making sure that you can effectively and quickly respond in real time to the breaches, and remediate those breaches, is all going to happen through AI and machine learning. >> So, I agree. I mean, just like Amazon turned the data center into an API, I think we're now going to be interfacing with technology through human language. >> That's right. >> I mean I think it's a really interesting point you're making. Now, from a security standpoint as well, I mean, the state of the art today in my email is be careful, this person's outside your organization. I'm like, yeah I know. So it's a good warning sign, but it's really not automated in any way. So two part question. One is, can AI help? You know, with the phishing, obviously it can, but the bad guys have AI too. >> Yeah. >> And they're probably going to be smarter than I am about using it. >> Yeah, and by the way, Talos is our kind of threat detection and response >> Yes. >> kind of engine. And, they had a great kind of piece that came out recently where they talked about this, where Chat GPT, there is going to be more sophistication of the folks that are the bad actors, the adversaries in using Chat GPT to have more sophisticated phishing attacks. But today it's not something that is fundamentally something that we can't handle just yet. But you still need to do the basic hygiene. That's more important. Over time, what you will see is attacks will get more bespoke. And in order, they'll get more sophisticated. And, you will need to have better mechanisms to know that this was actually not a human being writing that to you, but it was actually a machine pretending to be a human being writing something to you. And that you'll have to be more clever about it. >> Oh interesting. >> And so, you will see attacks get more bespoke and we'll have to get smarter and smarter about it. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you before we close is you're right on. I mean you take the top security vendors and they got a single digit market share. And it's like it's untenable for organizations, just far too many tools. We have a partner at ETR, they do quarterly survey research and one of the things they do is survey emerging technology companies. And when we look at in the security sector just the number of emerging technology companies that are focused on cybersecurity is as many as there are out there already. And so, there's got to be consolidation. Maybe that's through M & A. I mean, what do you think happens? Are company's going to go out of business? There's going to be a lot of M & A? You've seen a lot of companies go private. You know, the big PE companies are sucking up all these security companies and may be ready to spit 'em out and go back public. How do you see the landscape? You guys are obviously an inquisitive company. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think there will be a little bit of everything. But the biggest change that you'll see is a shift that's going to happen with an integrated platform, rather than point solution vendors. So what's going to happen is the market's going to consolidate towards very few, less than a half a dozen, integrated platforms. We believe Cisco is going to be one. Microsoft will be one. There'll be others over there. But these, this platform will essentially be able to provide a unified kind of policy engine across a multitude of different services to protect multiple different entities within the organization. And, what we found is that platform will also be something that'll provide, through APIs, the ability for third parties to be able to get their technology incorporated in, and their telemetry ingested. So we certainly intend to do that. We don't believe, we are not arrogant enough to think that every single new innovation will be built by us. When there's someone else who has built that, we want to make sure that we can ingest that telemetry as well, because the real enemy is not the competitor. The real enemy is the adversary. And we all have to get together, so that we can keep humanity safe. >> Do you think there's been enough collaboration in the industry? I mean- >> Jeetu: Not nearly enough. >> We've seen companies, security companies try to monetize private data before, instead of maybe sharing it with competitors. And so I think the industry can do better there. >> Well I think the industry can do better. And we have this concept called the security poverty line. And the security poverty line is the companies that fall below the security poverty line don't have either the influence or the resources or the know how to keep themselves safe. And when they go unsafe, everyone else that communicates with them also gets that exposure. So it is in our collective interest for all of us to make sure that we come together. And, even if Palo Alto might be a competitor of ours, we want to make sure that we invite them to say, let's make sure that we can actually exchange telemetry between our companies. And we'll continue to do that with as many companies that are out there, because actually that's better for the market, that's better for the world. >> The enemy of the enemy is my friend, kind of thing. >> That's right. >> Now, as it relates to, because you're right. I mean I, I see companies coming up, oh, we do IOT security. I'm like, okay, but what about cloud security? Do you that too? Oh no, that's somebody else. But, so that's another stove pipe. >> That's a huge, huge advantage of coming with someone like Cisco. Because we actually have the entire spectrum, and the broadest portfolio in the industry of anyone else. From the user, to the device, to the network, to the applications, we provide the entire end-to-end story for security, which then has the least amount of cracks that you can actually go out and penetrate through. The biggest challenges that happen in security is you've got way too many policy engines with way too much contention between the policies from these different systems. And eventually there's a collision course. Whereas with us, you've actually got a broad portfolio that operates as one platform. >> We were talking about the cloud guys earlier. You mentioned Microsoft. They're obviously a big competitor in the security space. >> Jeetu: But also a great partner. >> So that's right. To my opinion, the cloud has been awesome as a first line of defense if you will. But the shared responsibility model it's different for each cloud, right? So, do you feel that those guys are working together or will work together to actually improve? 'Cause I don't see that yet. >> Yeah so if you think about, this is where we feel like we have a structural advantage in this, because what does a company like Cisco become in the future? I think as the world goes multicloud and hybrid cloud, what'll end up happening is there needs to be a way, today all the CSPs provide everything from storage to computer network, to security, in their own stack. If we can abstract networking and security above them, so that we can acquire and steer any and all traffic with our service providers and steer it to any of those CSPs, and make sure that the security policy transcends those clouds, you would actually be able to have the public cloud economics without the public cloud lock-in. >> That's what we call super cloud Jeetu. It's securing the super cloud. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Really appreciate you coming on our editorial program. >> Such a pleasure. >> All right, great to see you again. >> Cheers. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We'll be back, right after this short break from MWC '23 live, in the Fira, in Barcelona. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBEs live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier with my host, Dave Vellante. Two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We got a great guest, Scott Baker, CMO at IBM, VP of Infrastructure at IBM. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, good to see you guys as well. It's always a pleasure. >> ()Good time last night at your event? >> Great time last night. >> It was really well-attended. IBM always has the best food so that was good and great props, magicians, and it was really a lot of fun, comedians. Good job. >> Yeah, I'm really glad you came on. One of the things we were chatting, before we came on camera was, how much changed. We've been covering IBM storage days, back on the Edge days, and they had the event. Storage is the center of all the conversations, cyber security- >> ()Right? >> ... But it's not just pure cyber. It's still important there. And just data and the role of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and data and security are the two hottest areas, that I won't say unresolved, but are resolving themselves. And people are talking. It's the most highly discussed topics. >> Right. >> ()Those two areas. And it's just all on storage. >> Yeah, it sure does. And in fact, what I would even go so far as to say is, people are beginning to realize the importance that storage plays, as the data custodian for the organization. Right? Certainly you have humans that are involved in setting strategies, but ultimately whatever those policies are that get applied, have to be applied to a device that must act as a responsible custodian for the data it holds. >> So what's your role at IBM and the infrastructure team? Storage is one only one of the areas. >> ()Right. >> You're here at VMware Explore. What's going on here with IBM? Take us through what you're doing there at IBM, and then here at VMware. What's the conversations? >> Sure thing. I have the distinct pleasure to run both product marketing and strategy for our storage line. That's my primary focus, but I also have responsibility for the mainframe software, so the Z System line, as well as our Power server line, and our technical support organization, or at least the services side of our technical support organization. >> And one of the things that's going on here, lot of noise going on- >> Is that a bird flying around? >> Yeah >> We got fire trucks. What's changed? 'Cause right now with VMware, you're seeing what they're doing. They got the Platform, Under the Hood, Developer focus. It's still an OPS game. What's the relationship with VMware? What are you guys talking about here? What are some of the conversations you're having here in San Francisco? >> Right. Well, IBM has been a partner with VMware for at least the last 20 years. And VMware does, I think, a really good job about trying to create a working space for everyone to be an equal partner with them. It can be challenging too, if you want to sort of throw out your unique value to a customer. So one of the things that we've really been working on is, how do we partner much stronger? When we look at the customers that we support today, what they're looking for isn't just a solid product. They're looking for a solid ecosystem partnership. So we really lean in on that 20 years of partnership experience that we have with IBM. So one of the things that we announced was actually being one of the first VMware partners to bring both a technical innovation delivery mechanism, as well as technical services, alongside VMware technologies. I would say that was one of the first things that we really leaned in on, as we looked out at what customers are expecting from us. >> So I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the industry. I've been following IBM since the early 1980s. It's trained in the mainframe market, and so we've seen, a lot of things you see come back to the mainframe, but we won't go there. But prior to Arvind coming on, it seemed like, okay, storage, infrastructure, yeah it's good business, and we'll let it throw off some margin. That's fine. But it's all about services and software. Okay, great. With Arvind, and obviously Red Hat, the whole focus shift to hybrid. We were talking, I think yesterday, about okay, where did we first hear hybrid? Obviously we heard that a lot from VMware. I heard it actually first, early on anyway, from IBM, talking hybrid. Some of the storage guys at the time. Okay, so now all of a sudden there's the realization that to make hybrid work, you need software and hardware working together. >> () Right. So it's now a much more fundamental part of the conversation. So when you look out, Scott, at the trends you're seeing in the market, when you talk to customers, what are you seeing and how is that informing your strategy, and how are you bringing together all the pieces? >> That's a really awesome question because it always depends on who, within the organization, you're speaking to. When you're inside the data center, when you're talking to the architects and the administrators, they understand the value in the necessity for a hybrid-cloud architecture. Something that's consistent. On The Edge, On-Prem, in the cloud. Something that allows them to expand the level of control that they have, without having to specialize on equipment and having to redo things as you move from one medium to the next. As you go upstack in that conversation, what I find really interesting is how leaders are beginning to realize that private cloud or on-prem, multi cloud, super cloud, whatever you call it, whatever's in the middle, those are just deployment mechanisms. What they're coming to understand is it's the applications and the data that's hybrid. And so what they're looking for IBM to deliver, and something that we've really invested in on the infrastructure side is, how do we create bidirectional application mobility? Making it easy for organizations, whether they're using containers, virtual machines, just bare metal, how do they move that data back and forth as they need to, and not just back and forth from on-prem to the cloud, but effectively, how do they go from cloud to cloud? >> Yeah. One of the things I noticed is your pin, says I love AI, with the I next to IBM and get all these (indistinct) in there. AI, remember the quote from IBM is, "You can't have AI without IA." Information architect. >> () Right. >> () Rob Thomas. >> Rob Thomas (indistinct) the sound bites. But that brings up the point about machine learning and some of these things that are coming down the like, how is your area devolving the smarts and the brains around leveraging the AI in the systems itself? We're hearing more and more softwares being coded into the hardware. You see Silicon advances. All this is kind of, not changing it, but bringing back the urgency of, hardware matters. >> That's right. >> () At the same time, it's still software too. >> That's right. So let's connect a couple of dots here. We talked a little bit about the importance of cyber resiliency, and let's talk about a little bit on how we use AI in that matter. So, if you look at the direct flash modules that are in the market today, or the SSDs that are in the market today, just standard-capacity drives. If you look at the flash core modules that IBM produces, we actually treat that as a computational storage offering, where you store the data, but it's got intelligence built into the processor, to offload some of the responsibilities of the controller head. The ability to do compression, single (indistinct), deduplication, you name it. But what if you can apply AI at the controller level, so that signals that are being derived by the flash core module itself, that look anomalous, can be handed up to an intelligence to say, "Hey, I'm all of a sudden getting encrypted rights from a host that I've never gotten encrypted rights for. Maybe this could be a problem." And then imagine if you connect that inferencing engine to the rest of the IBM portfolio, "Hey, Qradar. Hey IBM Guardian. What's going on on the network? Can we see some correlation here?" So what you're going to see IBM infrastructure continue to do is invest heavily into entropy and the ability to measure IO characteristics with respect to anomalous behavior and be able to report against that. And the trick here, because the array technically doesn't know if it's under attack or if the host just decided to turn on encryption, the trick here is using the IBM product relationships, and ecosystem relationships, to do correlation of data to determine what's actually happening, to reduce your false positives. >> And have that pattern of data too. It's all access to data too. Big time. >> That's right. >> And that innovation comes out of IBM R&D? Does it come out of the product group? Is it IBM research that then trickles its way in? Is it the storage innovation? Where's that come from? Where's that bubble up? That partnership? >> Well, I got to tell you, it doesn't take very long in this industry before your counterpart, your competitor, has a similar feature. Right? So we're always looking for, what's the next leg? What's the next advancement that we can make? We knew going into this process, that we had plenty of computational power that was untapped on the FPGA, the processor running on the flash core module. Right? So we thought, okay, well, what should we do next? And we thought, "Hey, why not just set this thing up to start watching IO patterns, do calculations, do trending, and report that back?" And what's great about what you brought up too, John, is that it doesn't stay on the box. We push that upstack through the AIOPS architecture. So if you're using Turbonomic, and you want to look applications stack down, to know if you've got threat potential, or your attack surface is open, you can make some changes there. If you want to look at it across your infrastructure landscape with a storage insight, you could do that. But our goal here is to begin to make the machine smarter and aware of impacts on the data, not just on the data they hold onto, but usage, to move it into the appropriate tier, different write activities or read activities or delete activities that could indicate malicious efforts that are underway, and then begin to start making more autonomous, how about managed autonomous responses? I don't want to turn this into a, oh, it's smart, just turn it on and walk away and it's good. I don't know that we'll ever get there just yet, but the important thing here is, what we're looking at is, how do we continually safeguard and protect that data? And how do we drive features in the box that remove more and more of the day to day responsibility from the administrative staff, who are technically hired really, to service and solve for bigger problems in the enterprise, not to be a specialist and have to manage one box at a time. >> Dave mentioned Arvind coming on, the new CEO of IBM, and the Red Hat acquisition and that change, I'd like to get your personal perspective, or industry perspective, so take your IBM-hat off for a second and put the Scott-experience-in-the-industry hat on, the transformation at the customer level right now is more robust, to use that word. I don't want to say chaotic, but it is chaotic. They say chaos in the cloud here at VM, a big part of their messaging, but it's changing the business model, how things are consumed. You're seeing new business models emerge. So IBM has this lot of storage old systems, you're transforming, the company's transforming. Customers are also transforming, so that's going to change how people market products. >> () Right. >> For example, we know that developers and DevOps love self-service. Why? Because they don't want to install it. Let me go faster. And they want to get rid of it, doesn't work. Storage is infrastructure and still software, so how do you see, in your mind's eye, with all your experience, the vision of how to market products that are super important, that are infrastructure products, that have to be put into play, for really new architectures that are going to transform businesses? It's not as easy as saying, "Oh, we're going to go to market and sell something." The old way. >> () Right. >> This shifting happening is, I don't think there's an answer yet, but I want to get your perspective on that. Customers want to hear the storage message, but it might not be speeds and fees. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's solutions. Maybe it's security. There's multiple touch points now, that you're dealing with at IBM for the customer, without becoming just a storage thing or just- >> () Right. >> ... or just hardware. I mean, hardware does matter, but what's- >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, and I think what complicates that too is, if you look at the buying centers around a purchase decision, that's expanded as well, and so as you engage with a customer, you have to be sensitive to the message that you're telling, so that it touches the needs or the desires of the people that are all sitting around the table. Generally what we like to do when we step in and we engage, isn't so much to talk about the product. At some point, maybe later in the engagements, the importance of speeds, feeds, interconnectivity, et cetera, those do come up. Those are a part of the final decision, but early on it's really about outcomes. What outcomes are you delivering? This idea of being able to deliver, if you use the term zero trust or cyber-resilient storage capability as a part of a broader security architecture that you're putting into place, to help that organization, that certainly comes up. We also hear conversations with customers about, or requests from customers about, how do the parts of IBM themselves work together? Right? And I think a lot of that, again, continues to speak to what kind of outcome are you going to give to me? Here's a challenge that I have. How are you helping me overcome it? And that's a combination of IBM hardware, software, and the services side, where we really have an opportunity to stand out. But the thing that I would tell you, that's probably most important is, the engagement that we have up and down the stack in the market perspective, always starts with, what's the outcome that you're going to deliver for me? And then that drags with it the story that would be specific to the gear. >> Okay, so let's say I'm a customer, and I'm buying it to zero trust architecture, but it's going to be somewhat of a long term plan, but I have a tactical need. I'm really nervous about Ransomware, and I don't feel as though I'm prepared, and I want an outcome that protects me. What are you seeing? Are you seeing any patterns? I know it's going to vary, but are you seeing any patterns, in terms of best practice to protect me? >> Man, the first thing that we wanted to do at IBM is divorce ourselves from the company as we thought through this. And what I mean by that is, we wanted to do what's right, on day zero, for the customer. So we set back using the experience that we've been able to amass, going through various recovery operations, and helping customers get through a Ransomware attack. And we realized, "Hey. What we should offer is a free cyber resilience assessment." So we like to, from the storage side, we'd like to look at what we offer to the customer as following the NIST framework. And most vendors will really lean in hard on the response and the recovery side of that, as you should. But that means that there's four other steps that need to be addressed, and that free cyber-resilience assessment, it's a consultative engagement that we offer. What we're really looking at doing is helping you assess how vulnerable you are, how big is that attack surface? And coming out of that, we're going to give you a Vendor Agnostic Report that says here's your situation, here's your grade or your level of risk and vulnerability, and then here's a prioritized roadmap of where we would recommend that you go off and start solving to close up whatever the gaps or the risks are. Now you could say, "Hey, thanks, IBM. I appreciate that. I'm good with my storage vendor today. I'm going to go off and use it." Now, we may not get some kind of commission check. We may not sell the box. But what I do know is that you're going to walk away knowing the risks that you're in, and we're going to give you the recommendations to get started on closing those up. And that helps me sleep at night. >> That's a nice freebie. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it really is, 'cause you guys got deep expertise in that area. So take advantage of that. >> Scott, great to have you on. Thanks for spending time out of your busy day. Final question, put a plug in for your group. What are you communicating to customers? Share with the audience here. You're here at VMware Explorer, the new rebranded- >> () Right? >> ... multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, steady state. There are three levels of transformation, virtualization, hybrid cloud, DevOps, now- >> Right? >> ... multi-cloud, so they're in chapter three of their journey- >> That's right. >> Really innovative company, like IBM, so put the plugin. What's going on in your world? Take a minute to explain what you want. >> Right on. So here we are at VMware Explorer, really excited to be here. We're showcasing two aspects of the IBM portfolio, all of the releases and announcements that we're making around the IBM cloud. In fact, you should come check out the product demonstration for the IBM Cloud Satellite. And I don't think they've coined it this, but I like to call it the VMware edition, because it has all of the VMware services and tools built into it, to make it easier to move your workloads around. We certainly have the infrastructure side on the storage, talking about how we can help organizations, not only accelerate their deployments in, let's say Tanzu or Containers, but even how we help them transform the application stack that's running on top of their virtualized environment in the most consistent and secure way possible. >> Multiple years of relationships with VMware. IBM, VMware together. Congratulations. >> () That's right. >> () Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, thanks (indistinct). Thank you very much. >> A lot more live coverage here at Moscone west. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Two more days of wall-to-wall coverage continuing here. Stay tuned. (soothing music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day two of our coverage of Cisco Live. We are live also from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, Stu Miniman is my co-host. And one of our alumni is back with us, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM Storage. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Welcome back. So, lots of buzz, we're in the DevNet Zone. This has been, I hear, one of the busiest expos at Cisco Live this year. The community is, I'm hearing, approaching 600,000 strong. Yesterday we were talking a lot about the big waves of innovation, one of them being GPU's everywhere, AI, but also some of the challenges with respect to data, that companies are generally getting less than 1% of that data to really extract insights from it. So let's talk about what IBM is doing with respect to AI and big data, and really helping customers really turn that dial up on getting more value out of what they have. >> Well, so we're doing a lot in that space. First of all, when you're running AI in particular, if you're really going to do something like run a robotic factory, you'd better make sure the storage doesn't fail. But that's sort of, you know, the checkbox item, just the way a car always has a spare tire. So the real differentiator, from a storage perspective, is what do you do to help the data prep, what do you help to do to make sure that the data is always in the right kind of pipeline? For example, just like a human always learns, right, at least smart humans always learn, so you learned certain things when you were seven or eight, they might've changed by the time you were in college, by the time you have your first kid they might be different again, and by the time you're getting ready to retire, but it could be still the same topic and the data's recycling, and then you learn new things about that topic. So in the case of a data workload, what you need to do is make sure you have data prep along the entire pipeline. And that's what we've done with a whole bunch of software that we offer for the big data and AI workloads and applications. >> So, Eric, we've talked with you many times about what's happening in the multi-cloud world. It feels like IBM and Cisco are on similar, parallel paths as to the move from, traditionally we think about boxes, and from a Cisco standpoint it's ports, and, you know, more and more it's about the software. So can you talk a little bit about that software-defined world in where IBM and Cisco are going together along that journey. >> So, one of the things that we've done from a storage division perspective, we do what we call the VersaStack. It's a converge infrastructure that includes Cisco UCS, our all-flash arrays, but it's packed with a bunch of software. So we can use that to transparently move block data out to a cloud, any cloud, IBM cloud, Amazon, Azure. We could move it out to a block store or to an object store. Now obviously to move it out to an object store, that can help you, can prevent ransomware and malware. And it's all automated. We've done the same thing with Scale-Out File, where we just see cloud as just a tier, and we've done the same thing with object storage. So the big thing we see from a hybrid, multi-cloud perspective at the IBM storage division, is everything needs to be able to have the data easily portable, easily migrateable, and easily replicable back, and constantly moving back and forth, not just going out to the cloud and staying there. So we've done that from our software-defined portfolio. But we also did it with our modern data protection portfolio, Spectrum Protect, which is one of the most award-winning products in the backup space. We've got over 400 small-medium cloud providers where their backup-as-a-service offering is based on Spectrum Protect. So if they go to Wikibon and Wikibon says, we want to back up to the cloud and you're using Tectrade or Cloud Temple or i-Virtualize, all those cloud providers, the backup-as-a-service they sell you is based on IBM Spectrum Protect. So for us cloud is just another tier. Just like hard drives and flash and tape, cloud's just the new tier. >> So in this pivot towards software-defined everything, with, say, VersaStack for example, give us one of your favorite customer success stories that really highlights the value of what IBM and your partnerships deliver. >> Sure, sure. So one of them would be Tectrade. So Tectrade is one of our public references. They only do PCI data. So, Wikibon couldn't be a customer, IBM can't be a customer, theCube can't be a customer, Cisco can't be, because we don't specialize, as you know, in financial-centric data. So they back up about, they do about two million backups a day, all of financial data across Europe and into North America, and they've got a VersaStack that happens to run Spectrum Protect on it. It's all flash, so they're not worried about performance. And then they back up to giant hard drive farms that they've also bought from IBM. But the real thing on the VersaStack is having that very fast edge, and then having the software that allows them to A, control the storage side, but then run Spectrum Protect to do backup. So if you were a bank, if theCUBE was a bank, then you guys could use Tectrade and they use a VersaStack for backing up data as a service. That's a perfect example of what we've done with the VersaStack solution, in this case in a hybrid cloud scenario. >> What are some of the business impacts that they have achieved so far? Are they finding new revenue streams, are they unlocking more valuable data to be more competitive? >> So, what they do is obviously in the PCI world. They're very centered, you can't lose anything. Because it's financial data. So for them, it's all about the security of the data, making sure the data gets there, the data's encrypted in flight, they know that the customers can do a lot of different things, because Spectrum tech is very much a big enterprise package that's very strong in the global Fortune 2000. So they like it for that. Now, we've had some other customers, and their the value has been things like the return on investment. For example, the second-largest dating site on the planet uses VersaStack. And they got a four month return on investment. They bought it, and in four months it paid for themselves, so they bought like four or five more. We had another customer who saved, and this is also a cloud service provider by the way, so they saved the equivalent of five full-time employees that were writing custom code and managing stuff, and they used Spectrum Protect also for backup. But in this case you and I could use them because they're not specialists like Tectrade is, and they'll back up anybody's data. And they saved five full-time equivalents. So they've now redeployed those full-time employees to do something else. So those are just examples from three different companies of ways that they've saved money and really driven a business value, not just about the data, and yeah, the data's fast, but really, if you're a storage guy, been doing it as long as I have, the data's always fast and it just gets faster every generation, so okay, it's fast. And in this case it's really about business value, about the value of the data, not about the storage. >> Eric, you mentioned security. Of course security is one of those topics that's hitting all of the environments here at Cisco, but bring us inside, especially from a storage division, modern data protection and how that's getting involved in the security discussion. >> Sure, so what we've done across the portfolio, even in primary storage, is made sure that we've done all sorts of things that help you against a ransomware or malware attack, keep the data encrypted. I think the key point actually, I think Silicon Angle wrote about this, something like 98% of all enterprises are going to get broken into anyway. So it's great that you've got security software on the edge, whether that be IBM or RSA or BlueCoat or Checkpoint, or who cares who you buy the software from. But when they're in, they're stealing. And sometimes, some accounts have told us that they can track them down in a day, but if you're a giant global Fortune 500 with data centers up, it might take you a week. They could be stealing stuff right and left. So we've done everything from, we have write-once technology, so it's immutable data, you can't change it. We've got encryption, so if they steal it, guess what, they can't use it. But the other thing we've done is real protection against ransomware and malware. So I am going to attack Wikibon, theCUBE, and I am going to charge you $10 million, and I'm going to steal every video you've ever created and hold it for ransom. So the way I would do that is I look at your snapshots, your replicas, and your backups first. So what do we do? We can actually snapshot a replica out to an object store, and ransomware and malware, at least today, doesn't attack object storage. So that way, when I'm talking to you or Stu and said I want $10 million, you start laughing, and go, what are you talking about? We replicate every night. Okay, we lose one day of data. He can't get half the $10 million. So that's ransomware or malware protection. We've also built that into Spectrum Protect, because what happens is when you're starting to, if you will, look at that data to get it wrapped up in the ransomware or malware, you have a whole bunch of extra activity around the backup data sets, so we send an alert. We'd send an alert to you, Lisa, and you would say, oh my god, what's going on? Why is all this activity going on the backup set? Because the backup's not scheduled, let's say, for tonight. And we would send you a note now, at two o'clock, that there's all kinds of activity, and you would go, what is going on, and you would check it out. So we can help with ransomware and malware, encryption on primary data. So we've really integrated across the portfolio, whether it be primary storage or secondary storage. And by the way, almost nobody thinks about storage. They always say, whose security package should I buy? And they never say okay, I'm going to buy it, but I, might buy some security for the storage, too. No one ever talks like that, which is why we're bringing up, and we actually launched a sales play for the field, all around storage for cyber resiliency. >> And how is that going, if you're saying it's-- >> It's actually gone incredibly well. We started with a product called Safeguarded Copy on the mainframe, and we actually got, in the first four months, almost $60 million a pipeline in the first four months of the product shipping. And now we've got it all over the whole portfolio, so we tried it just when we first got started, and now we're now talking about the ransomware and malware stuff, which by the way we've had for three years, but we were never emphasizing it to the end user. Now we're saying, by the way, has it happened or are you worried about it? Well guess what, if you're backing up with Spectrum Protect, we'll warn you. Why don't you go out to tape and air gap? Or why you don't go out to the cloud and we can do essentially a cloud air gap to object storage? And we weren't really talking like that until really we started doing it in Q4 and then really expanded it in Q1, so it's been very, very successful. The end users love it, our business partners who sell to the end users, they're loving it. And by the way, no one else is really talking about it. It's all about the security software company. So we're going beyond that. >> So, Eric, you talked about some of the products with Cisco and IBM working together. I wonder if you can up-level a little bit. You're a great watcher of the industry out there. Chuck Robbins, now four years into his tenure as CEO, Wall Street's doing well with the stock on there, finances look well. IBM and Cisco, two of the bellwethers in tech out there. How's Cisco doing? When you talk to your customers, what are they liking about Cisco, what do they want to see more from Cisco, are they aware of the transformation that Cisco's going through? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, IBM and Cisco have a mutual relationship that spans billions of dollars. Whether that be, for example, as they publicly have disclosed, IBM is the biggest customer for WebEx on the planet, and they talked about that. There's products that we sell to them that they're one of our biggest customers in the world as well. But then beyond that, whether it's common end users or common channel partners, we make sure that we deliver the right solutions together. So I think the feedback I get from both the end users and the partners is that Cisco's back. Right when Chuck came in, said, oh, what's going on with Cisco? They're still big, but the big sometimes fall over big, right? Like in the beanstalk, the giant falls over, right? So that's what I think people were thinking four years, I don't think people are thinking that now. From our perspective, we've always kept working tightly with them, between our relationship with them as a customer and us as their customer. But more importantly, it's really the common customers we have and the common channel partners, and we've never wavered for that support from a Cisco perspective. But just sort of off the cuff, when people make a comment that's like, hey, those Cisco guys are back. And four years ago people were saying, ehh, what do you think about Cisco? My wife works at Cisco, and my ex-wife works at Cisco, so it's a little easier for them to ask me that. Because I'm a Cisco shareholder too. But now you don't hear that question. It's like Cisco's got their act together, they're doing all the right stuff. So that's very good for me personally with my stock, but it's also good just for the industry. You know, you don't want someone to not be able to make the transition. And the valley's littered with that. DEC, Compaq, they're all gone. They're not the only guys that are gone. So Cisco's not going to go the way that other big companies have. They've made the transition and are transforming to what the end users really need. >> And I think the DevNet community growth is a great, speaks to the pivot that Cisco's making. DevNet has been in large part an accelerator of Cisco's transition from network appliance provider to more of a software services provider. But that community symbiosis with their end user customers, with their partners, and with their developer community, is really a driving force here. And I think just being in this DevNet Zone and how big it is, is a great example of how they're leveraging those other feedback channels to not just persist but be successful. So here we are, their Q3 2019 results are really strong, growth across all three business segments, we're in the middle of their fourth quarter. So for Cisco's FY 2020, what are some of the big bets that you can share with us that IBM and Cisco-- >> Well, the one we've done together has been one on security, so we have joint security products that we've done. We have a joint product on the system side with the VersaStack. We've done joint products with them also in the cloud solution area, both, if you think about hybrid cloud, but also in private cloud, so IBM Cloud Private for example is available on their HCI box, right, so their hyperconverged infrastructure solution includes an option for IBM Cloud Private. So IBM has made many bets with them in the security space, in the cloud space. Also, by the way, one of the biggest providers of service on Cisco solutions is actually IBM. So our services divisions do tons of business with Cisco, whether that's servicing the physical gear or servicing the software. And we've been doing that for years. So whether it be service, whether it be cloud, whether it be infrastructure, IBM is doing joint solutions across the board with the Cisco community. >> Got to ask you one last question, Eric. You've been in this industry a long time, you're a veteran extraordinaire. What keeps you excited about storage? >> Storage always change. Storage is not boring. Storage is boring for the uneducated. It is the most exciting thing, it changes all the time. I remember one of the good things about IBM was not just an array, come here, we only just do backup software, we've got high-end storage arrays, we still do tape. We're by far the dominant player, and we're having a huge resurgence there with hyperscalers and cloud providers. We're going crazy with tape because, for them, they're all about saving money for backup and archive, and we're critical to that. We are the number two storage software company in the world, all of our software works off of our gear. Some of the other guys that sell lots of software, yeah, they sell lots, but it only works on their products. Our software works with all of our competitor's products. So that makes everything exciting. I've done this now for 35 years. I've seen hard drives that were the size of a dishwasher to now flash that fits into your phone, or my MacBook, I've got five terabytes of flash. So, you know, to me that's all exciting. And the software is where it really matters. You know, we've gone from bare metal to virtualization, now to containers and cloud. So there's always new stuff going on. But I really think part of the problem with storage is everybody takes it for granted and doesn't realize, if your storage doesn't work, isn't performing, isn't reliable, and isn't available, basically your entire infrastructure caves in. I don't care whether you're in the cloud, whether you're in a virtual world, or you're still doing it really old hat with bare metal, the storage doesn't work, you're shutting down your company until that storage is back up and running again. So it is the critical foundation for every application workload and use case, in any company, big, medium, or small. And it's always evolving. So to me it's very exciting, although some people think storage is boring. I'd say networking is boring. That, to me, is boring. (Lisa laughs) Storage is exciting. >> Stu: Don't say that too loud, here. (Eric laughs) >> That's true, storage is sexy. Well Eric, it's been a pleasure to have you back on theCUBE once again, and we very much appreciate your time. >> Great, well thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, from Cisco Live in San Diego.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I've been following trends in backup and recovery and data protection for decades and I'll tell you right now is one of the most exciting eras that I've ever seen and with me here to talk about some of the trends and some hard news is Beth Phalen. She's the president and general manager of Dell EMCs data protection division. Beth it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to be here Dave. It's always good to talk to you. >> So, there's been a subtle change in IT. Even when you go to sort of the downturn in 2008 where IT was largely a support function. It's really now becoming a fundamental enabler. Are you seeing that with your customers? >> Absolutely. The vision of IT being some back office that is segregated from the rest of the company is no longer true. What we find is customers want their application owners to be able to drive data protection and then have that compared with the central oversight so they can still have that global overview. >> The other change is, for years data has been this problem that we have to manage. I got so much data. I got to back it up or protect it, move it. It's now become a source of value. Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's all about how you get value from data. >> Yeah. And it's so interesting because it was there all the time. Right? And suddenly people have realized, yes, this is an asset that has a huge impact on our business on our customers and again makes it even more important that they can rely on getting access to that data because they're building their business on it. >> So as the head of the data protection division, it's interesting. Even the palance has changed. It used to be, when it was just tape it was backup and now it's data protection. So the mindset is shifting. >> It is and it's continuing to shift with new threats like cyber recovery and other challenges that are out there, protecting data becomes the core of what we are offering our customers. >> So let's talk a little bit more about the catalysts for that change. You got tons of data, you are able to apply now machine intelligence like you never have before and you got cloud which brings scale. So this is changing the needs of customers in the way in which they protect data. >> As customers data becomes more and more distributed across multiple cloud providers, multiple locations, it's even more important that they can answer the question, where is my data and is it protected? And that they can recover it as quickly as possible. >> And you're seeing things like DevOps, data protection strategies and data management strategies, and so supporting DevOps and analytics applications. You also have new threats like ransomware. So it's a more fundamental component of cyber. >> Yeah and you will hear us talking a little bit about cyber recovery, the new product that we introduced last year. We can't just think about data protection as backup. We have to think about it as the comprehensive way that customers can get access to their data even if they're attacked. >> So much has changed. Everything has changed. >> The level of innovation that we've been doing has been keeping up with that change. And that's one of the things that I'm most excited about as the president of this division. We've been investing in enhancing the customer experience, and cyber recovery as I mentioned and expanding into new markets into driving a new level of reliability and resiliency, building on the duration that we have. And of course expanding into the cloud. So one of the things that hasn't changed is the fundamentals of I need to get my data back, I need to be trusted. Why is it, you guys make a big deal out of being number one. You're number one in all the Gartner Magic Quadrants and so forth. Why is leadership so important to customers and what are those fundamentals that haven't changed? >> So two questions there. First, leadership is so important because we have more experience protecting data around the globe than anybody else. And that means all environments right from the multi-petabyte, major corporations to the shops have maybe a terabyte. So 24 terabytes. We're involved in it all. So that experience is important. And then those fundamentals you talked about, lowest cost to protect, fastest performance, fastest backups and resiliency, those fundamentals have to be part of any data protection product. >> The way you guys are organized, you are in chare of R&D as well, you talked about innovation before. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how your R&D investments are translating into customer value in terms of price performance. So resiliency, speed, cost. What's going on there? >> The biggest thing that I wanna talk about and highlight here is how much our investment in cloud is enabling our customers to continue to have confidence that they can get the same level of digital trust that they've had with us on prem but now as they expand into the cloud for cloud disaster recovery, long-term retention, data protection in the cloud that that confidence comes with them. And we're doing it in a way that allows them to seamlessly expand into the cloud without having to introduce additional gateways, additional hardware. It becomes an extension of their data protection infrastructure. >> So the cloud operating model is very important here. What are you guys doing for instance, admins, application owners, in terms of enabling self-service for example. >> We have the broadest application support of any company. And what we're doing is we're integrating directly with those applications. Whether it be Oracle, SAP. You can go down the list. And then of course directly integrating with VMware for the VM admins. That's not enough though because if we just did that you wouldn't be able to have one view of how your data protection policies are working. And so we pair that with centralized governance to make sure that the person in charge of the data protection for that company still could have confidence that all the right things are happening. >> So what does the data protection portfolio look like? How should we think about that? >> Three simple things, Data Domain, our new integrated appliances and data protection suite. >> Okay. Follow up question on that is, how do you, for customers, obstruct the complexity? How are you simplifying their world especially in this cloud operating module. >> Simplifying comes in multiple stages. You have to simplify the first box to backup experience. We've cut that down to an hour and a half, two hours in max. From there, you have to make sure the day-to-day tasks are simple. So things like two clicks to do cloud failover, three clicks to failback. Things like a single step to restore a file in a VMware environment and then live movement of that VM to another primary storage array. That kind of targeted customer use case simple process is core to what we've been doing to enhance the customer experience. >> Now, you guys aren't really a public cloud provider so you gotta support multiple clouds. What are you doing there in terms of both cloud support and what are you seeing in multi-cloud. >> Most customers have more than one cloud provider that they're working with. So what we do is we allow the customers specific example right from within the data domain interface to select which cloud they wanna tier to and then they can also select other cloud providers through the same interface. So, it's not a separate experience. They can focus on the Data Domain but then interact with multiple clouds. >> Awesome. Beth, thanks for taking some time here to set this up. We're gonna hear about some hard news that you guys have today. We've got some perspectives from IDC on this but right now lets take a look at what the customer says. Keep it right there. (chilled piano music) >> Phoenix Children's is a healthcare organization for kids. Everything that we do is about the kids. So we wanna make sure that all our critical data that a doctor or a nurse needs on the floors to be able to take care of a sick kid, we need to make sure it's available at any time. The data protection software that we're using from Dell EMC with Data Domain give us that protection. Our critical data are well kept and we can easily recover them. Before we moved to Data Domain we were using Veritas NetBackup and some older technology. Our backup windows were taking upwards of 20 to 24 hours. Moving to Data Domain with de-duplication we can finish our full backups in less than seven hours. The user deployment for data protection software and Data Domain was very easy for us. Our engineers, they have never worked with data protection software or Data Domain before. They were able to do some research, walk a little bit with some Dell engineers and we were able to implement the technology within a month, a month and a half. ECS for Phoenix Children's Hospital is a great technology. Simple to use, easy to manage. The benefits from a user perspective are tremendous. From an IT perspective, I can extract terabytes of data in less than an hour. When we get into a critical situation, we can rely 100% on ECS that we will get the information that the doctor or the nurse needs to take care of the kid. The data protection software and the Data Domain benefits for Phoenix Children's Hospital are great. There is a solution that works seamlessly together. I have no worries that my backups will not run. I have no worries I will not be able to recover critical applications. (chilled piano music) >> We're back with Ruya Barrett who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection division. We got some hard news to get into. Ruya, let's get right into it. What are you guys announcing today? >> We are announcing a basically tremendous push with our data protection family both in Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection appliances and the software that basically makes those two rock. >> So, you've got a few capabilities that you're announcing. Cloud performance. Take us through sort of at a high level. What are the three areas that you're focused on this announcement? >> Exactly. You nailed it Dave. So three areas of announcement, exciting cloud capabilities and cloud expansion. We've been investing in cloud over the last three years and this announcement is just a furthering of those capabilities. Tremendous push around performance for an additional use cases and services that customers want. The last one but not least is basically expanded coverage and push into the mid-market space with our Data Domain 3300 and IDPA 4400. >> And this comes in the form of software that I can install on my existing appliances? >> It's all software value that really enables our appliances to do what they do best, to drive efficiency, performance but it's really the software layer that makes it sane. >> And if I'm a customer I get that software, no additional charges? >> If you have the capabilities, today you'll be able to get the expanding capabilities. No charge. >> Okay. So one of the important areas is cloud. Let's get into some of the cloud use cases. You're focused on a few of those. What are they? >> Cloud has become a really prevalent destination. So when we look at cloud and what customers wanna do with regards to data protection in the cloud, it's really a lot of use cases. The three we're gonna touch on today is really cloud tiering. Our capabilities are in cloud tiering with long time archival. So they're really trying to leverage cloud as a long time archival. The second one is really around cloud disaster recovery. To and from the cloud. So that's really important use case. That's becoming really important to our customers. And not, God forbid, for a disaster but just being able to test our disaster recovery capabilities and resiliency. And the last one is really in-cloud data protection. So those are the three use cases and we have enhancements across all three. >> Let's go deeper into those. So cloud tiering. We think of tiering. Often times you remember the big days of tiering, inbox tiering, hot data, cold data. What are you doing in cloud tiering? >> Well, cloud tiering is our way of really supporting object storage both on premises and in the cloud. And we introduced it about two years ago. And what we're really doing now is expanding that coverage, making it more efficient, giving customers the tools to be able to understand what the costs are gonna be. So one of the announcements is actually a free space estimator tool for our customers that really enables them to understand the impact of taking an application and using long-term retention using cloud tier both for their on-premise data protection capacity as well as what they need in the cloud and the cost associated. So that's a big question before customers wanna move data. Second is really broadest coverage. I mean, right now in addition to the usual suspects of AWS, Azure, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, we now support Ceph, we support Alibaba, we support Google Cloud. So really, how do you build out that multi-cloud deployment that we see our customers wanting to do with regards to their long-term archival needs? So really expanding that reach. So we now have the broadest coverage with regards to archiving in the cloud and using cloud for long-term retention. >> Great. Okay. Let's talk about disaster recovery. I'm really interested in this topic because the customers that we talk to they wanna incorporate disaster recovery and backup as part of a holistic strategy. You also mentioned testing. Not enough customers are able to test their DR. It's too risky, it's too hard, it's too complicated. What are you guys doing in the DR space. >> So one of the things that's I think huge and very differentiated with regards to how we approach, whether it's archive or whether it's DR or in-cloud is the fact that from an appliance standpoint you need no additional hardware or gateway to be able to leverage the capabilities. One of the things that we introduced, again cloud DR over a year ago, and we introduced it across our Data Domain appliances as well as our first entry to the mid-sized companies with IDPA DP 4400. And now what we're doing is making it available across all our models, all our appliances. And all of our appliances now have the ability to do fully orchestrated disaster recovery either for test use cases or actual disasters, God forbid, but what they are able to do. The three click failovers and the two click failbacks from the cloud. So both for failback from the cloud or in the cloud. So it's really big and important use cases for our customers right now. Again, with that, we're expanding use case coverage to now, we used to support AWS only, now we also support Azure. >> Great. Okay. The third use case you talked about was in-cloud data protection. What do you mean by that and what are you doing there? >> So one of, again, the really interesting things about our portfolio is our ability to run it as an integrated hardware-software platform or in the form of a software only deployment. So our data domain virtual addition is exactly that. You can run our Data Domain software in virtual machines. And what that allows our customers to do is whether they're running a software defined data center on prem or whether they want in-cloud capabilities and all that goodness they have been getting from Data Domain in the cloud, they now can do that very easily. And what we've done in that space with this announcement is expanded our capacity coverage. So now Data Domain Virtual Edition can cover 96 terabytes of in-cloud capability and capacity. And we've also, again, with that use case, expanded our coverage to include Google Cloud, AWS, Azure. So really expanded our coverage. >> Great. I'm interested in performance as well because everybody wants more performance but are we talking about backup performance, restore performance? What are you doing in that area? >> Perfect. And one of the things, when we talk about performance, one of the big use cases we're seeing that's driving performance is that customers wanna make their backup copies do more. They wanna use it for application test and development, they wanna use it for instant access to their VMs, instant access and restores for their VMs. So performance is being fueled by some additional services that customers wanna see on their backup copies. So basically one of the things that we've done with this announcement is improved our performance across all of these use cases. So for application test of test of development, you can have access to instant VMs. Up to 32 instant access and restore capabilities with VMs. We have improved our cash utilization. So now you can basically support a lot more IOPS, leveraging our cash, enhanced cash, four times as many IOPS as we were doing before. So up to 40,000 IOPS with almost no latency. So tremendous, again, improvement in use cases. Restores. Customers are always wanting to do restores faster and faster. So file restores is no exception to that. So with multi-streaming capability, we now have the opportunity and the capabilities to do file restores two times faster on premise and four times faster from cloud. So again, cloud is a big, everything we do, there's a cloud component to it. And that performance is no exception to that. >> The last thing I wanna touch on is mid-market. So you guys made an announcement this past summer. And so it sounds like you're doubling down on that space. Give us the update. >> Sure. So we introduced the Data Domain 3300 and our customers have been asking for a new capacity point. So one of the things we're introducing with this release is an eight terabyte version of Data Domain 3300 that goes and scales up to 32 terabytes. In addition to that, we're supporting faster networking with 10 gig E support as well as virtual tape libraries over Fiber Channels. So virtual tape libraries are also back and we're supporting with Data Domain 3300. So again, tremendous improvements and capabilities that we've introduced for mid-market in the form of Data Domain 3300 as well as the DP4400 which is our integrated appliance. So, again, how do we bring all that enterprise goodness to a much broader segment of the market in the right form factor and right capacity points. >> Love it. You guys are on a nice cadence. Last summer, we had this announcement, we got Dell Technologies World coming up in May, actually end of April, now May. So looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much for taking us through these announcements. >> Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Now, let's go Phil Goodwin. Phil Goodwin was an analyst at IDC. And IDC has done a ton of research on the economic impact of moving to sort of modern data protection environment, they've interviewed about a thousand customers and they had deep dive interviews with about a dozen. So let's hear from Phil Goodwin in IDC and we'll be right back. (chilled music) >> IDC research shows that 60% of organizations will be executing on a digital transformaion strategy by 2020, barely a year away. The purpose of digital transformation is to make the organization more competitive with faster, more accurate information and timely information driving driving business decisions. If any digital transformation effort is to be successful, data availability must be a foundational part in the effort. Our research also shows that 48.5% or nearly half of all digital transformation projects involve improvements to the organizations data protection efforts. Purpose-built backup appliances or PBBAs have been the cornerstone for many data protection efforts. PBBAs provide faster, more reliable backup with fewer job failures than traditional tape infrastructure. More importantly, they support faster data restoration in the event of loss. Because they have very high data de-duplication rates, sometimes 40 to one or more, organizations can retain data onsite longer at a lower overall cost thereby improving data availability and TCO. PBBAs may be configured as a target device or disk-based appliance that can be used by any backup software as a backup target or as integrated appliances that include all hardware and software needed for fast efficient backups. The main customer advantages are rapid deployment, simple management and flexible growth options. The Dell EMC line of PBBAs is a broad portfolio that includes Data Domain appliances and the recently introduced Integrated Data Protection Appliances. Dell EMC Data Domain appliances have been in the PBBA market for more than 15 years. According to IDC market tracker data as of December 20th, 2018, Dell EMC with Data Domain and IDPA currently holds a 57.5% market share of PBBA appliances for both target and integrated devices. Dell EMC PBBAs have support for cloud data protection including cloud long term retention, cloud disaster recovery and protection for workloads running in the cloud. Recently IDC conducted a business value study among Dell EMC data protection customers. Our business value studies seek to identify and quantify real world customer experiences and financial impact of specific products. This study surveyed more than 1000 medium-sized organizations worldwide as well as provided in-depth interviews with a number of them. We found several highlights in the study including a 225% five-year ROI. In numerical terms, this translated to $218,928 of ROI per 100 terabytes of data per year. We also found a 50% lower cost of operating a data protection environment, a 71% faster data recovery window, 33% more frequent backups and 45% more efficient data protection staff. To learn more about IDC's business value study of Dell EMC data protection and measurable customer impact, we invite you to download the IDC white paper titled, The Business Value of Data Protection in IT Transformation sponsored by Dell EMC. (bouncy techno music) >> We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth, thanks again for helping us with this session and taking us through the news. We've heard about, from a customer, their perspective, some of the problems and challenges that they face, we heard about the hard news from Ruya. Phil Goodwin at IDC gave us a great overview of the customer research that they've done. So, lets bring it home. What are the key takeaways of today? >> First and foremost, this market is hot. It is important and it is changing rapidly. So that's number one. Data protection is a very dynamic and exciting market. Number two is, at Dell EMC, we've been modernizing our portfolio over the past three years and now we're at this exciting point where customers can take advantage of all of our strenth put in multi-cloud environment, in a commercial environment, for cyber recovery. So we've expanded where people can take the value from our portfolio. And I would just want people to know that if they haven't taken a look at the Dell EMC data protection portfolio recently, it's time to take another look. We appreciate all of our customers and what they do for us. We have such a great relationship with our customer base. We wanna make sure that they know what's coming, what's here today and how we're gonna work with them in the future. >> Alright. Well, great. Congratulations on the announcement. You guys have been hard at work. It is a hot space. A lot of action going on. Where can people find more information? >> Go back to dellemc.com, it's all there. >> Great. Well, thank you very much Beth. >> Thank you Dave. >> And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. (chilled music)

Right, welcome to the studios here in Palo Alto. I'm John Three cohost in the queue. We here for Special News Conversation with Prakash, dodgy general manager of the flash array business at pure storage, some exciting cloud news for pure storage. Great to see you prakash. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us. So you guys got some big news. So I'm excited by this because I've been ranting and raving about how cloud native has been impacting the enterprise. It's pretty well documented that everyone's going going cloud operations. You guys are announcing a kind of a historic milestone for pure storage in that you guys had been doing great on the storage side within covering new since inception, but now as you guys continue to grow, you now have a new offering that's in the cloud. This is new for you guys. Talk about this announcement. What does it mean? You're an on premises storage, has done great to grow. Has Been Amazing gun public that now with the cloud growth you have a cloud offering. What's going on? Well, interestingly people were looking at storage for performance, cost and reliability reasons. That's kind of the three holy grails that you know, everyone expects out of storage. We added a fourth dimension in simplicity. Storage didn't need to be hard, and that's kind of the brand of pier and as we took a look, there was a fifth dimension that we realized was somewhat missing. While we made things simple. We didn't have the agility that public cloud offered. So as we were taking a liquid like, okay, public cloud brings to this instant available capacity, agility model, but do you have to trade off on the other dimensions? Performance costs for liability or simplicity, and our goal to bring customer value was to avoid tradeoffs. So why would you have to trade off on any of those dimensions? And then the second piece was why do you have to choose? Why do you have to choose between on premises or public cloud? And if you make the wrong choice, how do you have freedom to move? So the problem set that we were trying to address was that unification across all those dimensions, the onboarding of agility and frankly the ability to avoid people having to choose between them and use the best of what's available. Where know, I think you nailed something important that I want to get into the why you guys are doing this little bit deeper, but this notion of tradeoffs is an old it kind of philosophy. I got to trade this off to get that. Whether it's, you know, I want compute and stability or flexibility, agility, but with cloud and cloud operations, the operating model now is you choose, as you said, so this cloud operations on premises and cloud has to look the same. This is what we're hearing from Ceos and practitioners, cloud architects, they're re architecting their enterprises now because you know, the, the three main of it, storage, networking and compute never go away. It's just changing. This is a critical, fundamental piece of the architecture of it operations. Why now? Why cloud was the customer demand? Was it a natural progression for you guys? Explain. Explaining the why now. Well, I'll start with not the storage computer networking, but what they're used for and fundamentally the world's using those three dimensions for long, one of two sites, either building applications or building automation. That's kind of the two major trends in the industry. Now if we take a look, if you are running an application, primarily you would choose am I running it on premises or in the public cloud and as as the journeys emerged like public cloud probably introduction of as around 15 years ago, but initially there was this enamored. Everything's going there and then people settled down to some things will go here and some things will go here, but we believe that's a middle state where people are actually trying to do is deliver applications that solve problems and we believe that future is a hybrid application. Now, what is a hybrid application today? If you've got an on premises finance system, should you be able to use ai algorithms from Google's cloud? They book journal Entries for month end close. Let me, because it's now not a choice of am I using pads for the. That doesn't mean the whole application needs to sit in platform as a service. You should be able to use the best capabilities of what's available, where the same way today, anyone who is selling anything and using salesforce crm needs to ensure that what you've sold is booked in a finance system. That could be an sap finance system on premises, so what is the APP? It's an APP without borders now and these are modern day hybrid applications now coming and bringing that down to compute storage and networking. Trying to bring that together and actually deliver that in a consistent and operational way is difficult. It's a difficult across your application architectures. There are different. It's different across your management, even your consumption and how you bill cap ex versus Opex, but the big difference is that the storage layer, because the application architecture on premises relies on your storage for your reliability, but in the cloud they've actually moved that reliability characteristic to the middle tier. You're sharding and doing scaleout distributed application because you can't rely on the same characteristics out of your storage and we found this as an opportunity to bring these two worlds together. We call it the cloud divide. Talk about the cloud device. I think that's important because one of the things we talked with a lot of the end user customers, your customers and others, their challenges again, to focus on the outcomes that they want, the application that's going to drive their and and the value, not so much what the infrastructure, they have them create an infrastructure to enable that. What is this cloud divide when it comes to storage? In your mind, what did you guys discover? What were the key pain points? What were the, what was the customer's telling you around what and what is the cloud divide? No. Uh, the cloud divided, coming back to it is how you deal with applications, how you deal with management and how you deal with storage different between the enterprise in the cloud. We like to say the enterprise is not very cloudy, meaning you don't have instant available capacity in the cloud is not very enterprisey. Now what does that mean? What do we call enterprise? And there's a how it works with the rest of my landscape, what the API is our, uh, what the reliability characteristics, our performance and cost characteristics are also different. So if you want to adopt public cloud, you have to go ahead and say, I got to do a hard left, right? Because you're kind of going down this way and you got to choose a different path. And if you choose that hard left, you're now stuck on that road. It's a one way road. And we're trying to do is say, you know what, what if we could bridge these environments, like let's dig into the application architecture on the cloud divide. Pretty much people are using scale up or scale out as application architectures and then they're deciding, you know, vms or containers yet a, that those are common application development paradigms. What if you could use either one anywhere, right? Those technologies. Now, if you look at what vm ware is doing with Vm ware cloud and you look at what kubernetes is doing across on premise and cloud, there is now a unification happening at application architecture across management. What if you could have a seamless api in a seamless pane of glass around how you manage your applications? That's emerging, but as we looked around, no one was unifying the storage paradigm and actually that was the hardest we we thought that to unify the hardware or the storage paradigm, you have to build a data centric architecture and that's what we've been focused on doing. We've introduced our concept of data centric architecture a year ago and we're now extending that concept to the public cloud. What I like about what you guys are doing here, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this is. I think the trend that's really big in here is that you guys have been great storage provider since again, since inception can been following you guys and you have hardware and hardware has been a rack and stack kind of enterprise paradigm enterprises. We've got gear, we protected, we secure, but now with public cloud becoming more secure and more mainstream and with the Dev ops application environment developing. You mentioned the ems, the containers and Guth Coobernetti's. You're now having an operating model that's changing. You guys are doing software, so it's not a boxer. You're not shipped boxes to Amazon. They have stores. You got s three right out of the services. You're now extending the software component of your business. I want you to take a minute to explain for the people that might not know the extent of the software business at pure and specifically the cloud component software piece. It's not hardware and software, but it works with on premises. Talk about that dynamic of software in the cloud and the impact of the on premise piece of it. Well, I'll rewind a little back intel. What peers been known for peers been known as kind of this all flash company, but if you unwind that. When I took a look at it as I've joined pier actually about six months ago, what I realized is the unique skill that peer has is software engineering. To get the best out of any infrastructure that you give it. The medium happened to be flash initially, so what we've built with our direct flash and NBME and a lot of the advancements in our software has been to deal with the flash medium, but the core skill in Ip we have is software development to get the best out of a medium. What we've introduced is another medium. This medium is infrastructure as a service. We treat that as another medium and we believe that we're uniquely qualified to get the most out of that medium, which is the cloud. Alright, so I want to get into the infrastructure piece. You guys are well known for being a cloud, a data infrastructure component or data infrastructure. You mentioned the history of flash storage has been a great place to store data on premises. When you get into the cloud, you guys call this cloud data services and I'm going to get in another video on that, on the details of that, but when you hear about cloud data services, but pops in my mind is more is coming. You need to store it somewhere. You have to manage that data for applications, hybrid applications. You need to store the protect that data. You need to make that data available. They'll be able to recover all the same things that get done with data in the past on storage has to happen at a whole nother level. Describe what is cloud data services mean? What does that mean to you guys at pure and what does it mean to your customers? If you back up a little bit where we started and where a lot of our initial customers were at where sas customers and what we delivered to them was what we called cloud data infrastructure. That cloud data infrastructure allowed some of the largest sas companies, either consumer or enterprise to go ahead and use peer to build their sass applications. Companies like service now workday, those types of companies, but what was missing was how do you get that same value on infrastructure as a service environments, aws, Azure and GCP. So what we realized was the consistency model was not the same. The apis were not the same and you had to choose or not. And so our cloud data services are a set of services that give you, for example, the same block storage that you had on premises in the public cloud, gives you the same Api. And from a management and operations standpoint, we have pure one which is a cloud data management solution where all of your data, wherever it sits, because as you said, data is growing. You can see all of your Ras. It was interesting as we built the software, uh, when we first built it internally, we realized that hey, we went into pier one and we see all these storage volumes, but we didn't know which ones were on premises or cloud because our software is the same. We actually had to do some engineering to make it look different. Like, Hey, let's color the cloud volumes different. Or we had to actually think about that because we started from the place of driving consistency. And then we've extended the cloud data services dead. Go ahead and say not only can we allow you to run in either place, but how do you extend that to data protection? Because today, as you mentioned earlier on premises, people have workflows for backup and data protection and initially those workflows could have been disk to disk to tape to truck and we see that there's now a more modern way where you can do flash to flash to cloud where you can have your primary mission critical applications and flash and if you want one hop for backup, people looked at backup as an insurance policy. What happens if something goes wrong, but what's really important is when something goes wrong, how quickly can you recover? So providing flash in that second medium and then third, extending the step for cost optimization by leveraging public cloud in s three allows us to drive a consistency model and we can drive that same workflow on premises or in the public cloud. So the consistency to me, I should maybe put you on the spot here. So and consistency. Are we talking about if I'm a pure customer and I'm running pure on premises and I'm using, I'm using all the management something pure one, all this other great stuff and I want to use cloud. Does my job change at all? Does it look the same? So as a dashboard into the storage and the data because I want, I want, I want persistent data, I want ai and I want analytics now. Now I've got cloud going on. There's a lot of things out there, sage maker, tensorflow on the AI side. Lot of things. Goodness out there. What changes for me or does it change and how do you guys solve that problem? Because what I don't want is I don't want to have to hire developers to go do an integration with Amazon and Azure and Google cloud. I want to have a single consistent environment. Do you guys provide that from a data standpoint? We do. So this is a journey because when you start, you need to ensure that your data consistency and management across all of those environments, aws, azure and Google and on premises is the same. So we're introducing our solution cloud data services on Amazon first, but we are planning on extending that to the azure and Google environments in the cloud standpoint. So let's take Amazon. So I said, hey, I want to use some of that cloud. I just go to Amazon. It's extensible, fully extensible as if I'm using pure cloud formation template on Amazon. You just go in, it's there, you can pick it up, you could choose it, use it, and then what really is the difference is your platform services at a higher layer, maybe a little bit different because some of the things you mentioned and the pads are Amazon specific. Yeah. So if you start using pads services, it could impact your application development architecture, but the good news is if your goal is to drive the ability to use, what's the best thing that's available where as you take a look at evolutions in Vm ware, cloud and Coobernetti's combined with our cloud data services, you're now able to put together a use. Best of what available wherever you guys. I mean that's the. That's the application side. So you guys are providing a consistent layer for the data and the storage. Absolutely. That's going to. If I'm building an Amazon as a developer, I'm going to use those anyway. So it's not like it's a dependency per se, it's just you're going to allow for those hybrid apps to run across premises and in cloud and all the data takes care of itself. Right? It's like they get that, right? Yeah, and what's great about it is we've learned some things along the way. For example, we've been trying to get the best out of the flash medium in the past by enhancing performance characteristics or efficiency characteristics for cost optimization. We can bring some of those same value props to the Amazon world. So if you need to aggregate iops, we can do that. If you need to go ahead and drive efficiency, we have techniques to drive efficiency around thin provisioning. Those types of opens up more use cases for the customer to add more policy based things to their application. It makes data programmable. Well, it's interesting. There was one customer that we were speaking to a as part of our alpha usage and it's a online education company. They do curriculum development and that type of thing and they brought this use case to us. They have their APP that they've built for their curriculum on Amazon and then they want to take a lot of snapshots. So what they. One of the technologies, we have his space saving snapshots so they're like, oh, that'd be great if I could use your cloud block store data service on Amazon that way. But then they thought about it and they're like, well, every time we develop a new curriculum we have to send a snapshot out to a different location and site and what we could do is set up a your hardware in a direct attached way to Amazon because your software is the same. And we have active synchronous replication technology where we can now synchronously replicated between the public cloud and this private hosted direct attached diversion. And then they can do work here or even take snapshots from here. And the reason they were doing it was go ahead and say, use that space saving snapshot to reduce their overall cost profile on exports. That's a great example of cloudifying being cloudified, but more options. This brings up the question about competition. How do you guys compare to the competition? So you guys are. It's the first move for you guys in the cloud, within this operating model, which is consistent, you know, pure on premises and the cloud, get the consistency, loved the agility of the ability for applications and get all that goodness. What about the competition? How do you guys stand versus the competition? Well, when we take a look at what was going on, I think a lot of people wanted to check the box on cloud. So let's throw something out there and you know, see how people use. As we've done this market introduction, we've been very careful about that because peer has a certain brand reputation around when we say we're going to deliver some of these characteristics, we deliver and deliver those characteristics. And we didn't want to lose the value proposition of simplicity and agility. So as we launched this, we didn't just say let's throw it out there and see what happens. We did it with the deliberate intent of saying we want to provide agility is a characteristic that people could use and we want to deliver that agility with the same simplicity that they've come to know and love with peer. So those are the principles that we're focused on and as we take a look at the competition, you know, they've thrown their software out there but we don't see that it's been broadly adopted and then they're still the tradeoffs of should I go on premises or public cloud so they're stuck in the divide and that they're in the storage or the cloud, divide on premise, different operating models. And our goal is to really enable that replicates those guys are stuck on the divide. Yeah, and if you think about these hybrid applications that we see the world moving to think about it this way, the world's evolving where you're going to have more application to application integration. Gone is the days where you're going to have one monolithic application doing everything. So what's evolved is the application to application integration is exponentially growing. Now, if you assume that if you need to do a production to Dev test copy, do you need to do it for one app or for that entire set of apps that you treat as one monolithic entity because now they're all connected. He otherwise you have to decide, okay, I'm snapshotting this one and then I got to choose this one and I got to choose that one. So you, there's now a need to go ahead and consolidate a lot of application workloads and treat the management and operations of that as a unique entity. So hybrid apps are actually making you rethink how you deal with management of compute networking and storage. Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think application to application integration and totally agree with you is going to be happening at a much accelerated rate, but it changed the role of data. The role of data is central to that because as you mentioned, that other example, if you're doing a financial app and you want to use some ai from a cloud over here, the best tool for the job needs to be integrated in seamlessly and storage. Should they be part of that conversation? It should just be stored somewhere. That's what you guys are doing with this announcement and you guys are bringing that to the table. Um, so I got to get. I guess I'll ask you the final question here because it's exciting news. You guys are cloudified it made it. He bridged the divide on the storage cloud storage divide. What's the bottom line for this announcement? As you look at this impact to customers, what's the impact to pure customers and what does it mean for prospects that aren't yet your customers? What's the bottom line? This announcement? Well, I'll give it to you. For me, each perspective for our existing customers, this adds the agility tool set to their bag of tricks they've got and it does it in a way where they can start, get that instant available capacity and if they want, they can go ahead and now start benchmarking across both environments without having to re architect because the kpis are the same and for net new customers and prospects. It's interesting. As we speak to customers, we find that people are on a different educated education journey in the public cloud. Some are already using the public cloud and as we've been discussing this with them, they're like, hey, this could improve on some of these characteristics. Either I have performance challenges, cost challenges, reliability or manageability challenges. So we find that the customers or the prospects that are most educated or the ones that have already leaped, right? They've jumped in the pool and now they realize, hey, you know what? The water's cold and I need something, and there's another set of customers that are still haven't jumped in that pool. And what we're saying is for those customers, you have to make a choice. Right now you have to decide between multiple public clouds, you have to decide between on premise and what we're doing is we're de-risking that choice by allowing them to get the best of what's available where and most importantly ensuring that if they've chosen, if they've chosen something but one of the other choices evolves or matures to be a better option for them, they have the ability to move and I think also the focus we hear from the practitioners that they are investing more and more of their time and energy on building applications, hybrid applications as you're calling them, ones that are going to be a in the cloud or on premises, but solving a problem. They want to shift their resources and attention from mundane storage admin like maintenance problems and make the storage invisible to them. So the developer that they said, I know my thing's working great in the cloud. One of my apps are productive. My developers are programming and the storage resources are invisible and it's never a headache. That's kind of what you guys are getting at here. You're making storage pervasive and important to the developers and the it so that it kind of goes away in their mind, isn't it the sleep better at night, Kinda well, take Kubernetes, for example, um, a lot of application developers using it, but storage is not necessarily transparent. We, six months ago we introduced a pure service orchestrator that made storage transparent, so you have a block file object interface you, you just call and use storage, spin it up, use it as you need and let go, but you should not have to worry about, let me go phone someone creative volume decider either. So you need that transparent and elasticity and we've been focused on delivering that and now few modernize were kind of application development is going, we can provide that. It's always on. It always works. It's globally consistent, it shared, and it's easy to manage from wherever you're saying progress. Thanks for coming in and sharing the news on the new hybrid cloud applications that are hitting the market. Of course, having the right solutions and having the cloud data services available from pure storage. I'm here percussion, just general manager of the flash of rapists and pure storage. This is a special cube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer we are live from DockerCon 2018 on a sunny day here in San Francisco at Moscone Center. Excited to welcome to theCUBE Chris Brown the Technical Marketing Manager at Nutanix, Chris welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So you've been with Nutanix for a couple years, so we'll talk about Nutanix and containers, you have a session control and automate your container journey with Nutanix. Talk to us about what you're gonna be talking about in the session, what's Nutanix's role in helping the customers get over this trepidation of containers? >> Yeah, definitely, and it's, it's a 20 minute session, so we've got a lot of information to cover there 'cause wanna go over a little bit about, you know, who Nutanix is from the beginning to end but, the main part I'm gonna be focusing on in that session is talking about how we, with our com product, can automate VMs and containers together and how we're moving towards being able to, you know, define you application in a blueprint and understand what you're trying to do with your application. You know, one of the things I always say is that nobody runs Sequel because they love running Sequel, they run Sequel to do something, and our goal with the com is to capture that something, what it depends on, what it relies on. Once we understand what this particular component is supposed to do in your application, we can change that, we can move that to another cloud, or we can move it to containers without losing that definition, and without losing its dependence on the other pieces of the infrastructure and exchange information back and forth. So we're talking a little bit about what we're doing today with com and where we're going with it to add Kubernetes support. >> Chris, we're sitting here in the ecosystem expo at DockerCon and your booth is busy, there's a lot of good activity. Are people coming up to you and asking, do they know Nutanix, do they understand who you are, do they just say oh you guys sell boxes? You know you're both a, you're a systems provider, you're a private cloud provider, and a hybrid-cloud provider, do people understand that, the crowd here, and what kinda conversations are you having? >> It's actually really interesting 'cause we're seeing a broad range of people, some customers are comin' up, or some people are coming up that they don't reali--they don't know that other pieces, places their company use Nutanix, but they wanted to learn more about us, so they've got some sort of initiative that you know, a lot of times it is around containers, around understanding, you know, they're starting to figure out, you know, how do we deploy this, how do we connect? You know, we've got something we wanna deploy here and there how do we do that in a scalable way? But we also have some that have no idea who we are and just comin' up like so you've got a booth and some awesome giveaways, (laughing) what do I have to do to get that, and what do you do? And you know, I really kinda summarize it as two main main groups of people that I've seen is, one of 'em is, the people who've been doing containers for forever, they know it, they've been doing it, they're very familiar with the command line, they're ret-- any gooey is too much gooey for them. And then we've got the people who are just getting started, they've kinda been told hey, containers are coming, we need to figure out how to do this, or we've got, we need to start figuring out our containers strategy. And so they're here to learn and figure out how to begin that. And so it's really interesting because those, the ones that are just getting started or just learning, we obviously help out a ton because the people who came before had to go through all the fire, all the configuration, all of the challenges, and figure out there own solutions where as we can, now we kinda come in, there's a little bit more opinionated example of how to do these things. >> So DockerCon, this year is the fifth DockerCon, they've got between five thousand and six thousand people, I was talking with John earlier and Steve Singh as well, that how I really impressed when I was leaving the general session, it was standing room only a sea of heads so they've got, obviously developers here right, sweet spot, IT folks, enterprise architects, and execs, you talked about Nutanix getting those the two polar opposite ends of the spectrum, the container lovers, the ones who are the experts, and the ones going I know I have to do this. I'm curious, what target audience are you talking to that goes hey I'm tasked with doing this, are those developers, are those IT folks, are you talking with execs as well, give us that mix. >> For the most part they are IT folks, you're artusional operators who are trying to figure out this new shift in technology and we have to talk to some developers, and it's actually been interesting to have speak with developers because you know, in general that's not, that hasn't been Nutanix's traditional audience, we've sold this product called infrastructure to develop. But developers, the few developers I've talked to have gotten really receptive and really excited about what we can do and how we can help them do their job faster by getting their IT people on board but for the most part it'd be traditional IT operators who're looking at this new technology and you know, givin' it kind of a little squinty eye, trying to figure out where it's going, because at the end of the day, with any shift in IT, there's never a time where something is completely sunset, I mean people are still using mainframes today, people will be using mainframes forever, people are just starting their virtualization journey today they're just going from bare metal to VMs, so, and then even with that shift, there's always something that gets left behind, so, they're trying to figure out how can we get used to this new container shift because at the end of the day not everything is gonna be containerized because there's just simply some things that won't be able to or they'll scope out the project and then it'll end up falling by the wayside or budget will go somewhere else. So they're trying to figure out how they can understand the container world from the world that they come from, the VM-centric world, and then, you know, it's really interesting to talk to them and show them how we're able to bring those two together and give you, not only bring the container journey up another step, but also carry your VMs along the way as well. >> Chris, Nutanix is at a, the center of several different transitions, right, both old school hardware to kind of hyper converge, but not now also kind of private hybrid-cloud to more kind of multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud. When we're not at DockerCon, so when you're out in the field, how real is multi-cloud, how real is containers in a normal enterprise? >> Definitely, so, multi-cloud is a very hot topic for sure, everyone, there's no company, no IT department that doesn't have some sort of cloud strategy or analyzing it or looking at it. The main way that we get there, or one of the core tools we have is com once again, so, and I'm obviously biased because that's my wheelhouse, right, in marketing, so I talk about that day in day out, but, with com you can add, we support today AHV and EXSi both on and off Nutanix, as well as AWS, AWS gov cloud and GCP, and Azure's coming in down the line that's where Kubernetes will come in as well, so we see a lot of people looking a this and saying hey you know, we do wanna be able to move into AWS, we do wanna be able to move into GCP and use those clouds or unify them together, and some com lets us do that. There's a couple other of prongs to that as well, one of them is Beam, Nutanix Beam, which is a product we announced at DotNext last month, which is around multi-cloud cost optimization, Beam came from an acquisition that of bought metric--the company was called milinjar, I'm probably saying that horribly wrong, but made a product called bought metric which we've rebranded and are integrating into the platform as Nutanix Beam. So what that allows you to do is, you can, it's provided as a SaaS service, so you can go use it today, there's a trial available, all that, you give it AWS credentials and it reaches out and takes a look at your billing account and says hey, we noticed that these VMs are running 50% of the time at no capacity, or they're not being used at all, you can probably cut that down shrink these and save it or hey we noticed that in general you're using this level, this baseline level, you should buy these in reserved instances to save this much per month. And it presents all that up in a really easy to use interface, and then, depending on how you wanna use it, you can even have it automatically go and resize your VMs for you, so it can say, hey you've got a T2 medium or an M2 medium running, it really would make a lot more sense as a you know M2 small. You can, it'll give you the API call, you can go make it on your own, or you can have, if you give crede-- authorization of course, it can go ahead and run that for you and just downsize those and start saving you that money, so that's another fork of that, the multi-cloud strategy. And the last one is one of the other announcements we made around last month which was around--excuse me extract for VMs, so extract is a portfolio of products, we've got extract for DBs where we can scan your sequel databases and move into ESXi or AHV, both from bare metal, or wherever the sequel databases running, extract for VMs allows us to scan the ESXi VMs, and move them over to AHV. And then, we're taking extract for VMs to the next step and being able to scan your AWS VMs and pull them on, back on-prem, if that's what you're looking for as well, so that's right now in beta and they're working on fine tuning that. Because at the end of the day, it's not just enough to view and manage, we really need to get to someplace where we can move workloads between, and put the workload in the right place. Because really with IT, it's always a balance of tools, there's never one golden bullet that solves every problem, every time a new project comes out you're trying to choose the right tool based on the expertise of the team, based on what tools are already in use, based on policy. So, we wanna be able to make sure that we have the tool sets across, that you can choose and change those choices later on, and always use the right thing for the particular application you're running. >> Choice was a big theme this morning during the general session where Docker was talking about choice agility and security. I'm curious with some of the things that were announced, you know they're talking about the only multi-cloud, multi-OS, multi-Linux, they also were talking about, they announced this federated, containerized application management saying hey, containers have always been portable but management hasn't been. I'm curious what your perspectives are on some of the of the evolution that Docker is announcing today, and how will that help Nutanix customers be able to successfully navigate this container journey? >> Definitely. And--(clears throat) you know federation's critical, being able to, container management in general is always a challenge, one of the things that I've heard time and time again is that getting are back to work for Kubernetes has always been very difficult. (laughs) And so, getting that in there, getting, that is such a basic feature that people expect, you're getting the ability to properly federate roles or federate out authentication is huge. There's a reason that SAML took the world by storm, it's that nobody wants to manage passwords, you wanna rely on some external source of truth, being able to pull that in, being able to use some cloud service and have it federated against having Docker federated against other pieces is very important there. I might've gone way off there, but whatever. (laughing) >> No, no, absolutely. >> And then, the other piece of it is that we, with a multi-cloud, with the idea of it doesn't matter whether you're running on-prem or in the cloud or, that is what people need, that's one of the true promises of containers has always been is the portability, so seeing the delivery of that is huge, and being able to provision it on-prem, on Nutanix obviously because that's who I'm here from. (laughing) but, and being able to provision to the cloud and bring those together, that's huge. >> Chris you talked about Kubernetes couple times now, obviously a big topic here, seems to be kind of emerging de facto application deployment configuration for multi-cloud. What's Nutanix doing with Kubernetes? >> Yeah, so I've definitely, Kubernetes is, it's really in many ways winning that particular battle, I mean don't get me wrong Swarm is great, and the other pieces are great, but, Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard. One of the things we're working on is bringing containers as a service through Kubernetes, natively on Nutanix, to give you an easy way to manage, through Prism manage containers just the way you manage VMs, manage Kubernetes clusters, and you know it's, it's really important that that's, that is just one solution, because we, there's as many different Kubernetes orchestration engines as you can name, every, any name you bring in, so that's my-- >> It's like Linux, back in the day, they're a lot of different distributions or there're a lot of different ways to consume Kubernetes. >> Exactly. And so, we wanna be able to bring a opinionated way of consuming Kubernetes to the platform natively, just as a, so it's a couple of clicks away, it's very easy to do. But that's not the only way that we're doing it, we're also we do have a partnership with Docker where we're doing things like deploying Docker EE through com, or Docker, it's of course all sorts of legalese but, they're working on that so it's natively in everyone's Prism central you can just one click deploy Docker EE, we have a demo running at our booth deploying rancher using com as well, because we wanna be able to provide whatever set of infrastructure makes the most sense for the customer based on, this is what they've used in the past, this is what they're familiar with, or this is what they want. But we also want to offer an opinionated way to deliver containers as a service so that those of you that don't know, or just trying to get started, or that that's what they're looking for, this, when you've got a thousand choices to make everyone's gonna make slightly different ones. So we can't ever offer one, no one can offer the true, this is the only way to do Kubernetes, we need to offer flexibility across as well. >> One of the words we here all the time at trade shows is flexibility. So, love customer stories, as a customer marketing person, I think there's no greater brand validation you can get than the voice of the customer, and I was looking on the Docker website recently and they were saying: customers that migrate to Docker Enterprise Edition, are actually reducing costs by 50%, so, you're a marketing guy, what're some of your favorite examples of customers where Nutanix is really helping them to just kill it on their container journey? >> Yeah, so, there's a, wish I'd thought of this sooner, I shoulda. (laughing) No, but we have a, one of our customers actually, I, this always brings a smile to my face 'cause they they came and saw us last year at the booth, they're one of our existing long time customers, and they're looking to adopt Docker. They came up and we gave 'em a demo, showed them how all the pieces were doing all of the, and he's just looking at it and he's like man, I need this in my life right now, and it was mostly a demo around Docker EE, using the unified control plane, and showing off, using Nutanix drivers showing how we can back up the data and protect individual components of the containers in a very granular fashion. He's like man I need this in my life, this is incredible, and he went and grabbed his friend ran him over, and was like dude we're already using Nutanix look what they can do! And the perfect example of the two kinds of customers, this guy goes like hold on a second, jumps on the command line, like oh yeah I do this all the time from there. (laughing) >> But, that was the, that light up, the light in the eyes of the customer where they were like, this, I need to be able to see this, to be able to use this, and be able to integrate this, that's, I will not forget that anytime soon. That's really why I think we're going down a very good path there, because the ability to, when you have these tinkerers, the people who are really good at code, I mean I spend a lot of time on the command line myself even though I'm in marketing, so, I don't know what I'm doing there, Powerpoints maybe? (laughing) Just because I can understand it from the command line or an expert can understand it, doesn't mean you can share that. I've been tryin' to hand off some of the gear that I manage off to another person, and was like oh you just type out all these commands, and they're like I have no idea what's going on here. (laughing) And so, seeing the customers be able to, to understand what they're more in depth coworkers have done in a gooey fashion, that's just really, that makes a lot of sense to me and it's, I like that a lot. >> It's great. >> Are you seeing any, and the last question is, as we wrap up, some of the, one of the stats actually that was mentioned in the Docker press release this morning about the new announcements was, 85% of enterprise organizations have multi-cloud, and then we were talking with Scott Johnston, their Chief Product Officer, that said, upwards of 90% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on for existing applications, so, there's a lot of need there for enterprises to go this road. I'm wondering, are you seeing at Nutanix, any particular industries that are really leading edge here saying hey we have a lot of money that we're not able to use for innovation, are you seeing that in any specific industries, or is it kinda horizontal? >> I, to be honest, I've seen it kind of horizontally, I mean I've had, I've spoken to many different customers, mostly around com because, but, and they come from all different walks of life. I've seen, I've talked to customers from sled, who've been really excited about their ability to start better doing hadoop, because they do thousands of hadoop clusters a year for their researchers. I've talked to, you know in the cloud or on-prem, or across. I've talked to people in governments, I've talked to people in hospitals and, you know, all sorts of-- >> I can imagine oil and gas, some of those industries that have a ton of data. >> Yeah and it's actually, the oil and gas is really fascinating because a lot of times they, for in a rig, they wanna be able to use compute, but they can't exactly get to a cloud, so how do you, how do you innovate there and on the edge, without, how do you make a change in the core without making it on the edge, and how do you bring those together? So it's, there's really a lot of really fascinating things happening around that, but, I haven't noticed any one industry in particular it's, it's across, it's that everyone is, but then again, by the time they get to me, it's probably self selected. (laughing) But it's across horizontally, is that everyone is looking at how can we use this vast storage, I just found out this is already being used in my environment because it's super easy, how do I, how do I keep a job? (chuckles) Or how do I adopt this and free up my investments in keeping the lights on into innovation, how do I save time, how do I-- Because one of the things that I've noticed with all of this cloud adoption or container adoption all of that is that many times a customer will start making this push, not always from a low level, maybe from a high level, but, they start making this push because they hear it's faster and better and that it'll just solve all their problems if they just start using this. And, because they rush into they don't often they don't solve the fundamental problems that gave 'em the issue to begin with, and so they're just hoping that this new technology fixes it. So, now there's, I am seeing some customers shift back and say hey, I do wanna adopt that, but I need to do it in a smart way, 'cause we just ran to it and that caused us problems. >> Well it sounds like with all the momentum, John, that we've heard in the keynote, the general session this morning, and with some of the guests, you know, I think even Steve Singh was saying only about half of the audience is actually using containers so it's sounds like, with what you're talking about, with what we've heard consistently today, it's sort of the tip of the iceberg, so lots of opportunity. Chris thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us all the exciting things that are going on at Nutanix with containers and more. >> Thank you so much for having me, it was a lot of fun. >> And we wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with John Troyer, from DockerCon 2018 stick around we will be right back with our next guest. (bubbly music)

>> Narrator: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. (digital music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here on the ground. Here in New York City for Consensus 2018, sold out event. This is the premiere show for the Crypto Blockchain world. It's part of Blockchain Week, New York City, #BlockchainweekNY, for New York. A lot of events going on. Everyone's here, a lot of breaking news. I'm here with CUBE alumni, Dan Bates, ImpactPPA. He was on with us in our show in Puerto Rico, at CoinAgenda. Dan, great to see you, thanks for comin' in. >> Thanks, John. Glad to be here. >> So, you've got some hard news. Tell us a little about the conversation we had about, couple weeks ago, in Puerto Rico. You got a great mission, renewable energy. You got a token. You've been busy. You got a concrete deal. You're doing business. You're not just saying it, you're doing it. >> Yeah, shocking. >> Take a minute. What's the hard news? >> All right, so we're really proud to announce today, that we signed a deal with the Indian government, which is essentially going to lift 50 million people out of poverty. Women. How they're going to do that is they're going to help restart their textile industry. It's called Harit Khadi. It's an old craft of India, spinning cotton into really high quality fabric. What they're going to do is they're going to put an energy efficient loom in a woman's home. It's going to be powered by our technology. And the whole process, all supply chain and payment will be managed by our token. >> Take a minute real quick, to explain the technology. I know it's recycling. We've done it before. But for this first, while we're going to get context for this big news, what's, real quickly, what do you guys do? >> We install renewable energy systems on rooftops. In this case, it'll be a rooftop. In many cases, it's large microgrids. So, we use wind and solar technology to drive to batteries. And then we allow people to pay for power on an as needed or pay a you go model. It's very much like what M-PESA does in Africa. We've de-centralized electricity. De-centralized M-PESA for electricity. >> You took an economics utility, great thing. By the way, state of California, where I live, just mandating all new construction have solar panels. Not sure they're going to tokenize it. They might be getting it all wrong. But, you do an amazing mission. Great technology. But I'm amazed by the real deals you're doing. You got a PO in hand, real business. >> Yes. >> Signed. >> Yes. Sealed and delivered. >> Yes. >> What is it? How much, what's goin' on? This is big news. >> Yeah, the purchase order that we have is going to represent one quarter of 1% of this project. It's designed to put 125,000 women to work. I can tell you the number has a lot of zeros on it. >> So there's real cash in the barrel? >> This is a nine-figure-- That's right. This is nine-figure purchase order, that we have out of them. It's a big deal. 100 million plus. >> Yeah, 100 million plus. >> Just as a POC. >> Just on the POC, yeah. What we're going to be doing is we're setting this deal up now. End of June, early July, we will doing the inauguration on the first textile facility in Kahana, which is a city in India. And Prime Minister Modi is slated to cut the ribbon, to set this project in motion. His goal, and the Minister of Small and Medium Enterprises, Minister Singh, whom I met with a couple of weeks ago, they are committed to bringing 50 million people out of poverty. >> So this is really high impact, in my opinion, pun intended. You got a ImpactPPA. You got a mission-driven organization, real problem, growing middle class, by the way, is coming fast and furious. >> Exploding. >> You're connecting energy with token economics. Real money's on the table. Real impact to people's lives, with democratization. In this case, it's not, but it could apply to any other thing. This is just one example. >> That's right. This is the largest, in my opinion, from my view, from my vantage point, this deal alone, the pilot actually, that quarter of 1%, is the largest commercial blockchain project in the world. I can't see of anything else that's even close, right now. >> The claim has been made. The largest commercial blockchain deal in the world done by Dan Bates, ImpactPPA. Congratulations. Great stuff. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> We want to ask you now, shift gears to the event. You were out late last night, networking celebrating the success, doing more business. What are you doing here? Obviously, you're not done. It's the beginning of a big deal. There's only one deal. What other things you got goin' on? >> Oh, we got projects. We just signed a partnership with the Earth Day Network. They're responsible for launching Earth Day, 48 years ago. We've got a project with them, 50 by 50. We're going to be doing 50 installations around the world with our partnership by their 20th, or their 50th anniversary in 2020. We're here talking to protocols. We're here talking to strategic partners at Consensus. And it's an amazing show. The energy around here is just unbelievable. >> You know what I love about your project? And you know, we've talked before, but for the folks watching, you combine a mission-driven, high-need deal, electricity, with technology. I mean, it's.... If I'm a young person, I want to be in this business. How're you onboarding people? You guys are hiring? What kind of people are you hiring? >> Well, of course, we're looking for developers to help us with the token piece of it, the blockchain piece. We're also looking for guys who can help us get this thing to scale. That's going to be really critical. So we're talking to a whole bunch of guys around protocol to see who can bring on board, in this case, 125,000 people, like tomorrow. We're also looking for energy guys, engineering guys, because we've got projects all over the world. Don't forget, we're still doing those 42 cities in Haiti. Microgrids all up and down the West Coast of Haiti to help these people lift themselves out of darkness. We do that too. >> Dan, congratulations. You guys're doing great work. >> Thank you. >> I'm proud to know you, and I really believe in what you're doing. Thanks for doing it. >> Great. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, John. >> theCUBE coverage here in New York City. Big news. The largest commercial blockchain deal that we know of, that we've seen. If there's others out there, come challenge that and let's see it. Real offers being done. Dan Bates, ImpactPPA, CUBE coverage, here in New York at Consensus Blockchain Week. Be back with more, thanks for watching. (digital music)