(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We're in Vegas. Lovely Las Vegas. Beautiful outside, although I have only seen outside today once, but very excited to be at re:Invent. We're hearing between 50,000 and 70,000 attendees and it's insane, but people are ready to be back. This morning's keynote by CEO Adam Selipsky was full of great messages, big focus on data, customers, partners, the ecosystem. So excited. And I'm very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, David Shacochis, VP Enterprise Portfolio Strategy Product Management at Lumen. David, welcome back. >> Lisa, good to be here. The Five Timers Club. >> You are in the Five Timers Club. This is David's fifth appearance on the show. And we were talking before we went live- >> Do we do the jacket now and do we do the jacket later? >> Yeah, the jacket will come later. >> Okay. >> The Five Timers Club, like on SNL. We're going to have that for The Cube. We'll get you measured up and get that all fitted for you. >> That'd be better. >> So talk a little bit about Lumen. 'Cause last time you hear it wasn't Lumen. >> We weren't Lumen last time. So this is the first time... last time we were here on The Cube at re:Invent. This was probably 2019 or so. We were a different company. The company was called CenturyLink back then. We rebranded in 2020 to really represent our identity as a delivery of...as a solutions provider over our fiber network. So Lumen is the corporate brand, the company name. It represents basically a lot of the fiber that's been laid throughout the world and in North America and in enterprise metropolitan areas over the past 10 to 15 years. You know, companies like CenturyLink and Quest and Level 3, all those companies have really rolled up into building that core asset of the network. So Lumen is really the brand for the 21st century for the company, really focused on delivering services for the enterprise and then delivering a lot of value added services around that core network asset. >> So rebranding during the pandemic, what's been the customer feedback and sentiment? >> Yeah, I think customers have really actually appreciated it as certainly a more technology oriented brand, right? Sort of shifting away a little bit from some of the communications and telecom background of the company and the heritage. And while those assets that were built up during that period of time have been substantial, and we still build off of those assets going forward, really what a lot of the customer feedback has been is that it puts us in a posture to be a little bit more of a business solutions provider for customers, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do with that core network asset, the fiber networking a lot of the services that we launch on that in terms of public IP, you know, public internet capacity, private networking, private VPNs, VoIP and voice services. These are services that you'd expect from a company like that. But there's a lot of services inside the Lumen brand that you might surprise you, right? There's an edge computing capability that can deliver five milliseconds of latency within 95% of North American enterprise. >> Wow. >> There's a threat detection lab that goes and takes all of the traffic flowing over the public side of our network and analyzes it in a data lake and turns it into threat intelligence that we then offer off to our customers on a subscription basis. There's a production house that goes and, you know, does production networking for major sports arenas and sports events. There's a wide range of services inside of Lumen that really what the Lumen brand allows us to do is start talking about what those services can do and what networking can do for our customers in the enterprise in a more comprehensive way. >> So good changes, big brand changes for Lumen in the last couple of years. Also, I mean, during a time of such turmoil in the world, we've seen work change dramatically. You know, everybody...companies had to pivot massively quickly a couple years ago. >> Yep. >> Almost approaching three years ago, which is crazy amazing to be digital because they had to be able to survive. >> They did >> Now they're looking at being able to thrive, but now we're also in this hybrid work environment. The future of work has changed. >> Totally. >> Almost permanently. >> Yep. >> How is Lumen positioned to address some of the permanent changes to the work environments? Like the last time we were at re:Invented- >> Yeah. >> In person. This didn't exist. >> That's right. So really, it's one of the things we talk to our customers almost the most about is this idea of the future of work. And, you know, we really think about the future of work as about, you know, workers and workloads and the networks that connect them. You think about how much all of those demands are shifting and changing, right? What we were talking about, and it's very easy for all of us to conceptualize what the changing face of the worker looks like, whether those are knowledge workers or frontline workers the venues in which people are working the environments and that connectivity, predictability of those work desk environments changes so significantly. But workloads are changing and, you know we're sitting here at a trade show that does nothing but celebrate the transformation of workloads. Workloads running in ways in business logic and capturing of data and analysis of data. The changing methodologies and the changing formats of workloads, and then the changing venues for workloads. So workloads are running in places that never used to be data centers before. Workloads are running in interesting places and in different and challenging locations for what didn't used to be the data center. And so, you know, the workloads and the workloads are in a very dynamic situation. And the networks that connect them have to be dynamic, and they have to be flexible. And that's really why a lot of what Lumen invests in is working on the networks that connect workers and workloads both from a visibility and a managed services perspective to make sure that we're removing blind spots and then removing potential choke points and capacity issues, but then also being adaptable and dynamic enough to be able to go and reconfigure that network to reach all of the different places that, you know, workers and workloads are going to evolve into. What you'll find in a lot of cases, you know, the workers...a common scenario in the enterprise. A 500 person company with, you know, five offices and maybe one major facility. You know, that's now a 505 office company. >> Right. >> Right? The challenge of the network and the challenge of connecting workers and workloads is really one of the main conversations we have with our customers heading into this 21st century. >> What are some of the things that they're looking forward to in terms of embracing the future of work knowing this is probably how it's going to remain? >> Yeah, I think companies are really starting to experiment carefully and start to think about what they can do and certainly think about what they can do in the cloud with things like what the AWS platform allows them to do with some of the AWS abstractions and the AWS services allow them to start writing software for, and they're starting to really carefully, but very creatively and reach out into their you know, their base of enterprise data, their base of enterprise value to start running some experiments. We actually had a really interesting example of that in a session that Lumen shared here at re:Invent yesterday. You know, for the few hundred people that were there. You know, I think we got a lot of great feedback. It was really interesting session about the...really gets at this issue of the future of work and the changing ways that people are working. It actually was a really cool use case we worked on with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports, and AWS with the... using the Lumen network to essentially virtualize the production truck. Right? So you've all heard that, you know, the sports metaphor of, you know, the folks in the booth were sitting there started looking down and they're saying, oh great job by the guys or the gals in the truck. >> Yep. >> Right? That are, you know, that bring in that replay or great camera angle. They're always talking about the team and their production truck. Well, that production truck is literally a truck sitting outside the stadium. >> Yep. >> Full of electronics and software and gear. We were able to go and for a Major League Baseball game in...back in August, we were able to go and work with AWS, using the Lumen network, working with our partners and our customers at Fox Sports and virtualize all of that gear inside the truck. >> Wow. That's outstanding. >> Yep. So it was a live game. You know, they simulcast it, right? So, you know, we did our part of the broadcast and many hundreds of people, you know, saw that live broadcast was the first time they tried doing it. But, you know, to your point, what are enterprises doing? They're really starting to experiment, sort to push the envelope, right? They're kind of running things in new ways, you know, obviously hedging their bets, right? And sort of moving their way and sort of blue-green testing their way into the future by trying things out. But, you know, this is a massive revenue opportunity for a Major League Baseball game. You know, a premier, you know, Sunday night baseball contest between the Yankees and the Cardinals. We were able to go and take the entire truck, virtualize it down to a small rack of connectivity gear. Basically have that production network run over redundant fiber paths on the Lumen network up into AWS. And AWS is where all that software worked. The technical director of the show sitting in his office in North Carolina. >> Wow. >> The sound engineer is sitting in, you know, on his porch in Connecticut. Right? They were able to go and do the work of production anywhere while connected to AWS and then using the Lumen network, right? You know, the high powered capabilities of Lumens network underlay to be able to, you know, go and design a network topology and a worked topology that really wasn't possible before. >> Right. It's nice to hear, to your point, that customers are really embracing experimentation. >> Right. >> That's challenging to, obviously there was a big massive forcing function a couple of years ago where they didn't have a choice if they wanted to survive and eventually succeed and grow. >> Yeah. >> But the mindset of experimentation requires cultural change and that's a hard thing to do especially for I would think legacy organizations like Major League Baseball, but it sounds like they have the appetite. >> Yeah. They have the interest. >> They've been a fairly innovative organization for some time. But, you know, you're right. That idea of experimenting and that idea of trying out new things. Many people have observed, right? It's that forcing function of the pandemic that really drove a lot of organizations to go and make a lot of moves really quickly. And then they realized, oh, wait a minute. You know... I guess there's some sort of storytelling metaphor in there at some point of people realizing, oh wait, I can swim in these waters, right? I can do this. And so now they're starting to experiment and push the envelope even more using platforms like AWS, but then using a lot of the folks in the AWS partner network like Lumen, who are designing and sort of similarly inspired to deliver, you know, on demand and virtualized and dynamic capabilities within the core of our network and then within the services that our network can and the ways that our network connects to AWS. All of that experimentation now is possible because a lot of the things you need to do to try out the experiment are things you can get on demand and you can kind of pat, you can move back, you can learn. You can try new things and you can evolve. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Right. Absolutely. What are some of the things that you're excited about as, you know, here was this forcing function a couple years ago, we're coming out of that now, but the world has changed. The future of work as you are so brilliantly articulated has changed permanently. What are you excited about in terms of Lumen and AWS going forward? As we saw a lot of announcements this morning, big focus on data, vision of AWS is really that flywheel with Adams Selipsky is really, really going. What are you excited about going forward into 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we've been working with AWS for so long and have been critical partners for so long that, you know, I think a lot of it is continuation of a lot of the great work we've been doing. We've been investing in our own capabilities around the AWS partner network. You know, we're actually in a fairly unique position, you know, and we like to think that we're that unique position around the future of work where between workers, workloads and the networks that connect them. Our fingers are on a lot of those pulse points, right? Our fingers are on at really at the nexus of a lot of those dynamics. And our investment with AWS even puts us even more so in a position to go where a lot of the workloads are being transformed, right? So that's why, you know, we've invested in being one of the few network operators that is in the AWS partner network at the advanced tier that have the managed services competency, that have the migration competency and the network competency. You can count on one hand the number of network operators that have actually invested at that level with AWS. And there's an even smaller number that is, you know, based here in the United States. So, you know, I think that investment with AWS, investment in their partner programs and then investment co-innovation with AWS on things like that MLB use case really puts us in a position to keep on doing these kinds of things within the AWS partner network. And that's one of the biggest things we could possibly be excited about. >> So what does the go to market look like? Is it Lumen goes in, brings in AWS, vice versa? Both? >> Yeah, so a lot of being a member of the AWS partner network you have a lot of flexibility. You know, we have a lot of customers that are, you know, directly working with AWS. We have a lot of customers that would basically look to us to deliver the solution and, you know, and buy it all as a complete turnkey capability. So we have customers that do both. We have customers that, you know, just look to Lumen for the Lumen adjacent services and then pay, you know, pay a separate bill with AWS. So there's a lot of flexibility in the partner network in terms of what Lumen can deliver as a service, Lumen can deliver as a complete solution and then what parts of its with AWS and their platform factors into on an on-demand usage basis. >> And that would all be determined I imagine by what the customer really needs in their environment? >> Yeah, and sort of their own cloud strategy. There's a lot of customers who are all in on AWS and are really trying to driving and innovating and using some of the higher level services inside the AWS platform. And then there are customers who kind of looked at AWS as one of a few cloud platforms that they want to work with. The Lumen network is compatible and connected to all of them and our services teams are, you know, have the ability to go and let customers sort of take on whatever cloud posture they need. But if they are all in on AWS, there's, you know. Not many networks better to be on than Lumen in order to enable that. >> With that said, last question for you is if you had a bumper sticker or a billboard. Lumen's rebranded since we last saw you. What would that tagline or that phrase of impact be on that bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I'd get in a lot of trouble with our marketing team if I didn't give the actual bumper sticker for the company. But we really think of ourselves as the platform for amazing things. The fourth industrial revolution, everything going on in terms of the future of work, in terms of the future of industrial innovation, in terms of all the data that's being gathered. You know, Adam in the keynote this morning really went into a lot of detail on, you know, the depth of data and the mystery of data and how to harness it all and wrangle it all. It requires a lot of networking and a lot of connectivity. You know, for us to acquire, analyze and act on all that data and Lumen's platform for amazing things really helps forge that path forward to that fourth industrial revolution along with great partners like AWS. >> Outstanding. David, it's been such a pleasure having you back on The Cube. We'll get you fitted for that five timers club jacket. >> It sounds good. (Lisa laughs) >> I'll be back. >> Thanks so much for your insights and your time and well done with what you guys are doing at Lumen and AWS. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For David Shacochis, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube hopefully all day. This is our first full day of coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. Stick around. We'll be back tomorrow, and we know we're going to see you then. Have a great night. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

(Upbeat Music) >> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future with also a voice of the customer are three great guests. Isabelle Guis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside theCUBE. It's awesome to have you. [Isabelle] Great to be here today. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving matter for us as who that, has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we all there too. We assess workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer and then, adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for customer was thinking that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to quote why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? >> It's great to be back on theCUBE. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SaaS Model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better. Make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data, and that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabelle said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers has a new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the 'power of bank'; the ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. I don't know if all want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid-2000s. So, tell us why Commvault, what has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really what it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help in navel our digital transformation including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version version 6 if I remember right. This predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in ten, brought in eleven, brought in HyperScale, and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments, Metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes back up as one thing, recovery's everything. Isabelle. Yeah, we've seen the SaaSification of the enterprise. Particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things and that's that. As you know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CAPEX into OPEX. Well SaaS bring yet another level of benefits. IT, we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once you set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's, why it works. You can better manage your cash flow, because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery everybody's at different stages. You still have On-Premises, you have cloud, there's SaaS, there's Workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model being able to support them if they want a software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice, because everybody is at a different stage on this journey. When it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this bold choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, you know, On-Prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, what's interesting about this is, Mitchell is been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SaaS solutions, to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SaaS Model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, You need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, you know, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this. "And", in other words, it's not an either or it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah, no The Power of And, Dave, I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of The Power of And I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, and really that, that need for choice. So for example, you know, customers on various different paths to the cloud we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that, "And", as Isabella was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, you know, do you, go in there and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is the able to offer across the whole S state. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about but the emails are where I'm going to move to office 365, leverage the power of teams. And there's a Shared Responsibility Model there which is different than an On-Prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commonwealth environment, whether it's a Commonwealth software or HyperScale, and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, you know, 90 plus percent of workloads and data centers increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery isolation. You know, we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the Hyper-Scale deployment and just, you know, dock it into Metallic, and have a local copy, instant recovery, SLA, remote, you know, backup copy in the cloud for ransomware, or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power advantage. A very unique part of our portfolio, but, you know, companies can have portfolio products, but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. Yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Timmy, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, What was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up, and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints, and of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running the activate. We are running the the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mentioned something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releases. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API, and I think it may have been two days later. Good. Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know, just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product, you know, comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS, part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically in SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words the Shared Responsibility Model. And, you know, a lot of times our customers as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages the certain things you don't have to do, but the Shared Responsibility Model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in its S&As. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know, some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65, we've added support for Salesforce, and we see a rapid customer adoption because of that Shared Responsibility Model. If you have, some kind of, an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. And then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer is responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is, you know, one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap, and you look at at the right compliment, what is the right adjacency, we're seeing this part of Microsoft's Business Application Suite growing, you know, as millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds, Microsoft Azure, or 365, Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage. It's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins, and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that Shared Responsibility Model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOS, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question, the roadmap, you know, how do you see Commvault's, Metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it's, it has a big strategic, you know, impact on Commvault for sure on the first portfolio first because of all of our existing customers as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers are somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without, you know, adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers come to Commvault for Metallic. This is the first time enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their assessed application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their own premised data as well. So back to The Power of And, and without writing off their past investments, you know, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community the thing is that Metallic it brings I don't know Manoj is way too humble, but, you know, he don't go to this customer every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation we can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers, and our new customers we're welcoming, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me, but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know, we are 25 years old, or sorry, 25 years young, and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner survey, partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating, the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave, Isabelle, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat Music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with our leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE and the special IBM Brocade panel. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm having a great opportunity here to sit down for the next 20 minutes with three gentlemen please welcome Brian Sherman a distinguished engineer from IBM, Brian, great to have you joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Matt key here. Flash systems SME from IBM, Matt, happy Friday. >> Happy Friday, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. And AIG Customer solution here from Brocade is here. AJ welcome. >> Thanks for having me along. >> AJ we're going to stick with you, IBM and Brocade have had a very long you said about 22 year strategic partnership. There's some new news. And in terms of the evolution of that talk to us about what's going on with with Brocade IBM and what is new in the storage industry? >> Yeah, so the the newest thing for us at the moment is that IBM just in mid-October launched our Gen seven platforms. So this is think about the stresses that are going on in the IT environments. This is our attempt to keep pace with with the performance levels that the IBM teams are now putting into their storage environments the All-Flash Data Centers and the new technologies around non-volatile memory express. So that's really, what's driving this along with the desire to say, "You know what people aren't allowed "to be in the data center." And so if they can't be in the data center then the fabrics actually have to be able to figure out what's going on and basically provide a lot of the automation pieces. So something we're referring to as the autonomous SAM. >> And we're going to dig into NBME of our fabrics in a second but I do want to AJ continue with you in terms of industries, financial services, healthcare airlines there's the biggest users, biggest need. >> Pretty much across the board. So if you look at the global 2000 as an example, something on the order of about 96, 97% of the global 2000 make use of fiber channel environments and in portions of their world generally tends to be a lot of the high end financial guys, a lot of the pharmaceutical guys, the automotive, the telcos, pretty much if the data matters, and it's something that's critical whether we talk about payment card information or healthcare environments, data that absolutely has to be retained, has to get there, has to perform then it's this combination that we're bringing together today around the new storage elements and the functionalities they have there. And then our ability in the fabric. So the concept of a 64 gig environment to help basically not be the bottleneck in the application demands, 'cause one thing I can promise you after 40 years in this industry is the software guys always figure out how to all the performance that the hardware guys put on the shelf, right? Every single time. >> Well there's gauntlet thrown down there. Matt, let's go to you. I want to get IBM's perspective on this. Again, as we said, a 22 year strategic partnership, as we look at things like not being able to get into the data center during these unprecedented times and also the need to be able to remove some of those bottlenecks how does IBM view this? >> Yeah, totally. It's certainly a case of raising the bar, right? So we have to as a vendor continue to evolve in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, cost density, escalating simplicity, because it's not just a case of not be able to touch the rates, but there's fewer people not being able to adjust the rates, right? It's a case where our operational density continues to have to evolve being able to raise the bar on the network and be able to still saturate those line rates and be able to provide that simply a cost efficiency that gets us to a utilization that raises the bar from our per capita ratio from not just talking about 200, 300 terabytes per admin but going beyond the petabyte scale per admin. And we can't do that unless people have access to the data. And we have to provide the resiliency. We have to provide the simplicity of presentation and automation from our side. And then this collaboration that we do with our network brother like Brocade here continued to stay out of the discussion when it comes to talking about networks and who threw the ball next. So we truly appreciate this Gen seven launch that they're doing we're happy to come in and fill that pipe on the flash side for them. >> Excellent and Brian as a distinguished engineer and let me get your perspectives on the evolution of the technology over this 22 year partnership. >> Thanks Lisa. It certainly has been a longstanding, a great relationship, great partnership all the way from inventing joint things, to developing, to testing and deploying to different technologies through the course of time. And it's been one of those that where we are today, like AJ had talked about being able to sustain what the applications require today in this always on time type of environment. And as Matt said, bringing together the density and operational simplicity to make that happen 'cause we have to make it easier from the storage side for operations to be able to manage this volume of data that we have coming out and our due diligence is to be able to serve the data up as fast as we can and as resilient as we can. >> And so sticking with you, Brian that simplicity is key because as we know as we get more and more advances in technology the IT environment is only becoming more complex. So really truly enabling organizations in any industry to simplify is absolute table stakes. >> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's core to what we're focused on and how do we make the storage environment simple. It's been one those through the years and historically, we've had entry-level us and the industry as a whole, is that an entry-level product mid range level products, high-end level products. And earlier this year, we said enough, enough of that it's one product portfolio. So it's the same software stack it's just, okay. Small, medium and large in terms of the appliances that get delivered. Again, building on what Matt said, from a density perspective where we can have a petabyte of uncompressed and data reduced storage in a two Enclosure. So it becomes from a overall administration perspective, again, one software stake, one automation stack, one way to do point in time copies, replication. So in focusing on how to make that as simple for the operations as we possibly can. >> I think we'd all take a little bit of that right now. Matt, let's go to you and then AJ view, let's talk a little bit more, dig into the IBM storage arrays. I mean, we're talking about advances in flash, we're talking about NBME as a forcing function for applications to change and evolve with the storage. Matt, give us your thoughts on that. >> We saw a monumental leap in where we take some simplicity pieces from how we deliver our arrays but also the technology within the arrays. About nine months ago, in February we launched into the latest generation of non technology and with that born the story of simplicity one of the pieces that we've been happily essentially negating of value prop is storage level tiering and be able to say, "Hey, well we still support the idea of going down "to near line SaaS and enterprise disc in different flavors "of solid state whether it's tier one short usage "the tier zero high performance, high usage, "all the way up to storage class memory." While we support those technologies and the automated tiering, this elegance of what we've done as latest generation technology that we launched nine months ago has been able to essentially homogenize the environments to we're able to deliver that petabyte per rack unit ratio that Brian was mentioning be able to deliver over into all tier zero solution that doesn't have to go through woes of software managed data reduction or any kind of software managed hearing just to be always fast, always essentially available from a 100% data availability guaranteed that we offer through a technology called hyper swap, but it's really kind of highlighting what we take in from that simplicity story, by going into that extra mile and meeting the market in technology refresh. I mean, if you say the words IBM over the Thanksgiving table, you're kind of thinking, how big blue, big mainframe, old iron stuff but it's very happy to say over in distributed systems that we are in fact leading this pack by multiple months not just the fact that, "Hey, we announced sooner." But actually coming to delivering on-prem the actual solution itself nine, 10 months prior to anybody else and when that gets us into new density flavors gets us into new efficiency offerings. Not just talk about, "Hey, I can do this petabyte scale "a couple of rack units but with the likes of Brocade." That actually equates to a terabyte per second and a floor tile, what's that do for your analytics story? And the fact that we're now leveraging NBME to undercut the value prop of spinning disc in your HBC analytics environments by five X, that's huge. So now let's take near line SaaS off the table for anything that's actually per data of an angle of value to us. So in simplicity elements, what we're doing now will be able to make our own flash we've been deriving from the tech memory systems acquisition eight years ago and then integrating that into some essentially industry proven software solutions that we do with the bird flies. That appliance form factor has been absolutely monumental for us in the distributed systems. >> And thanks for giving us a topic to discuss at our socially distant Thanksgiving table. We'll talk about IBM. I know now I have great, great conversation. AJ over to you lot of advances here also in such a dynamic times, I want to get Brocade's perspective on how you're taking advantage of these latest technologies with IBM and also from a customer's perspective, what are they feeling and really being able to embrace and utilize that simplicity that Matt talked about. >> So there's a couple of things that fall into that to be honest, one of which is that similar to what you heard Brian described across the IBM portfolio for storage in our SaaS infrastructure. It's a single operating system up and down the line. So from the most entry-level platform we have to the largest platform we have it's a single software up and down. It's a single management environment up and down and it's also intended to be extremely reliable and extremely performance because here's part of the challenge when Matt's talking about multiple petabytes in a two U rack height, but the conversation you want to flip on its head there a little bit is "Okay exactly how many virtual machines "and how many applications are you going to be driving "out of that?" Because it's going to be thousands like between six and 10,000 potentially out of that, right? So imagine then if you have some sort of little hiccup in the connectivity to the data store for 6,000 to 10,000 applications, that's not the kind of thing that people get forgiving about. When we're all home like this. When your healthcare, when your finance, when your entertainment, when everything is coming to you across the network and remotely in this version and it's all application driven, the one thing that you want to make sure of is that network doesn't hiccup because humans have a lot of really good characteristics. Patience would not be one of those. And so you want to make sure that everything is in fact in play and running. And that's as one of the things that we work very hard with our friends at IBM to make sure of is that the kinds of analytics that Matt was just describing are things that you can readily get done. Speed is the new currency of business is a phrase you hear from... A quote you hear from Marc Benioff at Salesforce, right. And he's right if you can get data out of intelligence out of the data you've been collecting, that's really cool. But one of the other sort of flip sides on the people not being able to be in the data center and then to Matt's point, not as many people around either is how are humans fast enough when you look... Honestly when you look at the performance of the platforms, these folks are putting up how is human response time going to be good enough? And we all sort of have this headset of a network operations center where you've got a couple dozen people in a half lit room staring at massive screens on the thing to pop. Okay, if the first time a red light pops the human begins the investigation at what point is that going to be good enough? And so our argument for the autonomy piece of of what we're doing in the fabrics is you can't wait on the humans. You need to augment it. I get that people still want to be in charge and that's good. Humans are still smarter than the Silicon. We're not as repeatable, but we're still so far smarter about it. And so we needed to be able to do that measurement. We need to be able to figure out what normal looks like. We need to be able to highlight to the storage platform and to the application admins, when things go sideways because the demand from the applications isn't going to slow down. The demands from your environment whether you want to think about take the next steps with not just your home entertainment home entertainment systems but learning augmented reality, right. Virtual reality environments for kids, right? How do you make them feel like they're part and parcel of the classroom, for as long as we have to continue living a modified world and perhaps past it, right? If you can take a grade school from your local area and give them a virtual walkthrough of the loop where everybody's got a perfect view and it all looks incredibly real to them those are cool things, right? Those are cool applications, right? If you can figure out a new vaccine faster, right. Not a bad thing, right. If we can model better, not a bad thing. So we need to enable those things we need to not be the bottleneck, which is you get Matt and Brian over an adult beverage at some point and ask them about the cycle time for the Silicon they're playing with. We've never had Moore's law applied to external storage before never in the history of external storage. Has that been true until now. And so their cycle times, Matt, right? >> Yeah you struck a nerve there AJ, cause it's pretty simple for us to follow the linear increase in capacity and computational horsepower, right. We just ride the X86 bandwagon, ride the Silicon bandwagon. But what we have to do in order to maintain But what we have to do in order to maintain the simplicity story is followed more important one is the resiliency factor, right? 'Cause as we increased the capacity as we increased the essentially the amount of data responsible for each admin we have to literally log rhythmically increase the resiliency of these boxes because we're going to talk about petabyte scale systems and hosting them really 10,000 virtual machines in the two U form factor. I need to be able to accommodate that to make sure things don't blip. I need resilient networks, right. Have redundancy and access. I need to have protection schemes at every single layer of the stack. And so we're quite happy to be able to provide that as we leapfrog the industry and go in literally situations that are three times the competitive density that we you see out there and other distributed systems that are still bound by the commercial offerings, then, hey we also have to own that risk from a vendor side we have to make these things is actually rate six protection scheme equivalent from a drive standpoint and act back from controllers everywhere. Be able to supply the performance and consistency of that service throughout even the bad situations. >> And to that point, one of the things that you talked about, that's interesting to me that I'd kind of like you to highlight is your recovery times, because bad things will happen. And so you guys do something very, very different about that. That's critical to a lot of my customers because they know that Murphy will show up one day. So, I mean 'cause it happens, so then what. >> Well, speaking of that, then what Brian I want to go over to you. You mentioned Matt mentioned resiliency. And if we think of the situation that we're in in 2020 many companies are used to DR and BC plans for natural disasters, pandemics. So as we look at the shift and then the the volume of ransomware, that's going up one ransomware attack every 11 seconds this year, right now. How Brian what's that change that businesses need to make from from cyber security to cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, it's a good point in, and I try to hammer that home with our clients that, you're used to having your business continuity disaster recovery this whole cyber resiliency thing is a completely separate practice that we have to set up and think about and go through the same thought process that you did for your DR What are you going to do? What are you going to pretest? How are you going to test it? How are you going to detect whether or not you've got ransomware? So I spent a lot of time with our clients on that theme of you have to think about and build your cyber resiliency plan 'cause it's going to happen. It's not like a DR plan where it's a pure insurance policy and went and like you said, every 11 seconds there's an event that takes place. It's going to be a win not then. Yeah and then we have to work with our customers to put in a place for cyber resiliency and then we spent a lot of discussion on, okay what does that mean for my critical applications, from a restore time of backup and mutability. What do we need for those types of services, right? In terms of quick restore, which are my tier zero applications that I need to get back as fast as possible, what other ones can I they'll stick out on tape or virtual tape in and do things like that. So again, there's a wide range of technology that we have available in the in the portfolio for helping our clients from cyber resiliency. And then we try to distinguish that cyber resiliency versus cyber security. So how do we help to keep every, everybody out from a cybersecurity view? And then what can we do from the cyber resiliency, from a storage perspective to help them once once it gets to us, that's a bad thing. So how can we help? How help our folks recover? Well, and that's the point that you're making Brian is that now it's not a matter of, could this happen to us? It's going to, how much can we tolerate? But ultimately we have to be able to recover. We can't restore that data and one of those things when you talk about ransomware and things, we go to that people as the weakest link insecurity AJ talked about that, there's the people. Yeah there's probably quite a bit of lack of patients going on right now. But as we look as I want to go back over to you to kind of look at, from a data center perspective and these storage solutions, being able to utilize things to help the people, AI and Machine Learning. You talked about AR VR. Talk to me a little bit more about that as you see, say in the next 12 months or so as moving forward, these trends these new solutions that are simplified. >> Yeah, so a couple of things around that one of which is iteration of technology the storage platforms the Silicon they're making use of Matt I think you told me 14 months is the roughly the Silicon cycle that you guys are seeing, right? So performance levels are going to continue to go up the speeds. The speeds are going to continue to go up. The scale is going to is going to continue to shift. And one of the things that does for a lot of the application owners is it lets them think broader. It lets them think bigger. And I wish I could tell you that I knew what the next big application was going to be but then we'd be having a conversation about which Island in the Pacific I was going to be retiring too. But they're going to come and they're going to consume this performance because if you look at the applications that you're dealing with in your everyday life, right. They continue to get broader. The scope of them continues to scale out, right. There's things that we do. I saw I think it was an MIT development recently where they're talking about being able to and they were originally doing it for Alzheimer's and dementia, but they're talking about being able to use the microphones in your smartphone to listen to the way you cough and use that as a predictor for people who have COVID that are not symptomatic yet. So asymptomatic COVID people, right? So when we start talking about where this, where this kind of technology can go and where it can lead us, right. There's sort of this unending possibility for it. But what that on, in part is that the infrastructure has to be extremely sound, right? The foundation has to be there. We have to have the resilience, the reliability and one of the points that Brian was just making is extremely key. We talk about disaster tolerance business continuous, so business continuance is how do you recover? Cyber resilience is the same conversation, right? So you have the protection side of it. Here's my defenses. Now what happens when they actually get in. And let's be honest, right? Humans are frequently that weak link, right. For a variety of behaviors that the humans that humans have. And so when that happens, where's the software in the storage that tells you, "Hey, wait there's an odd traffic behavior here "where data is being copied "at rates and to locations that that are not normal." And so that's part of when we talk about what we're doing in our side of the automation is how do you know what normal looks like? And once you know what normal looks like you can figure out where the outliers are. And that's one of the things that people use a lot for trying to determine whether or not ransomware is going on is, "Hey, this is a traffic pattern, that's new. "This is a traffic pattern. "That's different." Are they doing this because they're copying the dataset from here to here and encrypting it as they go, right? 'Cause that's one of the challenges you got to, you got to watch for. So I think you're going to see a lot of advancement in the application space. And not just the MIT stuff, which is great. The fact that people are actually able to or I may have misspoken, maybe Johns Hopkins. And I apologize to the Johns Hopkins folks that kind of scenario, right. There's no knowing what they can make use of here in terms of the data sets, right. Because we're gathering so much data, the internet of things is an overused phrase but the sheer volume of data that's being generated outside of the data center, but manipulated analyzed and stored internally. 'Cause you got to have it someplace secure. Right and that's one of the things that we look at from our side is we've got to be that as close to unbreakable as we can be. And then when things do break able to figure out exactly what happened as rapidly as possible and then the recovery cycle as well. >> Excellent and I want to finish with you. We just have a few seconds left, but as AJ was talking about this massive evolution and applications, for example when we talk about simplicity and we talk about resiliency and being able to recover when something happens, how did these new technologies that we've been unpacking today? How did these help the admin folks deal with all of the dynamics that are happening today? >> Yeah so I think the biggest the drop, the mic thing we can say right now is that we're delivering 100% tier zero in Vme without data reduction value props on top of it at a cost that undercuts off-prem S3 storage. So if you look at what you can do from an off-prem solution for air gap and from cyber resiliency you can put your data somewhere else. And it's going to take whatever long time to transfer that data back on prem, to read get back to your recover point. But when you work at economics that we're doing right now in the distributed systems, hey, you're DR side, your copies of data do not have to wait for that. Off-prem bandwidth to restore. You can actually literally restore it in place. And you couple that with all of the the technology on the software side that integrates with it I get incremental point in time. Recovery is either it's on the primary side of DRS side, wherever, but the fact that we get to approach this thing from a cost value then by all means I can naturally absorb a lot of the cyber resiliency value in that too. And because it's all getting all the same orchestrated capabilities, regardless of the big, small, medium, all that stuff, it's the same skillsets. And so I don't need to really learn new platforms or new solutions to providing cyber resiliency. It's just part of my day-to-day activity because fundamentally all of us have to wear that cyber resiliency hat. But as, as our job, as a vendor is to make that simple make it cost elegance, and be able to provide a essentially a homogenous solutions overall. So, hey, as your business grows, your risk gets averted on your recovery means also get the thwarted essentially by your incumbent solutions and architecture. So it's pretty cool stuff that we're doing, right. >> It is pretty cool. And I'd say a lot of folks would say, that's the Nirvana but I think the message that the three of you have given in the last 20 minutes or so is that IBM and Brocade together. This is a reality. You guys are a cornucopia of knowledge. Brian, Matt, AJ, thank you so much for joining me on this panel I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you again Lisa. >> My pleasure. From my guests I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this IBM Brocade panel on theCUBE.

>>on the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello and welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage Cube live here in Palo Alto, California, with the Virtual Cube this year because we can't be there in person. I'm your host, John Fairy year. We're kicking off Day two of the three weeks of reinvent a lot of great leadership sessions to review, obviously still buzzing from the Andy Jassy three. Our keynote, which had so many storylines, is really hard to impact. We're gonna dig that into into into that today with Jerry Chan, who has been a Cube alumni since the beginning of our AWS coverage. Going back to 2013, Jerry was wandering the hallways as a um, in between. You were in between vm ware and V C. And then we saw you there. You've been on the Cube every year at reinvent with us. So special commentary from you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, John, Thanks for having me and a belated happy birthday as well. If everyone out there John's birthday was yesterday. So and hardest. Howard's working man in technology he spent his entire birthday doing live coverage of Amazon re events. Happy birthday, buddy. >>Well, I love my work. I love doing this. And reinvent is the biggest event of the year because it really is. It's become a bellwether and eso super excited to have you on. We've had great conversations by looking back at our conversations over the Thanksgiving weekend. Jerry, the stuff we were talking about it was very proposed that Jassy is leaning in with this whole messaging around change and horizontal scalability. He didn't really say that, but he was saying you could disrupt in these industries and still use machine learning. This was some of the early conversations we were having on the Cube. Now fast forward, more mainstream than ever before. So big, big part of the theme there. >>Yeah, it z you Amazon reinvent Amazon evolution to your point, right, because it's both reinventing what countries are using with the cloud. But also what Amazon's done is is they're evolving year after year with their services. So they start a simple infrastructure, you know, s three and e c. Two. And now they're building basically a lot of what Andy said you actually deconstructed crm? Ah, lot of stuff they're doing around the call centers, almost going after Salesforce with kind of a deconstructed CRM services, which is super interesting. But the day you know, Amazon announces all those technologies, not to mention the AI stuff, the seminar stuff you have slack and inquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. So ah, lot of stuff going on in the cloud world these days, and it's funny part of it, >>you know, it really is interesting. You look up the slack acquisition by, um, by Salesforce. It's interesting, you know, That kind of takes slack out of the play here. I mean, they were doing really well again. Message board service turns into, um, or collaboration software. They hit the mainstream. They have great revenue. Is that going to really change the landscape of the industry for Salesforce? They've got to acquire it. It opens the door up from, or innovation. And it's funny you mention the contact Center because I was pressing Jassy on my exclusive one on one with him. Like they said, Andy, my my daughter and my sons, they don't use the phone. They're not gonna call. What's this? Is it a call center deal? And he goes, No, it's the It's about the contact. So think about that notion of the contact. It's not about the call center. It's the point of contact. Okay, Linked in is with Microsoft. You got slack and Salesforce Contact driven collaboration. Interesting kind of play for Microsoft to use voice and their data. What's your take on that? >>I think it's, um you know, I have this framework. As you know, I talked my friend systems of engagement over systems intelligence and systems record. Right? And so you could argue voice email slack because we're all different systems of engagement, and they sit on top of system of record like CRM customer support ticketing HR. Something like that. Now what sells first did by buying slack is they now own a system engagement, right? Not on Lee is slack. A system engagement for CRM, but also system engagement for E. R. P Service. Now is how you interact with a bunch of applications. And so if you think about sales for strategy in the space, compete against Marcus Soft or serves now or other large AARP's now they own slack of system engagement, that super powerful way to actually compete against rival SAS companies. Because if you own the layer engagement layer, you can now just intermediate what's in the background. Likewise, the context center its own voice. Email, chat messaging, right? You can just inter mediate this stuff in the back, and so they're trying to own the system engagement. And then, likewise, Facebook just bought that company customer a week ago for a billion dollars, which also Omni Channel support because it is chat messaging voice. It's again the system engagement between End User, which could be a customer or could be employees. >>You know, this really gonna make Cit's enterprise has been so much fun over the past 10 years, I gotta say, in the past five, you know, it's been even more fun, has become or the new fun area, you know, And the impact to enterprise has been interesting because and we're talking about just engaging system of record. This is now the new challenge for the enterprise. So I wanna get your thoughts, Jerry, because how you see the Sea, X O's and CSOs and the architects out there trying to reinvent the enterprise. Jassy saying Look and find the truth. Be on the right side of history here. Certainly he's got himself service interest there, but there is a true band eight with Cove it and with digital acceleration for the enterprise to change. Um, given all these new opportunities Thio, revolutionize or disrupt or radically improve, what's the C. C X's do? What's your take on? How do you see that? >>It's increasingly messy for the CXS, and I don't I don't envy them, right? Because back in the day they kind of controlled all the I t spend and kind of they had a standard of what technologies they use in the company. And then along came Amazon in cloud all of sudden, like your developers and Dio Hey, let me swipe my credit card and I'm gonna access to a bunch of a P I s around computing stories. Likewise. Now they could swipe the credit card and you strike for billing, right? There's a whole bunch of services now, so it becomes incumbent upon CSOs. They need Thio new set of management tools, right? So not only just like, um, security tools they need, they need also observe ability, tools, understanding what services are being used by the customers, when and how. And I would say the following John like CSOs is both a challenge for them. But I think if I was a C X, so I'll be pretty excited because now I have a bunch of other weapons and other bunch of services I could offer. My end users, my developers, my employees, my customers and, you know it's exciting for them is not only could they do different things, but they also changed how their business being done. And so I think both interact with their end users. Be a chat like slack or be a phone like a contact center or instagram for your for your for your kids. It's actually a new challenge if I were sick. So it's it's time to build again, you know, I think Cove it has said it is time to build again. You can build >>to kind of take that phrase from the movie Shawshank Redemption. Get busy building or get busy dying. Kinda rephrase it there. And that's kind of the theme I'm seeing here because covert kind of forced people saying, Look, this things like work at home. Who would have thought 100% people would be working at home? Who would have thought that now the workloads gonna change differently? So it's an opportunity to deconstruct or distant intermediate these services. And I think, you know, in all the trends that I've seen over my career, it's been those inflection points where breaking the monolith or breaking the proprietary piece of it has always been an opportunity for for entrepreneur. So you know, and and for companies, whether you're CEO or startup by decomposing and you can come in and create value E I think to me, snowflake going public on the back of Amazon. Basically, this is interesting. I mean, so you don't have to be. You could kill one feature and nail it and go big. >>I think we talked to the past like it's Amazon or Google or Microsoft Gonna win. Everything is winner take all winner take most, and you could argue that it's hard to find oxygen as a start up in a broad platform play. But we think Snowflake and other companies have done and comes like mongo DB, for example, elastic have shown that if you can pick a service or a problem space and either developed like I p. That's super deep or own developer audience. You can actually fight the big guys. The Big Three cloud vendors be Amazon, Google or or market soft in different markets. And I think if you're a startup founder, you should not be afraid of competing with the big cloud vendors because there there are success patterns and how you can win and you know and create a lot of value. So I have found Investor. I'm super excited by that because, you know, I don't think you're gonna find a company takedown Amazon completely because they're just the scale and the network effects is too large. But you can create a lot of value and build Valuable comes like snowflake in and around the Amazon. Google Microsoft Ecosystem. >>Yeah, I want to get your thoughts. You have one portfolio we've covered rock rock set, which does a lot of sequel. Um, one of your investments. Interesting part of the Kino yesterday was Andy Jassy kind of going after Microsoft saying Windows sequel server um, they're targeting that with this new, uh, tool, but, you know, sucks in the database of it is called the Babel Fish for Aurora for post Chris sequel. Um, well, how was your take on that? I mean, obviously Microsoft big. Their enterprise sales tactics are looking like more like Oracle, which he was kind of hinting at and commenting on. But sequel is Lingua Franca for data >>correct. I think we went to, like, kind of a no sequel phase, which was kind of a trendy thing for a while and that no sequel still around, not only sequel like mongo DB Document TV. Kind of that interface still holds true, but your point. The world speaks sequel. All your applications be sequel, right? So if you want backwards, compatibility to your applications speaks equal. If you want your tire installed base of employees that no sequel, we gotta speak sequel. So, Rock said, when the first public conversations about what they're building was on on the key with you and Me and vent hat, the founder. And what Rock said is doing their building real time. Snowflake Thio, Lack of better term. It's a real time sequel database in the cloud that's super elastic, just like Snowflake is. But unlike snowflake, which is a data warehouse mostly for dashboards and analytics. Rock set is like millisecond queries for real time applications, and so think of them is the evolution of where cloud databases air going is not only elastic like snowflake in the cloud like Snowflake. We're talking 10 15 millisecond queries versus one or two second queries, and I think what any Jassy did and Amazon with bowel officials say, Hey, Sequels, Legal frank of the cloud. There's a large installed base of sequel server developers out there and applications, and we're gonna use Babel fish to kind of move those applications from on premise the cloud or from old workload to the new workloads. And, I think, the name of the game. For for cloud vendors across the board, big and small startups thio Google markets, often Amazon is how do you reduce friction like, How do you reduce friction to try a new service to get your data in the cloud to move your data from one place to the next? And so you know, Amazon is trying to reduce friction by using Babel fish, and I think it is a great move by them. >>Yeah, by the way. Not only is it for Aurora Post Chris equal, they're also open sourcing it. So that's gonna be something that is gonna be interesting to play out. Because once they open source it essentially, that's an escape valve for locking. I mean, if you're a Microsoft customer, I mean, it ultimately is. Could be that Gateway drug. It's like it is ultimately like, Hey, if you don't like the licensing, come here. Now there's gonna be some questions on the translations. Um, Vince, um, scuttlebutt about that. But we'll see it's open source. We'll see what goes on. Um great stuff on on rocks that great. Great. Start up next. Next, uh, talk track I wanna get with you is You know, over the years, you know, we've talked about your history. We're gonna vm Where, uh, now being a venture capitalist. Successful, wanted Greylock. You've seen the waves, and I would call it the two ways pre cloud Early days of cloud. And now, with co vid, we're kind of in the, you know, not just born in the cloud Total cloud scale cloud operations. This is kind of what jazz he was going after. E think I tweeted Cloud is eating the world and on premise and the edges. What it's hungry for. It kind of goof on mark injuries since quote a software eating the world. This is where it's going. So it's a whole another chapter coming. You saw the pre cloud you saw Cloud. Now we've got basically global I t everything else >>It's cloud only I would say, You know, we saw pre cloud right the VM ware days and before that he called like, you know, data centers. I would say Amazon lawns of what, 6 4007, the Web services. So the past 14 15 years have been what I've been calling cloud transition, right? And so you had cos technologies that were either doing on migration from on premise and cloud or hybrid on premise off premise. And now you're seeing a generation of technologies and companies. Their cloud only John to your point. And so you could argue that this 15 year transitions were like, you know, Thio use a bad metaphor like amphibians. You're half in the water, half on land, you know, And like, you know, you're not You're not purely cloud. You're not purely on premise, but you can do both ways, and that's great. That's great, because that's a that's a dominant architecture today. But come just like rock set and snowflake, your cloud only right? They're born in the cloud, they're built on the cloud And now we're seeing a generation Startups and technology companies that are cloud only. And so, you know, unlike you have this transitionary evolution of like amphibians, land and sea. Now we have ah, no mammals, whatever that are Onley in the cloud Onley on land. And because of that, you can take advantage of a whole different set of constraints that are their cloud. Only that could build different services that you can't have going backwards. And so I think for 2021 forward, we're going to see a bunch of companies or cloud only, and they're gonna look very, very different than the previous set of companies the past 15 years. And as an investor, as you covering as analysts, is gonna be super interesting to see the difference. And if anything, the cloud only companies will accelerate the move of I t spending the move of mawr developers to the cloud because the cloud only technologies are gonna be so much more compelling than than the amphibians, if you will. >>Yeah, insisting to see your point. And you saw the news announcement had a ton of news, a ton of stage making right calls, kind of the democratization layer. We'll look at some of the insights that Amazon's getting just as the monster that they are in terms of size. The scope of what? Their observation spaces. They're seeing all these workloads. They have the Dev Ops guru. They launched that Dev Ops Guru thing I found interesting. They got data acquisition, right? So when you think about these new the new data paradigm with cloud on Lee, it opens up new things. Um, new patterns. Um, S o. I think I think to me. I think that's to me. I see where this notion of agility moves to a whole nother level, where it's it's not just moving fast, it's new capabilities. So how do you How do you see that happening? Because this is where I think the new generation is gonna come in and be like servers. Lambs. I like you guys actually provisioned E c. Two instances before I was servers on data centers. Now you got ec2. What? Lambda. So you're starting to see smaller compute? Um, new learnings, All these historical data insights feeding into the development process and to the application. >>I think it's interesting. So I think if you really want to take the next evolution, how do you make the cloud programmable for everybody? Right. And I think you mentioned stage maker machine learning data scientists, the sage maker user. The data scientists, for example, does not on provisioned containers and, you know, kodama files and understand communities, right? Like just like the developed today. Don't wanna rack servers like Oh, my God, Jerry, you had Iraq servers and data center and install VM ware. The generation beyond us doesn't want to think about the underlying infrastructure. You wanna think about it? How do you just program my app and program? The cloud writ large. And so I think where you can see going forward is two things. One people who call themselves developers. That definition has expanded the past 10, 15 years. It's on Lee growing, so everyone is gonna be developed right now from your white collar knowledge worker to your hard core infrastructure developer. But the populist developers expanding especially around machine learning and kind of the sage maker audience, for sure. And then what's gonna happen is, ah, law. This audience doesn't want to care about the stuff you just mentioned, John in terms of the online plumbing. So what Amazon Google on Azure will do is make that stuff easy, right? Or a starved could make it easy. And I think that the move towards land and services that moved specifically that don't think about the underlying plumbing. We're gonna make it easy for you. Just program your app and then either a startup, well, abstract away, all the all the underlying, um, infrastructure bits or the big three cloud vendors to say, you know, all this stuff would do in a serverless fashion. So I think serverless as, ah paradigm and have, quite frankly, a battlefront for the Big Three clouds and for startups is probably one in the front lines of the next generation. Whoever owns this kind of program will cloud model programming the Internet program. The cloud will be maybe the next platform the next 10 or 15 years. I still have two up for grabs. >>Yeah, I think that is so insightful. I think that's worth calling out. I think that's gonna be a multi year, um, effort. I mean, look at just how containers now, with ks anywhere and you've got the container Service of control plane built in, you got, you know, real time analytics coming in from rock set. And Amazon. You have pinned Pandora Panorama appliance that does machine learning and computer vision with sensors. I mean, this is just a whole new level of purpose built stuff software powered software operated. So you have this notion of Dev ops going to hand in the glove software and operations? Kind of. How do you operate this stuff? So I think the whole new next question was Okay, this is all great. But Amazon's always had this problem. It's just so hard. Like there's so much good stuff. Like, who do you hired operate it? It is not yet programmable. This has been a big problem for them. Your thoughts on that, >>um e think that the data illusion around Dev ops etcetera is the solution. So also that you're gonna have information from Amazon from startups. They're gonna automate a bunch of the operations. And so, you know, I'm involved to come to Kronos Fear that we talked about the past team kind of uber the Bilson called m three. That's basically next generation data dog. Next generation of visibility platform. They're gonna collect all the data from the applications. And once they have their your data, they're gonna know how to operate and automate scaling up, scaling down and the basic remediation for you. So you're going to see a bunch of tools, take the information from running your application infrastructure and automate exactly how to scale and manager your app. And so AI and machine learning where large John is gonna be, say, make a lot of plumbing go away or maybe not completely, but lets you scale better. So you, as a single system admin are used. A single SRE site reliability engineer can scale and manage a bigger application, and it's all gonna be around automation and and to your point, you said earlier, if you have the data, that's a powerful situations. Once have the data can build models on it and can start building solutions on the data. And so I think What happens is when Bill this program of cloud for for your, you know, broad development population automating all this stuff becomes important. So that's why I say service or this, You know, automation of infrastructure is the next battleground for the cloud because whoever does that for you is gonna be your virtualized back and virtualized data center virtualized SRE. And if whoever owns that, it's gonna be a very, very strategic position. >>Yeah, it's great stuff. This is back to the theme of this notion of virtualization is now gone beyond server virtualization. It's, you know, media virtualization with the Cube. My big joke here with the Q virtual. But it's to your point. It's everything can now be replicated in software and scale the cloud scale. So it's super big opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies. Thio, pivot and differentiate. Uh, the question I have for you next is on that thread Huge edge discussion going on, right. So, you know, I think I said it two years ago or three years ago. The data center is just a edges just a big fat edge. Jassy kind of said that in his keynote Hey, looks at that is just a Nedum point with his from his standpoint. But you have data center. You have re alleges you've got five G with wavelength. This local zone concept, which is, you know, Amazon in these metro areas reminds me the old wireless point of presence kind of vibe. And then you've got just purpose built devices like cameras and factory. So huge industrial innovation, robotics, meet software. I mean, whole huge edge development exploding, Which what's your view of this? And how do you look at that from? Is an investor in industry, >>I think edges both the opportunity for start ups and companies as well as a threat to Amazon, right to the reason why they have outposts and all the stuff the edges if you think about, you know, decentralizing your application and moving into the eggs from my wearable to my home to my car to my my city block edges access Super interesting. And so a couple things. One companies like Cloudflare Fastly company I'm involved with called Kato Networks that does. SAS is secure access service edge write their names and the edges In the category definition sassy is about How do you like get compute to the edge securely for your developers, for your customers, for your workers, for end users and what you know comes like Cloudflare and Kate have done is they built out a network of pops across the world, their their own infrastructure So they're not dependent upon. You know, the big cloud providers, the telco providers, you know, they're partnering with Big Cloud, their parting with the telcos. But they have their own kind of system, our own kind of platform to get to the edge. And so companies like Kato Networks in Cloud Player that have, ah, presence on the edge and their own infrastructure more or less, I think, are gonna be in a strategic position. And so Kate was seen benefits in the past year of Of of Cove it and locked down because more remote access more developers, Um, I think edge is gonna be a super great area development going forward. I think if you're Amazon, you're pushing to the edge aggressively without post. I think you're a developer startup. You know, creating your own infrastructure and riding this edge wave could be a great way to build a moat against a big cloud guy. So I'm super excited. You think edge in this whole idea of your own infrastructure. Like what Kato has done, it is gonna be super useful going forward. And you're going to see more and more companies. Um, spend the money to try to copy kind of, ah, Cloudflare Kato presence around the world. Because once you own your own kind of, um, infrastructure instead of pops and you're less depend upon them a cloud provider, you're you're in a good position because there's the Amazon outage last week and I think like twilio and a bunch of services went down for for a few hours. If you own your own set of pops, your independent that it is actually really, really secure >>if you and if they go down to the it's on you. But that was the kinesis outage that they had, uh, they before Thanksgiving. Um, yeah, that that's a problem. So on this on. So I guess the question for you on that is that Is it better to partner with Amazon or try to get a position on the edge? Have them either by you or computer, create value or coexist? How do you see that that strategy move. Do you coexist? Do you play with them? >>E think you have to co exist? I think that the partner coexist, right? I think like all things you compete with Amazon. Amazon is so broad that will be part of Amazon and you're gonna compete with and that's that's fair game, you know, like so Snowflake competes against red shift, but they also part of Amazon's. They're running Amazon. So I think if you're a startup trying to find the edge, you have to coexist in Amazon because they're so big. Big cloud, right, The Big three cloud Amazon, Google, Azure. They're not going anywhere. So if you're a startup founder, you definitely coexist. Leverage the good things of cloud. But then you gotta invest in your own edge. Both both figure early what? Your edge and literally the edge. Right. And I think you know you complement your edge presence be it the home, the car, the city block, the zip code with, you know, using Amazon strategically because Amazon is gonna help you get two different countries, different regions. You know you can't build a company without touching Amazon in some form of fashion these days. But if you're a star found or doing strategically, how use Amazon and picking how you differentiate is gonna be key. And if the differentiation might be small, John. But it could be super valuable, right? So maybe only 10 or 15%. But that could be ah Holton of value that you're building on top of it. >>Yeah, and there's a little bit of growth hack to with Amazon if you you know how it works. If you compete directly against the core building blocks like a C two has three, you're gonna get killed, right? They're gonna kill you if the the white space is interest. In the old days in Microsoft, you had a white space. They give it to you or they would roll you over and level you out. Amazon. If you're a customer and you're in a white space and do better than them, they're cool with that. They're like, basically like, Hey, if you could innovate on behalf of the customer, they let you do that as long as you have a big bill. Yeah. Snowflakes paying a lot of money to Amazon. Sure, but they also are doing a good job. So again, Amazon has been very clear on that. If you do a better job than us for, the customer will do it. But if they want Amazon Red Shift, they want Amazon Onley. They can choose that eso kind of the playbook. >>I think it is absolutely right, John is it sets from any jassy and that the Amazon culture of the customer comes first, right? And so whatever is best for the customer that's like their their mission statement. So whatever they do, they do for the customer. And if you build value for the customer and you're on top of Amazon, they'll be happy. You might compete with some Amazon services, which, no, the GM of that business may not be happy, but overall. Net Net. Amazon's getting a share of those dollars that you're that you're charging the customer getting a share of the value you're creating. They're happy, right? Because you know what? The line rising tide floats all the boats. So the Mork cloud usage is gonna only benefit the Big Three cloud providers Amazon, particularly because they're the biggest of the three. But more and more dollars go the cloud. If you're helping move more. Absolute cloud helping build more solutions in the cloud. Amazon is gonna be happy because they know that regardless of what you're doing, you will get a fraction of those dollars. Now, the key for a startup founder and what I'm looking for is how do we get mawr than you know? A sliver of the dollars. How to get a bigger slice of the pie, if you will. So I think edge and surveillance or two areas I'm thinking about because I think there are two areas where you can actually invest, own some I p owned some surface area and capture more of the value, um, to use a startup founder and, you know, are built last t to Amazon. >>Yeah. Great. Great thesis. Jerry has always been great. You've been with the Cube since the beginning on our first reinvented 2013. Um, and so we're now on our eighth year. Great to see your success. Great investment. You make your world class investor to great firm Greylock. Um great to have you on from your perspective. Final take on this year. What's your view of Jackie's keynote? Just in general, What's the vibe. What's the quick, um, soundbite >>from you? First, I'm so impressed and you can do you feel like a three Archy? No more or less by himself. Right then, that is, that is, um, that's a one man show, and I'm All of that is I don't think I could pull that off. Number one. Number two It's, um, the ability to for for Amazon to execute at so many different levels of stack from semiconductors. Right there, there there ai chips to high level services around healthcare solutions and legit solutions. It's amazing. So I would say both. I'm impressed by Amazon's ability. Thio go so broad up and down the stack. But also, I think the theme from From From Andy Jassy is like It's just acceleration. It's, you know now that we will have things unique to the cloud, and that could be just a I chips unique to the cloud or the services that are cloud only you're going to see a tipping point. We saw acceleration in the past 15 years, John. He called like this cloud transition. But you know, I think you know, we're talking about 2021 beyond you'll see a tipping point where now you can only get certain things in the cloud. Right? And that could be the underlying inference. Instances are training instances, the Amazons giving. So all of a sudden you as a founder or developer, says, Look, I guess so much more in the cloud there's there's no reason for me to do this hybrid thing. You know, Khyber is not gonna go away on Prem is not going away. But for sure. We're going to see, uh, increasing celebration off cloud only services. Um, our edge only services or things. They're only on functions that serve like serverless. That'll be defined the next 10 years of compute. And so that for you and I was gonna be a space and watch >>Jerry Chen always pleasure. Great insight. Great to have you on the Cube again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Congrats to you guys in the Cube. Seven years growing. It's amazing to see all the content put on. So you think it isn't? Just Last point is you see the growth of the curve growth curves of the cloud. I'd be curious Johnson, The growth curve of the cube content You know, I would say you guys are also going exponential as well. So super impressed with what you guys have dealt. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much. Cute. Virtual. We've been virtualized. Virtualization is coming here, or Cubans were not in person this year because of the pandemic. But we'll be hybrid soon as events come back. I'm John for a year. Host for AWS reinvent coverage with the Cube. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more coverage all day. Next three weeks. Stay with us from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of aws reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel >>and AWS. Welcome back here to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS.

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon, North America, 2020, virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, virtual coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2020. We're not in person this year, normally we're there in person. We have to do remote because of the pandemic, but hey, it opens up more conversations. And this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. And you'll see a lot of interviews. We've got some great guests, Talking to the leaders, the developers, the end users, as well as the vendors with the CNCF, we got two great guests, Priyanka Sharma, the General Manager of the CNCF, great to see you and Stephen Augustus OSS Engineer at VMware. He's also the KubeCon co-chair back on the cube. Thanks for coming on folks. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. So, thanks for coming on, actually, remote and virtual. We're doing a lot of interviews, we're getting some perspectives, people are chatting in Slack. It's still got the hallway vibe feel, a lot of talks, a lot of action, keynotes happening, but I think the big story for me, and I would like to talk about, I want to get your perspective is this new working group that's out there. So I know there's some news around it. Could you take a minute to explain kind of what this is all about? >> Sure. I'll give a little bit of context for those who may have missed my keynote which... very bad. (Priyanka laughs) As I announced, I'm so proud to be working with the likes of Stephen Augustus here, and a bunch of other folks from different companies, different open source projects, et cetera, to bring inclusive naming to code. I think it's been a forever issue. Quite frankly. We've had many problematic terms in software out there. The most obvious one being master-slave. That really shouldn't be there. That have no place in an inclusive world, inclusive software, inclusive community with the help of amazing people like Stephen, folks from IBM, Red Hat, and many, many others. We came together because while there's a lot of positive enthusiasm and excitement for people to make the changes that are necessary to make the community welcome for all, there's a lot of different work streams happening. And we really wanted to make sure there is a centralized place for guidelines and discussion for everybody in a very non...pan-organizational kind of way. And so that's the working group that John is talking about. With that said, Stephen, I think you can do the best justice to speak to the overall initiative. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's to Priyanka's point, there are lots of people who are interested in this work and again, lots of work where this is already happening, which is very exciting to say, but as any good engineer, I think that's it's important to not duplicate your work. It's important to recognize the efforts that are happening elsewhere and work towards bringing people together. So part of this is providing, being able to provide a forum for discussion for a variety of companies, for a variety of associations that... and foundations that are involved in inclusive naming efforts. And then to also provide a framework for walking people through how we evaluate language and how we make these kinds of changes. As an example, for Kubernetes, we started off the Kubernetes working group naming and the hope for the working group naming was that it was going to evolve into hopefully an effort like this, where we could bring a lot of people on and not just talk about Kubernetes. So since we formed that back in, I want to say, June-ish, we've done some work on about of providing a language evaluation framework, providing templates for recommendations, providing a workflow for moving from just a suggestion into kind of actuating those ideas right and removing that language where it gets tricky and code is thinking about, thinking about, say a Kubernetes API. And in fact that we have API deprecation policies. And that's something that we have to if offensive language is in one of our APIs, we have to work through our deprecation policy to get that done. So lots of moving parts, I'm very excited about the overall effort. >> Yeah, I mean, your mind can explode if you just think about all the complications involved, but I think this is super important. I think the world has voted on this, I think it's pretty obvious and Priyanka, you hit some of the key top-line points, inclusive software. This is kind of the high order bit, but when you get down to it, it's hard as hell to do, because if you want to get ne new namings and/or changing namings accepted by the community and code owners, you're dealing with two things, a polarizing environment around the world today, and two, the hassles involved, which includes duplicate efforts. So you've got kind of a juggling act going on between two forces. So it's a hard problem. So how are you tackling this? Because it's certainly the right thing to do. There's no debate there. How do you make it happen? How do you go in without kind of blowing things up, if you will? And do it in a way that's elegant and clean and accept it. 'Cause that's the... end of the day, it's acceptance and putting it code owners. >> Absolutely. I think so, as you said, we live in a polarizing environment right now. Most of us here though know that this is the right thing to do. Team CloudNative is for everyone. And that is the biggest takeaway I hope people get from our work in this initiative. Open source belongs to everybody and it was built for the problems of today. That's why I've been working on this. Now, when it goes into actual execution, as you said, there are many moving parts, Stephen and the Kubernetes working group, is our shining example and a really good blueprint for many folks to utilize. In addition to that, we have to bring in diverse organizations. It's not just open source projects. It's not just companies. It's also standards organizations. It's also folks who think about language in books, who have literally done PhDs in this subject. And then there are folks who are really struggling through making the changes today and tomorrow and giving them hope and excitement. So that at the end of this journey, not only do you know you've done the right thing, but you'd be recognized for it. And more people will be encouraged by your own experience. So we and the LF have been thinking at it from a holistic perspective, let's bring in the standards bodies, let's bring in the vendors, let's bring in the open source projects, give them guidelines and blueprints that we are lucky that our projects are able to generate, combine it with learnings from other people, because many people are doing great work so that there is one cohesive place where people can go and learn from each other. Eventually, what we hope to do is also have like a recognition program so that it's like, hey, this open source project did this. They are now certified X or there's like an awards program. They're still figuring that piece out, but more to come on that space. That's my part. But Stephen can tell you about all the heavy lifting that they've been doing. >> Before we get to Steve, I just want to say congratulations to you. That's great leadership. And I think you're taking a pragmatic approach and you putting the stake in the ground. And that's the number one thing, and I want to take my hat off to you guys and Priyanka, thank you for that leadership. All right, Stephen, let's talk about how this gets done because you guys open sources is what it's all about is about the people, it's about building on the successes of others, standing on the shoulders of others, you guys are used to sitting in rooms now virtually and squabbling over things like, code reviews and you got governing bodies. This is not a new thing in collaboration. So this is also a collaboration test. What are you seeing as the playbook to get this going? Can you share your insights into what the Kubernetes group's doing and how you see this. What are the few first few steps you see happening? So people can either understand it, understand the context and get involved? >> So I think it comes down to a lot of it is scope, right? So as a new contributor, as a current contributor, maybe you are one of those language experts, that is interested in getting involved as a co-chair myself for SIG Release. A lot of the things that we do, we have to consider scope. If we make this change, how is it affecting an end user? And maybe you work in contributor experience. Maybe you work in release, maybe you work in architecture. But you may not have the entire scope that you need to make a change. So I think that first it's amazing to see all of the thought that has gone through making certain changes, like discussing master and slave, discussing how we name control plane members, doing the... having the discussion around a whitelist and blacklist. What's hard about it is, is when people start making those changes. We've already seen several instances of an invigorated contributor, and maybe the new contributor coming in and starting to kind of like search and replace words. And it... I wish it was that simple, it's a discussion that has to be heard, you need buy-in from the code owners, if it's an API that you're touching, it's a conversation that you need to have with the SIG Architecture, as well as say SIG Docs. If it's something that's happening in Release, then it's a easier 'cause you can come and talk to me, but, overall I think it's getting people to the point where they can clearly understand how a change affects the community. So we kind of in this language evaluation framework, we have this idea of like first, second and third order concerns. And as you go through those concerns, there are like diminishing impacts of potential harm that a piece of language might be causing to people. So first order concerns are the ones that we want to eliminate immediately. And the ones that we commonly hear this discussion framed around. So master-slave and whitelist, blacklist. So those are ones that we know that are kind of like on the track to be removed. The next portion of that it's kind of like understanding what it means to provide a recommendation and who actually approves the recommendation. Because this group is, we have several language aficionados in this group, but we are by now means experts. And we also want to make sure that we do not make decisions entirely for the community. So, discussing that workflow from a turning a recommendation into actuating a solution for that is something that we would also do with the steering committee. So Kubernetes kind of like top governing body. Making sure that the decision is made from the top level and kind of filtered out to all of the places where people may own code or documentation around it is I think is really the biggest thing. And having a framework to make it easy to make, do those evaluations, is what we've been craving and now have. >> Well, congratulations. That's awesome. I think it's always... it's easier said than done. I mean, it's a system when you have systems and code, it's like, there's always consequences in systems architecture, you know that you do in large scales OSS. You guys know what that means. And I think the low hanging fruit, obviously master, slave, blacklist, whitelist, that's just got to get done. I mean, to me, if that just doesn't get done, that's just like a stake in the ground that must happen. But I think this idea of it takes a village, kind of is a play here. People just buy into it. That so it's a little bit of a PR thing going on too, for get buy-in, this is again a classic, getting people on board, Priyanka, isn't it? It's the obvious and then there's like, okay, let's just do this. And then what's the framework? What's the process? What's the scope? >> Yeah, absolutely agree. And many people are midway through the journey. That's one of the big challenges. Some people are on different phases of the journey, and that was one of the big reasons we started this working group, because we want to be able to provide a place of conversation for people at different stages. So we get align now rather than a year later, where everybody has their own terms as replacements and nothing works. And maybe the downstream projects that are affected, like who knows, right? It can go pretty bad. And it's very complex and it's large-scale opensource or coasters, anywhere, large software. And so because team CloudNative belongs to everyone because open source belongs to everyone. We got up, get people on the same page. For those who are eager to learn more, as I said in my keynote, please do join the two sessions that we have planned. One is going to happen, which is about inclusive naming in general, it's an hour and a half session happening on Thursday. I'm pretty sure. And there we will talk about all the various artists who are involved. Everybody will have a seat at the table and we'll have documentation and a presentation to share on how we recommend the all move, move together as an ecosystem, and then second is a presentation by Celeste in the Kubernetes working group about how Kubernetes specifically has done naming. And I feel like Stephen, you and your peers have done such amazing work that many can benefit from it. >> Well, I think engineers, you got two things going to work in for you, which is one, it's a mission. And that's... There's certainly societal benefits for this code, code is for the people. Love that, that's always been the marching orders, but also engineers are efficient. If you have duplicate efforts. I mean, it's like you think about people just doing it on their own, why not do it now, do it together, more efficient, fixing bugs over stuff, you could have solved now. I mean, this is a huge issue. So totally believe it. I know we got to go, but I want to get the news and Priyanka, you guys had some new stuff coming out from the CNCF, new things, survey, certifications, all kinds of new reports. Give us the quick highlights on the news. >> Yes, absolutely. So much news. So many talking points. Well, and that's a good thing, why? Because the CloudNative Ecosystem is thriving. There is so many people doing so much awesome stuff that I have a lot to share with you. And what does that tell us about our spirit? It tells you about the spirit of resilience. You heard about that briefly in the conversation we just had with Stephen about our working group to align various parties and initiatives together, to bring inclusive naming to code. It's about resilience because we did not get demoralized. We did not say, "oh, it's a pandemic. I can't meet anyone. So this isn't happening." No, we kept going. And that is happening in inclusive naming that is happening in the CloudNative series we're doing, that's happening in the new members that are joining, as you may have seen Volcano Engine just joined as platinum member and that's super exciting. They come from China. They're part of the larger organization that builds Tik Tok, which is pretty cool as a frequent bruiser I can say that, in addition, on a more serious note, security is really key and as I was talking to someone just minutes ago, security is not something that's a fad. Security is something that as we keep innovating, as cloud native keeps being the ground zero, for all future innovation, it keeps evolving. The problems keep getting more complex and we have to keep solving them. So in that spirit, we in CNCF see it as our job, our duty, to enable the ecosystem to be better conversant in the security needs of our code. So to that end, we are launching the CKS program, which is a certification for our Kubernetes security specialist. And it's been in the works for awhile as many of you may know, and today we are able to accept registrations. So that's a really exciting piece of news, I recommend you go ahead and do that as part of the KubeCon registration folks have a discount to get started, and I think they should do it now because as I said, the security problems keep getting worse, keep getting more complicated. And this is a great baseline for folks to start when they are thinking about this. it's also a great boon for any company out there, whether they're end users, vendors, it's all sometimes a blurry line between the two, which is all healthy. Everybody needs developers who are security conversant I would say, and this certification help you helps you achieve that. So send all of your people to go take it. So that's sort of the announcements. Then other things I would like to share are as you go, sorry, were you saying something? >> No. Go ahead. >> No, as you know, we talked about the whole thing of team CloudNative is for everyone. Open source is for everyone And I'm really proud that CNCF has offered over 1000 diversity scholarships since 2016 to traditionally under-representing our marginalized groups. And I think that is so nice, and, but just the very, very beginning. As we grow into 2021, you will see more and more of these initiatives. Every member I talked to was so excited that we put our money where our mouth is, and we support people with scholarships, mentorships, and this is only going to grow. And it just so like at almost 17%, the CNCF mentors in our program are women. So for folks who are looking for that inspiration, for folks who want to see someone who looks like them in these places, they have more diverse people to look up to. And so overall, I think our DEI focus is something I'm very proud of and something you may hear about in other news items. And then finally, I would like to say is that CloudNative continues to grow. The cloud native wave is strong. The 2.0 for team CloudNative is going very well. For the CloudNative annual survey, 2020, we found an astonishing number of places where CloudNative technologies are in production. You heard some stories that I told in my keynote of people using multiple CNCF projects together. And these are amazing and users who have this running in production. So our ecosystem has matured. And today I can tell you that Kubernetes is used in production, by at about 83% of the places out there. And this is up by 5% from 78% last year. And just so much strength in this ecosystem. I mean, now at 92% of people are using containers. So at this point we are ubiquitous. And as you've heard from us in various times, our 70 plus project portfolio shows that we are the ground zero of innovation in cloud native. So if you asked me to summarize the news, it's number one, team CloudNative and open source is for everyone. Number two, we take pride in our diversity and over 1000 scholarships have been given out since 2016 to recipients from underrepresented groups. Number three, this is the home base for innovation with 83% of folks using Kubernetes in production and 70 plus projects that deliver a wide variety of support to enterprises as they modernize their software and utilize containers. >> Awesome. That was a great summary. First of all, you're a great host. You should be hosting theCUBE with us. Great keynote, love the virtual events that you guys have been doing, love the innovation. I think I would just say just from my perspective and being from there from the beginning is it's always been inclusive and the experience of the events and the community have been top-notch. People squabble, people talk, people have conversations, but at the end of the day, it is a great community and it's fun, memorable, and people are accepting, it's a great job. Stephen, good job as co-chair this year. Well done. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Take it easy. >> Okay, this is theCUBE virtual, we wish we were there in person, but we're not, we're remote. This is the virtual Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Oven. Welcome back to the Space and Cyber Security Symposium. 2020 I'm John for your host with the Cuban silicon angle, along with Cal Poly, representing a great session here on industry success in developing space and cybersecurity. Resource is Got a great lineup. Brigadier General Steve Hotel, whose are also known as Bucky, is Call Sign director of Space Portfolio Defense Innovation Unit. Preston Miller, chief information security officer at JPL, NASA and Major General retired Clint Crozier, director of aerospace and satellite solutions at Amazon Web services, also known as a W s. Gentlemen, thank you for for joining me today. So the purpose of this session is to spend the next hour talking about the future of workforce talent. Um, skills needed and we're gonna dig into it. And Spaces is an exciting intersection of so many awesome disciplines. It's not just get a degree, go into a track ladder up and get promoted. Do those things. It's much different now. Love to get your perspectives, each of you will have an opening statement and we will start with the Brigadier General Steve Hotel. Right? >>Thank you very much. The Defense Innovation Unit was created in 2015 by then Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. To accomplish three things. One is to accelerate the adoption of commercial technology into the Department of Defense so that we can transform and keep our most relevant capabilities relevant. And also to build what we call now called the national Security Innovation Base, which is inclusive all the traditional defense companies, plus the commercial companies that may not necessarily work with focus exclusively on defense but could contribute to our national security and interesting ways. Um, this is such an exciting time Azul here from our other speakers about space on and I can't, uh I'm really excited to be here today to be able to share a little bit of our insight on the subject. >>Thank you very much. Precedent. Miller, Chief information security officer, Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA, Your opening statement. >>Hey, thank you for having me. I would like to start off by providing just a little bit of context of what brings us. Brings us together to talk about this exciting topic for space workforce. Had we've seen In recent years there's been there's been a trend towards expanding our space exploration and the space systems that offer the great things that we see in today's world like GPS. Um, but a lot of that has come with some Asian infrastructure and technology, and what we're seeing as we go towards our next generation expects of inspiration is that we now want to ensure that were secured on all levels. And there's an acknowledgement that our space systems are just a susceptible to cyber attacks as our terrestrial assistance. We've seen a recent space, uh, policy Directive five come out from our administration, that that details exactly how we should be looking at the cyber principle for our space systems, and we want to prevent. We want to prevent a few things as a result of that of these principles. Spoofing and jamming of our space systems are not authorized commands being sent to those space systems, lots of positive control of our space vehicles on lots of mission data. We also acknowledge that there's a couple of frameworks we wanna adopt across the board of our space systems levers and things like our nice miss cybersecurity frameworks. eso what has been a challenge in the past adopted somebody Cyber principles in space systems, where there simply has been a skill gap in a knowledge gap. We hire our space engineers to do a few things. Very well designed space systems, the ploy space systems and engineer space systems, often cybersecurity is seen as a after thought and certainly hasn't been a line item and in any budget for our spaces in racing. Uh, in the past in recent years, the dynamic started to change. We're now now integrating cyber principles at the onset of development of these life cycle of space. Systems were also taking a hard look of how we train the next generation of engineers to be both adequate. Space engineers, space system engineers and a cyber engineers, as a result to Mrs success on DWI, also are taking a hard look at What do we mean when we talk about holistic risk management for our space assistance, Traditionally risk management and missing insurance for space systems? I've really revolved around quality control, but now, in recent years we've started to adopt principles that takes cyber risk into account, So this is a really exciting topic for me. It's something that I'm fortunate to work with and live with every day. I'm really excited to get into this discussion with my other panel members. Thank you. >>You Preston. Great insight there. Looking forward. Thio chatting further. Um, Clint Closure with a W. S now heading up. A director of aerospace and satellite Solutions, formerly Major General, Your opening statement. >>Thanks, John. I really appreciate that introduction and really appreciate the opportunity to be here in the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. And thanks to Cal Poly for putting it together, you know, I can't help, but as I think to Cal Poly there on the central California coast, San Luis Obispo, California I can't help but to think back in this park quickly. I spent two years of my life as a launch squadron commander at Vandenberg Air Force Base, about an hour south of Cal Poly launching rockets, putting satellites in orbit for the national intelligence community and so some really fond memories of the Central California coast. I couldn't agree more with the theme of our symposium this week. The space and cyber security we've all come to know over the last decade. How critical spaces to the world, whether it's for national security intelligence, whether it's whether communications, maritime, agriculture, development or a whole host of other things, economic and financial transactions. But I would make the case that I think most of your listeners would agree we won't have space without cybersecurity. In other words, if we can't guaranteed cybersecurity, all those benefits that we get from space may not be there. Preston in a moment ago that all the threats that have come across in the terrestrial world, whether it be hacking or malware or ransomware or are simple network attacks, we're seeing all those migrate to space to. And so it's a really important issue that we have to pay attention to. I also want to applaud Cow Pauling. They've got some really important initiatives. The conference here, in our particular panel, is about developing the next generation of space and cyber workers, and and Cal Poly has two important programs. One is the digital transformation hub, and the other is space data solutions, both of which, I'm happy to say, are in partnership with a W. S. But these were important programs where Cal Poly looks to try to develop the next generation of space and cyber leaders. And I would encourage you if you're interested in that toe. Look up the program because that could be very valuable is well, I'm relatively new to the AWS team and I'm really happy Thio team, as John you said recently retired from the U. S. Air Force and standing up the U. S. Space force. But the reason that I mentioned that as the director of the aerospace and satellite team is again it's in perfect harmony with the theme today. You know, we've recognized that space is critically important and that cyber security is critically important and that's been a W s vision as well. In fact, a W s understands how important the space domain is and coupled with the fact that AWS is well known that at a W s security is job zero and stolen a couple of those to fax A. W. S was looking to put together a team the aerospace and satellite team that focus solely and exclusively every single day on technical innovation in space and more security for the space domain through the cloud and our offerings there. So we're really excited to reimagine agree, envision what space networks and architectures could look like when they're born on the cloud. So that's important. You know, talk about workforce here in just a moment, but but I'll give you just a quick sneak. We at AWS have also recognized the gap in the projected workforce, as Preston mentioned, Um, depending on the projection that you look at, you know, most projections tell us that the demand for highly trained cyber cyber security cloud practitioners in the future outweighs what we think is going to be the supply. And so a ws has leaned into that in a number of ways that we're gonna talk about the next segment. I know. But with our workforce transformation, where we've tried to train free of charge not just a W s workers but more importantly, our customers workers. It s a W s we obsessed over the customer. And so we've provided free training toe over 7000 people this year alone toe bring their cloud security and cyber security skills up to where they will be able to fully leverage into the new workforce. So we're really happy about that too? I'm glad Preston raised SPD five space policy Directive five. I think it's gonna have a fundamental impact on the space and cyber industry. Uh, now full disclosure with that said, You know, I'm kind of a big fan of space policy directives, ESPN, Or was the space policy directive that directed to stand up of the U. S. Space Force and I spent the last 18 months of my life as the lead planner and architect for standing up the U. S. Space force. But with that said, I think when we look back a decade from now, we're going to see that s p d five will have as much of an impact in a positive way as I think SPD for on the stand up of the space Force have already done so. So I'll leave it there, but really look forward to the dialogue and discussion. >>Thank you, gentlemen. Clint, I just wanna say thank you for all your hard work and the team and the people who were involved in standing up Space force. Um, it is totally new. It's a game changer. It's modern, is needed. And there's benefits on potential challenges and opportunities that are gonna be there, so thank you very much for doing that. I personally am excited. I know a lot of people are excited for what the space force is today and what it could become. Thank you very much. >>Yeah, Thanks. >>Okay, So >>with >>that, let me give just jump in because, you know, as you're talking about space force and cybersecurity and you spend your time at Vanderburgh launching stuff into space, that's very technical. Is operation okay? I mean, it's complex in and of itself, but if you think about like, what's going on beyond in space is a lot of commercial aspect. So I'm thinking, you know, launching stuff into space on one side of my brain and the other side of brain, I'm thinking like air travel. You know, all the logistics and the rules of the road and air traffic control and all the communications and all the technology and policy and, you >>know, landing. >>So, Major General Clint, what's your take on this? Because this is not easy. It's not just one thing that speaks to the diversity of workforce needs. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. I mean, your observation is right on. We're seeing a real boom in the space and aerospace industry. For all the good reasons we talked about, we're recognizing all the value space from again economic prosperity to exploration to being ableto, you know, improve agriculture and in weather and all those sorts of things that we understand from space. So what I'm really excited about is we're seeing this this blossom of space companies that we sort of referred to his new space. You know, it used to be that really only large governments like the United States and a handful of others could operate in the space domain today and largely infused because of the technological innovation that have come with Cyber and Cyrus Space and even the cloud we're seeing more and more companies, capabilities, countries, all that have the ability, you know. Even a well funded university today can put a cube sat in orbit, and Cal Poly is working on some of those too, by the way, and so it's really expanded the number of people that benefits the activity in space and again, that's why it's so critically important because we become more and more reliant and we will become more and more reliant on those capabilities that we have to protect him. It's fundamental that we do. So, >>Bucky, I want you to weigh in on this because actually, you you've flown. Uh, I got a call sign which I love interviewing people. Anyone who's a call sign is cool in my book. So, Bucky, I want you to react to that because that's outside of the technology, you know, flying in space. There's >>no >>rule. I mean, is there like a rules? I mean, what's the rules of the road? I mean, state of the right. I mean, what I mean, what what's going? What's gonna have toe happen? Okay, just logistically. >>Well, this is very important because, uh and I've I've had access thio information space derived information for most of my flying career. But the amount of information that we need operate effectively in the 21st century is much greater than Thanet has been in the past. Let me describe the environment s so you can appreciate a little bit more what our challenges are. Where, from a space perspective, we're going to see a new exponential increase in the number of systems that could be satellites. Uh, users and applications, right? And so eso we're going we're growing rapidly into an environment where it's no longer practical to just simply evolved or operate on a perimeter security model. We and with this and as I was brought up previously, we're gonna try to bring in MAWR commercial capabilities. There is a tremendous benefit with increasing the diversity of sources of information. We use it right now. The military relies very heavily on commercial SAT com. We have our military capabilities, but the commercial capabilities give us capacity that we need and we can. We can vary that over time. The same will be true for remote sensing for other broadband communications capabilities on doing other interesting effects. Also, in the modern era, we doom or operations with our friends and allies, our regional partners all around the world, in order to really improve our interoperability and have rapid exchange of information, commercial information, sources and capabilities provides the best means of doing that. So that so that the imperative is very important and what all this describes if you want to put one word on it. ISS, we're involving into ah hybrid space architectures where it's gonna be imperative that we protect the integrity of information and the cyber security of the network for the things most important to us from a national security standpoint. But we have to have the rules that that allows us to freely exchange information rapidly and in a way that that we can guarantee that the right users are getting the right information at the right. >>We're gonna come back to that on the skill set and opportunities for people driving. That's just looking. There's so much opportunity. Preston, I want you to react to this. I interviewed General Keith Alexander last year. He formerly ran Cyber Command. Um, now he's building Cyber Security Technologies, and his whole thesis is you have to share. So the question is, how do you share and lock stuff down at the same time when you have ah, multi sided marketplace in space? You know, suppliers, users, systems. This is a huge security challenge. What's your reaction to this? Because we're intersecting all these things space and cybersecurity. It's just not easy. What's your reaction? >>Absolutely, Absolutely. And what I would say in response to that first would be that security really needs to be baked into the onset of how we develop and implement and deploy our space systems. Um, there's there's always going to be the need to collect and share data across multiple entities, particularly when we're changing scientific data with our mission partners. Eso with that necessitates that we have a security view from the onset, right? We have a system spaces, and they're designed to share information across the world. How do we make sure that those, uh, those other those communication channels so secure, free from interception free from disruption? So they're really done? That necessitates of our space leaders in our cyber leaders to be joining the hip about how to secure our space systems, and the communications there in Clinton brought up a really good point of. And then I'm gonna elaborate on a little bit, just toe invite a little bit more context and talk about some the complexities and challenges we face with this advent of new space and and all of our great commercial partners coming into therefore way, that's going to present a very significant supply chain risk management problems that we have to get our hands around as well. But we have these manufacturers developing these highly specialized components for the space instruments, Um, that as it stands right now, it's very little oversight And how those things air produced, manufactured, put into the space systems communication channels that they use ports protocols that they use to communicate. And that's gonna be a significant challenge for us to get get our hands around. So again, cybersecurity being brought in. And the very onset of these development thes thes decisions in these life cycles was certainly put us in a best better position to secure that data in our in our space missions. >>Yeah, E just pick up on that. You don't mind? Preston made such a really good point there. But you have to bake security in up front, and you know there's a challenge and there's an opportunity, you know, with a lot of our systems today. It was built in a pre cyber security environment, especially our government systems that were built, you know, in many cases 10 years ago, 15 years ago are still on orbit today, and we're thankful that they are. But as we look at this new environment and we understand the threats, if we bake cybersecurity in upfront weaken balance that open application versus the risk a long as we do it up front. And you know, that's one of the reasons that our company developed what we call govcloud, which is a secure cloud, that we use thio to manage data that our customers who want to do work with the federal government or other governments or the national security apparatus. They can operate in that space with the built in and baked in cybersecurity protocols. We have a secret region that both can handle secret and top secret information for the same reasons. But when you bake security into the upfront applications, that really allows you to balance that risk between making it available and accessible in sort of an open architecture way. But being sure that it's protected through things like ITAR certifications and fed ramp, uh, another ice T certifications that we have in place. So that's just a really important point. >>Let's stay high level for a man. You mentioned a little bit of those those govcloud, which made me think about you know, the tactical edge in the military analogy, but also with space similar theater. It's just another theater and you want to stand stuff up. Whether it's communications and have facilities, you gotta do it rapidly, and you gotta do it in a very agile, secure, I high availability secure way. So it's not the old waterfall planning. You gotta be fast is different. Cloud does things different? How do you talk to the young people out there, whether it's apparent with with kids in elementary and middle school to high school, college grad level or someone in the workforce? Because there are no previous jobs, that kind of map to the needs out there because you're talking about new skills, you could be an archaeologist and be the best cyber security guru on the planet. You don't have to have that. There's no degree for what, what we're talking about here. This >>is >>the big confusion around education. I mean, you gotta you like math and you could code you can Anything who wants to comment on that? Because I think this >>is the core issue. I'll say there are more and more programs growing around that educational need, and I could talk about a few things we're doing to, but I just wanna make an observation about what you just said about the need. And how do you get kids involved and interested? Interestingly, I think it's already happening, right. The good news. We're already developing that affinity. My four year old granddaughter can walk over, pick up my iPad, turn it on. Somehow she knows my account information, gets into my account, pulls up in application, starts playing a game. All before I really even realized she had my iPad. I mean, when when kids grow up on the cloud and in technology, it creates that natural proficiency. I think what we have to do is take that natural interest and give them the skill set the tools and capabilities that go with it so that we're managing, you know, the the interest with the technical skills. >>And also, like a fast I mean, just the the hackers are getting educated. Justus fast. Steve. I mean e mean Bucky. What do you do here? You CIt's the classic. Just keep chasing skills. I mean, there are new skills. What are some of those skills? >>Why would I amplify eloquent? Just said, First of all, the, uh, you know, cyber is one of those technology areas where commercial side not not the government is really kind of leading away and does a significant amount of research and development. Ah, billions of dollars are spent every year Thio to evolve new capabilities. And a lot of those companies are, you know, operated and and in some cases, led by folks in their early twenties. So the S O. This is definitely an era and a generation that is really poised in position. Well, uh, Thio take on this challenge. There's some unique aspects to space. Once we deploy a system, uh, it will be able to give me hard to service it, and we're developing capabilities now so that we could go up and and do system upgrades. But that's not a normal thing in space that just because the the technical means isn't there yet. So having software to find capabilities, I's gonna be really paramount being able to dio unique things. The cloud is huge. The cloud is centric to this or architectural, and it's kind of funny because d o d we joke because we just discovered the cloud, you know, a couple years ago. But the club has been around for a while and, uh, and it's going to give us scalability on and the growth potential for doing amazing things with a big Data Analytics. But as Preston said, it's all for not if if we can't trust the data that we receive. And so one of the concepts for future architectures is to evolve into a zero trust model where we trust nothing. We verify and authenticate everyone. And, uh, and that's that's probably a good, uh, point of departure as we look forward into our cybersecurity for space systems into the future. >>Block everyone. Preston. Your reaction to all this gaps, skills, What's needed. I mean it Z everyone's trying to squint through this >>absolutely. And I wanna want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the space agencies and organizations that are responsible for deploying these spaces into submission. So what is gonna take in this new era on, and what do we need from the workforce to be responsive to the challenges that we're seeing? First thing that comes to mind is creating a culture of security throughout aerospace right and ensuring that Azzawi mentioned before security isn't an afterthought. It's sort of baked into our models that we deploy and our rhetoric as well, right? And because again we hire our spaces in years to do it very highly. Specialized thing for a highly specialized, uh, it's topic. Our effort, if we start to incorporate rhetorically the importance of cybersecurity two missing success and missing assurance that's going to lend itself toe having more, more prepared on more capable system engineers that will be able to respond to the threats accordingly. Traditionally, what we see in organizational models it's that there's a cyber security team that's responsible for the for the whole kit kaboodle across the entire infrastructure, from enterprise systems to specialize, specialize, space systems and then a small pocket of spaces, years that that that are really there to perform their tasks on space systems. We really need to bridge that gap. We need to think about cybersecurity holistically, the skills that are necessary for your enterprise. I t security teams need to be the same skills that we need to look for for our system engineers on the flight side. So organizationally we need we need to address that issue and approach it, um todo responsive to the challenges we see our our space systems, >>new space, new culture, new skills. One of the things I want to bring up is looking for success formulas. You know, one of the things we've been seeing in the past 10 years of doing the Cube, which is, you know, we've been called the ESPN of Tech is that there's been kind of like a game ification. I want to. I don't wanna say sports because sports is different, but you're seeing robotics clubs pop up in some schools. It's like a varsity sport you're seeing, you know, twitch and you've got gamers out there, so you're seeing fun built into it. I think Cal Poly's got some challenges going on there, and then scholarships air behind it. So it's almost as if, you know, rather than going to a private sports training to get that scholarship, that never happens. There's so many more scholarship opportunities for are not scholarship, but just job opportunities and even scholarships we've covered as part of this conference. Uh, it's a whole new world of culture. It's much different than when I grew up, which was you know, you got math, science and English. You did >>it >>and you went into your track. Anyone want to comment on this new culture? Because I do believe that there is some new patterns emerging and some best practices anyone share any? >>Yeah, I do, because as you talked about robotics clubs and that sort of things, but those were great and I'm glad those air happening. And that's generating the interest, right? The whole gaming culture generating interest Robotic generates a lot of interest. Space right has captured the American in the world attention as well, with some recent NASA activities and all for the right reasons. But it's again, it's about taking that interested in providing the right skills along the way. So I'll tell you a couple of things. We're doing it a w s that we found success with. The first one is a program called A W s Academy. And this is where we have developed a cloud, uh, program a cloud certification. This is ah, cloud curriculum, if you will, and it's free and it's ready to teach. Our experts have developed this and we're ready to report it to a two year and four year colleges that they can use is part of the curriculum free of charge. And so we're seeing some real value there. And in fact, the governor's in Utah and Arizona recently adopted this program for their two year schools statewide again, where it's already to teach curriculum built by some of the best experts in the industry s so that we can try to get that skills to the people that are interested. We have another program called A W s educate, and this is for students to. But the idea behind this is we have 12 cracks and you can get up to 50 hours of free training that lead to A W s certification, that sort of thing. And then what's really interesting about that is all of our partners around the world that have tied into this program we manage what we call it ws educate Job board. And so if you have completed this educate program now, you can go to that job board and be linked directly with companies that want people with those skills we just helped you get. And it's a perfect match in a perfect marriage there. That one other piece real quickly that we're proud of is the aws Uh restart program. And that's where people who are unemployed, underemployed or transitioning can can go online. Self paced. We have over 500 courses they can take to try to develop those initial skills and get into the industry. And that's been very popular, too, So that those air a couple of things we're really trying to lean into >>anyone else want to react. Thio that question patterns success, best practices, new culture. >>I'd like Thio. The the wonderful thing about what you just touched on is problem solving, right, And there's some very, very good methodologies that are being taught in the universities and through programs like Hacking for Defense, which is sponsored by the National Security Innovation Network, a component of the I you where I work but the But whether you're using a lien methodologies or design school principals or any other method, the thing that's wonderful right now and not just, uh, where I work at the U. The Space force is doing this is well, but we're putting the problem out there for innovators to tackle, And so, rather than be prescriptive of the solutions that we want to procure, we want we want the best minds at all levels to be able to work on the problem. Uh, look at how they can leverage other commercial solutions infrastructure partnerships, uh, Thio to come up with a solution that we can that we can rapidly employ and scale. And if it's a dual use solution or whether it's, uh, civil military or or commercial, uh, in any of the other government solutions. Uh, that's really the best win for for the nation, because that commercial capability again allows us to scale globally and share those best practices with all of our friends and allies. People who share our values >>win win to this commercial. There's a business model potential financial benefits as well. Societal impact Preston. I want to come to you, JPL, NASA. I mean, you work in one of the most awesome places and you know, to me, you know, if you said to me, Hey, John, come working JP like I'm not smart enough to go there like I mean, like, it's a pretty It's intimidating, it might seem >>share folks out there, >>they can get there. I mean, it's you can get there if you have the right skills. I mean I'm just making that up. But, I mean, it is known to be super smart And is it attainable? So share your thoughts on this new culture because you could get the skills to get there. What's your take on all this >>s a bucket. Just missing something that really resonated with me, right? It's do it your love office. So if you put on the front engineer, the first thing you're gonna try to do is pick it apart. Be innovative, be creative and ways to solve that issue. And it has been really encouraging to me to see the ground welcome support an engagement that we've seen across our system. Engineers in space. I love space partners. A tackling the problem of cyber. Now that they know the West at risk on some of these cyber security threats that that they're facing with our space systems, they definitely want to be involved. They want to take the lead. They want to figure things out. They wanna be innovative and creative in that problem solving eso jpl We're doing a few things. Thio Raise the awareness Onda create a culture of security. Andi also create cyber advocates, cybersecurity advocates across our space engineers. We host events like hacked the lad, for example, and forgive me. Take a pause to think about the worst case scenarios that could that could result from that. But it certainly invites a culture of creative problem solving. Um, this is something that that kids really enjoy that are system engineers really enjoyed being a part off. Um, it's something that's new refreshing to them. Eso we were doing things like hosting a monthly cybersecurity advocacy group. When we talk about some of the cyber landscape of our space systems and invite our engineers into the conversation, we do outweighs programs specifically designed to to capture, um, our young folks, uh, young engineers to deceive. They would be interested and show them what this type of security has to offer by ways of data Analytic, since the engineering and those have been really, really successful identifying and bringing in new talent to address the skill gaps. >>Steve, I want to ask you about the d. O. D. You mentioned some of the commercial things. How are you guys engaging the commercial to solve the space issue? Because, um, the normalization in the economy with GPS just seeing spaces impacts everybody's lives. We we know that, um, it's been talked about. And and there's many, many examples. How are you guys the D o. D. From a security standpoint and or just from an advancement innovation standpoint, engaging with commercials, commercial entities and commercial folks? >>Well, I'll throw. I'll throw a, uh, I'll throw ah, compliment to Clint because he did such an outstanding job. The space forces already oriented, uh, towards ah, commercial where it's appropriate and extending the arms. Leveraging the half works on the Space Enterprise Consortium and other tools that allow for the entrepreneurs in the space force Thio work with their counterparts in a commercial community. And you see this with the, uh, you know, leveraging space X away to, uh, small companies who are doing extraordinary things to help build space situational awareness and, uh, s So it's it's the people who make this all happen. And what we do at at the D. O. D level, uh, work at the Office of Secretary defense level is we wanna make sure that they have the right tools to be able to do that in a way that allows these commercial companies to work with in this case of a space force or with cyber command and ways that doesn't redefine that. The nature of the company we want we want We want commercial companies to have, ah, great experience working with d o d. And we want d o d toe have the similar experience working, working with a commercial community, and and we actually work interagency projects to So you're going to see, uh, General Raymond, uh, hey, just recently signed an agreement with the NASA Esa, you're gonna see interagency collaborations on space that will include commercial capabilities as well. So when we speak as one government were not. You know, we're one voice, and that's gonna be tremendous, because if you're a commercial company on you can you can develop a capability that solves problems across the entire space enterprise on the government side. How great is that, Right. That's a scaling. Your solution, gentlemen. Let >>me pick you back on that, if you don't mind. I'm really excited about that. I mentioned new space, and Bucky talked about that too. You know, I've been flying satellites for 30 years, and there was a time where you know the U. S. Government national security. We wouldn't let anybody else look at him. Touch him. Plug into, um, anything else, right. And that probably worked at the time. >>But >>the world has changed. And more >>importantly, >>um, there is commercial technology and capability available today, and there's no way the U. S government or national security that national Intel community can afford economically >>to >>fund all that investment solely anymore. We don't have the manpower to do it anymore. So we have this perfect marriage of a burgeoning industry that has capabilities and it has re sources. And it has trained manpower. And we are seeing whether it's US Space Force, whether it's the intelligence community, whether it's NASA, we're seeing that opened up to commercial providers more than I've ever seen in my career. And I can tell you the customers I work with every day in a W s. We're building an entire ecosystem now that they understand how they can plug in and participate in that, and we're just seeing growth. But more importantly, we're seeing advanced capability at cheaper cost because of that hybrid model. So that really is exciting. >>Preston. You know you mentioned earlier supply chain. I don't think I think you didn't use the word supply chain. Maybe you did. But you know about the components. Um, you start opening things up and and your what you said baking it in to the beginning, which is well known. Uh, premise. It's complicated. So take me through again, Like how this all gonna work securely because And what's needed for skill sets because, you know, you're gonna open. You got open source software, which again, that's open. We live in a free society in the United States of America, so we can't lock everything down. You got components that are gonna be built anywhere all around the world from vendors that aren't just a certified >>or maybe >>certified. Um, it's pretty crazy. So just weigh in on this key point because I think Clint has it right. And but that's gonna be solved. What's your view on this? >>Absolutely. And I think it really, really start a top, right? And if you look back, you know, across, um in this country, particularly, you take the financial industry, for example, when when that was a burgeoning industry, what had to happen to ensure that across the board. Um, you know, your your finances were protected these way. Implemented regulations from the top, right? Yeah. And same thing with our health care industry. We implemented regulations, and I believe that's the same approach we're gonna need to take with our space systems in our space >>industry >>without being too directive or prescriptive. Instance she ating a core set of principles across the board for our manufacturers of space instruments for deployment and development of space systems on for how space data and scientific data is passed back and forth. Eso really? We're gonna need to take this. Ah, holistic approach. Thio, how we address this issue with cyber security is not gonna be easy. It's gonna be very challenging, but we need to set the guard rails for exactly what goes into our space systems, how they operate and how they communicate. >>Alright, so let's tie this back to the theme, um, Steve and Clint, because this is all about workforce gaps, opportunities. Um, Steve, you mentioned software defined. You can't do break fix in space. You can't just send a technician up in the space to fix a component. You gotta be software defined. We're talking about holistic approach, about commercial talk about business model technology with software and policy. We need people to think through, like you know. What the hell are you gonna do here, right? Do you just noticed road at the side of the road to drive on? There's no rules of engagement. So what I'm seeing is certainly software Check. If you wanna have a job for the next millennial software policy who solves two problems, what does freedom looked like in space Congestion Contention and then, obviously, business model. Can you guys comment on these three areas? Do you agree? And what specific person might be studying in grad school or undergraduate or in high school saying, Hey, I'm not a techie, but they can contribute your thoughts. I'll >>start off with, uh, speak on on behalf of the government today. I would just say that as policy goes, we need to definitely make sure that we're looking towards the future. Ah, lot of our policy was established in the past under different conditions, and, uh, and if there's anything that you cannot say today is that space is the same as it was even 10 years ago. So the so It's really important that our policy evolves and recognizes that that technology is going to enable not just a new ways of doing things, but also force us to maybe change or or get rid of obsolete policies that will inhibit our ability to innovate and grow and maintain peace with with a rapid, evolving threat. The for the for the audience today, Uh, you know, you want some job assurance, cybersecurity and space it's gonna be It's gonna be an unbelievable, uh, next, uh, few decades and I couldn't think of a more exciting for people to get into because, you know, spaces Ah, harsh environment. We're gonna have a hard time just dud being able differentiate, you know, anomalies that occur just because of the environment versus something that's being hacked. And so JPL has been doing this for years on they have Cem Cem great approaches, but but this is this is gonna be important if you put humans on the moon and you're going to sustain them there. Those life support systems are gonna be using, you know, state of the art computer technology, and which means, is also vulnerable. And so eso the consequences of us not being prepared? Uh, not just from our national security standpoint, but from our space exploration and our commercial, uh, economic growth in space over the long term all gonna be hinged on this cyber security environment. >>Clint, your thoughts on this too ill to get. >>Yeah. So I certainly agree with Bucky. But you said something a moment ago that Bucky was talking about as well. But that's the idea that you know in space, you can't just reach out and touch the satellite and do maintenance on the satellite the way you can't a car or a tank or a plane or a ship or something like that. And that is true. However, right, comma, I want to point out. You know, the satellite servicing industry is starting to develop where they're looking at robotic techniques in Cape abilities to go up in services satellite on orbit. And that's very promising off course. You got to think through the security policy that goes with that, of course. But the other thing that's really exciting is with artificial intelligence and machine learning and edge computing and database analytics and all those things that right on the cloud. You may not even need to send a robotic vehicle to a satellite, right? If you can upload and download software defined, fill in the blank right, maybe even fundamentally changing the mission package or the persona, if you will, of the satellite or the spacecraft. And that's really exciting to, ah, lot >>of >>security policy that you've gotta work through. But again, the cloud just opens up so many opportunities to continue to push the boundaries. You know, on the AWS team, the aerospace and satellite team, which is, you know, the new team that I'm leading. Now our motto is to the stars through the cloud. And there are just so many exciting opportunities right for for all those capabilities that I just mentioned to the stars through the cloud >>President, your thoughts on this? >>Yes, eso won >>a >>little bit of time talking about some of the business model implications and some of the challenges that exists there. Um, in my experience, we're still working through a bit of a language barrier of how we define risk management for our space systems. Traditionally traditionally risk management models is it is very clear what poses a risk to a flight mission. Our space mission, our space system. Um, and we're still finding ways to communicate cyber risk in the same terms that are system engineers are space engineers have traditionally understood. Um, this is a bit of a qualitative versus quantitative, a language barrier. But however adopting a risk management model that includes cybersecurity, a za way to express wish risk to miss the success, I think I think it would be a very good thing is something that that we have been focused on the J. P o as we Aziz, we look at the 34 years beyond. How do >>we >>risk that gap and not only skills but communication of cyber risk and the way that our space engineers and our project engineers and a space system managers understand >>Clinton, like Thio talk about space Force because this is the most popular new thing. It's only a couple of nine months in roughly not even a year, uh, already changing involving based on some of the reporting we've done even here at this symposium and on the Internet. Um, you know, when I was growing up, you know, I wasn't there when JFK said, you know, we're gonna get to the moon. I was born in the sixties, so, you know, when I was graduating my degree, you know, Draper Labs, Lincoln Lab, JPL, their pipeline and people wasn't like a surge of job openings. Um, so this kind of this new space new space race, you know, Kennedy also said that Torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. So in a way that's happening right now with space force. A new generation is here is a digital generation. It's multi disciplinary generation. Could you take a minute and share, uh, for for our audience? And here at this symposium, um, the mission of Space Force and where you see it going because this truly is different. And I think anyone who's young e I mean, you know, if this was happening when I was in college would be like dropping everything. I'm in there, I think, cause there's so many areas thio jump into, um, it's >>intellectually challenging. >>It's intoxicating in some level. So can you share your thoughts? >>Yeah. Happy to do that. Of course. I I need to remind everybody that as a week ago I'm formally retired. So I'm not an official spokesman for US forces. But with that, you know, it said I did spend the last 18 months planning for it, designing and standing it up. And I'll tell you what's really exciting is you know, the commander of, uh, US Base Force General J. Raymond, who's the right leader at the right time. No question in my >>mind. But >>he said, I want to stand up the Space Force as the first fully digital service in the United States. Right? So he is trying >>to bake >>cloud baked cybersecurity, baked digital transformational processes and everything we did. And that was a guidance he gave us every day, every day. When we rolled in. He said, Remember, guys, I don't wanna be the same. I don't wanna be stale. I want new thinking, new capabilities and I want it all to be digital on. That's one of the reasons When we brought the first wave of people into the space force, we brought in space operations, right. People like me that flew satellites and launch rockets, we brought in cyber space experts, and we brought in intelligence experts. Those were the first three waves of people because of that, you know, perfect synergy between space and cyber and intel all wrapped in >>it. >>And so that was really, really smart. The other thing I'll say just about, you know, Kennedy's work. We're going to get to the moon. So here we are. Now we're going back to the Moon Project Artemus that NASA is working next man first woman on the moon by 2024 is the plan and >>then >>with designs to put a permanent presence on the moon and then lean off to march. So there was a lot to get excited about. I will tell you, as we were taking applications and looking at rounding out filling out the village in the U. S. Space Force, we were overwhelmed with the number of people that wanted, and that was a really, really good things. So they're off to a good start, and they're just gonna accomplishment major things. I know for sure. >>Preston, your thoughts on this new generation people out there were like I could get into this. This is a path. What's your what's your opinion on this? And what's your >>E could, uh, you so bold as to say >>that >>I feel like I'm a part of that new generation eso I grew up very much into space. Uh, looking at, um, listen to my, uh, folks I looked up to like Carl Sagan. Like like Neil Tyson. DeGrasse on did really feeling affinity for what What this country has done is for is a space program are focused on space exploration on bond. Through that, I got into our security, as it means from the military. And I just because I feel so fortunate that I could merge both of those worlds because of because of the generational, um, tailoring that we do thio promote space exploration and also the advent of cybersecurity expertise that is needed in this country. I feel like that. We are We are seeing a conversions of this too. I see a lot of young people really getting into space exploration. I see a lot of young people as well. Um uh, gravitating toward cybersecurity as a as a course of study. And to see those two worlds colliding and converse is something that's very near and dear to me. And again, I I feel like I'm a byproduct of that conversion, which is which, Really, Bothwell for space security in the future, >>we'll your great leader and inspiration. Certainly. Senior person as well. Congratulations, Steve. You know, young people motivational. I mean, get going. Get off the sidelines. Jump in Water is fine, Right? Come on in. What's your view on motivating the young workforce out there and anyone thinking about applying their skills on bringing something to the table? >>Well, look at the options today. You have civil space President represents you have military space. Uh, you have commercial space on and even, you know, in academia, the research, the potential as a as an aspiring cyber professional. All of you should be thinking about when we when we When? When we first invented the orbit, which eventually became the Internet, Uh, on Lee, we were, uh if all we had the insight to think Well, geez, you know whether the security implications 2030 years from now of this thing scaling on growing and I think was really good about today's era. Especially as Clint said, because we were building this space infrastructure with a cyber professionals at ground zero on dso the So the opportunity there is to look out into the future and say we're not just trying to secure independent her systems today and assure the free for all of of information for commerce. You know, the GPS signal, Uh, is Justus much in need of protection as anything else tied to our economy, But the would have fantastic mission. And you could do that. Uh, here on the ground. You could do it, uh, at a great companies like Amazon Web services. But you can also one of these states. Perhaps we go and be part of that contingency that goes and does the, uh, the se's oh job that that president has on the moon or on Mars and, uh, space will space will get boring within a generation or two because they'll just be seen as one continuum of everything we have here on Earth. And, uh, and that would be after our time. But in the meantime, is a very exciting place to be. And I know if I was in in my twenties, I wanna be, uh, jumping in with both feet into it. >>Yeah, great stuff. I mean, I think space is gonna be around for a long long time. It's super exciting and cybersecurity making it secure. And there's so many areas defeating on. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your awesome insight. Great panel. Um, great inspiration. Every one of you guys. Thank you very much for for sharing for the space and cybersecurity symposium. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. >>Thanks, John. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, >>I'm >>John for your host for the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And as you know, I've been running a CxO series in this COVID economy. And as we go into the post-isolation world, really want to focus and expand our scope and really look at startups. And of course, we're going to look at startups, let's follow the money. And I want to start with the investor. Mark Roberge is here. He's the managing director at Stage 2 capital. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School, former CRO over at HubSpot. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, you bet, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> So I love that, you know... looking at your career a little bit, on your LinkedIn and following some of your videos, I love the fact that you did, and now you teach and you're also applying it with Stage 2 Capital. Tell us a little bit more about both of your career and Stage 2. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's a bit serendipitous, especially last 10 years, but I've always had this learn, do, teach framework in my, in mind as I go through the decades of my career, you know, like you're probably like 80% learning in your twenties, early thirties and you know, 20% doing. Then, you know, I think my thirties was like leading the HubSpot sales team, a lot of doing, a little bit of teaching, you know, kind of hopping into different schools, et cetera, and also doing a lot of, some writing. And now like, I'm teaching it. I think investing kind of falls into that too, you know, where you've got this amazing opportunity to meet, the next generation of, of extraordinary entrepreneurs and engage with them. So yeah, that, that has been my career. You know, Dave, I've been a, passionate entrepreneur since 22 and then, the last one I did was HubSpot and that led to just an opportunity to build out one of the first sales teams in a complete inside environment, which opened up the doors for a data driven mindset and all this innovation that led to a book that led to recruitment on HBS's standpoint, to like come and teach that stuff, which was such a humbling honor to pursue. And that led to me a meeting my co-founder, Jay Po, of Stage 2 Capital, who was a customer to essentially start the first VC fund, running back by sales and marketing leaders, which was his vision. But when he proposed it to me, addressed a pretty sizeable void, that I saw, in the entrepreneur ecosystem that I thought could make a substantial impact to the success rate of startups. >> Great, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys compete and what's different there, but you know, I've read some of your work, looked at some of your videos, and we can bring that into the conversation. But I think you've got some real forward-thinking for example, on the, you know, the best path to the upper right. The upper right, being that, that xy-axis on growth and adoption, you know, do you go for hyper-growth or do you go for adoption? How you align sales and marketing, how you compensate salespeople. I think you've got some, some leading-edge thinking on that, that I'd love for you to bring into the conversation, but let's start with Stage 2. I mean, how do you compete with the big guys? What's different about Stage 2 Capital? >> Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we're a bunch of sales and marketing and execs. I mean, our backing is, a hundred plus CROs, VPs of marketing, CMOs from, from the public companies. I mean, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Asana, I mean, just pick a unicorn, we probably have some representation from it. So that's, a big part of how we compete, is most of the time, when a rocket ship startup is about to build a sales team, one of our LPs gets a call. And because of that, we get a call, right. And, and so there's, we're just deep in, in helping... So first off, assess the potential and risks of a startup in their current, go to market design, and then really, you know, stepping in, not just with capital, but a lot of know-how in terms of, you know, how to best develop this go-to-market for their particular context. So that's a big part of our differentiation. I don't think we've ever lost a deal that we tried to get into, you know, for that reason, just because we come in at the right stage, that's right for our value prop. I'd say Dave, the biggest, sort of difference, in our investing theme. And this really comes out of like, post HubSpot. In addition to teaching the HBS, I did parachute into a different startup every quarter, for one day, where you can kind of like assess their go-to-market, looking for, like, what is the underlying consistency of those series A businesses that become unicorns versus those that flatline. And if I, you know, I've now written like 50 pages on it, which I, you know, we can, we can highlight to the crew, but the underlying cliffnotes is really, the avoidance of a premature focus on top line revenue growth, and an acute focus early on, on customer attention. And, I think like, for those of you, who run in that early stage venture community these days, and especially in Silicon Valley, there's this like, triple, triple, double, double notion of, like year one, triple revenue, year two, triple revenue, year three, double revenue, year four, double revenue, it's kind of evolved to be like the holy grail of what your objectives should be. And I do think like there is a fraction of companies that are ready for that and a large amount of them that, should they pursue that path, will lead to failure. And, and so, we take a heavy lens toward world-class customer retention as a prerequisite, to any sort of triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling type model. >> So, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So it sounds like your LPs are heavily, not only heavily and financially invested, but also are very active. I mean, is that a, is that a fears thing? How active are the LPs in reality? I mean, they're busy people. They're they're software operators. >> Yeah. >> Do they really get involved in businesses? >> Absolutely. I mean, half of our deals that we did in fund one came from the LPs. So we get half of our funnel, comes from LPs. Okay. So it's always like source-pick-win-support. That's like, what basically a VC does. And our LPs are involved in every piece of that. Any deal that we do, we'll bring in four or five of our LPs to help us with diligence, where they have particular expertise in. So we did an insuretech company in Q4, one of our LPs runs insurance practice at Workday. And this particular play he's selling it to big insurance companies. He was extremely helpful, to understand that domain. Post investment, we always bring in four or five LPs to go deeper than I can on a particular topic. So one of our plays is about to stand up in account based marketing, you know, capability. So we brought in the CMO, a former CMO at Rapid7 and the CMO at Unisys, both of which have, stood in, stood up like, account based marketing practices, much more deeply, than I could. You know of course, we take the time to get to know our LPs and understand both their skills, and experiences as well as their willingness to help, We have Jay Simons, who's the President of Atlassian. He doesn't have like hours every quarter, he's running a $50 billion company, right? So we have Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, right? He's running a $10 billion company now. So, we just get deal flow from them and maybe like an event once or twice a year, versus I would say like 10 to 20% of our LPs are like that. I would say 60% of them are active operators who are like, "You know what? I just miss the early days, and if I could be active with one or two companies a quarter, I would love that." And I would say like a quarter of them are like semi-retired and they're like, they're choosing between helping our company and being on the boat or the golf course. >> Is this just kind of a new model? Do you see having a different philosophy where you want to have a higher success rate? I mean, of course everybody wants to have a, you know, bat a thousand. >> Yeah. >> But I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah. I don't think it, I'm not advocating slower growth, but just healthier growth. And it's just like an extra, it's really not different than sort of the blitzscaling oriented San Francisco VC, okay? So, you know, I would say when we were doing startups in the nineties, early 2000s before The Lean Startup, we would have this idea and build it in a room for a year and then sell it in parallel, basically sell it everywhere and Eric Ries and The Lean Startup changed all that. Like he introduced MVPs and pivots and agile development and we quickly moved to, a model of like, yeah, when you have this idea, it's not like... You're really learning, keep the team small, keep the burn low, pivot, pivot, pivot, stay agile and find product-market fit. And once you do that, scale. I would say even like, West Coast blitzscaling oriented VCs, I agree with that. My only take is... We're not being scientifically rigorous, on that transition point. Go ask like 10 VCs or 10 entrepreneurs, what's product-market fit, and you'll get 10 different answers. And you'll get answers like when you have lots of sales, I just, profoundly disagree with that. I think, revenue in sales has very little to do with product-market fit. That's like, that's like message-market fit. Like selling ice to Eskimos. If I can sell ice to Eskimos, it doesn't mean that product-market fit. The Eskimos didn't need the ice. It just means I was good at like pitching, right? You know, other folks talk about like, having a workable product in a big market. It's just too qualitative. Right? So, that's all I'm advocating is, that, I think almost all entrepreneurs and investors agree, there's this incubation, rapid learning stage. And then there's this thing called product-market fit, where we switch to rapid scale. And all I'm advocating is like more scientist science and rigor, to understanding some sequences that need to be checked off. And a little bit more science and rigor on what is the optimal pace of scale. Because when it comes to scale, like pretty much 50 out of 50 times, when I talk to a series A company, they have like 15 employees, two sales reps, they got to like 2 million in revenue. They raise an 8 million-dollar round in series A, and they hired 12 salespeople the next month. You know, and Dave, you and your brother, who runs a large sales team, can really understand how that's going to failure almost all the time. (Dave mumbles) >> Like it's just... >> Yeah it's a killer. >> To be able to like absorb 10 reps in a month, being a 50, it's just like... Who even does all those interviews? Who onboards them? Who manages them? How do we feed them with demand? Like these are some of the things I just think, warrant more data and science to drive the decisions on when and how fast to scale. >> Mark, what is the key indicator then, of product-market fit? Is it adoption? Is it renewal rates? >> Yeah. It's retention in my opinion. Right? So, so the, the very simple framework that I require is you're ready to scale when you have product-market and go to market-fit. And let's be, extremely precise, and rigorous on the definitions. So, product-market fit for me, the best metric is retention. You know, that essentially means someone not only purchased your offering, but experienced your offering. And, after that experience decided to repurchase. Whether they buy more from you or they renew or whatever it is. Now, the problem with it is, in many, like in the world we live inside's, it's like, the retention rate of the customers we acquire this quarter is not evident for a year. Right, and we don't have a year to learn. We don't have a year to wait and see. So what we have to do is come up with a leading indicator to customer retention. And that's something that I just hope we see more entrepreneurs talking about, in their product market fit journey. And more investors asking about, is what is your lead indicator to customer retention? Cause when that gets checked off, then I believe you have product-market fit, okay? So, there's some documentation on some unicorns that have flirted with this. I think Silicon Valley calls it the aha moment. That's great. Just like what. So like Slack, an example, like, the format I like to use for the lead indicator of customer retention is P percent of customers, do E event, in T time, okay? So, it basically boils it down to those three variables, P E T. So if we bring that to life and humanize it, 70% of the customers, we sign up, this is Slack, 70% of the customers who sign up, send 2000 team messages in 30 days, if that happens, we have product-market fit. I like that a lot more, than getting to a million in revenue or like having a workable product in a big market. Dropbox, 85% of customers, share one file in one hour. HubSpot, I know this was the case, 75% of customers, use five or more of the 25 features in the platform, within 60 days. Okay? P percent, do E event, in T time. So, if we can just format that, and look at that through customer cohorts, we often get visibility into, into true product market-fit within weeks, if not like a month or two. And it's scientifically, data-driven in terms of his foundation. >> Love it. And then of course, you can align sales compensation, you know, with that retention. You've talked a lot about that, in some of your work. I want to get into some of the things that stage two is doing. You invest in SaaS companies. If I understand it correctly, it's not necessarily early stage. You're looking for companies that have sort of achieved some degree of revenue and now need help. It needs some operational help and scaling. Is that correct? >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little bit broader in size, as any sort of like B2B software, any software company that's scaling through a sales team. I mean, look at our backers and look at my background. That's, that's what we have experience in. So not really any consumer plays. And yeah, I mean, we're not, we have a couple product LPs. We have a couple of CFO type LPs. We have a couple like talent HR LPs, but most of us are go-to-market. So we don't, you know, there's awesome seed funds out there that help people set up their product and engineering team and go from zero to one in terms of the MVP and find product-market fit. Right? We like to come in right after that. So it's usually like between the seed and the A, usually the revenue is between half a million and 1.5 million. And of course we put an extraordinary premium on customer retention, okay? Whereas I think most of our peers put an extraordinary premium on top line revenue growth. We put an extraordinary premium on retention. So if I find a $700,000 business that, you know, has whatever 50, 70 customers, you know, depending on their ticket size, it has like North of 90% local retention. That's super exciting. Even if they're only growing like 60%, it's super exciting. >> What's a typical size of investments. Do you typically take board seats or not? >> Yeah. We typically put in like between like seven hundred K, one and a half million, in the first check and then have, larger amounts for follow on. So on the A and the B. We try not to take board's seats to be honest with you, but instead the board observers. It's a little bit selfish in terms of our funds scale. Like the general counsel from other venture capitalists is of course, like, the board seat is there for proper governance in terms of like, having some control over expenditures and acquisition conversations, et cetera, or decisions. But a lot of people who have had experience with boards know that they're very like easy and time efficient when the company is going well. And there are a ton of work when the company is not going well. And it really hurts the scale, especially on a smaller fund like us. So we do like to have board observers seats, and we go to most of the board meetings so that our voice is heard. But as long as there's another fund in there that, has, world-class track record in terms of, holding proper governance at the board level, we prefer to defer to them on that. >> All right, so the COVID lock down, hit really in earnest in March, of course, we all saw the Sequoia memo, The Black Swan memo. You were, I think it HubSpot, when, you remember the Rest In Peace Good Times memo, came out very sort of negative, put up all over the industry, you know, stop spending. But there was some other good advice in there. I don't mean to sort of, go too hard on that, but, it was generally a negative sentiment. What was your advice to your portfolio companies, when COVID hit, what were you telling them? >> Yeah, I summarized this in our lead a blog article. We kicked off our blog, which is partially related to COVID in April, which has kind of summarize these tips. So yes, you are correct, Dave. I was running sales at HubSpot in '08 when we had last sort of major economic, destabilization. And I was freaking out, you know (laughs briefly) at the time we were still young, like 20, 30 reps and numbers to chase. And... I was, actually, after that year, looking back, we are very fortunate that we had a value prop that was very recession-proof. We were selling to the small business community, who at the time was cutting everything except new ways to generate sales. And we happen to have the answer to that and it happened to work, right? So it showed me that, there's different levels of being recession proof. And we accelerated the raise of our second fund for stage two with the anticipation that there would be a recession, which, you know, in the venture world, some of the best things you could do is close a fund and then go into a recession, because, there's more deals out there. The valuations are lower and it's much easier to understand, nice to have versus must have value props. So, the common theme I saw in talking to my peers who looked back in the '01 crisis, as well as the '08 crisis, a year later was not making a bolder decision to reorient their company in the current times. And usually on the go-to-market, that's two factors, the ICP who you're selling to, ideal customer profile and the CVP, what your message is, what's your customer value prop. And that was really, in addition to just stabilizing cash positions and putting some plans in there. That was the biggest thing we pushed our portfolio on was, almost like going through the exercise, like it's so hard as a human, to have put like nine months into a significant investment leading up to COVID and now the outcome of that investment is no longer relevant. And it's so hard to let that go. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> But you have to, you have to. And now it's everything from like, you spent two years learning how to sell to this one persona. And now that persona is like, gyms, retail and travel companies. Like you've got to let that go. (chuckle simultaneously) You know what I mean? Like, and, you know, it's just like... So that's really what we had to push folks on was just, you know, talking to founders and basically saying this weekend, get into a great headspace and like, pretend like you were parachuted into your company as a fresh CEO today. And look around and appreciate the world and what it is. What is this world? What are the buyers talking about? Which markets are hot, which markets are not, look at the assets that you have, look at your product, look at your staff, look at your partners, look at your customer base, and come up with a strategy from the ground up based on that. And forget about everything you've done in the last year. Right? And so, that's really what we pushed hard on. And in some cases, people just like jumped right on it. It was awesome. We had a residential real estate company that within two weeks, stood up a virtual open house module that sold like hotcakes. >> Yeah. >> That was fantastic execution. And we had other folks that we had to have like three meetings with to push them deep enough, to go more boldly. But that, was really the underlying pattern that I saw in past, recessions and something I pushed the portfolio on, is just being very bold on your pivots. >> Right? So I wanted to ask you how your portfolio companies are doing. I'm imagining you saw some looked at this opportunity as a tailwind. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned the virtual, open house, a saw that maybe were exposed, had, revenue exposure to hard-hit industries and others kind of in the middle. How are your portfolio companies doing? >> Yes, strong. I'm trying to figure out, like, of course I'm going to say that, but I'm trying to figure out like how to provide quant, to just demonstrate that. We were fortunate that we had no one, and this was just dumb luck. I mean, we had no one exclusively selling to like travel, or, restaurants or something. That's just bad luck if you were, and we're fortunate that we got a little lucky there, We put a big premium, obviously we had put a big premium on customer retention. And that, we always looked at that through our recession proof lens at all our investments. So I think that helped, but yeah, I mean, we've had, first off, we made one investment post COVID. That was the last investment on our first fund and that particular company, March, April, May, their results were 20% higher than any month in history. Those are the types of deals we're seeing now is like, you literally find some deals that are accelerating since COVID and you really just have to assess if it's permanent or temporary, but that one was exciting. We have a telemedicine company that's just like, really accelerating post COVID, again, luck, you know, in terms of just their alignment with the new world we're living in. And then, jeez! I mean, we've had, I think four term sheets, for markups in our portfolio since March. So I think that's a good sign. You know, we only made 11 investments and four of them, either have verbal or submitted term sheets on markups. So again, I feel like the portfolio is doing quite well, and I'm just trying to provide some quantitative measures. So it doesn't feel like a political answer. (Mark chuckles) >> Well, thank you for that, but now, how have you, or have you changed your sort of your thesis post COVID? Do you feel like your... >> Sure. >> Your approach was sort of geared towards, you know, this... >> Yeah. >> Post COVID environment? But what changes have you made. >> A little bit, like, I think in any bull market, generally speaking, there's just going to be a lot of like triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling, huge focus on top-line revenue growth. And in any down market, there's going to be a lot of focus on customer retention unit economics. Now we've always invested in the latter, so that doesn't change much. There's a couple of things that have changed. Number one, we do look for acceleration post COVID. Now, that obviously we were not, we weren't... That lens didn't exist pre-COVID, So in addition to like great retention, selling through a sales team, around the half million to a million revenue, we want to see acceleration since COVID and we'll do diligence to understand if that's a permanent, or a temporary advantage. I would say like... Markets like San Francisco, I think become more attractive in post COVID. There's just like, San Francisco has some magic happening there's some VC funds that avoid it, cause it's too expensive. There's some VC funds that only invest in San Francisco, because there's magic happening. We've always just been, you know... we have two portfolio companies there that have done well. Like we look at it and if it's too expensive, we have to avoid it. But we do agree that there's magic happening. I did look at a company last week. (chuckles inaudibly) So Dave, there are 300K in revenue, and their last valuation is 300 million. (both chuckle) >> Okay, so why is San Francisco more attractive, Mark? >> Well, I mean and those happened in Boston too. >> We looked at... (Mark speaks inaudibly) >> I thought you were going to tell me the valuations were down. (Dave speaks inaudibly) >> Here's the deal all right, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and this is one, but in general, I think like they have come down. And honestly, the other thing that's happened is good entrepreneurs that weren't raising are now raising. Okay? So, a market like that I think becomes more attractive. The other thing that I think that happens is your sort of following strategies different. Okay so, there is some statistical evidence that, you know, obviously we're coming out of a bear market, a bullish market in, in both the public and the private equities. And there's been a lot of talk about valuations in the private sector is just outrageous. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we come in at this like post seed, pre-A, where it's not as impacted. It is, but not as or hasn't been, but because there's so many more multibillion-dollar funds that have to deploy 30 to 50 million per investment, there's a lot of heating up that's happened at that stage. Okay? And so pre COVID, we would have taken advantage of that by taking either all or some of our money off the table, in these following growth rounds. You know, as an example, we had a company that we made an investment with around 30 million evaluation and 18 months later, they had a term sheet for 500. So that's a pretty good return in 18 months. And you know, that's an expensive, you know, so that that's like, wow, you know, we probably, even though we're super bullish on the company, we may want to take off a 2X exposition... >> Yeah. >> And take advantage of the secondaries. And the other thing that happens here, as you pointed out, Dave is like, risk is not, it doesn't become de-risk with later rounds. Like these big billion dollar funds come in, they put pressure on very aggressive strategic moves that sometimes kills companies and completely outside of our control. So it's not that we're not bullish on the company, it's just that there's new sets of risks that are outside of the scope of our work. And so, so that that's probably like a less, a lesser opportunity post COVID and we have to think longer term and have more patient capital, as we navigate the next year or so of the economy. >> Yeah, so we've got to wrap, but I want to better understand the relationship between the public markets and you've seen the NASDAQ up, which is just unbelievable when you look at what's happening in main street, and the relationship between the public markets and the private markets, are you saying, they're sort of tracking, but not really identical. I mean, what's the relationship. >> Okay, there's a hundred, there's thousands of people that are better at that than me. Like the kind of like anecdotal thoughts that I, or the anecdotal narrative that I've heard in past recessions and actually saw too, was the private market, when the public market dropped, it took nine months roughly for the private market to correct. Okay, so there was a lag. And so there's, some arguments that, that would happen here, but this is just a weird situation, right? Of like the market, even though we're going through societal crazy uncertainty, turmoil and, and tremendous tragedy, the markets did drop, but they're pretty hot right now, specifically in tech. And so there's a number of schools of thoughts there that like some people claim that tech is like the utilities companies of the eighties, where it's just a necessity and it's always going to be there regardless of the economy. Some people argue that what's happened with COVID and the remote workplace have made, you know, accelerated the adoption of tech, the inevitable adoption, and others could argue that like, you know, the worst is still the come. >> Yeah. And of course, you've got The Fed injecting so much liquidity into the system, low interest rates, Mark, last question. Give me a pro tip for entrepreneurs. (Mark Sighs) >> I would say, like, we've talked a lot about, this methodology with, you know, customer retention, really focusing there, align everything there as opposed to top line revenue growth initially. I think that the extension I do at this point is, do your diligence on your investors, and what their thoughts are on your future growth plans to see if they're aligned. Cause that, that becomes like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they dig into this work, they do want to operate around it. But that becomes that much harder when you have investors that think a different way. So I would just, you know, just always keep in mind that, you know, I know it's so hard to raise money, but you know, do the diligence on your investors to understand, what they'd like to see in the next two years and how it's aligned with your own vision. >> Mark is really great having you on. I'd love to have you back and as this thing progresses, and see how it all shakes out. It really a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time. (music plays)

>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, it's theCUBE's coverage of Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019 here in Miami Beach, Florida, at the Fontainebleau hotel. I'm John Furrier hosting theCUBE. We're here with Craig Weir, Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro. Welcome to theCUBE. Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro Cloud, so you guys have a cloud and you guys have sales, technicals out there? >> We got everything, so we have the platform itself, so we have our own platform that is used by one-third of the world telcos. We have large VAR's, DVAR's, SP's using our platform. We're also a cloud aggregator, so we offer pretty much any vendor solution on there, so today, we have over 200 solutions on our platform. We offer services to help partners grow and expand because jumping from where they are today to where they want to go tomorrow is very difficult, so we offer those services, so it's a full package. >> You know, I'm really impressed with Ingram. I got to tell you, Ingram Micro, you guys have essentially reinvented you guys' self in plain sight, so it's like changing the airplane out of 35,000 feet, it's really hard to do. You guys have done it, you've essentially taken a distribution model to the cloud, maintained that stickiness with your clients and partners, and now have automation built in. >> Yeah, we always talk about: we're building a plane while we fly it. And we've been doing that for 10 years. We were the first to get into cloud, we're the world's largest distributor, we know that, but times are changing and you need to adapt with it. So we want to get ahead of the curve, being that we want to own the platform, so we made large acquisitions to be the number-one platform provider. We also want to do the value-added service because partners today want to make that change. They're starting to make that change, but they're not sure exactly how to do it or how to monetize it correctly. So we realized, earlier on, we need to make a massive investment and DNA change in what we do. The old word of pick, pack, and ship is gone, right? Distributing now means a million things that we do. We're more of a service provider than we are anything else. >> Yeah, it's so funny, and also, gross margin used to be higher in the old days. When they started to get hit, started getting out of that direct distribution, there was margin pressure, and again, channel businesses are very efficient. The weak don't survive very long and the ones that are smart actually evolve. This is a great case where you can wrap services around it and, with the cloud, you get operating leverage. So you have an investment, now you have a business model for the next 10, 20 years. >> Yeah, if you think about distributions' basis points, it's a term that doesn't really exist outside distribution where you're razor-thin on those margins, but to your point on cloud, it's much heavier lift, it's much more cooperative selling, so obviously, we want to focus there where we can have growth at a higher profitable rate. And, if you can wrap around platform services around that and make you more money and give more value to the channel, why not? >> Well, that's what the channel wants. They want profitability, want to keep their customers, and increase their gross profit, and that's from services. Now, with software economic margins coming in, the revenue is higher. Software economics are great. >> Yeah, and I think a lot of partners today, NSP's, LAR's, VAR's, DVAR's, they don't really know what is their company actually worth? What's the multiple, right? And they're trying to do that assessment of how much your businesses are actually services and how much is that just reoccurring on an annuity basis, not managed service in some respect. So, for us, we look at that and say, well, how do we actually help you migrate that business? We want to get you to 60, 50, 70% services-led where you're making an average of 10, 20, 30 points. >> And a lot of your partners too have long-standing relationships with customers. And so, by you innovating, that just trickles down to them. That makes it sticky for you guys, great business model. Craig, talk about your relationship with Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit 2019. Talk about what you guys are doing with them. >> So we've been with Acronis for six years now. We're their largest distributor worldwide. We operate from pretty much every country we operate. They're one of our leading, actually, they are our leading backup disaster recovery and cybersecurity solution. We've an amazing partnership at every single level. When it comes to how we go to market, how we back its position, how we recruit enable partners, it's really next to none. We've very, very aggressive timelines and goals for next year for where we want to go, and where that means it's actually growth, expansion, service offering, no matter what head count we have towards this initiative. Acronis is our number-one provider. >> They have a similar DNA and they're thinking like you guys do with the cloud, thinking about how that transformation business model evolved for Ingram Micro. They're seeing it now with their unique integrated... Well, it won't be unique for long 'cause I think everyone is going to copy it. This integrated holistic view having a platform that's an enable, not just hardware, the infrastructure, where they got a platform layer which is enabling capabilities for sets of services on top. Theirs and their ISV's and developers, I mean that's just a proven platform formula. What's your feedback on that? Do you see that translating well in the field, in the partner networks? >> Yeah, very well, I think today, you think of backup disaster recovery as legacy backup disaster recovery. Where am I backing up to, why am I backing? It's for that disaster. Not remediation of issues, security risks. You're seeing them go into a completely security play which someone argues and says it makes no sense, your backup disaster recovery, your BDR. But, if you think of the ransomware attacks today, the fact that I can have a safe copy hooked up in minutes, the ransomware is no longer an issue. And how they position that is really a security end-to-end solution. It doesn't mean you don't need any other security. Obviously, you still do. But it comes at a very different angle and I think it provides a bit of clarity to customers who are confused. They said that earlier, they mentioned: how many different security providers are becoming open every single day? >> No one wants to buy another tool. >> No, and there's no more large mega offer. There's no one solution. >> You know, solving the ransomware problem certainly is a great way to get breached in any account. Hey, I get the mousetrap for solving ransomware. In that case, that's when a better mousetrap works. You're right to the front of the line. Then, once you're in there, then you got to figure it out. This is what's interesting to me is that it's a data solution. I think you cracked that nut, it's a winning formula. >> If you think of a really basic, what are we trying to do or who are we trying to protect? Either people or information, right? We're not worrying about protecting people today. We're talking about information, so at the end of the day, what's most vital for a company's organization? You're looking at their customer data, their personal data, financial data, and if you think about would you want them to have access to, how do you want to mediate that? So the ability of end-to-end and how that story, which was really, really important to the customer, to have the clarity on why, is critical. >> Well, you guys do a great job on security. I read your reports every year that go out at VMworld and Reinvent, all the different events you guys go to. You guys have great security groups, props to those guys. I want to get back to this data backup thing that you mentioned earlier 'cause we had some insight from our conversation. I was just on with a Forrester analyst where, if you look at backup and recovery, it was basically because it was some operational disruption. That had nothing to do with security. I was like, lights go out, hurricane, Hurricane Sandy, whatever happens, something's happening. And that was all built around the continuity of its down rollback. But now the disruption is security. So no one's actually thought about it that way. So I think these guys have a great angle. I'm thinking of it like, well, if the disruption's security, that eliminates almost all the current solutions because they're just rolling back bad code. >> I don't think it eliminates all of them, but it's a great point. >> Well, the majority of them. >> You sit there and go, well, why is Acronis a security provider? It makes no sense. And you sit back and start thinking about the approach 'cause, again, we're thinking old BD and R. The new world of backup and disaster recovery is not the disaster being a natural occurrence or something with this were to happen. It's the every-single-day cyberattack and ransomware that's happening on a regular basis. That's the new norm. New norm isn't the hurricane, it isn't the cyclone, it's security attacks every day. >> And, happening weekly, two towns are being taken out. Craig, observations from your standpoint being an industry participant. Got experience out there in the field, talked to a lot of customers. You guys have your own cloud. Just in general, the top story of this whole cyber protection, security, data world, what's the top story in your mind? What's the most important story that needs to be continually covered and talked about? >> I think what we're missing today is a lot of partners aren't protecting their own house. At the end of the day, when an MSP is looking after their end user's data, do they really understand what they're responsible for? Do they have the right system in place, right? It's back to the constant security attacks. We're seeing, time and time again, MSP's, medium to small, are having massive breaches and going out of businesses in no time. You see MSP's who want to go to MSSP, but that requires-- >> John: What's that mean? >> Managed security service provider. >> John: Okay, all right. >> So you're an MSP specializing, dedicated on... And security, you have a SOC, which means you have a security operational center, meaning that you have to either buy that or go and invest on it or maybe partner with somebody. It's incredibly expensive. So MSP's today-- >> John: The compliance and the insurance alone. >> The compliance, insurance, the expertise. There's a massive shortage of people. So we see the MSP's today may be fine. Maybe 10% could go make that leap to MSP so that everyone else is figuring out: how do I manage the security space? I have all these different offers I have and solutions I have. A lot of them are homegrown, they're not very good. So, at the end of the day, when we look at what's missing is, hey, if you're an MSP, is your own house protected? Before you try to put everyone else's. Because, if you're managing all that data from that partner, you better make sure your house is protected. >> Protect your own house and I think that's interesting, what just came out of Acronis is that, it's a little bit of a flashy announcement, but the blockchain notary, they say, hey, we'll protect the data in all forms and we'll encrypt it on a blockchain. So that speaks to this blockchain problem. Well, data's a supply chain. >> It is, and you sit there... Again, let's talk old backup disaster recovery. You have data somewhere, it's a copy of your file. Do you know it's a clean copy, an authentic file? Do you know that something hasn't happened to it? And before, we never would've known that. Now we do. >> Yeah, well, I've always said in theCUBE, Dave Vellante and I talk about storages, not about the storage, CPU's and the hardware, but the data that's being stored. Take care of your own house first before you take on other people's data. I love that analogy. >> Yeah and customers are getting smart these days. Customers are looking, they're doing reading. Most customers look each at a time. They're looking at word-of-mouth, a trusted advisor, and they're doing research online. So they're demanding this. >> Craig, I really appreciate your insights. Thanks for taking time to share. Take a minute to give a plug for what you guys do in the cloud, how does someone get involved and work with you, what's a customer for you? Take a minute to give a plug out for what you guys do. >> So Ingram Micro, so we're the largest cloud organization in the world. We'll talk U.S. specifically. >> John: Cloud? >> U.S. cloud. >> John: Amazon's bigger. >> As a distributor. >> John: Okay, distributor cloud, that's what I thought. Just to make sure, you keep an eye on them. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. So we actually are, we do distribute AWS, we do distribute Azure. They're largest for both of them in the channel perspective. But partners today, what I would say the opportunity to them is there's those who play very heavily in the space, then those that do not. Everyone is somewhere in the middle. Working with Ingram Micro, the ability to really, what we said, the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap which we presented earlier, we're taking a partner from infancy maybe doing a handful of SaaS offers today to going 10, 20 offers on a regular basis. We really enable and train them to make that jump both financially and from a skillset perspective. >> Can anyone get involved? You guys have a vetting process? They have a cloud SaaS app? >> Yeah, so cloud marketplace, if you're an Ingram Micro account today, you have a free account into our cloud marketplace, which is our e-commerce buying engine which is built on CloudBlue, which is our platform. Free access to it, online purchasing of any SaaS offer you want, depending on what the authorizations are by the SaaS offer. Free access to our team when it comes to how to enable support them, whether it's security, UCA's, backup disaster recovery, public cloud, Microsoft, you name it. And it's really a team dedicated to help the problem solvers, which is everyone here today, solve the current problem of how to get more of an annuity subscription basis. >> Awesome, well, congratulations. Cloud marketplaces are hot, you guys are number-one channel, distributor, cloud, whatever it's called. Is there a category? >> For making new-- >> Channel cloud. >> Yeah, you could say-- >> Distributor cloud. >> We're a distribution service provider. >> Congratulations Ingram Micro trends. Building the plane while they're flying it, I love that one too. It's theCUBE, we're a-flying here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. We're back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome to Austin, Texas. This is the Cube. Live at the fourth annual pure accelerate. I'm Lisa Martin with David, Dante, Dave or in Texas, >> Texas again. >> Austin, Texas. Very interesting venue for this fourth annual hear stories. >> A lot of construction, >> music, a >> lot of music. >> So we just came from the keynote and news announcements, customers on stage. But the first thing to point out is, this is here is about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Charlie Giancarlo, CEO and chairman who's coming on the program with us, and just a few minutes talking about what they have innovated and delivered these 10 X improvements and 10 years kind of this overnight success in 10 years and what's coming? What was with the things that really stuck out at you, Nicky Note. >> Well, first of all, ironically, this is the 10th year of the Cube, not our 10th anniversary, but it's the 10th year of doing the Cube. And so our fourth year, I think it's pure accelerate about what 3000 people here, >> you know, the keynotes >> pure was laying out what their vision is of the modern data experience and that I felt like the keynotes least there were sort of, ah, speed date of what's coming. There was a couple of major announcements that we'll talk about, >> Uh, but >> they really are trying to differentiate as the modern storage company turn a deep position. The competition, as the old guard is to use this term that Andy Jassy uses pure, didn't use that term. But they really talked about it's time to go Modern. And so they were an overnight success. It took him 10 years, was one of the comments that was on stage. So I think this is worth pointing out. A couple of things. I mean, let me lay out. Sort of my thoughts on Pure is a company. They were the only storage company Ah, in the past. Let's call a decade to reach what I'll call escape velocity. They achieved a billion dollars a couple years ago. They're doing their due about a billion and 1/2 on a trailing 12 month basis. They'll do 1.7 billion this year and evaluations about 4.5 billion. So they got a a three ex valuation in that fluctuates. That's pretty good for a storage company. Billy on Lee major storage company. That's really growing rapidly. They got 28% growth. I did a breaking analysis on Lincoln, and I'll just share with you some of the numbers. Dallas flat at 0%. So Del is actually gaining share with no growth has got a scary NetApp minus 16% in the quarter H P E minus 3% IBM minus 21%. And so it is pure A 28%. So they're really crushing it in terms of growth. They've also got a 69% gross gross margin, even if it's in its heyday. E emcees gross margins weren't that high, you know. They were in the sort of mid sixties, and so, and they've also got a good balance sheet. About a billion dollars in cash A little. A little more than that, they got some debt. They're shifting their model to a deferred revenue model. Now the only thing is, you know they're growing much, much faster than the competition. But they're throwing off a lot less cash because they're much smaller. Just as an example, they probably throw off 5 to 6% of their revenues in cash. Netapp probably throws about 23% of its revenues, often catch the big Delta there, so the point is long winded. But but pure storage is in growth mode. And until the market rewards more consistent with a cash flow, they're gonna, I think, stay in huge growth mode. >> There was a great analysis. Dave and I saw an analysis that you did with some spends data, just a couple of your reverence. A little bit of that. There's there seems to be a tailwind behind here you mention the 28% wrote that they announced in Q two, and some of the things that also they talked about were there. Adding about in Q two of F Y 2020 about seven net new customers every business day, adding about 450 new customers just in that quarter. Like you said, 3000 folks expected here today. The momentum is behind them, but they're also a company of firsts. You talked about this a number of times. The first, with all flashed the first with envy me on the back and a couple of additional firsts announced today. Talk about the as a service model and how that youth, in your opinion, you think might continue that trajectory that they're on. >> Yes, so basically pure laid out today, said that vast majority are Pouliot Portfolio is gonna be available as a service. That's the cloud consumption mall is important because pure has about $600 million in deferred revenue, largely coming from their evergreen service. But there they are, slowly shifting their model to a subscription model. It's gonna be very interesting to see how that plays out. Um, we've seen a number of companies do a tableau in Adobe kind of pulled the band Aid off and did it Splunk has taken years to do. It will be interesting to see how how pure goes. For that. I'll >> bring it >> back to the cloud up yours largely an on Prem storage company. That's where most of the revenues come from. But we heard the gentleman from Amazon today. I think it was E ethan whiner, not Ethan, anyway, Mr Whiner, he said. That gardener did A survey last year showed 88% of customers said they have a cloud for a strategy, but 86% of those customers continue to spend on prim. So here you have the cloud. Amazon gorilla wants everybody to go to the cloud pure would much rather they make much more money on Prem? But they realize customers air pulling them in. So they have to move to that as a service model. One of the interesting things that pure is done, which, you know, that's not really a first. But it certainly is for the large storage companies they've announced. Ah, block storage on AWS. So basically what they're doing is they're taking the pure experience. It all looks like pure software, and they're front ending cheap s3 storage from Amazon with E. C. To compute instances, and they've architected using Amazon service. Is this basically a block storage array in the cloud so Amazon gets paid, pure, gets paid? It's a little bit of a premium, but you get higher availability. You get great right performance and you get the pure cloud experience pretty interesting strategy, >> and they're talking about it really as this. This positioning it rather as a bridge, a bridge to hybrid cloud. This numbers that the Amazon gentlemen, share that you mentioned Gardner were really interesting both sides recognizing there's a forcing function there and that forcing function is the customers from the enterprise to the small business who need to have data available immediately wherever it is people to extract this insights from it quickly so that those companies, whether it's a capital one or a Delta Airlines or a smaller organization, can act on it quickly to Dr Competitive Advantage. Same kind of challenge that your storage has. But really that forcing function of the customer, clearly bringing the giant AWS together with yet another story >> so pure as they say reached escape velocity. They and Nutanix were the only on a new entrance that reached a billion dollars Nutanix. I really don't consider a storage company. They're kind of hyper converged. And the way they did that as they drove a truck through E emcees install base with flash. So they were the first within all flash array. Maybe maybe they weren't the first, but they were the first to really drive it. They hired a bunch of DMC sales reps. They knew where all the skeletons were buried and they really took out a lot of old Symmetric Se's and Claire eons and V. Max is and all the old sort of GMC install base, and that helped them catapult their way there 1st 10 years. Now they got to do that again. They got to get to get They're on their way to two billion. But how did they get to five billion? Um, and and so the way they do that is they have to expand their tam. I mean, we'll talk to Charlie Jean Carlo about this. My feeling is a big job of the CEO is to expand the Tamil. How do they do that? They go after new workloads like a i. They go for cloud. They go from multi cloud. These are all very large markets in which they don't participate. Data protection. They'll partner with Lex, Kohi City and Rubric and Beam to to have data protection software running on their flash. A raise with very, very fast restores. That's something that's taking off. It's gonna be really interested in seeing as they say, they've got this subscription model that's coming in. They've got all this deferred revenue that in a way, it's going to slow him down a little bit just from an accounting standpoint, cause when you recognize deferred revenue, you recognize that, you know over 12 months over 36 months, so that's a little bit of a transition. The other thing that pure is facing in a tactical basis is Nande pricing. It's like this countervailing effects nan pricing is coming down, which means lower prices, lower costs but also lower revenue. But at the same time, it becomes more competitive with spinning disk. This is something else. We'll talk to Charlie Jean. Cholera right about it opens up new markets. So this tam expansion is critical for pure in terms of driving this modern data experience into these new workloads and fighting the competition, the competition is not sitting still. All those companies that I mentioned the H P ease, the the Delhi emcees, et cetera, are basically taking a page out of your swords narrative, talking about the cloud experience, talking about, you know, flexible pricing models, building cloud products on prime and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. So it's hard sometimes for customers to squint through that. And really, no, I guess the bottom line, the last thing I'll say is pure. Doesn't have as many feet on the street is these other guys. So it's gotta leverage the channel increasingly, and that's how it gets beyond two billion on its way to five billion. >> And that was one of the factors that they attributed the second quarter. 28% year on year growth is to not just innovation, but also to the channel. So they've done a good job of really pivoting. There's large enterprise deals to be covered, direct and then bringing in the channel for those smaller mid size business customers. Adding a lot of momentum in cute to you mentioned the nan pricing that in some of the political climate with the start of China, most of their businesses in the Americas so they're not facing as many of those challenges. So they did lower guidance for the rest of it is >> the second time they've >> lowered 20. However, they kind of attributed that thio the nan supply oversupply and they say happy Matt to flatten out quickly, say they're >> not worried about the macro. I mean, look, if if the economy is good and is booming and people are spending money on cap ex. That's good for even a high growth company. They're basically positioning to the street that if if the economy does turn down and there's a softness at the macro, they'll actually gain share more rapidly. Which, by the way, is probably true. But look at the rising tide lifts all boats. Nobody wants to see Ah recession. Having said that, well, it's interesting. When you saw Pure Lower, its guidance stock took a hit, and then net app, I'd be him. All these other company you have to see a deli emcee they announced in the market said, Wow, pure must be doing really well compared to these other guys. So it's come back in a big way. My opinion pure is going to in the e. T. Our data shows this from a spending intentions Pure is going to continue to gain share at a much, much more rapid pace of the other. The other guys, from a product standpoint, delicacies consolidating its product portfolio, trying to lower its cost. H. P E is really focused on limbo. IBM needs a mainframe product cycle to get back going, Ned APS facing its challenges and its kind of tweaking its go to market model. So all these other companies air dealing with sort of some structural changes. Where is pure is like put the put the foot on the gas and accelerate no pun intended. And so I think they're gonna continue to gain share for quite quite a number of quarters. >> I want to talk about sustainability before we break. And one of the things that Charlie talked about on his keynote is in terms of the modern data experience, he said. It was three things. It was simple, seamless and sustainable, an inch sustainable. You really started talking about the evergreen model that they launched a while ago that seems to be really sticky with organizations. He also talked about sustainability is a lot of other organization I need to adjust in terms of, you know, waste and carbon emissions and things like that. But I'm just curious, since Pierre is much smaller than the competitors that you mentioned and a lot more focus, obviously all in on flash. Where does the evergreen model, in your opinion, give them that tail winter? That advantage? >> Well, the Evergreen model was first of all brilliant marketing strategy and a business strategy Because if you think about the traditional storage vendors, they make so much money on maintenance, they would never have done this unless pure force them to do it. Because they're making so much cash on the maintenance. You know, it's it's you. You put the storage array in and we're just gonna charge you maintenance. And if you're not on the maintenance contract, sorry. You don't get all the software upgrades, everything else. So it's just this, you know, this lock in strategy, which is work brilliantly for two decades pure, comes along and says, Hey, where? Software driven. We're gonna allow you to get all the modern software. As long as you're got a subscription with us, we'll swap out your controller for free. You know, the competitors hate that. There's all kinds of nuances and stuff, but it worked, and customers love it. And so it's very strong, and it's a fundamental as they said, they got $600 million in deferred revenue, largely from that evergreen model. So they, you know, Charlie mentioned first for non disruptive upgrades. First for cloud management, first for a I ops first for always on que Os first with always on encryption, and if they're really the first, we're probably the first big company. They got a lot of attention there. Last thing, it's it's a four big announcements today. There's a I ready infrastructure, airy. They're doing some stuff they were first to announce with video. You know, a year or so ago, they got cloud offerings. Ah, block storage for AWS. And they've got clout Snap for Azure, which is actually pretty hot. It's backup on Azure, and they got product extensions. They got cheaper flash with a flash or a C for capacity. And then they have extended their all flashy raise their flash played etcetera with storage class, memory and and storage memory. And in this, this as a service model. Those are really the four big announcements that were gonna dig into all this week. >> We are, and we're gonna be talking with This is a great event. Two days. The cube is going to be here. We have seven pure customers to talk to you that I think kind of a record, at least in my cube experience of the last >> AWS always puts a lot of customers up too. You know. All >> right, well, there's no better validation than the success of a brand, whether we're talking about Evergreen or their first or the reaction of the market to bringing flash down to satya prices. So excited to dig into customer stories with you, Dave. Course we'll talk to some partners who got c'mon slung Cisco somebody else and probably forgetting. And, of course, some of the pure, exactly gonna be exciting two days with you and looking for two days >> looking forward to at least a great >> all right stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our first guest, Charlie Giancarlo, chairman and CEO of Pier Storage. Stick around, come back Mawston in just a minute.

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners okay welcome back everyone we live in Las Vegas with a cube tech cue coverage of Dell technology world I'm Jean for @d Volante we're here in Cuba Lumley MERIS house who's the president and chief commercial officer Dell technologies great to see you again always great to be here sir so the the movie just gets better and sequels and Dell 3 into the year 3 of the acquisition I love look I love the script and we're gonna keep going you guys are access to the Game of Thrones it's not going to end it's gonna one of the themes I want to get your thoughts on first of all welcome back to look you good to see you what's going on right now give us an update Mars you've you've seen the chessboard of MMA of big firms on the private equity side you worked at HP during those days you came to Dell with Michael early on partnering on the going private and then looking at the overall plan which is now in full execution mode at the integration part of integrating it all together it's working really good mill the fairway revenues at ninety plus billion where are we right now well I'll tell you I think you and I were just discussing it a second ago scale does matter but if you can align scale with ax in your portfolio that it's so well aligned to the trends in the industry and you're representing an opportunity for a customer to select a partner like Dell technologies to help them solve their key business channel and just not just for today we're into the future and then if you can do at scale right portfolio at the velocity we're doing it's a trifecta that we love it's a that you know I recently talked to Tom Tom sweet we grew the business eleven billion dollars on an already big number just last year alone so and we're gaining sharing all of our key lines of business so the Folies aligning really well customers have been extraordinary and obviously building those big trusted relationships not just now to the but into the future that's you guys ready and you guys got a great team the ability to attract the talent has been phenomenal give you guys props on that but I keep coming back to we had a few years ago which is okay the big waves coming everyone kind of got cloud they saw the scale of Amazon great gel sign that continues to do great for AWS now it's multi cloud now IT the original consolidation of IT that you guys were going after had good growth and value creation just out of the box and now the tail winds as you mentioned so I got to ask you about this end to end this is a land grab this end to end operational consistency thing because it's a very unique it's hard to copy it's in the middle if you can continue to pull that off that's going to be a great opportunity that's gonna feed up up the stack if you will talk about the challenges and why you guys are going this end to end and the benefits the customers there's there is no doubt that the customers are getting smarter every day in understanding what workloads what applications what data sets ought to reside in which ecosystems to better serve them and to better align to their overall economic needs and desires that they want and their flexibility and agility to be able to move those workloads in that data seamlessly to best address their particular needs the beauty of what we've been able to do is integrate the VMware architecture into the public cloud ecosystems and we've got many others that are ready knocking on the door to the beat want to be part of it so now what a customer can have is that true agility that true flexibility of moving applications and data seamlessly but all control through one mechanism because at the end of the day what's going to happen is they're gonna have their day to resign on multiple different sources but they want to be able to see it they want to be able to accident they want to be able to analyze it and once you're able to analyze it regardless of where it resides and then draw the conclusions from it that's what's enables them to then create a predictive model that almost a cost to zero so on day one of the keynotes Michael said he showed the be of a video he said if you're you know bank with two trillion and assets or your two-story farmhouse we care about you know that's kind of music to your ears you obviously you're a big part of that what's different about the commercial customers and and what's going on in that base in terms of their transformation their trends and how is that different from I mean in commercial customers Lisa my and my patch I've got the biggest of the public-sector account so I've got them of all different sizes and shapes and different stages of the journey and that's what we're finding everywhere even if you're a big account small account medium account everyone is on there's digital transformation journey and there's an intersection that we can play a very big part of in and then enabling them to create a playbook as to how do I go through this journey effectively but what we're finding is when we took the overall architecture kind of or indeed tenants if you will around making sure that we have a scale out architecture model it doesn't able to have our customers adopt things and then be able to scale it out as their economic or as their business grows as an example so you can jump into having leading-edge capabilities and technology to help you drive your your company today but know that we're there with you all the way to then scale at whatever rate you want to scale at Mars I got to ask you we had Tom sweet on as you just mentioned CFO he talked about the multiple levers to create multiple levers you guys are pulling to create shareholder value which is ultimately comes from free cash flow which is happy customers great to pay down the debt that's his job margin expansion get good product development increase go to market efficiencies okay and then so philosophy supply chain go to market efficiencies this is your wheelhouse as you guys go talk to the customers and go to the market now with the sets of partnerships one of the changes that we're seeing is in IT it shifted the conversation shifted from not just cost reduction but revenue generating so with these new tailwind is creating a business model opportunity for your customers this is not the old school best in breed got great storage low cost I I've you know low cost per storage gigabyte this is about I don't want to deal with infrastructure anymore you guys handle that this is what you're going after how are you guys going to market under the new reality that customers are critical do you agree with that and how are you going to market with this new shift in the customers mindset Mike the mindset is now that change or dying if I don't drive the digital transformation within my company someone else will do it and more than likely will be a competitor so you see it having on the the uber front air B&B front you can go down the list every single one of these industries are figuring out I better Drive this aggressively and make sure that I take advantage of what's happening in the technology landscape in order to progress and grow my business to be more relevant and more differentiated so instead of IT being a let me lower my cost structure model IT is now the enabler of changing the business model the enabler of a scaling at a much faster rate to take advantage of the options and how does that change the customer selection on vendor supplier because obviously this is obviously gonna probably good for saying you know one supplier gel but that's gonna change how they evaluate procure consume and they're partnering how is that going to change their selection they they want to move more and more towards having the conversation around what do we need to do to scale our business and again create a differentiated advantage right well last thing they want to be is a systems integrator of all the different IT suppliers so when you have a partner like Dell technologies that truly does have the broadest and and and what I'd say best capabilities on the planet to then become that partner of choice for them to move them in this direction faster that's a very simple decision for them to make and how is that dynamic translating into public sector where you know there's a lot of turnover in terms of administration's you might have edicts in terms of you know multi vendor what are you seeing there but I think this is consistent we have a built a a practice what we call smart digital cities that we seeing the need everywhere at the end of the day regardless what public sector entity you go to what country you go to whatever mean it's about you go to every single one of them are thinking about how can I create more jobs how can I create build and grow the economic engine of my city my state my country and guess what they're leaning on technology to do that so everywhere we go it's a conversation about how can we drive efficiencies and productivity improvements across all the things you do and provide a greater level of service to every one of your it's constituencies through technology anything from securing the environment driving protecting our citizens to providing better health care services to providing better traffic management to providing better education and reach waste management you just go down the list every single city every single Enterprise a public sector entity around the globe is thinking about it and what's again the beautiful thing is we can come in we can bring in our overall partner ecosystem because it is a broader ecosystem that is needed in order to be able to deliver those end-to-end capabilities but very much on demand everywhere I gotta ask you about first of all is on the IT side those four public sector entities have a huge job ahead of them and they're not IT huge that staffs they need nimbleness and they need horsepower basically out of the gate and the beauty of what we are able to do is we share the best practices of what we see around the world you can imagine that a city of Dubai very progressive right clearly have the budget clearly have less restrictions on data privacy clearly have less restrictions on legacy integrations into past solutions so they can move pretty quickly with a pretty broad base view as to where they want to go so you take those ideas take those best practices and then you you showcase that to the rest of the world it's - ok what can we use what can they use - to move their agenda forward quickly I want to switch gears talk about competition I saw the Tom sweets presentation the analyst briefing around competition I didn't see any cloud vendors on their office T going multi cloud with your own cloud I see that but just in the traditional IT space the numbers are great in your and you got bigger bigger is better so HPE when smaller they thought that focus would be better for them maybe it is but now you have existing competitors from the classic IT market it's a new new ground you're going after you got Alienware here it's a gaming world you're partnering with it's a beautiful set up so that's the future of TCS so you're in all these markets what's the competitive view how did you talk about your companies for competitive strategy - what we first talked about if you if you've got scale and you have a broad broad portfolio they can address the the core trends that are emerging for the next decade or two and you can do it at speed I'd say a very nice formula and that's what we're starting to really operate at that kind of cadence with the the the strategically aligned businesses like VM were like like pivotal like secure works that are all coming together very nicely to be able to drive these transformations collectively as one portfolio where's the partner coopertition kind of thing going on because you think Cisco for instance you know you guys partner with Cisco in some level but also at the same time NSX on the VMware family side looking like us competing directly with Cisco so this is this you're going to have direct competition and then other ones that are coopertition where you're working as a partner or maybe and it's evolving so how do you guys bet to have those balance conversations it's it's been like that for decades right and there's you you've got big players in the market at the end of the day as long as you service your customer and deliver to them what they want and how they want it at the end of the day we need to collaborate to make that happen - same exact reason why we announced our partnership with Microsoft and Azure earlier this week customer draw was there they said we want you to be that single that single broker that enables me to move my my data in my application seamlessly and securely containerized to any public cloud well guess what Azure needs to be part of that equation so when the customer drives it and it's clearly aligned to their particular needs the the IT ecosystem comes together the best serve that when you have when you meet with the top customers and the top senior people what's the pitch Mario's when you go in and say hey you know here's get we're just gel technology we've got all the puzzle pieces they'll be be successful what's your pitch when you go in what's the mean message that you guys say to those customers I like for the last couple of years we've been talking about that the transformations that are happening right at the highest level it's just a digital transformation journey that people are on the work force transformation they're doing the overall IT transformation that enables that then of course how do you the whole environment on top of that they're having the conversation about okay let's go build the blueprint as to what that looks like for me as a customer and then show me how I'm gonna you're gonna deliver to me the platforms that enables me to grow and make sure that I'm making the right batch long term right I don't want a solution that's just there for today I want to make sure that I've got a solution that good that that will take me into the future and that makes me ultra competitive so when you think about it if I wanted a an app development platform that clearly needs to be cloud native in mind I need to have agile development capabilities and I need to be able the time to value needs to continue to shrink well guess what we got that with pivotal right you want to be able to now do your data management ecosystem seamlessly and and across multiple platforms clearly we have assets like Bumi that enable that to happen very very well and and then you want to virtualize your overall infrastructure layer as much as possible so you truly can scale up or scale down any of your infrastructure capabilities in order to meet the needs of that particular workload seamlessly when you have the data platform when you have the app platform when you have the virtualization platform and you have all of the infrastructure platform so well aligned to the overall trends and transformations our customers are doing it's almost a no-brainer I mean it is an IQ test that all of our customers are clearly passing and okay and what you just laid out it's probably like a ten year he's gonna play out over the next ten years and there's still a lot of invention to be required if you guys aren't doing a lot of M&A right now you know paying down the debt tom was clear on that but as an M&A person I want if we can pick your brain and I'm more familiar with the tech M&A it's where myspace but most M&A much of it anyway fails and and from your perspective why is that and why are some successful why or some not I think it is the how do you how do you when you add a new entity into the broader entity what are the synergies that you're aligning to to make sure that that new entity has the opportunity scale and grow right and that's why you have meant you have sometimes smaller deals are interesting from an IP perspective but if you don't tie it back into how are you gonna go scale to go to market to make it available to your broader set of customer base you or it gets lost in the equation that's a problem and I think what we've done is a very good job making sure that we understand how each piece of the IP portfolio comes together and is aligned to our overall approach and how we how we how we help you have the conversation with the customer that we've been able to see what we call our cross synergies of all the acquisitions we've made significantly exceed any and all of our expectations and and that's important part to do ahead of time before you make the acquisition know not just how it fits into the IP stack but how it fits into your overall go to market stack and how it fits in your overall value proposition to the customer Marcus thanks for spending the time know you're really busy coming on the cube I got to ask you one final question of this showed here Dell technology world over three days what are the three top highlights that happened to you that give a tell sign of the next 10 years with Dell technology I mean we've always said that we do what we say so I think and I've had many of analyst tell us that my god you guys consistently have delivered what you said you would deliver so the early skepticism of hey this this is a big company there's multiple cultures not sure that operationally you will execute well guess what I think it's fair to say the teams are executing and then when you see the results of taking share in every line of business you see the results where the customer satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner growth is higher is the fastest-growing route to market for us all of that is just a testament that we are operating on all cylinders but what's more exciting is the yet to come part and and the fortuity so big right the market is what three and a half trillion ninety billion is a fraction of that so this is what our our team members see it's what our customers see our partners see so that momentum it's just a tsunami that's just gonna keep on growing well the cube barometer certainly showing activity to sets when we get four you know you're doing well so we're gonna keep an eye on the pulse of the cube pan and we got here Mari it's great to see you always a pleasure great insight thanks for sharing John awesome grant appeared a virus awesome thank you so much Myers house president chief commercial officer Dell technologies Friends of the cube great executive tech athlete as we say live coverage day three here the cube coverage of Delta knows we will be right back with more after the short break [Music]

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World here at the Venetian fifteen thousand attendees. One of the biggest, most important tech conferences all year long. I'm Rebecca, not your host. Along with my co host, stew Minutemen. We're joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP product marketing at Delhi Emcee. Thanks so much for coming back on the cute Kate. I >> know This is so nice. Maybe we'LL have to make it three days in a row. >> I would we would love that. All right, so the last year at this very comforted you lunch power, Max, what's Tet Walker viewers through Sort of. The new capability is the latest and greatest. What's going on with power Max this year? >> Yeah, My favorite thing to talk about his power, Max. So we couldn't miss that today. Yeah, So a couple of updates in the Power Mac's front couple on the software side and then on more on the hardware side as well. S o from ah software side. We've got a couple pieces, which is a lot of our customers, really starting with the largest of our customers, are looking to add more automation into their data centers, and storage is no exception. And how do I automate some of those storage work clothes? Teo, make things run more seamlessly, get into more of a cloud operating model. So we had a couple of announcements on that front. We have a new V R. Oh, plug in, um, to automate work clothes through the r o A. CZ. Well, as ants will play books coming this summer, a couple important automation hand spins and obviously a lot more to come there in the future. The other one in a similar vein, is that containers, right. We've seen the increase adoption of container. So, um, and that the container is being used in production applications means that external storage is actually become a reality in that world, and the support for a C. S. I plug in on power Max, is something that we're seeing more interest from. So we have announced that's coming this summer as well. >> So, Caitlyn, I remember a year ago when Power Mask got announced. I heard things like intelligence and automation. And I went to add non, you know who's been working on this kind of technology for decades? Is that non how we've been talking about this for decades? Tell me why it's different and he lit up like I hadn't seen him in awhile, told me, What's going on for I want you to connect now a year later is what's this mean for customers? What does that automation? You know, an intelligence mean, is there a certain KP eyes or hero metrics who have is two customers using this today that they couldn't have done? And with you, no last generation intelligence storage? >> Yeah. Hey, think about it. It's really about moving to this concept of the Autonomous Data center. And how does this become an autonomous storage system? So both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day all by itself, that's that has really changed. And it's a completely new evolution of its making billions of decisions a day for customers so they don't have to do that means you're gonna have fewer people managing storage and they can invest in other things. Then when you move that up the stack, some of that the bureau, the answer will play books really enables you to then automate more of the work flows within that so again gets you more into that operating model, and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure, but then get to this autonomous data center >> So way talk to Travis briefly about Dev ops and you're mentioning answerable playbooks. You know, for years we've been talking to customers and saying, Okay, we we need to get two more agile environments, you know, Dev ops there, but enterprise storage specifically, there's a little bit slowed up, so it sounds like we're starting to get to greater adoption. What? What, what what got us over that you know, Hurdle, and where our customers with it today? >> Yeah, and I think it's really the maturity of our largest global customers that have gotten to a place where, for the workloads that will continue to remain on these thes on from infrastructure on our purpose built storage on our high end arrays, they need to run that as efficiently as possible. Um, and a lot of the work we've done to build in a. I does part of that, but really, ultimately they're looking at in there. Three. Terek protector. How do they run things more smoothly? Um, and it's really our customers that have brought that us is a requirement, and we've been able to to support that. >> So how do you work with customers? Mean innovation is, of course, an underlying theme of this of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to to solve their problems and how you help them. Think ahead what their future needs are. >> Yeah, and certainly Travis, I myself, might our teams, as well as the engineering team, spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing centre. A lot of in the field, um, really talking about their challenges and the privilege that we have, especially with something like a Power Max platform, is the customers we have. There are the ones that are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them today, so they always need the best performance. The best efficiency and what has changed is they also now we need that simplicity. They need that operational simplicity, even on their high resiliency. High performance systems. Um, and we spend a lot of time understanding those requirements on DH, the problems that they're trying to solve and how we can help them get there and that that could be automation that could be containers. But it could also be cloud right, And that's the other piece that we've we made a lot of investments across our portfolio is how do we support that cloud consumption cloud operating model, leveraging public cloud? Um, and and a lot of it really just comes from how do we help our oppressors continue to solve their problems? >> It's a competitive marketplace, and, as you said, customers, they want everything. They want efficiency. They want simplicity. They wanted to not cost them too much money. What what's your unique selling point? How do you message this is This is why our solution is >> that I mean, our overall strategy delancy from a storage perspective is that we're way. We'LL have a single product in each segment with which we've compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price points and it features and capabilities across all these different perspectives and that each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category. Which is why we have power Max on the high end, the resiliency, that performance, the availability that you know, banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect. But the same time we have mid range pot for us. We have an entry platform that could be sold for under twenty five thousand dollars, right and has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business, which is supporting the data. Aaron. That data explosion in a file data, Um, so the The fact is the matter is this. That is all about having the right actor architecture's so customers can have the data in the right place at the right time with the right service level. Um, and that's why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that were leading in each one of those categories, That's kind of the bigger perspective we have on it. We do not just have a hammer. Not everything is a nail for us. Um, and that's an important part of how we can partner with with our customers to help themselves. Not one challenge, but all the challenges they have >> killing one of the interesting shifts we saw the show is clouds being talked at more than ever at this show. One of the earlier segments we had on we talked about the cloud enabled infrastructure. So things like power, Max, you know, I asked J. Crone, you know, tell me why this is cloud watching, and he gave me a good answer. What I want to ask you your angle on is when you talk to customers, you know how to storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy. You know what, some of the key business drivers and you know how how's Del technology? >> And I'm glad you said that because Jay and I have had this cloud washing conversation as well as I think that's the unfortunate thing in the reality in the market in the past, probably ten years is a lot of cloud washing, and where we're really focused today is, and we talked a little about this yesterday as well as they say. There's one piece of the how do we fit into overall Del technologies cloud strategy with the Del Tech Cloud. I'm in the VCF integration. We kind of covered that the other pieces that when we look at cloud enabled infrastructure, we're focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today of connecting that data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud connected systems. The tearing of data from your own promises, infrastructure into the public cloud. Really, that's more of an archiving. This case, a kind of a tape replacement use case that could be dead, remain cloud tear, cloud tearing cloud pools. All the different pieces we have there could be CLO Data Services, right. Offering storage Data services is in a public cloud. Unity Cloud Edition will be one or the New Delhi emcee. Cloud storage services could be another one or even that cloud data insights piece of it. So it's really about solving that solving real challenges about disaster recovery Analytics in the cloud. How do you do that? In a really impactful way? That's simple and easy for customers. >> Yeah, the other Claude related thing wanted to get your take on is many of solutions. I heard on there is, you know, it's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail under >> you. Notice that >> I did, and you know a way. We had a number of people. V X ray. Lt's doing great, but, you know, if you talk about cloud and the infrastructure that I have in my data center, you know, we've talked Teo, talk to Dell for years. You know, the new power Max last year is underneath some of those admire. Where does that fit in? Kind of CIA and cloud, you know, infrastructure piece. >> Yeah, in a lot of different places. And for Roddy, for reasons, right? Some of us just the high value workloads you need. The scalability, the resiliency, the performance you need the ability to scale your computing your capacity separately. You want to be able to consolidate not just your applications, but actually all your file and sew something like unity or even power. Max, you can have your block workloads and your file workloads there. So we have a lot of customers looking to use traditional three tier architecture, but leverage that in a true cloud operating model from an automation standpoint, cloud consumption model, but also leveraging public cloud computing, right, leveraging the public cloud and really impactful ways, for example, for disaster recovery, eh? So it's really that combining what people love about our industry leading best of reed storage. Um, with that agility of the public cloud is a combination that we certainly hear a lot from our customers of How can I make the best use of clouds? Everyone walks in and say that club first strategy, but it's really about well, how do you actually think about data first and then how do you have a cloud strategy that supports that? >> So So let's talk about the future. I mean, ahs, You said This is what the customer is thinking about right now, but it's your job to think ahead and make sure that you are giving them solutions that fit their future need. So what are you thinking about the solutions that are available today that were really unimaginable five years ago. I think about ahead to twenty twenty five when there is enough data to fill the Empire State Building thirteen times over. How are you helping companies manage the tsunami of data? >> Yeah, and I think part of that is really about again the operations we talked about. Part of that really just comes back to having the right architecture for that type of workload. So this is where I salon actually well before the data era actually was designed for this specifically. So Iceland, created in the early two thousand's, was designed of one file system from terabytes and two petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to fifty eight petabytes in a single file system. That's game changing when you think about the scale that we're seeing today. So the reason we went to that capacity isn't certainly just cause we thought we could. It was cause our customers were asking for it. Is these workloads in that data that we're talking about autonomous driving center that are just driving the scale? Ability limits, And they're asking for more and more in the most efficient floor print possible. And if you think about that, especially even in the cloud context, there's a There's a combination of How do you leverage that in the in the data center right? And physics means you can't get it up into the cloud necessarily. Um, but then also, there are use cases. They're like analytics of How do you leverage public cloud computing? But then you have that industry leading scale out now, as on the from the storage side so you can combine that. So you talk about something that we talked about here last year, and now we're talking about it a little bit more as well as our integration with Google Cloud platforms. So a lot of our customers are looking to use G. C p for compute for analytics workloads on DH. It's really almost rent your compute for analytics, but you have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that. So what we've done is fully integrated. Iceland, uh, platform and file system through G C P portal. So you could actually combine that public hug, compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. So it's a really unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also that some of the unique use cases and work loads that are coming out of that >> So Caitlin lot of products here that that would be talking about. Last thing I want to ask is customer customer conversation you have, you know, is data the center of the challenge and opportunity. They have something else that kind of bubbling up. As you look across the conversations you're having that you could have your audience. >> I think at the center of what I hear from customers, Data's in there, but they don't come in saying its data, right? They'll come in thinking about, you know, just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly there. Think about how Doe I simplify things. How do I, um, operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that's definitely not getting bigger? Um, and really be as efficient as possible. And it's not, um, some people are looking to go public. Cloud thinking. It's an easy button are there, but it's it's really about How do we change things? Teo run more efficiently and customers inherently to understand, right that the data is at the center of it, and that's increasingly the most valuable asset in the organization. And then they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that, so it really does come down to what? What can we help them to simplify? Optimize. Secure that so that they can truly unlock that. David Capital. >> Well, thank you so much, Caitlin, for coming back on the Cube. That's thanks for having me. Rebecca Knight for stew Minutemen. There is so much more coming up of the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe, brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live! 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. Dave, myself, and John Furrier here, gettin' wall to wall coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Dave Stanford, who's the Customer Experience Cloud Product Management at Cisco, Dave thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Alright. So, we've been digging into the whole multi-Cloud piece here, some real big announcements. A lot of their business solutions talking about being anywhere, it's the bridge-to-possible here at the show- >> Exactly. >> So, tell us exactly the customer experience there. Is this, the gooeys, much more than that, do you know? >> It is. >> What's that encompass? >> We really want to put a whole wrapper around all these products and solutions from a service perspective, and that includes everything from advisory, really guiding our customers, how do I get there, we see all these products and sometimes, it's like, well what do I use these for? So, we want to guide them, help them adopt it and then, support it, support's probably the most important piece. With all these multiple solutions, who can the customers call to get support for all of these? >> You know, I mean, I've worked with Cisco, partnered with Cisco my entire career, and the last few years, boy, things are changing so fast. >> Absolutely. >> A year ago kind of opened my eyes, and said, oh Cisco's movin' to be a software company? You really see the movement when I come to the show here, when I talk to people like the Cisco DNA Platform Solutions. >> Exactly. >> And all the things that customers need to change. Bring us inside how you're helping customers with that change, the services, and everything that you're wrapping around there. >> Sure. My role today is to develop the offers and scale them out and enable our other advanced services folks to deliver, but previously I was delivery myself. So, I understand the challenges that the customers have, so I know what they expect, they want the products to go out there and seamlessly work together, now they do. There's APIs, there's connectivity, but we have to actually show them what they can do with them, what are the use-cases. And from our perspective, when a product's released, a CX offer or service package should go out the door with that, too. QuickStarts are the biggest thing we have. >> Yeah and actually one of the keys things we talk about that move to software, with hardware it was inner-operability and how do all these things wire together? >> Exactly. >> Software, right, it needs to be seamless. >> It does. >> It should be platforms. And solutions in there, so give us the critical eye, a look internally, how's Cisco doing, what's the feedback you're hearing from the teams and partners? >> I think we're on the right track. We're well ahead with some of the solutions we're released with Cisco Container Platform, Cisco CloudCenter Suite. The biggest thing we hear from customers, a lot of, especially developers, application users, they don't care, they just want it to be up and running. So, with our integrated solutions, with things like the new HyperFlex 4.0, we build on top of that, they don't have to worry about connectivity to security or to load balancing, name the technology, they can bring it up and we can actually have the software do exactly what it needs to do. >> So, I've observed for decades the evolution and the services' business. >> Yeah. >> When I started in the business, it was all about break-fix. >> Yes. >> Right and then you had large software projects and ERPs. >> Yeah. >> And business process, re-engineering, a lot of consultative selling, internet came in. A lot of e-commerce activity. >> Yeah. >> How has the Cloud changed the service role, the organization, and how you go to market and scale, as you mentioned before. >> I think the biggest change with the Cloud, it's no longer just break-fix, let me go and install it and figure it out. It's, we really need to understand what our requirements are before we move to the Cloud, we hear about speed, cost-performance, but there's a lot more thought that has to go into it. We have to look across the IT infrastructure. So, that advisory upfront, that guidance, that wasn't necessarily always there, that's the biggest change, before we even think about using the product, we need to understand why we purchase this product. >> And so, what do you need from the customer? I mean, you obviously need data and participation and buy-in from the customer, what do you need to be successful there? >> Really from the customer we need to know, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the use-cases, and we have a lot of common use-cases we've seen, security is always a concern. How do I securely connect to the Cloud? How can I leverage Cisco's software to do that? And it's not just about connecting to Cisco's software, but how do we use Cisco's software to do that connectivity? So, it's over and over we see this constant pattern of, I want to build a manager hybrid Cloud securely, multi-Cloud network it and take the complexity out of what we do there. >> As the demographics of your buyer changes- >> Yes. >> How do you service them differently? How do you create a customer experience that's more focused on the way they want to interact with you? Whether it's chat or talk about that a little bit. >> So, you're not really talking to the IT infrastructure person anymore, you're talking to the lines of business or the application developers. So, you have to go in with the understanding of, I'm not going to go in and say, we're going to refresh the hardware, we're going to do this, we're going to give you new switches, new routers. You start the conversation at the application level now. What types of applications do you have? Are they traditional, do we have to re-factor them? Can't we just move them to the Cloud? Then, you go to the next level of, we understand this, now let's get our hardware in place to support this and then our infrastructure. But applications, that's the big shift. That's where the discussion is now. >> Alright, so we've talked about some of the impact of Cloud. >> Yeah. >> We've been hearing about how AI and ML are getting infused- >> Yes. >> Into all the products and that has to have a huge impact on how the customers interact and manage- >> It does. >> And there's got to be a little bit of the retraining that we talked about, too. >> Definitely, I mean, that's probably the biggest challenge, even hiring right now to find the right fit for Cloud or for Dev-Ops, AI, ML, it's a challenge. So, you have to have a plan in place with this background. And, what we've done within CX is we have a five tiered model. So, we start with the pre-requisites, where are you in this scale, we'll give you a rating based on what you have, but you really still have to train the folks, you have to give boot camps, cohorts, then code deliver on different engagements. But you still have to bring in folks with the right background, even if it's network route-switch, you can train them, but you have to have that program in place to be able to ramp them up. >> Yeah, we always said one of the biggest strengths Cisco has, is you've got those army of Cisco certified- >> Yes. >> The CCIEs out there. >> Yes. >> CCNPS and the like out there. Now, a lot of what they have to manage, it's either outside of their control, it's in the public Cloud >> It is, yeah. >> Or, right there's automation. I don't need to just get an alert and go do it, wait I need to make sure that the business rules are in place and- >> Exactly. >> The tooling's going to take care of that. So, help us understand what's the new, what's the new role inside the customers, that's got to change who you're negotiating with and who's involved in the conversations when you're putting this solution together, as well as, kind of the pre as well as the post deployments. >> Sure, sure I think the biggest difference is our customers now have customers. >> Yeah. >> Before we just managed their IT infrastructure. A good example, we have a healthcare comp, a healthcare corporation in Canada, the clinics are basically the clients of the overall organization, they don't care how long it takes to spend, they want speed. They can't go to the IT department and say, give me a VM and then three weeks later, they give it up or they provision it. And then, they'll go and say, well this is too slow. Here's my credit card, I'm going to buy Amazon Web Services and provision it, now we need to bring all of that together so, the route-switch folks need to become multi-Cloud architects. And when I talk about multi-Cloud, they need to know everything up the stack, infrastructure, connectivity with the CSR, security with our Cloud Protect Portfolio, and then the applications, not to mention the vast array of third party solutions, Cooper Netties is everywhere now. It's the defacto standard for containerization. This is really something that's come up over and over. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges is to get our folks to look at the overall stack rather than one piece. >> You challenge. I mean, Cisco and Hallmark, and Cisco has always been partner friendly. >> Yes. >> It's worked with all the different infrastructure that's out there. >> Yup. >> Now, you add in all the different Clouds. >> Exactly. >> And it's not just a cloud. >> It's an entire cloud stack, all the APIs. Your eyes bleed when you look at all the different APIs from Amazon- >> Yup. >> Data services, even. >> Exactly. >> There are dozens and dozens of them and so, so how do you manage (chuckles) that challenge? You can't just throw bodies at it? >> No, so we leverage the tools that we have. Cisco Container Platform's a good example. We use it in-house, but it's the biggest thing we position to our customers in the Cloud story because it's made deploying and managing containers or Cooper Netties simple. Before CCP, my team would deploy open source Cooper Netties which worked great, it was complex to set up, but then you had to look at, I need a tool for monitoring, I need one for logging, for load balancing, you ended up with 10 different applications. You thought you were moving to containers, but hey, there's much more to it. So, now with CCP, it's all packaged, everything's simple to manage. So, that's just the containers. And you mentioned governance before. I think this is a big thing, CloudCenter Suite, we can model our applications in there, deploy to any Cloud endpoint, so we support over 15 Clouds. And what my team does is bring this all together. So, it's not just a service, we want to show you how you can automatically provision those clusters and move it anywhere you want to go. >> Yeah, I wonder if you can put a point on that. The CloudCenter Suite, CloudCenter's been around for awhile. >> It has. >> But there's really been a re-architecture. It's built, Cloud native. >> It is. >> Cooper Netties' in there, but what, as a customer, is going to be like, oh wait, this isn't what I was used to in the past, help us understand what it is for the future. >> Absolutely, I think CloudCenter has been around for awhile, it's an amazing product. I took over this Cloud Portfolio and Services about a year ago and I'd heard all about it, started to ramp up on it, within four hours I couldn't believe this is really gooey-based. This is simple, so I can model the application and it's a simple as clicking deploy, and I can push it to any Cloud environment. And I think that's the biggest challenge, it's always been, how do I migrate my applications from the data center to the cloud or vice-versa. And CloudCenter's made it so simple within two minutes, you can actually migrate an application or deploy it, and they've added so many other features around cost and orchestration that it's everyday, I see customers starting to adopt CloudCenter Suite. >> I want to ask you about Swimlanes. >> Yeah. >> Cisco's a product company. >> Yes. >> You R&D. You build product, you ship products. >> You're not a services company. but you have a large services organization. How do you, what's your swim lane relative to some of the big SIs, what's your relationship with them? How does that work? >> Sure. So, I'm really closely partnered with all of the engineering teams, but at the same time, the partner organization, the systems integrators, they're still partners, especially in the new CX organization, we want to drive the solutions out to our customers, so we're actually taking some of our partners, bringing them on board, ramping them up on our services. And saying, hey you know what, you go deliver it, we'll support you, there's not a competition. I think, with CX now, we've combined everything together, the partners are just as important to us as the products that we sell. >> Will they private label those services or is- >> Yeah, absolutely, so our QuickStarts for example, these smaller packages, to turn up the solution stack quickly and drive adoption, we can hand that off to 'em, they can sell it themselves and label it. >> Yeah, so you're open that. And that drives their brand and their value. Their intimacy with their customers, yeah. >> I mean, we have a big market, but still the partners can reach them different spaces that we wouldn't traditionally be able to get to in professional services. >> Yeah, they have those relationships. Services has always been very local by nature. >> It has. >> The world's not just going to, we've talked about this, not just going to go to three clouds. I mean- >> That's right. >> Services, people want to meet people and they're in the same neighborhood. And there's trust. >> Yup. >> And that just doesn't disappear over night. >> And you have to build that, too. But you have to build the expertise before you get that trust. >> Yeah (chuckles). >> So, Dave, lot of customers here, you've been in meetings, giving presentations all week, give us a little bit of what's the buzz at the show? What are some of the top conversations? People are doing their planning for 2019. >> Yeah. >> You know, big hurdles and big opportunities that people are excited for. >> So, two common themes, security has come up over and over again, customers who haven't moved to Cloud they're concerned, how do I connect? And can I really put this in the Cloud? Or do I have to keep it in the data center? So, we talk about how we can secure and it- >> And I'm sorry, are they concerned about security, compliance, governance- >> They are. >> All of the above. >> One example. Yesterday, a customer said, I have a top secret application. And my company's pushing me towards the Cloud, can I really put this top secret application in a container in a public Cloud environment? So, that's just one conversation. It's the concern of, I don't own this anymore. It's not my data center, so how do I secure the application? How do I make sure there's no type of interference with that app, any type of interjection into damage it, right? And then, the other thing is, I see your stack, I see you have infrastructure, I see all the products, I don't think it's that simple to put together. It's great on a PowerPoint, but show me in the real world how this works together. And, that's what we've been doing, showing these demos, how we can build everything. >> Alright, so once you've shown them, walked through everything, they're feeling answered? >> They're feeling much better, but we go back to the whole CX lifecycle, advisory, implement, support, and that brings it all together. >> Yeah, and the top secret thing, Google, you've been highlighting partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they've got specific Clouds, we've been watching this- >> They do. >> 'Specially, all the stuff happening at the government level. >> Yeah. >> And one of the great proof points about public Cloud adoption. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Alright, want to give you the final word as people come away from Cisco Live! 2019, when it comes to customer experience, what do you want them to understand? >> It's all about solutions, putting it together. So, you see all these products, it's not that complex, CX, our partners can help you build it, scale it out, and really adopt it. >> Alright, well Dave Stanford, really appreciate you helping us understand the CX experience here. >> Thank you. >> Definitely lots of opportunities here. Cloud, AI, ML, putting all the solutions together. For Dave Vallente, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here of Cisco Live! 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky upbeat music)

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

(ambient Music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for the week is John Troyer, happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alumni, we have Margaret Dawson and John Alessio. Margaret is the vice-president of Portfolio Product Marketing and John is the vice-president of Global Services. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Alright so, John has gotten the week and a half now of the red hat greatness of being at summit last week, I unfortunately missed Summit, first time in five years I hadn't been at the show, did watch some of the interviews, caught up on it, and of course we talked to a lot of your team but, Margaret, let's start with you >> Margaret: Okay. >> One of the things we were looking at was, really, it's not just a maturation of OpenStack, but it's beyond where we were, how it fits into the greater picture, something we've been observing is when you think about open sourced projects, it's not one massive stack that you just deploy, it's you take what you need, it kind of gets embedded all over the place, and help us frame for us where we are today. >> Wow, that's a big question. So I think there's a couple things, I mean, in talking to customers, I think there's a couple trends that are happening. One is one you've probably talked about a lot and we probably covered at the Red Hat Summit which is just this overall digital transformation, digital leadership, whatever you want to call it, digital disruption tends to be a thing, and open sources definitely playing, really, the critical role of that, right, you will not be able to innovate and disrupt or even manage a disruption if you're not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt to it and have it work with other things. So the need for openness, for open APIs, for open technologies, inner-operability allows us to move faster and have that innovation and agility that every enterprise and organization needs world wide. And tied to that is kind of this overall hybrid cloud, so it's not just, OpenStack is a part of a much bigger kind of solution or goal that enterprises have in order to win and transform and be a digital leader. >> Margaret, I love that. Digital transformation, absolutely something we hear time and again from customers. >> Margaret: Yup. >> John, I've got a confession to make. I'm an infrastructure person and sometimes we're always like, why, come on, we spend all our time talking about how all the widgets and doo-dads and things-- >> Margaret: Blinky lights. >> Blinky lights, up on stage we have the-- >> He missed the blinking lights >> He did miss the blinking light. >> They had a similar stack up on stage yesterday. >> Oh, that's right. >> Same fans you could hear in the back of the room. But the whole goal of infrastructure always, of course, is to run the application, the whole reason for applications is to run and transform and do-- >> John: Serve the business >> Yeah, so that's where I'm going with this is we're talking more about not only that foundational layer of OpenStack but everything that goes with it and on it so maybe you could talk about the services-- >> Sure. So I think, Stu, that's exactly what we're seeing. So if you think about the last year and what we're seeing with services and projects here on OpenStack, I think the first thing to talk about is the fact that it's been growing quite a bit, in fact, from a 2017 versus 2018 perspective, our number of OpenStack projects have increased 36% year on year globally. So we're seeing a lot of demand, but we're seeing the projects be a lot more comprehensive. So these are OpenStack projects, but they're OpenStack with Open Shift, with Cloud Form, with Suff, as an example, and this combination is, really, a very very powerful combination. In fact, it's been so powerful that we started to see some common patterns of customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using OpenStack as their kind of private cloud infrastructure, but then using Open Shift as their way to kind of deploy applications in containers in that hybrid way, that we created a whole solution, which we announced two weeks ago, when John was at our Red Hat Summit, called Containers on Cloud. And that's taking all of our best practices around combining these products together in a very comprehensive, programmatic approach to deploying those solutions together. >> And I think it's really important, I mean, as you know, I think you and I met when we were both in networking, so coming from that infrastructure background but we really all need to talk about the workload down, starting with the application, starting with the business goal, and then how the infrastructure is almost becoming a services-based abstraction layer where you just need it to be always there. >> John: Yup. >> And whether it's public cloud or private cloud or traditional infrastructure, what developers in the business want is that agility and flexibility and containers provide that. There's other kind of architectural fabrics that allow that consistency and that's when it gets really exciting. >> One thing that's really interesting to me this week at OpenStack, as we've drilled into different customers, and talking to different people, even at lunch, is one, it's real. Everyone I've talked to, stuff in deployment, it went quickly, it's rock solid, it's powering, as we know, actually a lot of that is technical infrastructure that's powering a lot of the world's infrastructure at this point. >> That's right. >> The other thing that was interesting to me is some folks I talked to were saying, "Well, actually we have enough knowledge "that we're actually doing a lot of it ourselves, "we're going upstream." However, so that's great, and that's right for some people, but what I'm kind of been interested in both just coming from Red Hat Summit is both the portfolio, the breadth of the stack, and then all the different offerings that Red Hat, you know, it's not Rel anymore, it's not just Linux anymore, there's everything that's been built up and around and on top for orchestration and management, and then also the training, the services, the support, and that sort of thing, and I was wondering, that's kind of a two-part question, but maybe you all could tackle that. What does Red Hat bring to the table then? >> So, let me just start with, again, just to kind of position what we do as global services, our number one priority is customer success with Red Hat technology, that's the first and foremost thing we do and second is really around building expertise in the ecosystem so our customers have choice and where to go to get that expertise. So, if you start to look at kind of what's been going on as it relates to OpenStack, and, again, many customers are using Upstream bits, but many customers are using Red Hat bits, we see that and we look at the number of people who are getting trained around our technology. So over the last three years, we've trained, through our fee-based programs, 55,000 people on our OpenStack portfolio and in fact from 2017 to 2018 that was up 50% year on year and so the momentum is super super strong. So, that's the first point. The second is it's not just our customers. So part of my remit is, yes, to run consulting and, yes, to drive customer enablement and training, but it's also to build an ecosystem through our business partners. Our business partners use a program we call OPEN, Online Partner Enablement Network, which actually will just be celebrating five years just like OpenStack will, we'll be celebrating five years for OPEN. And our business partner accreditations on OpenStack specifically are up 49% year on year. So we're seeing the momentum in our regional systems integrators, our global systems integrators, our partners at large, building their solutions and capabilities around OpenStack, which I think is fantastic. >> No and it helps a lot with the verticalization of that, right, 'cause every industry has slightly different things they need. The thing I that would add to that, in terms of do-it-yourself community versus a dis-ter that's supported from someone like Red Hat, is it really comes down to core competency. And so even though OpenStack has become vastly simplified from a day one, day two, ongoing management, it is still a complex project. I mean that's the power of it, it can be highly customizable, right, it is an incredibly powerful infrastructure capability and so for most people their core competency is not that, and they need that support at least initially to get it going. What we have done is a couple things. I've actually talked to customers a lot about doing that training earlier and it's for a couple reasons, one is so that they actually have the people in house that have that competency but, two, you're giving infrastructure folks a chance to be part of that future cool stuff, right? I mean, OpenStack's written in Python and there's other languages that are newer and sexier, I guess, but it's still kind of moving them towards that future and for a lot of guys that have been in the data center and the ops world for a long time, they're looking out there at developers and going, I'm not the cool kid anymore, right? So OpenStack actually is a little bit of a window, not just to help companies go through that digital transformation, but actually help your ops personnel get a taste of that future and be part of that transformation instead of being stuck in just mainframe land or whatever, so training them early in the process is a really powerful way to do a lot of things. You know, skillset, retention, as well as then you can manage more of that yourself. >> And then all the way up to Stack, right? I mean, we're talking about containers, and then there's containers but then there's container data storage, container data networking. I mean, you've got the rest of the pieces in that, in Open Shift, in the rest. >> Absolutely. >> That is correct. >> And I think, John, you were at Red Hat Summit, we had a number of different innovation award winners. So I think one good example of kind of this kind of transformation from a digital transformation perspective, but also kind of leveraging a lot of what our Stack has to offer is Cafe Pacific. And so we talked about Cafe, they were one of our innovation award winners and what their challenge really was is how do they create a new modern infrastructure that gave them more flexibility so they could be more responsive to their customers. >> Yeah. >> In the airline industry. And so what they were really looking for was really, truly a hybrid cloud solution. They wanted to be able to have some things run in their infrastructure, have some things run in the public cloud, and we worked with them over the last, little over a year now, Red Hat consulting, Red Hat training, the Red Hat engineering team, in really building a solution that leverage OpenStack, yes, but also a number of other capabilities in the Red Hat portfolio, Open Shift, so they can deploy these applications, containerized applications now both to the public cloud as well as to the private cloud, but also automation through Ansible, which we're hearing a lot about Ansible and products like Ansible here at the conference-- >> Well the Open Stock and Ansible communities are starting to really work well together, just like Kubernetes, you've got a lot of this collaboration happening at the project level not to mention when we actually productize it and take it to customers. >> Yeah, so it's been super super powerful and I think it's a good one where it really hit on what Margaret was saying, which was giving the guys in infrastructure an opportunity to be a part of this huge transformation that Cafe went through, 'cause they were a very very key part of it. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're seeing that also with the open innovation labs. So this is something, which is really an innovation incubation process, it's agile, scrum, whatever, and in those we're not just talking to the developers, we're actually combining developers, functional lines of business leaders, infrastructure, architects, who all come together in a very typical six week kind of agile methodology and what comes out of that, I don't know, I've seen it a couple times, it's magical is all I can say, but having those different perspectives and having those different people work together to innovate is so powerful and they all feel like they're moving that forward and you come out with pilots, and we've seen things where they come out with two apps at the end of six weeks or eight weeks, it's just incredible when they're all focused on that and you start to understand those different perspectives and to me that's open source culture, right? It's awesome. >> And, Margaret, I'd love to hear your perspective also on that hybrid cloud discussion because so many people look at OpenStack and be like, oh, that's private cloud. >> Margaret: Right. >> And, of course, every customer we talk to, they have a cloud strategy. And they're doing lots of SaaS, they've got public cloud, multiple, Red Hat, I know you play across all of them, big announcement with Microsoft last week, last year was Amazon big partnerships with, so is Kubernetes the story, or is Kubernetes a piece of the story, how do all these play together for customers? >> I think Kubernetes is one and so, especially when you look at the broader architectural level, OpenStack becomes obviously the private cloud and enables them to start to do things that are more cloud-native even in their own data center, or if it's hosted or management or more traditional infrastructure, but it really has to be fluid. And a lot of customers initially were saying that their strategy was cloud first, and they would say, "Oh, we're going to put "everything in the public cloud." And then you actually start going through the workloads, you start going through the cost, you start going through the data privacy, or whatever the criteria capabilities are, and that's just not practical, frankly. And so this hybrid reality with private cloud, traditional, and public is going to be the reality for a very very long time, if not forever. There's always going to be things that you want to have better control of. And so Kubernetes at the orchestration layer becomes really critical to be able to have that agility across all those environments, but you have other fabrics like that in your architecture too, we talked about Ansible, it allows you to have common automation and do those play books that you can use across all those different infrastructure, KVM, what's your virtualization fabric, and can KVM take you from traditional virtualization all through public cloud? The answer is yes. So we're going to see increasingly these kind of layers of the overall architecture that allows you to have that flexibility, that management that's still the consistency, which is what you need to keep your policies the same, your access controls, you security, your compliance, and your sanity, whereas before it was kind of Ad Hoc. People would be like, oh, we're just going to put this here, go to public cloud. We're going to do this here, and now people are finding standardizing on things like even Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that's my OS layer, and that allows me to easily do Linux containers in a secure way, et cetera, et cetera. So, doing hybrid cloud means both the agility but you got to have some consistency in order to have the security and control that you need. So it's a little bit different than what we were talking about a few years ago, even. >> And I think one of the things that we've learned in the services world is that we started this idea about 18 months ago, we called these journey adoption programs, which were really the fact that some of these transformations are big, they're not about a single project that's going to last four to six weeks, it's a journey that the customer's going to go on and so when we talk about hybrid cloud, we've actually created this adoption program which can really start with the customer in this whole discovery phase, really, what are you trying to accomplish from a business perspective then take them into a design phase, take them into a deployment phase, take them into an enablement phase, and then take them into a sustainment phase. And there's a number of different services that we'll do across consulting, training, even within Marco Bill Peters Organization, which is our customer experience and engagement organization, around what role a technical account manager can play and really help our customer in the operational phases. And so we've learned this from some of the very large deployments, like Verizon, where we've seen some very-- >> And it's cyclical, right? You can do that many times. >> We do. In fact, you absolutely do. And so we've created now a program, specifically, around hybrid clouded option to try and de-mistify it. >> Yeah. >> Because it is complex. >> Well, and the reality is, there's somewhere around 30% of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy. And we see that in our own research, our own experiences, but industry analysts come up with the exact same number. >> And Margaret, by the way, the other 70%, the ink still pretty-- >> Yeah. >> Still wet! (laughing) >> Yes, it is. I'll tell you, I love saying cloud first to people because they kind of giggle. It's like, yeah, that's our strategy but we know we don't really know what that means. >> Which cloud? >> Exactly. >> Exactly. >> All the clouds. >> Exactly. >> Alright, well Margaret and John, want to give you a final word, key takeaways you want to have or anything new to the show that you want to point out? >> I would just say we are still in early days. I think sometimes we forget that we, both in the open source communities, in the industry for a long time, tend to be 10 years ahead of where most people are and so when you hear jokes about, oh, is OpenStack still viable or is everything doing this, it's like right now we only have a very small percentage of actual enterprise workloads in the cloud and so we need to just now get to the point where we're all getting mature in this and really start to help our customers and our partners and our communities take this to the next level and work on inter-operability, and ease of use, and management. We're so mature now in technology, now let's put the polish on it, so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level. >> Yeah, and I'll play off what Margaret said. I think it's very very key. When I look at where we've had the biggest success, as defined by, in that discovery phase, the customer lays out for us, here's what our business objectives were, did we achieve those business objectives, it's all about figuring out how we can create the solution and integrate into their environment today. So Margaret said I think very very well which is we have to integrate into these other solutions and every one of these big customer deployments has some Red Hat software, but it also has some other software that we're integrating into because customers have investments. So it's not about rip and replace, it's about integrate, it's about leverage, it's about time to market, and that's what most of the customers I've talked to, they're very worried about time to value, and so that's what we're trying to focus in, I think as a whole company, around Red Hat. >> Margaret: Agree. >> Absolutely. Summed it up very well. John Alessio, Margaret Dawson, thanks so much for joining us again. >> Thanks again. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, watch more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.