(gentle pulsating music) >> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Good evening from Fira, Barcelona in Spain. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We are covering with theCUBE MWC '23. This is day three. Three full days, almost, of coverage we've given you. And don't worry, we've got a great conversation next, and another day tomorrow. We're going to be talking with Singtel and Dell next about 5G network slicing. Sexy stuff. Please welcome Dennis Wong, VP Enterprise 5G and Platform from Singtel. And Douglas Lieberman is back with us. Our alumni, Global Senior Director, GTM and Co-Creation Services, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome, guys. Great to have you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Dennis, go ahead and start with you. Talk to the audience about Singtel. You've got a unique insight into some of the challenges that 5G brings and the opportunities. What is Singtel seeing there? >> I think from a Singtel perspective, I think 5G technology brings about a new era of opportunities for all the enterprises, you know, from big to small. I think that's one thing that we are aiming to do. How do we put technology together? And that's why I think that 5G brings about a lot more capabilities, a lot more parameters that, you know, for the new technology, new devices, new services that we can explore. I mean, we are giving ourself a new opportunity to try something that's better than Wi-Fi, that is better 4G. So I think that's something very exciting for me. >> What are some of the challenges that you see that are, that you look to partners like Dell to help wipe off the table? >> I think one of the things that Dell has been doing very closely with us, I think in terms of the network technology, in terms of the RAN, in terms of the, you know, kind of virtualization, in terms of marketplace, in terms of ecosystem, they are all over the place. So I think for them, they are not looking at just hardware, they are looking at how to support us as a whole ecosystem to work things together. >> You know, it's interesting because it's maybe an overused term, but everyone talks about 5G being the enterprise G. And really, what's interesting about 5G, and where Dell is really able to add value in working with partners like Singtel, is the disaggregation of 5G and the open side of it, and the ability to take different workloads and customize them because of the fact that the whole packet core and the CU and the DU and that architecture is not locked into a single proprietary architecture, allows for customization and injection of workloads, and allows enterprises to really tune the network to what their workloads need to be. >> So I wonder, Dennis, can you take us through the anatomy of a 5G deployment? How does it work? Do you start with a sort of greenfield, sort of test bed? How do you connect it to your 4G networks? Take us through the process. >> Maybe I will go through from a customer lens. What does the customer think, and what does the customer feels about when we approach them for 5G? I think for most of the customers who are thinking about 5G, they are usually already having some kind of a services that's running on the current technology. Could be 4G, could be Wi-Fi. And one very typical example that I can share with you is that one of the customers, he was saying that, "I'm having Wi-Fi already. Can you prove to me that 5G is better?" So, what we did was that we actually rolled out our, this little proprietary 5G in the box. We call it 5G GENIE. GENIE stands for Generating Instant Experience. You know, very interesting name. We pushed that to the customer place. Within 30 minutes, he set up a 5G connectivity in his area, and he tested his performance of his Wi-Fi with the GENIE on the spot. And immediately, wow, he see that there's a lot of difference in the performance. Now, so the first part, is really about getting the customer to feel that, why 5G is truly better. Let them experience it. Then after which, we went through with them, because of this performance, what does it do to your business? From a productivity perspective, security perspective, safety perspective. And they kind of look at it and say, "Wow." that is where the ROI comes from. Then after which, then is where I think, you know, where Dave says, you know, he comes in whereby then, we will design, if it's a factory, we are to design the coverage in the factory because robots are moving. You want to ensure that every part of them, of their factories have the coverage. So we are to design it, we are to build it, put in all the controls and put in all the devices. And then after which, you know, then all things will go. And of course, from a customer perspective, they will still need to run the application. We need to check that the performance is, you know, up to the mark. So I think in all, the 5G journey is not really just about putting the network and, "Here, customer, let's use it." There's a lot of conviction, there's a lot of testing, there's a lot of what we call trial and error with the customer. Yeah. >> So thank you for that explanation. So that's there, we're going to make a business case, and they're going to see immediate performance improvements. Then, I presume they're going to start building new applications on top. And then maybe that'll negatively affect the performance, but that's okay. It's like we were talking about the other day, there's so much data pumping, you get equivalent performance, but so much more capability. So how are you guys thinking about that ultimate layer, where that value is, the application, the workloads, that are going to be new to these networks? >> Well, let's, you know, we can take a step back and talk about, for example, the use case he just talked about, which was in, you know, autonomous vehicles or robots inside a factory. It's not that it's just more performance. It's reliable performance and consistent performance. Because the difference with a cellular solution, a mobile solution, a 5G solution, than a Wi-Fi, is the guaranteed spectrum and the isolated spectrum and the lack of competition for that space. I mean, I tell people this all the time, and you can see it right now. If you were to open your phone and look at all the Wi-Fi hotspots that exist right here, there is an enormous amount of contention for the exact same spectrum and we're all competing with each other. >> Dave: I can't get into the network. >> Right, and so the more people that walk past us in this cube, the more that there's going to be interference. And so the performance is not guaranteed. And if you have an automated factory, if you have machines that are moving around a factory, if you have robots that need to work together, you can't afford for it to be great one minute, and lousy the next minute. You need consistent high performance. And that's where these 5G networks and private 5G networks are really, really important. 'Cause it's not just about faster. Sometimes it's not all about can I get it there faster? I want it faster, but reliably and consistently, and make sure I get the same experience every time, so that I can then build more intricate and complicated applications. If you have a warehouse that's got autonomous robots, the closer I can have those robots get to each other, means the more packages I can move, or the more welds I can make, or the more machine parts I can get out the door because I don't have to build into the, "Oh my God, I lost Wi-Fi connectivity for 10 seconds," and I got, "And everything stops, until the connectivity comes back and they can resume." >> And anybody would choose consistent, predictable performance over spiky performance. >> Doug: Right. >> And you're saying the technology, you're able to better leverage the spectrum, isolate the spectrum for that specific use case. That is a technology enabler. >> Dennis: Maybe I can also give you another perspective. Together with the 5G technology is where the multi-edge computing comes into place. And that's where I think one of the things that we work very closely with Dell as well. Because that is very important. With that compute at the edge, means that your latency is low. And, like what you said, it's not just low latency, it's consistently low latency. Today, let's say in Singapore, Singapore is a very small city. You can travel from one end of the city to the other end in one and a half hour, and that's it. Singapore is so- >> If there's no traffic. >> And if there's no traffic. (all laugh) Now, so everyone was saying, "Singapore is such a small city, why would you need a edge?" So I explained to them, we did a test from a cloud gaming perspective. As we use 4G over the public cloud, it's true that you can get about 10, 15, 20 milliseconds, you know, on a good day, but it's, on average, it's about 15, 20 milliseconds. However, you will find that there are times, whereby it'll spike to 150, spike to 90, spike to 200. So you can see that it's not just about low latency, it's about consistent low latency. So that's where I think 5G and MEC come as a good pair to make sure that, you know, the performance of our, for those factories or what, you know, kind of Doug has mentioned, the high performance, you know, synchronized services is very important. Beside packing the, you know, the drones, or the robots who go close together, you want it to be synchronized. And you know, if you've seen some of those robots that work together, it's almost synchronized. That is the one thing that, our dreams that we going to make sure that we going to achieve, yeah. >> And then, of course, on top of all that, is security, which is really, really important on all these. I mean the vulnerabilities of Wi-Fi are well known. There is a hundred different tools that you can download for free to test the security of any Wi-Fi network. So there's- >> Dave: I got my VPN and it won't let me on the network. >> Right, exactly. (all laugh) You know, so the benefit of a 5G solution, a 4G solution, is the added layer of security. I'm not saying that it's perfect, you know, there are obviously ways to get around those as well, but every additional layer of security is one less attack factor that you have to worry about every single day. >> So Dennis, you're pro on the 5G adoption journey. You both have talked about the ostensible benefits there and then the capabilities. I want to understand, how is Dell actually helping, under the covers, Singtel, deliver this connectivity and this consistency and the reliability that your customers expect? >> Yeah. I think, you know, having all these services together, I think, other than just what we call the 5G connectivity, it's like what you mentioned about the RAN, the disaggregated kind of services, I think that gives us a lot of opportunity in terms of flexibility, in terms, of course. But I think one of the things that we also work closely together is about new technology. As I've mentioned also that, you know, the marketplace or the partners that Dell brings, that's very, very important for us. And then for me, I think that, if I look at it again from the customer lens again, right? Having the kind of right equipment, which we are working together with Dell, is important, but I think having the right ecosystem that use the equipment, is even more important. I will give you a very simple example. For any organization, for any services that you need to deploy, let's choose a SMB. You'll realize that, if I want to deploy an application in my office, there's a few things you need to consider. Networks, which could be provided by 5G, right? Then you talk about the public cloud. Then you talk about the, what we call the public cloud and you talk about the edge. Now, in order for you to deploy this, you'll realize that every one of them could be orchestrated and synchronized. And then, as well, Doug has mentioned, after you implemented three of them, you've still got to consider security across them. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. >> So what happens there for us, what we want to do is that, we actually build a platform that actually sits on top of all this. This platform actually controls the 5G network, the MEC, as well as the, what we call the public all together. And on top, sitting on top of that is all the applications. Why so? Because again, anytime you have an application, you know that you have to make sure that the VMs works, the hypervisor works, you know, connectivity works, the compatibility works. So, when we build this platform, we put all the ecosystem on board and then it makes it like, the customer can have a one stop shop, look at the equipment, look at the, what we call the equipment, look at the networks, look at the, you know, the cloud, the IaaS as well as the application, it works. And so, working together with Dell, we actually come up and look at some solution that's fit for the market. One of the opportunity that we are looking together with this Dell is in Singapore. How do we actually ship a really packaged bundle to SMEs that has a Dell equipment, our 5G network, plus the platform product ecosystem, that can ship to any restaurant around? So that, you know, we are thinking out loud. Like for example, as you move into the restaurant, you know, we always say that, please scan your barcode on the table for the menu. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> You can just go in, and by facial recognition, knowing that you are not a staff. So it's a reverse privacy. And then after that, push, you know, the menu to your phone directly. And so, therefore, it cuts again the stuff of me trying to scan the menu or waiting for it to load. And because with the on-prem equipment from Dell, let's say for example, there's things is pushed to the phone instantly. You know, sometimes we know that, when some of this goes to the public web or public cloud, and by the time it loads the menu, you are just waiting to avoid the load. So you can see that all these become a experience for the SMEs and the restaurant's staff. So I think these are some of these great use cases that we can foresee in the future. >> And I think, you know, something you just said is really a key part, right? As technologists, sometimes we get wrapped around the technology, and we forget about the fact that it's all about the outcome. To the enterprise, they're looking at a workload. They have a very specific thing they want to accomplish. And all this stuff, private 5G, and edge, and cloud, they're all really irrelevant. They're just means to get to what their outcome that they want to be is. And when we look at them atomically, and as independent little units, we end up with sprawl, and honestly, enterprises are telling us more and more and more, "I don't want that. I don't want a science project. I don't want to be responsible for figuring out how all these things are going to play together and have one rack of equipment for my network, and one rack of equipment for my private 5G, and another rack of equipment for my edge cloud and another rack of equipment for the MEC." And you start to get data centers inside of a pizza shop where there's no space to put a data center, right? And so the partnership we have with Singtel, and exactly what Dennis was just talking about, is how do we take all of those and start realizing that with virtualization and containerization and the open architecture that exists with function virtualization in networking today, in private 5G. We're able to utilize a common infrastructure stack, a common platform to be able to give you all those functions to run the 5G, to run your core applications, to run the MEC, to do all those things, so that we're minimizing the footprint, but also minimizing the complexity. And that's really the point. >> So how mature are we today? Where are we? When can we expect deployments? You know, are there any sort of early case examples you can share? >> Yeah, like I said, you know, in Singapore itself, we have already saw a little bit of success. Especially in Singapore, we have 5G SA already. So I think one of the few things that like I mentioned, some of these use cases that we did. So the company that I talked earlier about is a factory. They took the 5G GENIE, went there, and tested against the Wi-Fi, agree with it. They say, "Let's deploy." They have deployed it now, and it's running. So it's using the 5G for safety, you know, and safety inspection and remote assistance, for training, et cetera. We're using the VR goggles. So I think that's really a live use case. The other live use case is that in Singapore, one of the, you know, kind of automotive manufacturing plants is actually using the AGV that's controlled by our 5G, that's moving around in the factory in a very, what we call random manner. In a way that, in the past, whereby you would never conceive the automotive factories that is going to go on conveyor belts. But now, the AGV is moving as in where at in the ad hoc manner, yeah. >> Yeah, I mean we've got solutions. We've implemented with customers for mining, for example. For the autonomous vehicles in a mine where the, you know, after the mine explosion goes off and you got to gather the minerals and the ores, there's a lot of time that you have to wait before humans can go in. But with a 5G solution, we've been able to enable autonomous vehicles to go in there and start the process of collecting that ore without waiting for the humans, substantially improving safety, security, and the output and revenue of those mines. >> Dave: No, no canary necessary. (Dennis laughs) Is that correct that this capability is not really going to cannibalize Wi-Fi, right? It's going to go into use cases, or will it? Are there situations that overlap, where customers have sort of on the edge, no pun intended, tried to use Wi-Fi and then this will cannibalize some piece of the market? >> Look, there's a Venn diagram somewhere, right? (Lisa and Dennis chuckle) And at the end of the day, no one who's being honest is going to say that 5G is going to replace Wi-Fi, right? >> Yeah, yeah, sure. >> There are, and there's a lot of reasons for that. You know, challenges in adding new devices, you know, if you go to a store, and you want to get on their Wi-Fi, you don't want to necessarily add a new SIM to your phone. So there are places where Wi-Fi is still going to remain a very powerful long-term solution that's not going anywhere, especially at the moment because the cost of Wi-Fi, you know, the chips for Wi-Fi are pennies a piece to put in devices. So we're a long way away from 5G being at the same monetary scale as Wi-Fi. But, there are a lot of use cases where Wi-Fi is simply doesn't work. I talked about that mining solution, Wi-Fi doesn't work in a mine. It's got the wrong physics properties, it's got the wrong distance limitations, there's all sorts of problems. And so, what 5G has opened up, is where in the past, people tried to make Wi-Fi work and either gave up and ran wired, or just dealt with constant problems, like all their machines shutting down simultaneously. 5G is enabling them to now have a real solution that works. So it's carving out a niche for itself. In some places it's replacing Wi-Fi without a doubt 'cause it is a better solution. But there are some use cases that are going to remain Wi-Fi for a long time. >> And how flexible and mobile can that solution be? 'Cause we can't use Wi-Fi here. (Dennis chuckles) We have to use a hard line. >> Yep. >> Right? So, could we use 5G, our own private network on theCUBE? Or is it because we're going too many places? It's just just too complicated for us? >> That's where it comes from. >> Stick with fixed lines. >> That's where the next technology of 5G come from. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Talk about that. >> You see that, you know, somebody ask me, "Why would somebody need slicing?" Then I'll ask you, "That if you are in US, or in any country in the world, there's always two way. You can use a highway and you pay toll. Or you use your small roads. Exactly, why do you have a highway, that you have to pay toll?" There is a highway, there's a path, there's a slice. So for operators, we can always say that based on your mission criticality, based on the speed you want, based on the kind of urgency you need, our works give you a slice, and that you have to pay a premium for it. So similarly, would be that 5G is going to be available here, and say that Cube will purchase a slice from Californica. And say that for Cube, this is your 5G, you have a freeway, green way, it's highly possible. >> Believe me, we're paying a premium for hard lines at Mobile World Congress or MWC. (all laugh) >> And to that point, right, you know, and those slicing gives you the opportunity to do profiling and, you know, setting up. When I say profiling, you know, different devices and different customers getting different metrics on how they use that network. So some of them will get a superhighway, some of them will get a medium size highway, somebody- >> Dennis: Somebody getting a secured highway. >> Right, so a more secure highway. So, there's a lot more flexibility with 5G, and that's why I said, you know, there's a lot of use cases, where it will replace Wi-Fi, and it will be very powerful. And that's the places where we're really seeing the adoption really taking off. >> You guys have done a great job explaining 5G, really. Why you're pro 5G, the opportunities of the use cases. Thank you so much for joining us today. >> Dennis: Thank you, Lisa. >> Also talking about what Dell and Singtel are doing together. I imagine the journey probably has just begun, but you've made tremendous amount of progress so far. It's a great use case. Thank you for sharing it with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Lisa. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live at MWC '23 from Barcelona, Spain. Stick around. Dave comes up with a very cool wrap, after this. (light airy music)

>> Okay, so now that we've heard Scott talk about smart data fabrics, it's time to see this in action. Right now we're joined by Jess Jowdy, who's the manager of Healthcare Field Engineering at InterSystems. She's going to give a demo of how smart data fabrics actually work, and she's going to show how embedding a wide range of analytics capabilities including data exploration, business intelligence natural language processing, and machine learning directly within the fabric, makes it faster and easier for organizations to gain new insights and power intelligence, predictive and prescriptive services and applications. Now, according to InterSystems, smart data fabrics are applicable across many industries from financial services to supply chain to healthcare and more. Jess today is going to be speaking through the lens of a healthcare focused demo. Don't worry, Joe Lichtenberg will get into some of the other use cases that you're probably interested in hearing about. That will be in our third segment, but for now let's turn it over to Jess. Jess, good to see you. >> Hi. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And so for this demo we're really going to be bucketing these features of a smart data fabric into four different segments. We're going to be dealing with connections, collections, refinements and analysis. And so we'll see that throughout the demo as we go. So without further ado, let's just go ahead and jump into this demo and you'll see my screen pop up here. I actually like to start at the end of the demo. So I like to begin by illustrating what an end user's going to see and don't mind the screen 'cause I gave you a little sneak peek of what's about to happen. But essentially what I'm going to be doing is using Postman to simulate a call from an external application. So we talked about being in the healthcare industry. This could be for instance, a mobile application that a patient is using to view an aggregated summary of information across that patient's continuity of care or some other kind of application. So we might be pulling information in this case from an electronic medical record. We might be grabbing clinical history from that. We might be grabbing clinical notes from a medical transcription software or adverse reaction warnings from a clinical risk grouping application and so much more. So I'm really going to be assimilating a patient logging on in on their phone and retrieving this information through this Postman call. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hit send, I've already preloaded everything here and I'm going to be looking for information where the last name of this patient is Simmons and their medical record number their patient identifier in the system is 32345. And so as you can see I have this single JSON payload that showed up here of just relevant clinical information for my patient whose last name is Simmons all within a single response. So fantastic, right? Typically though when we see responses that look like this there is an assumption that this service is interacting with a single backend system and that single backend system is in charge of packaging that information up and returning it back to this caller. But in a smart data fabric architecture we're able to expand the scope to handle information across different, in this case, clinical applications. So how did this actually happen? Let's peel back another layer and really take a look at what happened in the background. What you're looking at here is our mission control center for our smart data fabric. On the left we have our APIs that allow users to interact with particular services. On the right we have our connections to our different data silos. And in the middle here we have our data fabric coordinator which is going to be in charge of this refinement and analysis those key pieces of our smart data fabric. So let's look back and think about the example we just showed. I received an inbound request for information for a patient whose last name is Simmons. My end user is requesting to connect to that service and that's happening here at my patient data retrieval API location. Users can define any number of different services and APIs depending on their use cases. And to that end we do also support full lifecycle API management within this platform. When you're dealing with APIs I always like to make a little shout out on this that you really want to make sure you have enough like a granular enough security model to handle and limit which APIs and which services a consumer can interact with. In this IRIS platform, which we're talking about today we have a very granular role-based security model that allows you to handle that, but it's really important in a smart data fabric to consider who's accessing your data and in what contact. >> Can I just interrupt you for a second? >> Yeah, please. >> So you were showing on the left hand side of the demo a couple of APIs. I presume that can be a very long list. I mean, what do you see as typical? >> I mean you can have hundreds of these APIs depending on what services an organization is serving up for their consumers. So yeah, we've seen hundreds of these services listed here. >> So my question is, obviously security is critical in the healthcare industry and API securities are really hot topic these days. How do you deal with that? >> Yeah, and I think API security is interesting 'cause it can happen at so many layers. So there's interactions with the API itself. So can I even see this API and leverage it? And then within an API call, you then have to deal with all right, which end points or what kind of interactions within that API am I allowed to do? What data am I getting back? And with healthcare data, the whole idea of consent to see certain pieces of data is critical. So the way that we handle that is, like I said, same thing at different layers. There is access to a particular API, which can happen within the IRIS product and also we see it happening with an API management layer, which has become a really hot topic with a lot of organizations. And then when it comes to data security, that really happens under the hood within your smart data fabric. So that role-based access control becomes very important in assigning, you know, roles and permissions to certain pieces of information. Getting that granular becomes the cornerstone of security. >> And that's been designed in, >> Absolutely, yes. it's not a bolt-on as they like to say. Okay, can we get into collect now? >> Of course, we're going to move on to the collection piece at this point in time, which involves pulling information from each of my different data silos to create an overall aggregated record. So commonly each data source requires a different method for establishing connections and collecting this information. So for instance, interactions with an EMR may require leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format like FIRE, interactions with a homegrown enterprise data warehouse for instance may use SQL for a cloud-based solutions managed by a vendor. They may only allow you to use web service calls to pull data. So it's really important that your data fabric platform that you're using has the flexibility to connect to all of these different systems and and applications. And I'm about to log out so I'm going to keep my session going here. So therefore it's incredibly important that your data fabric has the flexibility to connect to all these different kinds of applications and data sources and all these different kinds of formats and over all of these different kinds of protocols. So let's think back on our example here. I had four different applications that I was requesting information for to create that payload that we saw initially. Those are listed here under this operations section. So these are going out and connecting to downstream systems to pull information into my smart data fabric. What's great about the IRIS platform is it has an embedded interoperability platform. So there's all of these native adapters that can support these common connections that we see for different kinds of applications. So using REST or SOAP or SQL or FTP regardless of that protocol there's an adapter to help you work with that. And we also think of the types of formats that we typically see data coming in as, in healthcare we have H7, we have FIRE we have CCDs across the industry. JSON is, you know, really hitting a market strong now and XML, payloads, flat files. We need to be able to handle all of these different kinds of formats over these different kinds of protocols. So to illustrate that, if I click through these when I select a particular connection on the right side panel I'm going to see the different settings that are associated with that particular connection that allows me to collect information back into my smart data fabric. In this scenario, my connection to my chart script application in this example communicates over a SOAP connection. When I'm grabbing information from my clinical risk grouping application I'm using a SQL based connection. When I'm connecting to my EMR I'm leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format known as FIRE, which is a rest based protocol. And then when I'm working with my health record management system I'm leveraging a standard HTTP adapter. So you can see how we can be flexible when dealing with these different kinds of applications and systems. And then it becomes important to be able to validate that you've established those connections correctly and be able to do it in a reliable and quick way. Because if you think about it, you could have hundreds of these different kinds of applications built out and you want to make sure that you're maintaining and understanding those connections. So I can actually go ahead and test one of these applications and put in, for instance my patient's last name and their MRN and make sure that I'm actually getting data back from that system. So it's a nice little sanity check as we're building out that data fabric to ensure that we're able to establish these connections appropriately. So turnkey adapters are fantastic, as you can see we're leveraging them all here, but sometimes these connections are going to require going one step further and building something really specific for an application. So let's, why don't we go one step further here and talk about doing something custom or doing something innovative. And so it's important for users to have the ability to develop and go beyond what's an out of the box or black box approach to be able to develop things that are specific to their data fabric or specific to their particular connection. In this scenario, the IRIS data platform gives users access to the entire underlying code base. So you cannot, you not only get an opportunity to view how we're establishing these connections or how we're building out these processes but you have the opportunity to inject your own kind of processing your own kinds of pipelines into this. So as an example, you can leverage any number of different programming languages right within this pipeline. And so I went ahead and I injected Python. So Python is a very up and coming language, right? We see more and more developers turning towards Python to do their development. So it's important that your data fabric supports those kinds of developers and users that have standardized on these kinds of programming languages. This particular script here, as you can see actually calls out to our turnkey adapters. So we see a combination of out of the box code that is provided in this data fabric platform from IRIS combined with organization specific or user specific customizations that are included in this Python method. So it's a nice little combination of how do we bring the developer experience in and mix it with out of the box capabilities that we can provide in a smart data fabric. >> Wow. >> Yeah, I'll pause. >> It's a lot here. You know, actually, if I could >> I can pause. >> If I just want to sort of play that back. So we went through the connect and the collect phase. >> And the collect, yes, we're going into refine. So it's a good place to stop. >> Yeah, so before we get there, so we heard a lot about fine grain security, which is crucial. We heard a lot about different data types, multiple formats. You've got, you know the ability to bring in different dev tools. We heard about FIRE, which of course big in healthcare. >> Absolutely. >> And that's the standard and then SQL for traditional kind of structured data and then web services like HTTP you mentioned. And so you have a rich collection of capabilities within this single platform. >> Absolutely, and I think that's really important when you're dealing with a smart data fabric because what you're effectively doing is you're consolidating all of your processing, all of your collection into a single platform. So that platform needs to be able to handle any number of different kinds of scenarios and technical challenges. So you've got to pack that platform with as many of these features as you can to consolidate that processing. >> All right, so now we're going into refine. >> We're going into refinement, exciting. So how do we actually do refinement? Where does refinement happen and how does this whole thing end up being performant? Well the key to all of that is this SDF coordinator or stands for smart data fabric coordinator. And what this particular process is doing is essentially orchestrating all of these calls to all of these different downstream systems. It's aggregating, it's collecting that information it's aggregating it and it's refining it into that single payload that we saw get returned to the user. So really this coordinator is the main event when it comes to our data fabric. And in the IRIS platform we actually allow users to build these coordinators using web-based tool sets to make it intuitive. So we can take a sneak peek at what that looks like and as you can see it follows a flow chart like structure. So there's a start, there is an end and then there are these different arrows that point to different activities throughout the business process. And so there's all these different actions that are being taken within our coordinator. You can see an action for each of the calls to each of our different data sources to go retrieve information. And then we also have the sync call at the end that is in charge of essentially making sure that all of those responses come back before we package them together and send them out. So this becomes really crucial when we're creating that data fabric. And you know, this is a very simple data fabric example where we're just grabbing data and we're consolidating it together. But you can have really complex orchestrators and coordinators that do any number of different things. So for instance, I could inject SQL Logic into this or SQL code, I can have conditional logic, I can do looping, I can do error trapping and handling. So we're talking about a whole number of different features that can be included in this coordinator. So like I said, we have a really very simple process here that's just calling out, grabbing all those different data elements from all those different data sources and consolidating it. We'll look back at this coordinator in a second when we introduce or we make this data fabric a bit smarter and we start introducing that analytics piece to it. So this is in charge of the refinement. And so at this point in time we've looked at connections, collections, and refinements. And just to summarize what we've seen 'cause I always like to go back and take a look at everything that we've seen. We have our initial API connection we have our connections to our individual data sources and we have our coordinators there in the middle that are in charge of collecting the data and refining it into a single payload. As you can imagine, there's a lot going on behind the scenes of a smart data fabric, right? There's all these different processes that are interacting. So it's really important that your smart data fabric platform has really good traceability, really good logging 'cause you need to be able to know, you know, if there was an issue, where did that issue happen, in which connected process and how did it affect the other processes that are related to it. In IRIS, we have this concept called a visual trace. And what our clients use this for is basically to be able to step through the entire history of a request from when it initially came into the smart data fabric to when data was sent back out from that smart data fabric. So I didn't record the time but I bet if you recorded the time it was this time that we sent that request in. And you can see my patient's name and their medical record number here and you can see that that instigated four different calls to four different systems and they're represented by these arrows going out. So we sent something to chart script to our health record management system, to our clinical risk grouping application into my EMR through their FIRE server. So every request, every outbound application gets a request and we pull back all of those individual pieces of information from all of those different systems and we bundle them together. And for my FIRE lovers, here's our FIRE bundle that we got back from our FIRE server. So this is a really good way of being able to validate that I am appropriately grabbing the data from all these different applications and then ultimately consolidating it into one payload. Now we change this into a JSON format before we deliver it, but this is those data elements brought together. And this screen would also be used for being able to see things like error trapping or errors that were thrown alerts, warnings, developers might put log statements in just to validate that certain pieces of code are executing. So this really becomes the one stop shop for understanding what's happening behind the scenes with your data fabric. >> Etcher, who did what, when, where what did the machine do? What went wrong and where did that go wrong? >> Exactly. >> Right in your fingertips. >> Right, and I'm a visual person so a bunch of log files to me is not the most helpful. Well, being able to see this happened at this time in this location gives me that understanding I need to actually troubleshoot a problem. >> This business orchestration piece, can you say a little bit more about that? How people are using it? What's the business impact of the business orchestration? >> The business orchestration, especially in the smart data fabric is really that crucial part of being able to create a smart data fabric. So think of your business orchestrator as doing the heavy lifting of any kind of processing that involves data, right? It's bringing data in, it's analyzing that information, it's transforming that data, in a format that your consumer's not going to understand it's doing any additional injection of custom logic. So really your coordinator or that orchestrator that sits in the middle is the brains behind your smart data fabric. >> And this is available today? This all works? >> It's all available today. Yeah, it all works. And we have a number of clients that are using this technology to support these kinds of use cases. >> Awesome demo. Anything else you want to show us? >> Well we can keep going. 'Cause right now, I mean we can, oh, we're at 18 minutes. God help us. You can cut some of this. (laughs) I have a lot to say, but really this is our data fabric. The core competency of IRIS is making it smart, right? So I won't spend too much time on this but essentially if we go back to our coordinator here we can see here's that original that pipeline that we saw where we're pulling data from all these different systems and we're collecting it and we're sending it out. But then we see two more at the end here which involves getting a readmission prediction and then returning a prediction. So we can not only deliver data back as part of a smart data fabric but we can also deliver insights back to users and consumers based on data that we've aggregated as part of a smart data fabric. So in this scenario, we're actually taking all that data that we just looked at and we're running it through a machine learning model that exists within the smart data fabric pipeline and producing a readmission score to determine if this particular patient is at risk for readmission within the next 30 days. Which is a typical problem that we see in the healthcare space. So what's really exciting about what we're doing in the IRIS world is we're bringing analytics close to the data with integrated ML. So in this scenario we're actually creating the model, training the model, and then executing the model directly within the IRIS platform. So there's no shuffling of data, there's no external connections to make this happen. And it doesn't really require having a PhD in data science to understand how to do that. It leverages all really basic SQL like syntax to be able to construct and execute these predictions. So it's going one step further than the traditional data fabric example to introduce this ability to define actionable insights to our users based on the data that we've brought together. >> Well that readmission probability is huge. >> Yes. >> Right, because it directly affects the cost of for the provider and the patient, you know. So if you can anticipate the probability of readmission and either do things at that moment or you know, as an outpatient perhaps to minimize the probability then that's huge. That drops right to the bottom line. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And that really brings us from that data fabric to that smart data fabric at the end of the day which is what makes this so exciting. >> Awesome demo. >> Thank you. >> Fantastic people, are you cool? If people want to get in touch with you? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Jessica Jowdy and we'd love to hear from you. I always love talking about this topic, so would be happy to engage on that. >> Great stuff, thank you Jess, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay, don't go away because in the next segment we're going to dig into the use cases where data fabric is driving business value. Stay right there.

>> From "theCube" Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from "theCube" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> As an independent pure play company, Palo Alto Networks has earned its status as the leader in security. You can measure this in a variety of ways. Revenue, market cap, execution, ethos, and most importantly, conversations with customers generally. In CISO specifically, who consistently affirm this position. The company's on track to double its revenues in fiscal year 23 relative to fiscal year 2020. Despite macro headwinds, which are likely to carry through next year, Palo Alto owes its position to a clarity of vision and strong execution on a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration into its cloud and SaaS offerings. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR and this breaking analysis and ahead of Palo Alto Ignite the company's user conference, we bring you the next chapter on top of the last week's cybersecurity update. We're going to dig into the ETR data on Palo Alto Networks as we promised and provide a glimpse of what we're going to look for at "Ignite" and posit what Palo Alto needs to do to stay on top of the hill. Now, the challenges for cybersecurity professionals. Dead simple to understand. Solving it, not so much. This is a taxonomic eye test, if you will, from Optiv. It's one of our favorite artifacts to make the point the cybersecurity landscape is a mosaic of stovepipes. Security professionals have to work with dozens of tools many legacy combined with shiny new toys to try and keep up with the relentless pace of innovation catalyzed by the incredibly capable well-funded and motivated adversaries. Cybersecurity is an anomalous market in that the leaders have low single digit market shares. Think about that. Cisco at one point held 60% market share in the networking business and it's still deep into the 40s. Oracle captures around 30% of database market revenue. EMC and storage at its peak had more than 30% of that market. Even Dell's PC market shares, you know, in the mid 20s or even over that from a revenue standpoint. So cybersecurity from a market share standpoint is even more fragmented perhaps than the software industry. Okay, you get the point. So despite its position as the number one player Palo Alto might have maybe three maybe 4% of the total market, depending on what you use as your denominator, but just a tiny slice. So how is it that we can sit here and declare Palo Alto as the undisputed leader? Well, we probably wouldn't go that far. They probably have quite a bit of competition. But this CISO from a recent ETR round table discussion with our friend Eric Bradley, summed up Palo Alto's allure. We thought pretty well. The question was why Palo Alto Networks? Here's the answer. Because of its completeness as a platform, its ability to integrate with its own products or they acquire, integrate then rebrand them as their own. We've looked at other vendors we just didn't think they were as mature and we already had implemented some of the Palo Alto tools like the firewalls and stuff and we thought why not go holistically with the vendor a single throat to choke, if you will, if stuff goes wrong. And I think that was probably the primary driver and familiarity with the tools and the resources that they provided. Now here's another stat from ETR's Eric Bradley. He gave us a glimpse of the January survey that's in the field now. The percent of IT buyers stating that they plan to consolidate redundant vendors, it went from 34% in the October survey and now stands at 44%. So we fo we feel this bodes well for consolidators like Palo Alto networks. And the same is true from Microsoft's kind of good enough approach. It should also be true for CrowdStrike although last quarter we saw softness reported on in their SMB market, whereas interestingly MongoDB actually saw consistent strength from its SMB and its self-serve. So that's something that we're watching very closely. Now, Palo Alto Networks has held up better than most of its peers in the stock market. So let's take a look at that real quick. This chart gives you a sense of how well. It's a one year comparison of Palo Alto with the bug ETF. That's the cyber basket that we like to compare often CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Okta. Now remember Palo Alto, they didn't run up as much as CrowdStrike, ZS and Okta during the pandemic but you can see it's now down unquote only 9% for the year. Whereas the cyber basket ETF is off 27% roughly in line with the NASDAQ. We're not showing that CrowdStrike down 44%, Zscaler down 61% and Okta off a whopping 72% in the past 12 months. Now as we've indicated, Palo Alto is making a strong case for consolidating point tools and we think it will have a much harder time getting customers to switch off of big platforms like Cisco who's another leader in network security. But based on the fragmentation in the market there's plenty of room to grow in our view. We asked breaking analysis contributor Chip Simington for his take on the technicals of the stock and he said that despite Palo Alto's leadership position it doesn't seem to make much difference these days. It's all about interest rates. And even though this name has performed better than its peers, it looks like the stock wants to keep testing its 52 week lows, but he thinks Palo Alto got oversold during the last big selloff. And the fact that the company's free cash flow is so strong probably keeps it at the one 50 level or above maybe bouncing around there for a while. If it breaks through that under to the downside it's ne next test is at that low of around one 40 level. So thanks for that, Chip. Now having get that out of the way as we said on the previous chart Palo Alto has strong opinions, it's founder and CTO, Nir Zuk, is extremely clear on that point of view. So let's take a look at how Palo Alto got to where it is today and how we think you should think about his future. The company was founded around 18 years ago as a network security company focused on what they called NextGen firewalls. Now, what Palo Alto did was different. They didn't try to stuff a bunch of functionality inside of a hardware box. Rather they layered network security functions on top of its firewalls and delivered value as a service through software running at the time in its own cloud. So pretty obvious today, but forward thinking for the time and now they've moved to a more true cloud native platform and much more activity in the public cloud. In February, 2020, right before the pandemic we reported on the divergence in market values between Palo Alto and Fort Net and we cited some challenges that Palo Alto was happening having transitioning to a cloud native model. And at the time we said we were confident that Palo Alto would make it through the knot hole. And you could see from the previous chart that it has. So the company's architectural approach was to do the heavy lifting in the cloud. And this eliminates the need for customers to deploy sensors on prem or proxies on prem or sandboxes on prem sandboxes, you know for instance are vulnerable to overwhelming attacks. Think about it, if you're a sandbox is on prem you're not going to be updating that every day. No way. You're probably not going to updated even every week or every month. And if the capacity of your sandbox is let's say 20,000 files an hour you know a hacker's just going to turn up the volume, it'll overwhelm you. They'll send a hundred thousand emails attachments into your sandbox and they'll choke you out and then they'll have the run of the house while you're trying to recover. Now the cloud doesn't completely prevent that but what it does, it definitely increases the hacker's cost. So they're going to probably hit some easier targets and that's kind of the objective of security firms. You know, increase the denominator on the ROI. All right, the next thing that Palo Alto did is start acquiring aggressively, I think we counted 17 or 18 acquisitions to expand the TAM beyond network security into endpoint CASB, PaaS security, IaaS security, container security, serverless security, incident response, SD WAN, CICD pipeline security, attack service management, supply chain security. Just recently with the acquisition of Cider Security and Palo Alto by all accounts takes the time to integrate into its cloud and SaaS platform called Prisma. Unlike many acquisitive companies in the past EMC was a really good example where you ended up with a kind of a Franken portfolio. Now all this leads us to believe that Palo Alto wants to be the consolidator and is in a good position to do so. But beyond that, as multi-cloud becomes more prevalent and more of a strategy customers tell us they want a consistent experience across clouds. And is going to be the same by the way with IoT. So of the next wave here. Customers don't want another stove pipe. So we think Palo Alto is in a good position to build what we call the security super cloud that layer above the clouds that brings a common experience for devs and operational teams. So of course the obvious question is this, can Palo Alto networks continue on this path of acquire and integrate and still maintain best of breed status? Can it? Will it? Does it even have to? As Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and I talk about all the time integrated suites seem to always beat best of breed in the long run. We'll come back to that. Now, this next graphic that we're going to show you underscores this question about portfolio. Here's a picture and I don't expect you to digest it all but it's a screen grab of Palo Alto's product and solutions portfolios, network cloud, network security rather, cloud security, Sassy, CNAP, endpoint unit 42 which is their threat intelligence platform and every imaginable security service and solution for customers. Well, maybe not every, I'm sure there's more to come like supply chain with the recent Cider acquisition and maybe more IoT beyond ZingBox and earlier acquisition but we're sure there will be more in the future both organic and inorganic. Okay, let's bring in more of the ETR survey data. For those of you who don't know ETR, they are the number one enterprise data platform surveying thousands of end customers every quarter with additional drill down surveys and customer round tables just an awesome SaaS enabled platform. And here's a view that shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis in provision or presence within the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. You see that red dotted line at 40%. Anything at or over that indicates a highly elevated net score. And as you can see Palo Alto is right on that line just under. And I'll give you another glimpse it looks like Palo Alto despite the macro may even just edge up a bit in the next survey based on the glimpse that Eric gave us. Now those colored bars in the bottom right corner they show the breakdown of Palo Alto's net score and underscore the methodology that ETR uses. The lime green is new customer adoptions, that's 7%. The forest green at 38% represents the percent of customers that are spending 6% or more on Palo Alto solutions. The gray is at that 40 or 8% that's flat spending plus or minus 5%. The pinkish at 5% is spending is down on Palo Alto network products by 6% or worse. And the bright red at only 2% is churn or defections. Very low single digit numbers for Palo Alto, that's a real positive. What you do is you subtract the red from the green and you get a net score of 38% which is very good for a company of Palo Alto size. And we'll note this is based on just under 400 responses in the ETR survey that are Palo Alto customers out of around 1300 in the total survey. It's a really good representation of Palo Alto. And you can see the other leading companies like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, Forte, Cisco they loom large with similar aspirations. Well maybe not so much Okta. They don't necessarily rule want to rule the world. They want to rule identity and of course the ever ubiquitous Microsoft in the upper right. Now drilling deeper into the ETR data, let's look at how Palo Alto has progressed over the last three surveys in terms of market presence in the survey. This view of the data shows provision in the data going back to October, 2021, that's the gray bars. The blue is July 22 and the yellow is the latest survey from October, 2022. Remember, the January survey is currently in the field. Now the leftmost set of data there show size a company. The middle set of data shows the industry for a select number of industries in the right most shows, geographic region. Notice anything, yes, Palo Alto up across the board relative to both this past summer and last fall. So that's pretty impressive. Palo Alto network CEO, Nikesh Aurora, stressed on the last earnings call that the company is seeing somewhat elongated deal approvals and sometimes splitting up size of deals. He's stressed that certain industries like energy, government and financial services continue to spend. But we would expect even a pullback there as companies get more conservative. But the point is that Nikesh talked about how they're hiring more sales pros to work the pipeline because they understand that they have to work harder to pull deals forward 'cause they got to get more approvals and they got to increase the volume that's coming through the pipeline to account for the possibility that certain companies are going to split up the deals, you know, large deals they want to split into to smaller bite size chunks. So they're really going hard after they go to market expansion to account for that. All right, so we're going to wrap by sharing what we expect and what we're going to probe for at Palo Alto Ignite next week, Lisa Martin and I will be hosting "theCube" and here's what we'll be looking for. First, it's a four day event at the MGM with the meat of the program on days two and three. That's day two was the big keynote. That's when we'll start our broadcasting, we're going for two days. Now our understanding is we've never done Palo Alto Ignite before but our understanding it's a pretty technically oriented crowd that's going to be eager to hear what CTO and founder Nir Zuk has to say. And as well CEO Nikesh Aurora and as in addition to longtime friend of "theCube" and current president, BJ Jenkins, he's going to be speaking. Wendy Whitmore runs Unit 42 and is going to be several other high profile Palo Alto execs, as well, Thomas Kurian from Google is a featured speaker. Lee Claridge, who is Palo Alto's, chief product officer we think is going to be giving the audience heavy doses of Prisma Cloud and Cortex enhancements. Now, Cortex, you might remember, came from an acquisition and does threat detection and attack surface management. And we're going to hear a lot about we think about security automation. So we'll be listening for how Cortex has been integrated and what kind of uptake that it's getting. We've done some, you know, modeling in from the ETR. Guys have done some modeling of cortex, you know looks like it's got a lot of upside and through the Palo Alto go to market machine, you know could really pick up momentum. That's something that we'll be probing for. Now, one of the other things that we'll be watching is pricing. We want to talk to customers about their spend optimization, their spending patterns, their vendor consolidation strategies. Look, Palo Alto is a premium offering. It charges for value. It's expensive. So we also want to understand what kind of switching costs are customers willing to absorb and how onerous they are and what's the business case look like? How are they thinking about that business case. We also want to understand and really probe on how will Palo Alto maintain best of breed as it continues to acquire and integrate to expand its TAM and appeal as that one-stop shop. You know, can it do that as we talked about before. And will it do that? There's also an interesting tension going on sort of changing subjects here in security. There's a guy named Edward Hellekey who's been in "theCube" before. He hasn't been in "theCube" in a while but he's a security pro who has educated us on the nuances of protecting data privacy, public policy, how it varies by region and how complicated it is relative to security. Because securities you technically you have to show a chain of custody that proves unequivocally, for example that data has been deleted or scrubbed or that metadata does. It doesn't include any residual private data that violates the laws, the local laws. And the tension is this, you need good data and lots of it to have good security, really the more the better. But government policy is often at odds in a major blocker to sharing data and it's getting more so. So we want to understand this tension and how companies like Palo Alto are dealing with it. Our customers testing public policy in courts we think not quite yet, our government's making exceptions and policies like GDPR that favor security over data privacy. What are the trade-offs there? And finally, one theme of this breaking analysis is what does Palo Alto have to do to stay on top? And we would sum it up with three words. Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. And we said this at CrowdStrike Falcon in September that the one concern we had was the pace of ecosystem development for CrowdStrike. Is collaboration possible with competitors? Is being adopted aggressively? Is Palo Alto being adopted aggressively by global system integrators? What's the uptake there? What about developers? Look, the hallmark of a cloud company which Palo Alto is a cloud security company is a thriving ecosystem that has entries into and exits from its platform. So we'll be looking at what that ecosystem looks like how vibrant and inclusive it is where the public clouds fit and whether Palo Alto Networks can really become the security super cloud. Okay, that's a wrap stop by next week. If you're in Vegas, say hello to "theCube" team. We have an unbelievable lineup on the program. Now if you're not there, check out our coverage on theCube.net. I want to thank Eric Bradley for sharing a glimpse on short notice of the upcoming survey from ETR and his thoughts. And as always, thanks to Chip Symington for his sharp comments. Want to thank Alex Morrison, who's on production and manages the podcast Ken Schiffman as well in our Boston studio, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight they help get the word out on social and of course in our newsletters, Rob Hoof, is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some awesome editing, thank you to all. Remember all these episodes they're available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, all you got to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com where you can email me at david.valante@siliconangle.com or dm me at D Valante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for "theCube" Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week on "Ignite" or next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

(shimmering corporate music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi Vantara. Lisa Martin here with Russell Skingsley, the CTO and Global VP of Technical Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Russell, welcome to the program. >> Hiya, Lisa! Nice to be here! >> Yeah, great to have you. So, here we are, at the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers' priorities for 2023? >> Yeah, good one. Just to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission-critical IT environments and this has been been in our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So, just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from and so, that's what you're going to hear about here. Now, in terms of 2023, one of the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate, is power consumption and closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and de-carbonization and all of that sort of thing, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say, it is a priority for us and we are very active in that area. So, aside from that one, that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020 and I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So, just the act of managing that amount of data is a challenge in itself and I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas is another one of those big challenges. In that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call, the Post-Facebook Awakening Era, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's, yeah, the minutiae of people's lives, and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data. >> Right. >> Yeah, right, and I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, this whole idea of all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to power it and I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data. Right. >> Yeah, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, it's got to be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value, new opportunities for the business, at record speed. >> Yes, that's exactly right, and so, being able to wield that data somehow, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data or a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the Cloud to be able to build out their capabilities and the reason why the Cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card and now, all of a sudden, they could start to build a business from that and I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now, how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages? How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this is why, really, Hybrid Cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >> So, when it comes to Hybrid Cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then, I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Vantara and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those Hybrid Cloud challenges? >> Yeah, it's a great question and, you know, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from one vendor. Hybrid by, sort of, its, you know, by definition, is going to involve multiple pieces and so, there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at a one-stop shop like you used to, but even if you think about the biggest public Cloud provider on the planet, AWS, even it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on Public Cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace comes in. Now, for us, you know, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage, and, you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So, partners are absolutely essential, and so now, we kind of have a partner-first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in Hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our own solutions and so, you know, when it comes to those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace and, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter, but, you know, that's kind of what you say when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable. You know, of course they matter and for us, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible Hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >> Can you peel the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions? Give me a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that. >> Yeah, let me do that with a few examples here and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So, for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important Hybrid Cloud partners and in fact, it's my belief they have one of the strongest Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with our customers as well, but, you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. We combine that with what VMware's doing and then, when you look at our converged, or hyper-converged, solutions with them, it's a 'better together' story where you now have what is one of the best Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry with VMware, but now, for the on-premise part especially, you've now added 100% data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level, a level underneath, where VMware are, and so, that's VMware, and I've got a couple more examples just to sort of fill that out a bit. >> Sure. >> Cisco is another part, a very strong partner of ours, a key partner, and, I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a $50,000,000,000 IT provider, and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own, so they're going to partner with someone. From our perspective, we look at Cisco's customers and we look at them and think, they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality and we think we match with them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converged platforms in the industry from Cisco, so it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best arrays, best storage arrays, they can get, and so, we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be UCS customers. Final one for you, Lisa, by way of example. We have a relationship with Equinix and, you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading Colo provider and the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. They're connected to all of the significant Cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the Cloud. Compute from the Cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over. You, like, you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long-lived. Storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time and so, the cost model around Public Cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute, and so, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a data anchor point, where they put our arrays into an Equinix location and then they utilize Equinix as high-speeding, interconnects to the Cloud providers to take the compute from them. So, they take the compute from the Cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way, they feel like, we've now got the best of all worlds. >> Right. >> What I hope that illustrates Lisa is, with those three examples, is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partner's advantages. >> Right. What are, when you're in customer conversations, in our final few minutes here I want to get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi Vantara as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as-a-service business so we can round out with that. >> Okay, let's just start with the differentiators. You know, firstly, and hopefully, I've kind of, I've hit this point hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that and so, they're looking for, okay, you've got that. Now, how can you make my Hybrid Cloud aspirations better? So, we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly, I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and into the areas of data management. >> Okay. >> You know, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. So, you know, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that and we think that that's a competitive advantage for us. >> Right. >> One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time, where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again, but you only really get that perspective if you are long-lived in the industry and so, we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >> Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as-a-service business? >> They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know? We ourselves don't own data centers, right? So, we don't provide our own Cloud services out. So, we are 100% partner-focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their Cloud services with our solutions and then on-sell them to their customers as a service. You know, and by quick way of example, VMware, for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware Cloud services. 5,000 blows me away and many of them are our partners too. So, we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware, and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as-a-service business. >> Got it. So, as you said, the partner ecosystem, it's absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things Hybrid Cloud challenges and how Hitachi Vantara is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa! >> Thanks, Russell. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage!

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here joining myself, Lisa Martin at Dave Valante. David, it's great to see the energy of day one alone. People are back, they're ready to be back. They're ready to hear from AWS and what it's gonna announce to. >>Yeah, all through the pandemic. Of course, we've talked about digital transformation, but the conversation is evolving beyond that to business transformation now, deeper integration of the cloud to really transform fundamental business operations and And that's a new era. >>It is a new era. It's exciting. We've got a couple of guests that we're gonna unpack that with. Anan. Beji joins us, the President Digital Business Services at HCL Tech and Prar, SVP and Global head of AWS business unit. Also from HCL Tech. Guys, welcome. Thank >>You. Thank you, >>Thank you. >>Let's talk about some of the latest trends anon. We'll start with you. What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption? What are you hearing out in the marketplace? >>Yeah, I think you said it right. The post pandemic, every industry, every enterprise and every industry realize that for resilience, for their ability to change and adapt change and their ability to increase, you know, velocity of change so that they can move fast and keep up the expectations of their consumers, their partners, their employees, they need to have composability at the core and resilience at the core. And so, digital transformation became all about the ability to change, an ability to pivot faster. Now, it's easier said than done, right? Larger enterprises, especially as you move into complex regulated industries, you know, oil and gas, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, utilities, these are industries that are not easy to change. They're not adaptable to change, and yet they had to really become more adaptable. And they saw cloud as an enabler to, to all of that, right? So they started looking at every area of their business, business processes that make up their value chains and really look at how can they increase the adaptability and the ability to change these value chains so that they can engage with their customers better, their partners, better their employees better, and also build some of the composability. >>And what might mean that is that just kind of like Lego blocks, they don't have to make changes that are sweeping and big that are difficult to make, but make them in parts so that they can make them again and again. So velocity of change becomes important. Clouds become an enabler to all of this. And so if I look at the last four years, every industry, whether regulated or not b2c, B2B to C, B2B is adopting cloud for digital acceleration. >>I'm curious to what you're seeing on the front lines, given the macro headwinds. You mentioned business resilience and during the pandemic, it was a lot of CIOs told us, wow, we were, we were kind of focused on disaster recovery, but our business wasn't resilient. We were really optimizing for efficiency. And then they started to okay, build in that business resilience. But now you got the economic headwinds. Yes. People are tapping their brakes a little bit. There's some uncertainty, a longer sales cycle, even the cloud's not immune. Yeah. Even though it's still growing at 30% plus per year. What are you guys seeing in the field with the AWS partnership? How are customers, you know, dealing with some of those more strategic transformation projects? Yeah, >>Yeah. So you know, first off, one thing that's changed and is different is every industry realizes that there is no choice. They don't have a choice to not be resilient. They don't have a choice to not be adaptable. The pandemic has taught them that the markets and the macros are increasingly changing supply chains. It's changing customer behavior for their own industries. It's changing their pricing and their cost models. And for all of that, they need to continue on their digital journeys. Now, what's different though is they wanna prioritize. They wanna prioritize and do more with less. They want to adapt faster, but also make sure that they don't, they don't just try to do everything together. And so there's a lot of focus on what do we prioritize? How do we leverage cloud to move faster, you know, and cheaper in terms of our change. >>And also to decide where do we consume and where do we compose? We'll talk a little bit more about that. There are certain things that you don't want to invent yourself. You can consume from cloud providers, whether it's business features, whether it is cloud capabilities. And so it's, there is a shift from adopting cloud just for cost takeout and just for resilience, but also for composability, which means let's consume what I can consume from the cloud and really build those features faster. So squeeze the go to market time, squeeze the time to market and squeeze the price to market, right? So that's the >>Change and really driving those business outcomes. As we talked about Absolut ard, talk to us about how hcl tech and AWS are working together. How are you enabling customers to achieve what an was talking about? >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, our partnership has started almost 10 years back, but over the last one year, we have created what we call as AWS dedicated business unit to look at end to end stock from an AWS perspective. So what we see in the market as a explained is more drive from clients for optimization, driving, app modernization, driving consolidation, looking at the cost, sustainability angles, looking at the IOT angle, manufacturing platforms, the industry adoption. All this is actually igniting the way the industry would look at AWS and as well as the partnership. So from an HCL tech and AWS partnership, we're actually accelerating most of these conversations by building bespoke accelerated industry solutions. So what I mean is, for example, there is an issue with a manufacturing plant and take Covid situation, people can't get into a a manufacturing plant. So how can AWS help put it in the cloud, accelerate those conversations. So we are building those industry specific solutions so that it can be everybody from a manufacturing sector can adopt and actually go to market. As well as you can access all this applications once it is in the cloud from anywhere, any device with a scalable options. That's where our partnership is actually igniting lot of cloud conversations and playing conversations in the market. So we see a lot of traction there. Lisa, on >>That, incredibly important during the last couple of years alone. >>Absolutely. I mean, last couple of years have been groundbreaking, right? Especially with the covid, for example, Amazon Connect, we use, we used Amazon Connect to roll out, you know, call center at the cloud, right? So you don't have to walk into an office, for example. People are working in the banking sector, especially in the trading platform. They were, they were not able to get there. So, but they need to make calls. How do you do the customer service? So Amazon Connect came right at the junction, so call center in the cloud and you can access, dial the number so the customer don't feel the pain of, you know, somebody not answering. It's accessible. That's where the partnership or the HCL tech partnership and AWS comes into play because we bring the scale, the skill set capability with the services of, you know, aws, Amazon, and that forms a concrete story for the client, right? That's one such example. And you know, many such examples are in the market that we are accelerating in the, in the discussions. >>And connect is a good example. Lisa, we were talking earlier about Amazon doubling down on the primitives, but also moving up up market as well, up chain up the value chain. And it needs partners like HCL to be able to go into various industries and apply that effectively. Absolutely. And that's where business transformation comes >>In. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think some of the aspects that we are looking at is, you know, while we do most of this cloud transformation initiatives from an tech perspective, what we are doing is we are encompassing them into a story, which we call it as cloud smart, right? So we are calling it as cloud smart, which is a go-to market offering from Atcl Tech, where the client doesn't have to look at each of these services from various vendors. So it's a one stop shop, right? From strategy consulting, look, implementation, underpinned by app modernization, consolidation, and the operational. So we do that as end to end service with our offerings, which is why helping us actually accelerate conversations on the crowd. What happen is the clients are also building these capabilities more and more often. You see a lot of new services are being added to aws, so not many clients are aware of it. So it is the responsibility of system integrator like us to make them aware and bring it into a shape where the client can consume in a low cost option, in an optimized way. That's where I think it's, it's, it's working out very well for us. With the partnership of, so >>You curate those services that you know will fit the customer's business. You, you know, the ingredients that you could put together, the, the dinner. >>Absolutely. You're preparing a dish, right? So you're preparing a dish, you know where the ingredients are. So the ingredients are supplied by aws. So you need to prepare a pasta dish, right? So you, you how spicy you want to make it howland, you want to make it, you know what source you want to use. How do you bring all those elements together? That's what, you know, tech has been focusing on. >>And you use the word curation, right? Curation is really industry process down, depending on your industry, every industry, every enterprise, there are things that are differentiating them. There's a business processes that differentiate you and there are business processes that don't necessarily differentiate you but are core to you. For example, if you're a retailer, you know, you're retailing, you're merchandising, how you price your products, how you market your products, your supply chains, those differentiate you. How you run your general ledger, your accounting, your payables. HR is core to your business but doesn't differentiate you. And the choices you make in the cloud for each of these areas are different. What differentiates you? You compose what doesn't differentiate you consume because you don't want to try and compose what >>Telco Exactly. Oh my gosh. >>Our biggest examples are in Telco, right? Right. Their omnichannel marketing, you know, how they connect with their consumers, how they do their billing systems, how they do their pricing systems. Those are their differentiations and things that don't they want to consume. And that's where cloud adoption needs to come with really a curation framework. We call it the Phoenix framework, which defines what differentiates you versus not. And based on that, what are the architectural choices you make at the applications layer, the integration layer, the data layer, and the infrastructure layer all from aws and how do you make those choices? >>Talk about a customer example anon that really articulates that value. >>Yeah, I'll give you an example that sort of, everybody can relate to a very large tools company that manufactures tools that we all use at home for, you know, remodeling our houses, building stuff, building furniture. Their business post pandemic dramatically shifted in every way possible. Nobody was going anymore to Home Depot and Lowe's to buy their tools, their online business surge by 200%. Their supply chains were changing because their manufacturers originally were in China and Malaysia. They were shifting a lot of that base to Taiwan and Germany and Latin America. Their pricing model was changing. Their last mile deliveries were changing cuz they were not used to delivering you and me last mile deliveries. So every aspect of their business was changing. They hadn't thought of their business in the same way, but guess what? That business was growing, but the needs were changing and they needed to rethink every value chain in their business. >>And so they had to adopt cloud. They leverage AWS at their core to rethink every part of their business. Rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms, every aspect you can think of and all of that within 24 months. Cuz otherwise they would lose market share, you know, in any given market. And all of this, while they were, you know, delivering their day to day business, they were manufacturing the goods and they were shipping products. So that was quite a lot to achieve in 24 months. And that's not just one example is across industries, examples like that that we have. That's >>One of the best business transformation examples I think I've heard. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And so cloud does need to start with a business transformation objective. And that's what's happening to the cloud. It's changing away from an infrastructure consolidation discussion to business task. >>Because I know you guys have a theater session tomorrow on, on continuous modern, it was experiencing cloud transformation and continuous modernization. That's the theme. Pre-cloud. It was just a, you'd, you'd live, you'd rip and replace your infrastructure and it was a big application portfolio assessment and rationalization. It was just, it just became this years long, you know, like an SAP installation. Yes. How has cloud changed that and what's, tell us more about that session and that continuous modernization. Yeah, >>So, so we are doing a John session with a client on how HCL Tech helped the client in terms of transforming the landscape and adopting cloud much faster, you know, into the ecosystem. So what we are currently doing is, so it's a continuous process. So when we talk about cloud adoption transformation, it doesn't stop there. So it, it needs to keep evolving. So what we came up with a framework for the all such clients who are on the cloud transformation part need to look at which we call it a smart waste cloud, cloud smart. Where once it is in the clouds, smart waste to cloud for cloud and in the cloud. So what happens is, when it is to cloud, what do you do? What are the accelerators? What are the frameworks? Smart waste for clouds? How do you look at the governance of it? >>Okay? Consolidation activities of it, once it is in the cloud, how do we optimize, what do you look at? Security aspects, et cetera. So the client doesn't have to go to multiple ecosystem partners to look at it. So he is looking at one such service provider who can actually encompass and give all this onto the plate in a much more granular fashion with accelerated approach. So we build accelerated solutions frameworks, which helps the client to actually pick and choose in a much lower cost, I think. And it has to be a continuous modernization for the client. So why we are calling it as a continuous modernization is we are also also creating what we call cloud foundries and factories. What happens is the client can look at not only in a transformation journey, but also futuristic when there are new services are adapted, how this transformation and factories helping them in a lower cost option and driving that a acceleration story. So we are addressing it in multiple ways. One on the transformation front, one on the TCO front, one on the AX accelerated front, one on the operational front. So all this combined into one single framework, which is what is a continuous modernization of clouded option from xgl tech. >>When you apply this framework with customers, how do you deal with technical debt? Can you avoid technical debt? Can you hide technical debt? Or is it like debt and taxes? We're always gonna have technical debt because Amazon, you know, they'll talk about, they don't ever deprecate anything. Yeah. You know, are they gonna, are we gonna see Amazon take on tech? How do you avoid that? Or at least shield the customer for that technical debt. >>So every cio, right? Key ambitions are digital cloud, TCO optimization, sustainability. So we have a framework for that. So every CIO will look at, okay, I wanna spend, but I want to be optimized. My TCO should not go up. So that's where a system integrator like us comes. We have AOP story where, which does the complete financial analysis of your cloud adoption as to what estate and what technical client already has. How can we optimize that and how can we, how can we overlay on top of that our own services to make it much more optimized solution for the client? And there are several frameworks that we have defined for the CIO organizations where the CIO can actually look at some of these elements and adopt it internally within the system. You wanna pick it from there? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's a great question. First of all, there's a generational shift in the last three years where nobody's doing lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. As you said, nobody's taking their technical debt to the cloud anymore. >>Business value's not there. >>There's no business value, right? The value is really being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains, which means your applications, your integration, your data to leverage the cloud and continuously modernize. Now you will still make priority decisions, right? Things that really differentiate you. You will modernize them through composition things that don't, you'll rather consume them, but in both factors, you're modernizing, I use the word surround and drown enterprises are surrounding their traditional, you know, environments and drowning them over a period of time. So over the next five years, you'll see more and more irrelevant legacy because the relevance is being built in the cloud, cloud for the future. That's the way I see it. >>Speaking of, take us out here, speaking of business value and on, we're almost outta time here. If there's a billboard on 1 0 1 in Palo Alto regarding HCL tech, what's the value prop? What does it say? >>It's a simple billboard. We say we are super charging our customers, our partners, our employees. We are super charging progress. And we believe that the strength that we bring from learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at hcl working with over half of, you know, 500 of the, the largest Fortune thousands in the world is, is really bringing those learnings that we continuously look at every day that we live with, every day across all kind of regulations, all kind of industries, in adopting new technologies, in modernizing their business strategies and achieving their business transformation goals with the velocity they want. That's kind of the supercharging progress mantra, >>Super charging progress. Love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining. David, me on the program talking about, thank you for having a conversation. Our pleasure. What's going on with HCL Tech, aws, the value that you're delivering for customers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank >>You. Thank you. Thanks. Have a great time. >>Take care for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin, he's Dave Valante. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back. With Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest, modern, simple power protect data manager software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers. And they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize, and they want us as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX data storage services. >> Okay, so three pieces, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works, and performs great." So what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is, that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property. Components that we've taken, that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities, we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-scale interface for customers. >> So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on Cyber Recovery, your specific news that you have there? >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance. We are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And Cyber Recovery, especially, when it comes to cloud deployments, it's an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our Cyber Recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major Clouds. And it really provides customers the flexibility to cure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises, in a Colo, at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a Cyber Recovery vault. That really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection, or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always involve my favorite Matt Baker here, It's not a zero-sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay so my other question, Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX Solutions, since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is, that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a one-year term, or a three-year term? And we take it from there. We get them up and running, so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX console. >> Okay, so you're keeping a simple, like, I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this, Jeff, maybe you can- >> So, I'll start and then, pitch me, you know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here so... >> Awesome. >> So first I'd say we offer innovative Multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> 80%? >> 80%. >> That's a big number. Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX solution as well. So really we can provide solutions that helps support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives, Edge core to cloud. The other thing that we're here, as a big differentiator for Dell and Jeff touched on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and Cyber Recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber-attacks, it can help customer speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber-attack and fast recovery should a cyber-attack occur. And you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera that an end-to-end capability that that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your R&D, and now, they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure, Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So we have unmatched capabilities, going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate and we have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we have the trusted market leader, no if and or buts. We're a number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC. And we were just named, for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah. And I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for (indistinct). >> Thank you, sir. Thanks, Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment, I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music) >> In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical, to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place, because the threat of cyber-attack are imminent. >> PowerProtects Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted we chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been on strategic partner with Dell Technologies, for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale, and grow as we've transition from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> Got installed it by myself, learn it by myself, with very intuitive >> While restoring a machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent Snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the Transparent Snapshots. >> With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extreme important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager. >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection and cyber security must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition, to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace. Specifically, address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system. Taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall earlier this year, we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX backup services. And then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera, really, what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course, that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard, was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market, and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information go to the Data Protection page at Dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and all the videos are available on demand at thecube.net. Check out our series, on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multi-cloud Protection." Made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padre and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with the high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it is really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multi-cloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >>What does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vhi to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? It performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery, you specific news that you have there. >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We can talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis and all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right? Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We have the trusted market leader, no, if and or buts, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc and we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Travis. Good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, what are they telling you? >> Sure. As you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning understanding their use cases their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot, to no surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible it's secure, and it's recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you know you have data sprawl, which is the big one which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service, attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay. So it's nuanced cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about, we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I've often said the CISO, now they have this shared responsibility model they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >> You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient, you know? Are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things one's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know the multi-cloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me the global data protection index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus! >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> Well what does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay. So you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional, subscription, or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, well, that's going to going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in immuneability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI parred recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Correct. >> Yeah. All right. In a minute we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break, keep it right there. (calming piano music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cyber crime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreaux is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padro and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And and by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What, what are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're a lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this is, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution in needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach, >>But what does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud in any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So how, what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cyber security, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vehill to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? Performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have at this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. You, you have specific news that you have there? >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so Mike, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right. Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber re attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We are the trusted market leader, no if and or bots, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc. And we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Dave. Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologists has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the world's of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly, we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public cloud is certainly world class, the result of multicloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. And at the end of the day, more, not less, . But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today, there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but is becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection people, technologies and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello, and welcome to "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the President and General Manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the Senior Vice-President of Product Management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (upbeat music) We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Alright, let's start off Jeff, with the high level. You know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing? You're talking to customers all the time. What are they telling you? >> Sure, as you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. No surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So, they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure and its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay, so maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multicloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that surface as attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity, you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay, so it's nuanced 'cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multicloud complexity and we talk about multicloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this multicloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So, we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lacking consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So, how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the Cisco, now they have this shared responsibility model. They have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So, maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency and specifically, they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. You know, it's funny. I said this in my open. I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency, and now they're like, "Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient." You know, are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things. One's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Global Data Protected, excuse me, the Global Data Protection Index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus. >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually, that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges. But also it highlights at an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, I've done this many, many years in a row. I'd like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell, from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So, we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multicloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> What does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture. Right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So, we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1,700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge. And that's from deployment to consumption, to management and support. So, our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So, traditional subscription or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, "Well, that's going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk." So, what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So, we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secure by design. And we have some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in immutability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI part recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have, our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity. It's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Jeff: Correct. Yeah. >> All right. In a minute, we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat adventurous music) Okay, we're back with Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah. Thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern, simple PowerProtect Data Manager Software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, 1,700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions. They want us to help them modernize. And they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So, that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX Data Storage Services. >> Okay, so three pieces. Let's dig to that. It's interesting, appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works." >> Travis: (laughs) Right. >> It performs great. So, what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >> So, the premise that I've been putting forth for months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So, I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. Your specific news that you have there. >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So, what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running on-premises, in Acolo, at the Edge, in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always invoke my favorite Matt Baker here. "It's not a zero sum game", but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service. It's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so, what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you-go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is specify their base capacity. They specify their performance tier. They tell us do they want a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX Console. >> Okay, so it's, you're keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small. You know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this. Jeff, maybe you can start. >> Sure, I'll start and then- >> Pitch me. >> You know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here. >> Awesome. >> So, first I'd say we offer innovative multicloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis said, all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> Dave: 80%? >> 80% >> Hey, that's a big number. All right, Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We are that one stop shop that I talked about, whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the Edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software. We have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX Solution as well. So really, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives. Edge, Core to Cloud. The other thing that we hear as a big differentiator for Dell, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our Intelligent Cyber Resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks. It can help customers speed time to recovery. And really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And if you look at customer adoption of that solution, specifically in the cloud, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So, I think it's fair to say that your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator. Whenever I talk to your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end-to-end capability, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting the client's burden to your R&D. now they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax. But that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So, we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio. We're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale. We have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we are the trusted market leader. No if, ands or buts. We're number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC and we were just named for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So, bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years. It's really becoming an adjacency and really, a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, sir. >> Dave. >> Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Right back. >> Advertiser: In our data-driven world, protecting data has never been more critical. To guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages, you need a cyber resilient multicloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >> Advertiser: PowerProtect Data Manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >> We chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> I'd installed it by myself, learn it by myself. It was very intuitive. >> While restoring your machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast, we can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Instructor: Data Manager offers innovation such as transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups, and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights into protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now, we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Advertiser: Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect's Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now, in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. And there were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall, earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX Backup Services and then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now, I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance and I asked Dell off camera, "Really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition?" Because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So, I heard a number of items. Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So, I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So, we're talking minutes to deploy, and of course that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now, this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the Data Protection Page at dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multicloud Protection" made possible by Dell, in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

>>Hello, Ron. Welcome to AWS reinforce here. Live in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John feer, host of the cube. We're here at Carl Matson. CSO at no name security. That's right, no name security, no name securities, also a featured partner at season two, episode four of our upcoming eightish startup showcase security themed event happening in the end of August. Look for that at this URL, AWS startups.com, but we're here at reinforc Carl. Thanks for joining me today. Good to see >>You. Thank you for having us, John. >>So this show security, it's not as packed as the eight of us summit was in New York. That just happened two weeks ago, 19,000 people here, more focused crowd. Lot at stake operations are under pressure. The security teams are under a lot of pressure as apps drive more and more cloud native goodness. As we say, the gen outta the bottle, people want more cloud native apps. Absolutely. That's put a lot of pressure on the ops teams and the security teams. That's the core theme here. How do you see it happening? How do you see this unfolding? Do you agree with that? And how would you describe today's event? >>Well, I think you're, you're spot on. I think the, the future of it is increasingly becoming the story of developers and APIs becoming the hero, the hero of digital transformation, the hero of public cloud adoption. And so this is really becoming much more of a developer-centric discussion about where we're moving our applications and, and where they're hosted, but also how they're designed. And so there's a lot of energy around that right now around focusing security capabilities that really appeal to the sensibilities and the needs of, of modern applications. >>I want to get to know name security a second, and let you explain what you guys do. Then I'll have a few good questions for you to kind of unpack that. But the thing about the structural change that's happened with cloud computing is kind of, and kind of in the past now, DevOps cloud scale, large scale data, the rise of the super cloud companies like snowflake capital, one there's examples of companies that don't even have CapEx investments building on the cloud. And in a way, our, the success of DevOps has created another sea of problems and opportunities that is more complexity as the benefits of DevOps and open source, continue to rise, agile applications that have value can be quantified. There's no doubt with the pandemic that's value there. Yeah. Now you have the collateral damage of success, a new opportunity to abstract away, more complexity to go to the next level. Yep. This is a big industry thing. What are the key opportunities and areas as this new environment, cuz that's the structural change happening now? Yep. What's the key dynamics right now. That's driving this new innovation and what are some of those problem areas that are gonna be abstracted away that you see? >>Well, the, the first thing I I'd suggest is is to, to lean into those structural changes and take advantage of them where they become an advantage for governance, security risk. A perfect example is automation. So what we have in microservices, applications and cloud infrastructures and new workloads like snowflake is we have workloads that want to talk, they want to be interoperated with. And because of that, we can develop new capabilities that take advantage of those of those capabilities. And, and so we want to have on our, on our security teams in particular is we wanna have the talent and the tools that are leaning into and capitalizing on exactly those strengths of, of the underlying capabilities that you're securing rather than to counter that trend, that the, the security professional needs to get ahead of it and, and be a part of that discussion with the developers and the infrastructure teams. >>And, and again, the tructure exchange could kill you too as well. I mean, some benefits, you know, data's the new oil, but end of the day it could be a problematic thing. Sure. All right. So let's get that. No names talk about the company. What you guys do, you have an interesting approach, heavily funded, good success, good buzz. What's going on with the company? Give the quick overview. >>Well, we're a company that's just under three years old and, and what APIs go back, of course, a, a decade or more. We've all been using APIs for a long time, but what's really shifted over the last couple of years is the, is the transition of, of applications and especially business critical processes to now writing on top of public facing APIs where API used to be the behind the scenes interconnection between systems. Now those APIs are exposed to their public facing. And so what we focus on as a company is looking at that API as a, as a software endpoint, just like any other endpoint in our environments that we're historically used to. That's an endpoint that needs full life cycle protection. It needs to be designed well secure coding standards for, for APIs and tested. Well, it also has to be deployed into production configured well and operated well. And when there's a misuse or an attack in progress, we have to be able to protect and identify the, the risks to that API in production. So when you add that up, we're looking at a full life cycle view of the API, and it's really it's about time because the API is not new yet. We're just starting to now to apply like actual discipline and, and practices that help keep that API secure. >>Yeah. It's interesting. It's like what I was saying earlier. They're not going anywhere. They're not going, they're the underpinning, the underlying benefit of cloud yes. Cloud native. So it's just more, more operational stability, scale growth. What are some of the challenges that, that are there and what do you guys do particularly to solve it? You're protecting it. Are you scaling it? What specifically are you guys addressing? >>But sure. So I think API security, even as a, as a discipline is not new, but I think the, the, the traditional look at API security looks only at, at the quality of the source code. Certainly quality of the source code of API is, is sort of step one. But what we see in, in practices is most of the publicly known API compromises, they weren't because of bad source code that they because of network misconfiguration or the misapplication of policy during runtime. So a great example of that would be developer designs, an API designs. It in such a way that Gar that, that enforces authentication to be well designed and strong. And then in production, those authentication policies are not applied at a gateway. So what we add to the, we add to the, to the conversation on API security is helping fill all those little gaps from design and testing through production. So we can see all of the moving parts in the, the context of the API to see how it can be exploited and, and how we can reduce risk in independent of. >>So this is really about hardening the infrastructure yep. Around cuz the developer did their job in that example. Yep. So academic API is well formed working, but something didn't happen on the network or gateway box or app, you know, some sort of network configuration or middleware configuration. >>Absolutely. So in our, in our platform, we, we essentially have sort of three functional areas. There's API code testing, and then we call next is posture management posture. Management's a real thing. If we're talking about a laptop we're talking about, is it up to date with patches? Is it configured? Well, is it secure network connectivity? The same is true with APIs. They have to be managed and cared for by somebody who's looking at their posture on the network. And then of course then there's threat defense and run time protection. So that posture management piece, that's really a new entrant into the discussion on API security. And that's really where we started as a company is focusing on that sort of acute gap of information, >>Posture, protection, >>Posture, and protection. Absolutely >>Define that. What does that, what does posture posture protection mean? How would you define that? >>Sure. I think it's a, it's identifying the inherent risk exposure of an API. Great example of that would be an API that is addressable by internal systems and external systems at the same time. Almost always. That is, that is an error. It's a mistake that's been made so well by, by identifying that misconfiguration of posture, then we can, we can protect that API by restricting the internet connectivity externally. That's just a great example of posture. We see almost every organization has that and it's never intended. >>Great, great, great call out. Thanks for sharing. All right, so I'm a customer. Yep. Okay. Look at, Hey, I already got an app firewall API gateway. Why do I need another tool? >>Well, first of all, web application firewalls are sort of essential parts of a security ecosystem. An API management gateway is usually the brain of an API economy. What we do is we, we augment those platforms with what they don't do well and also when they're not used. So for example, in, in any environment, we, we aspire to have all of our applications or APIs protected by web application firewall. First question is, are they even behind the web? Are they behind the w at all? We're gonna find that the WAFF doesn't know if it's not protecting something. And then secondary, there are attack types of business logic in particular of like authentication policy that a WAFF is not gonna be able to see. So the WAFF and the API management plan, those are the key control points and we can help make those better. >>You know what I think is cool, Carl, as you're bringing up a point that we're seeing here and we've seen before, but now it's kind of coming at the visibility. And it was mentioned in the keynote by one of the presenters, Kurt, I think it was who runs the platform. This idea of reasoning is coming into security. So the idea of knowing the topology know that there's dynamic stuff going on. I mean, topes aren't static anymore. Yep. And now you have more microservices. Yep. More APIs being turned on and off this runtime is interesting. So you starting to see this holistic view of, Hey, the secret sauce is you gotta be smarter. Yep. And that's either machine learning or AI. So, so how does that relate to what you guys do? Does it, cuz it sounds like you've got something of that going on with the product. Is that fair or yeah. >>Yeah, absolutely. So we, yeah, we talked about posture, so that's, that's really the inherent quality or secure posture of a, of an API. And now let's talk about sending traffic through that API, the request and response. When we're talking about organizations that have more APIs than they have people, employees, or, or tens of thousands, we're seeing in some customers, the only way to identify anomalous traffic is through machine learning. So we apply a machine learning model to each and every API in independently for itself because we wanna learn how that API is supposed to be behave. Where is it supposed to be talking? What kind of data is it supposed to be trafficking in, in, in all its facets. So we can model that activity and then identify the anomaly where there's a misuse, there's an attacker event. There's an, an insider employee is doing something with that API that's different. And that's really key with APIs is, is that no, a no two APIs are alike. Yeah. They really do have to be modeled individually rather than I can't share my, my threat signatures for my API, with your organization, cuz your APIs are different. And so we have to have that machine learning approach in order to really identify that >>Anomaly and watch the credentials, permissions. Absolutely all those things. All right. Take me through the life cycle of an API. There's pre-production postproduction what do I need to know about those two, those two areas with respect to what you guys do? >>Sure. So the pre-production activities are really putting in the hands of a developer or an APSEC team. The ability to test that API during its development and, and source code testing is one piece, but also in pre-production are we modeling production variables enough to know what's gonna happen when I move it into production? So it's one thing to have secure source code, of course, but then it's also, do we know how that API's gonna interact with the world once it's sort of set free? So the testing capabilities early life cycle is really how we de-risk in the long term, but we all have API ecosystems that are existing. And so in production we're applying the, all of those same testing of posture and configuration issues in runtime, but really what it, it may sound cliche to say, we wanna shift security left, but in APIs that's, that's a hundred percent true. We want to keep moving our, our issue detection to the earliest possible point in the development of an API. And that gives us the greatest return in the API, which is what we're all looking for is to capitalize on it as an agent of transformation. >>All right, let's take the customer perspective. I'm the customer, Carl, Carl, why do I need you? And how are you different from the competition? And if I like it, how do I get started? >>Sure. So the, the, the first thing that we differentiate selves from the customer is, or from our competitors is really looking at the API as an entire life cycle of activities. So whether it's from the documentation and the design and the secure source code testing that we can provide, you know, pre-development, or pre-deployment through production posture, through runtime, the differentiator really for us is being a one-stop shop for an entire API security program. And that's very important. And as that one stop shop, the, the great thing about that when having a conversation with a customer is not every customer's at the same point in their journey. And so if, if a customer discussion really focuses on their perhaps lack of confidence in their code testing, maybe somebody else has a lack of confidence in their runtime detection. We can say yes to those conversations, deliver value, and then consider other things that we can do with that customer along a whole continuum of life cycle. And so it allows us to have a customer conversation where we don't need to say, no, we don't do that. If it's an API, the answer is, yes, we do do that. And that's really where we, you know, we have an advantage, I think, in, in looking at this space and, and, and being able to talk with pretty much any customer in any vertical and having a, having a solution that, that gives them something value right away. >>And how do I get started? I like it. You sold me on, on operationalizing it. I like the one stop shop. I, my APIs are super important. I know that could be potential exposure, maybe access, and then lateral movement to a workload, all kinds of stuff could happen. Sure. How do I get started? What do I do to solve >>This? Well, no name, security.com. Of course we, we have, you know, most customers do sandboxing POVs as part of a trial period for us, especially with, you know, being here at AWS is wonderful because these are customers who's with whom we can integrate with. In a matter of minutes, we're talking about literally updating an IAM role. Permission is the complexity of implementation because cloud friendly workloads really allow us to, to do proofs of concept and value in a matter of minutes to, to achieve that value. So whether it's a, a dedicated sandbox for one customer, whether it's a full blown POC for a complicated organization, you know, whether it's here at AWS conference or, or, or Nona security.com, we would love to do a, do a, like a free demo test drive and assessment. >>Awesome. And now you guys are part of the elite alumni of our startup showcase yep. Where we feature the hot startups, obviously it's the security focuses episodes about security. You guys have been recognized by the industry and AWS as, you know, making it, making it happen. What specifically is your relationship with AWS? Are you guys doing stuff together? Cuz they're, they're clearly integrating with their partners. Yeah. I mean, they're going to companies and saying, Hey, you know what, the more we're integrated, the better security everyone gets, what are you doing with Amazon? Can you share any tidbits? You don't have to share any confidential information, but can you give us a little taste of the relationship? >>Well, so I think we have the best case scenario with our relationship with AWSs is, is as a, as a very, very small company. Most of our first customers were AWS customers. And so to develop the, the, the initial integrations with AWS, what we were able to do is have our customers, oftentimes, which are large public corporations, go to AWS and say, we need, we need that company to be through your marketplace. We need you to be a partner. And so that partnership with, with AWS has really grown from, you know, gone from zero to 60 to, you know, miles per hour in a very short period of time. And now being part of the startup program, we have a variety of ways that a customer can, can work with us from a direct purchase through the APS marketplace, through channel partners and, and VA, we really have that footprint now in AWS because our customers are there and, and they brought our customers to AWS with us. >>It's it nice. The customers pulls you to AWS. Yes. Its pulls you more customers. Yep. You get kind of intermingled there, provide the value. And certainly they got, they, they hyperscale so >>Well, that creates depth of the relationship. So for example, as AWS itself is evolving and changing new services become available. We are a part of that inner circle. So to speak, to know that we can make sure that our technology is sort of calibrated in advance of that service offering, going out to the rest of the world. And so it's a really great vantage point to be in as a startup. >>Well, Carl, the CISO for no name security, you're here on the ground. You partner with AWS. What do you think of the show this year? What's the theme. What's the top story one or two stories that you think of the most important stories that people should know about happening here in the security world? >>Well, I don't think it's any surprise that almost every booth in the, in the exhibit hall has the words cloud native associated with it. But I also think that's, that's, that's the best thing about it, which is we're seeing companies and, and I think no name is, is a part of that trend who have designed capabilities and technologies to take advantage and lean into what the cloud has to offer rather than compensating. For example, five years ago, when we were all maybe wondering, will the cloud ever be as secure as my own data center, those days are over. And we now have companies that have built highly sophisticated capabilities here in the exhibit hall that are remarkably better improvements in, in securing the cloud applications in, in our environments. So it's a, it's a real win for the cloud. It's something of a victory lap. If, if you hadn't already been there, you should be there at this point. >>Yeah. And the structural change is happening now that's clear and I'd love to get your reaction if you agree with it, is that the ops on security teams are now being pulled up to the level that the developers are succeeding at, meaning that they have to be in the boat together. Yes. >>Oh, lines of, of reporting responsibility are becoming less and less meaningful and that's a good thing. So we're having just in many conversations with developers or API management center of excellence teams to cloud infrastructure teams as we are security teams. And that's a good thing because we're finally starting to have some degree of conversions around where our interests lie in securing cloud assets. >>So developers ops security all in the boat together, sync absolutely together or win together. >>We, we, we win together, but we don't win on day one. We have to practice like we as organizations we have to, we have to rethink our, we have to rethink our tech stack. Yeah. But we also have to, you have to rethink our organizational models, our processes to get there, to get >>That in, keep the straining boat in low waters. Carl, thanks for coming on. No name security. Why the name just curious, no name. I love that name. Cause the restaurant here in Boston that used to be of all the people that know that. No name security, why no name? >>Well, it was sort of accidental at, in the, in the company's first few weeks, the there's an advisory board of CISOs who provides feedback on, on seed to seed companies on their, on their concept of, of where they're gonna build platforms. And, and so in absence of a name, the founders and the original investor filled out a form, putting no name as the name of this company that was about to develop an API security solution. Well, amongst this board of CSOs, basically there was unanimous feedback that the, what they needed to do was keep the name. If nothing else, keep the name, no name, it's a brilliant name. And that was very much accidental, really just a circumstance of not having picked one, but you know, a few weeks passed and all of a sudden they were locked in because sort of by popular vote, no name was, >>Was formed. Yeah. And now the legacy, the origination story is now known here on the cube call. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you, John. Okay. We're here. Live on the floor show floor of AWS reinforced in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John with Dave ALO. Who's out and about getting the stories in the trenches in the analyst meeting. He'll be right back with me shortly day tuned for more cube coverage. After this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, the fourth annual Snowflake Summit. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, We're live in Vegas, as I mentioned. We've got a couple of guests here with us. We're going to be unpacking some more great information that has come out of the show news today. Please welcome Chris Child back to theCUBE, Senior Director of Product Management at Snowflake, and Lisa Cramer is here, Head of Embedded Products at LiveRamp, guys welcome. >> Thank you. >> Hi. >> Tell us a little bit about LiveRamp, what you guys do, what your differentiators are and a little bit about the Snowflake partnership? >> Sure, well, LiveRamp makes it safe and easy to connect data. And we're powered by core identity resolution capabilities, which enable our clients to resolve their data, and connect it with other data sets. And so we've brought these identity infrastructure capabilities to Snowflake, and built into the Native Application Framework. We focused on two initial products around device resolution, which enables our clients to connect customer data from the digital ecosystem. This powers things like, measurement use cases, and understanding campaign effectiveness and ROI. And the second capability we built into the Native Application Framework is called transcoding. And this enables a translation layer between identifiers, so that parties can safely and effectively share data at a person-based view. >> Chris, talk to us about, Snowflake just announced a lot of news this morning, just announced, the new Snowflake Native Application Framework. You alluded to this, Lisa, talk to us about that. What does it mean for customers, what does it do? Give us all the backstory. >> Yeah, so we had seen a bunch of cases for our customers where they wanted to be able to take application logic, and have other people use it. So LiveRamp, as an example of that, they've built a bunch of complicated logic to help you figure out who is the same person in different systems. But the problem was always that, that application had to run outside of the Data Cloud. And that required you to take your data outside of Snowflake, entrust your data to a third party. And so every time that companies have to go, become a vendor, they have to go through a security review, and go through a long onerous process, to be able to be allowed to process the really sensitive data that these customers have. So with the Native Applications Framework, you can take your application code, all of the logic, and the data that's needed to build it together, and actually push that through secure data sharing into a customer's account, where it runs, and is able to access their data, join it with data from the provider, all without actually having to give that provider access to your core data assets themselves. >> Is it proper to think of the Native Application Framework as a PaaS layer within the Data Cloud? >> That's a great way to think about it. And so, this is where we've integrated with the marketplace as well. So providers like LiveRamp will be able to publish these applications. They'll run entirely on effectively a PaaS layer that's powered by Snowflake, and be able to deliver those to any region, any cloud, any place that Snowflake runs. >> So, we get a lot of grief for this term, but we've coined a term called "supercloud". Okay, and the supercloud is an abstraction layer that hovers above the hyperscale infrastructure. Companies like yours, build on top of that. So you don't have to worry about the underlying complexities. And we've said that, in order to make that a reality, you have to have a super PaaS. So is that essentially what you're doing? You're building your product on top of that? You're not worrying about, okay, now I'm going to go to Azure, I'm going to go to AWS, or I'm going to go to, wherever, is that a right way to think about it? >> That's exactly right. And I think, Snowflake has really helped us, kind of shift the paradigm in how we work with our customers, and enabled us to bring our capabilities to where their data lives, right? And enabled them to, kind of run the analytics, and run the identity resolution where their data sits. And so that's really exciting. And I think, specifically with the Native Application Framework, Snowflake delivered on the promise of minimizing data movement, right? The application is installed. You don't have to move your data at all. And so for us, that was a really compelling reason to build into it. And we love when our customers can maintain control of their data. >> So the difference between what you are doing as partners, and a SaaS, is that, you're not worrying about all the capabilities, there in the data, all the governance, and the security components. You're relying on the Data Cloud for that, is that right? Or is it a SaaS? >> Yeah, I think there's components, like certainly parts of our business still run in the SaaS model. But I think the ability to rely on some of the infrastructure that Snowflake provides, and honestly kind of the connectivity, and the verticalized solutions that Snowflake brings to bear with data providers, and technology providers, that matter most to that vertical, really enable us to kind of rely on some of that to ensure that we can serve our customers as they want us to. >> So you're extending your SaaS platform and bringing new capabilities, as opposed to building, or are you building new apps in the Data Cloud? This is, I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but I'm trying to understand from your perspective. >> Oh yeah, so we built new capabilities within the Data Cloud. It's based on our core identity infrastructure capabilities, but we wanted to build into the Native Application Framework, so that data doesn't have to move and we can serve our customers, and they can maintain control over their data in their environment. So we built new capabilities, but it's all based on our core identity infrastructure. >> So safe sharing reminds me of like when procurement says, do we have an MSA? Yes, okay, go. You know, it's just frictionless. Versus no, okay, send some paper, go back and forth and it just takes forever. >> That's one of the big goals that we see. And to your point on, is it a PaaS, is it a SaaS? We honestly think of it as something a little bit different, in a similar way to where, at Snowflake we saw a whole generation of SaaS business models, and as a utility, and a consumption-based model, we think of ourselves as different from a SaaS business model. We're now trying to enable application providers, like LiveRamp, to take the core technology in IP that they've built over many, many years, but deliver it in a completely new different way that wasn't possible. And so part of this is extending what they're doing, and making it a little easier to deploy, and not having to go through the MSA process in the same way. But also we do think that this will allow entirely new capabilities to be brought that wouldn't be possible, unless they could be deployed and run inside the Data Cloud. >> Is LiveRamp a consumption pricing model, or is it a subscription, or a combo? >> We are actually a subscription, but with some usage capabilities. >> It's an hybrid. >> Chris, talk a little bit about the framework that you guys have both discussed. How is it part of the overall Snowflake vision of delivering secure and governed, powerful analytics, and data sharing to customers, and ecosystem partners? >> So this, for us we view this as kind of the next evolution of Snowflake. So Snowflake was all built on helping people consolidate their data, bring all your data into one place and then run all of your different workloads on it. And what we've seen over the years is, there are still a lot of different use cases, where you need to take your data out of the Data Cloud, in order to do certain different things. So we made a bunch of announcements today around machine learning, so that you don't have to take your data out to train models. And native applications is built on the idea of don't bring your data to the applications you need. Whether they're machine learning models, whether they're identity resolution, whether they're really even just analytics. Instead, take the application logic and bring that into the Data Cloud, and run it right on your data where it is. And so the big benefit of that is, I don't need copies of my data that are getting out of sync, and getting out of date. I don't need to give a copy of my data to anyone else. I get to keep it, I get to govern it. I get to secure it. I know exactly what's going on. But now, we can open this up to workloads, not just ones that Snowflake's building, but workloads that partners like LiveRamp, or anyone else is building. All those workloads can then run in a single copy of your data, in a single secure environment. >> And when you say in one place, Chris, people can get confused by that, 'cause it's really not in one place. it's the global thing that Benoit stressed this morning >> And that right, and so these, once you write a native app once, so the native app that they've written is one piece of code, one application, that now can be deployed by customers in any region, or on any cloud that they're running on without any changes at all. So to your point on the PaaS, that's where it gets very PaaS-like, because they write once to the Snowflake APIs, and now it can run literally anywhere the Snowflake runs. >> But the premise that we've put forth in supercloud is that, this is a new era. It's not multicloud. And it's consistent with a digital business, right? You're building, you've got a digital business, and this is a new value layer of a digital business. If I've got capabilities, I want to bring them to the cloud. I want to bring them to, every company's a software company, software's eating the world, data's eating software. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but it's not like 10 years ago. This is a whole new life cycle that we're just starting. Is that valid? I mean do you feel that way about LiveRamp? >> Definitely, I mean, I think it's really exciting to see all of the data connectivity that is happening. At the same time, I think the challenges still remain, right? So there are still challenges around being able to resolve your data, and being able to connect your data to a person-based view in a privacy safe way, to be able to partner with others in a data collaboration model, right? And to be able to do all of that without sharing anything from a sensitive identifier standpoint, or not having a resolved data set. And so I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of really cool, awesome innovation happening, but the customer challenges, kind of still exist. And so that's why it's exciting to build these applications that can now solve those problems, where that data is. >> It's the cloud benefit, the heavy lifting thing, for data? 'Cause you don't have to worry about all that. You can focus on campaign ROI, or whatever new innovation that you want to bring out. >> And think about it from the end customer's perspective. They now, can come into their single environment where they have all their data, they can say, I need to match the identity, and they can pull in LiveRamp with a few clicks, and then they can say, I'm ready to take some actions on this. And they can pull in action tools with just a few more clicks. And they haven't made current marketing stack that you see. There's 20 different tools and you're schlepping data back and forth between each of them, and LiveRamp's just one stop on your journey to get this data out to where I'm actually sending emails or targeting ads. Our vision is that, all that happens on one copy of the data, each of these different tools are grabbing the parts they need, again in a secure well-governed, well-controlled way, enriching in ways that they need, taking actions that they need, pulling in other data sets that they need. But the end consumer maintains control over the data, and over the process, the entire way through. >> So one copy data. So you sometimes might make a copy, right? But you'd make as many copies as you need to, but no more, kind of thing, to paraphrase Einstein, or is that right? >> There's literally one copy of the data. So one of the nice things with Snowflake, with data sharing, and with native applications, the data is stored once in one file on disc and S3, which eventually is a disc somewhere. >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> But what can happen is, I'm really just granting permission to these different applications, to read and write from that single copy of the data. So as soon as a new customer touches my website, that immediately shows up in my data. LiveRamp gets access to that instantly. They enrich it. Before I've even noticed that that new customer signed up, the data's already been enriched, the identity's been matched, and they're already put into a bucket about what campaign I should run against them. >> So the data stays where it is. You bring the ISO compute, but the application. And then you take the results, right? And then I can read them back? >> You bring the next application, right to that same copy of the data. So what'll happen is you'll have a view that LiveRamp is accessing and reading and making changes on, LiveRamp is exposing its own view, I have another application reading from the LiveRamp view, exposing its own view. And ultimately someone's taking an action based on that. But there's one copy of the data all the way through. That's the really powerful thing. >> Okay, so yeah, so you're not moving the data. So you're not dealing with latency problems, but I can, if I'm in Australia and I'm running on US West, it's not a problem? >> Yes, so there, if you do want to run across different clouds, we will copy the data in that case, we've found it's much faster. >> Okay, great, I thought I was losing my mind. >> No, but as long as you're staying within a single region, there will be no copies of the data. >> Yeah, okay, totally makes sense, great. >> One of the efficiency there in speed to be able to get the insights. That's what it's all about, being able to turn the volume up on the data from a value perspective. Thanks so much guys for joining us on the program today talking about what LiveRamp and Snowflake are doing together and breaking down the Snowflake Native Application Framework. We appreciate your insights and your time, And thanks for joining us. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests, and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Snowflake Summit 22 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)