(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host John Furrier. We're here at our tricked out Palo Alto studio. We're going live wall to wall all day. We're inserting a number of pre-recorded interviews, folks like Walmart. We just heard from Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks, and I'm really pleased to welcome in David Flynn. David Flynn, you may know as one of the people behind Fusion-io, completely changed the way in which people think about storing data, accessing data. David Flynn now the founder and CEO of a company called Hammerspace. David, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> David: Good to see you too. >> And Dr. Nelu Mihai is the CEO and founder of Cloud of Clouds. He's actually built a Supercloud. We're going to get into that. Nelu, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Happy New Year. >> Yeah, Happy New Year. So I'm going to start right off with a little debate that's going on in the community if you guys would bring out this slide. So Bob Muglia early today, he gave a definition of Supercloud. He felt like we had to tighten ours up a little bit. He said a Supercloud is a platform, underscoring platform, that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. Now, Nelu, we have this shared doc, and you've been in there. You responded, you said, well, hold on. Supercloud really needs to be an architecture, or else we're going to have this stove pipe of stove pipes, really. And then you went on with more detail, what's the information model? What's the execution model? How are users going to interact with Supercloud? So I start with you, why architecture? The inference is that a platform, the platform provider's responsible for the architecture? Why does that not work in your view? >> No, the, it's a very interesting question. So whenever I think about platform, what's the connotation, you think about monolithic system? Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether it's true or or not, but there is this connotation of of monolithic. On the other hand, if you look at what's a problem right now with HyperClouds, from the customer perspective, they're very complex. There is a heterogeneous world where actually every single one of this HyperClouds has their own architecture. You need rocket scientists to build a cloud applications. Always there is this contradiction between cost and performance. They fight each other. And I'm quoting here a former friend of mine from Bell Labs who work at AWS who used to say "Cloud is cheap as long as you don't use it too much." (group chuckles) So clearly we need something that kind of plays from the principle point of view the role of an operating system, that seats on top of this heterogeneous HyperCloud, and there's nothing wrong by having these proprietary HyperClouds, think about processors, think about operating system and so on, so forth. But in order to build a system that is simple enough, I think we need to go deeper and understand. >> So the argument, the counterargument to that, David, is you'll never get there. You need a proprietary system to get to market sooner, to solve today's problem. Now I don't know where you stand on this platform versus architecture. I haven't asked you, but. >> I think there are aspects of both for sure. I mean it needs to be an architecture in the sense that it's broad based and open and so forth. But you know, platform, you could say as long as people can instantiate it themselves, on their own infrastructure, as long as it's something that can be deployed as, you know, software defined, you don't want the concept of platform being the monolith, you know, combined hardware and software. So it really depends on what you're focused on when you're saying platform, you know, I'd say as long as they software defined thing, to where it can literally run anywhere. I mean, because I really think what we're talking about here is the original concept of cloud computing. The ability to run anything anywhere, without having to care about the physical infrastructure. And what we have today is not that, the cloud today is a big mainframe in the sky, that just happens to be large enough that once you select which region, generally you have enough resources. But, you know, nowadays you don't even necessarily have enough resources in one region. and then you're kind of stuck. So we haven't really gotten to that utility model of computing. And you're also asked to rewrite your application, you know, to abandon the conveniences of high performance file access. You got to rewrite it to use object storage stuff. We have to get away from that. >> Okay, I want to just drill on that, 'cause I think I like that point about, there's not enough availability, but on the developer cloud, the original AWS premise was targeting developers, 'cause at that time, you have to provision a Sun box get a Cisco DSU/CSU, now you get on the cloud. But I think you're giving up the scale question, 'cause I think right now, scale is huge, enterprise grade versus cloud for developers. >> That's Right. >> Because I mean look at, Amazon, Azure, they got compute, they got storage, they got queuing, and some stuff. If you're doing a startup, you throw your app up there, localhost to cloud, no big deal. It's the scale thing that gets me- >> And you can tell by the fact that, in regions that are under high demand, right, like in London or LA, at least with the clients we work with in the median entertainment space, it costs twice as much for the exact same cloud instances that do the exact same amount of work, as somewhere out in rural Canada. So why is it you have such a cost differential, it has to do with that supply and demand, and the fact that the clouds aren't really the ability to run anything anywhere. Even within the same cloud vendor, you're stuck in a specific region. >> And that was never the original promise, right? I mean it was, we turned it into that. But the original promise was get rid of the heavy lifting of IT. >> Not have to run your own, yeah, exactly. >> And then it became, wow, okay I can run anywhere. And then you know, it's like web 2.0. You know people say why Supercloud, you and I talked about this, why do you need a name for Supercloud? It's like web 2.0. >> It's what Cloud was supposed to be. >> It's what cloud was supposed to be, (group laughing and talking) exactly, right. >> Cloud was supposed to be run anything anywhere, or at least that's what we took it as. But you're right, originally it was just, oh don't have to run your own infrastructure, and you can choose somebody else's infrastructure. >> And you did that >> But you're still bound to that. >> Dave: And People said I want more, right? >> But how do we go from here? >> That's, that's actually, that's a very good point, because indeed when the first HyperClouds were designed, were designed really focus on customers. I think Supercloud is an opportunity to design in the right way. Also having in mind the computer science rigor. And we should take advantage of that, because in fact actually, if cloud would've been designed properly from the beginning, probably wouldn't have needed Supercloud. >> David: You wouldn't have to have been asked to rewrite your application. >> That's correct. (group laughs) >> To use REST interfaces to your storage. >> Revisist history is always a good one. But look, cloud is great. I mean your point is cloud is a good thing. Don't hold it back. >> It is a very good thing. >> Let it continue. >> Let it go as as it is. >> Yeah, let that thing continue to grow. Don't impose restrictions on the cloud. Just refactor what you need to for scale or enterprise grade or availability. >> And you would agree with that, is that true or is it problem you're solving? >> Well yeah, I mean it, what the cloud is doing is absolutely necessary. What the public cloud vendors are doing is absolutely necessary. But what's been missing is how to provide a consistent interface, especially to persistent data. And have it be available across different regions, and across different clouds. 'cause data is a highly localized thing in current architecture. It only exists as rendered by the storage system that you put it in. Whether that's a legacy thing like a NetApp or an Isilon or even a cloud data service. It's localized to a specific region of the cloud in which you put that. We have to delocalize data, and provide a consistent interface to it across all sites. That's high performance, local access, but to global data. >> And so Walmart earlier today described their, what we call Supercloud, they call it the Walmart cloud native platform. And they use this triplet model. They have AWS and Azure, no, oh sorry, no AWS. They have Azure and GCP and then on-prem, where all the VMs live. When you, you know, probe, it turns out that it's only stateless in the cloud. (John laughs) So, the state stuff- >> Well let's just admit it, there is no such thing as stateless, because even the application binaries and libraries are state. >> Well I'm happy that I'm hearing that. >> Yeah, okay. >> Because actually I have a lot of debate (indistinct). If you think about no software running on a (indistinct) machine is stateless. >> David: Exactly. >> This is something that was- >> David: And that's data that needs to be distributed and provided consistently >> (indistinct) >> Across all the clouds, >> And actually, it's a nonsense, but- >> Dave: So it's an illusion, okay. (group talks over each other) >> (indistinct) you guys talk about stateless. >> Well, see, people make the confusion between state and persistent state, okay. Persistent state it's a different thing. State is a different thing. So, but anyway, I want to go back to your point, because there's a lot of debate here. People are talking about data, some people are talking about logic, some people are talking about networking. In my opinion is this triplet, which is data logic and connectivity, that has equal importance. And actually depending on the application, can have the center of gravity moving towards data, moving towards what I call execution units or workloads. And connectivity is actually the most important part of it. >> David: (indistinct). >> Some people are saying move the logic towards the data, some other people, and you are saying actually, that no, you have to build a distributed data mesh. What I'm saying is actually, you have to consider all these three variables, all these vector in order to decide, based on application, what's the most important. Because sometimes- >> John: So the application chooses >> That's correct. >> Well it it's what operating systems were in the past, was principally the thing that runs and manages the jobs, the job scheduler, and the thing that provides your persistent data (indistinct). >> Okay. So we finally got operating system into the equation, thank you. (group laughs) >> Nelu: I actually have a PhD in operating system. >> Cause what we're talking about is an operating system. So forget platform or architecture, it's an operating environment. Let's use it as a general term. >> All right. I think that's about it for me. >> All right, let's take (indistinct). Nelu, I want ask you quick, 'cause I want to give a, 'cause I believe it's an operating system. I think it's going to be a reset, refactored. You wrote to me, "The model of Supercloud has to be open theoretical, has to satisfy the rigors of computer science, and customer requirements." So unique to today, if the OS is going to be refactored, it's not going to be, may or may not be Red Hat or somebody else. This new OS, obviously requirements are for customers too but is what's the computer science that is needed? Where are we, what's the missing? Where's the science in this shift? It's not your standard OS it's not like an- (group talks over each other) >> I would beg to differ. >> (indistinct) truly an operation environment. But the, if you think about, and make analogies, what you need when you design a distributed system, well you need an information model, yeah. You need to figure out how the data is located and distributed. You need a model for the execution units, and you need a way to describe the interactions between all these objects. And it is my opinion that we need to go deeper and formalize these operations in order to make a step forward. And when we design Supercloud, and design something that is better than the current HyperClouds. And actually that is when we design something better, you make a system more efficient and it's going to be better from the cost point of view, from the performance point of view. But we need to add some math into all this customer focus centering and I really admire AWS and their executive team focusing on the customer. But now it's time to go back and see, if we apply some computer science, if you try to formalize to build a theoretical model of cloud, can we build a system that is better than existing ones? >> So David, how do you- >> this is what I'm saying. >> That's a good question >> How do You see the operating system of a, or operating environment of a decentralized cloud? >> Well I think it's layered. I mean we have operating systems that can run systems quite efficiently. Linux has sort of one in the data center, but we're talking about a layer on top of that. And I think we're seeing the emergence of that. For example, on the job scheduling side of things, Kubernetes makes a really good example. You know, you break the workload into the most granular units of compute, the containerized microservice, and then you use a declarative model to state what is needed and give the system the degrees of freedom that it can choose how to instantiate it. Because the thing about these distributed systems, is that the complexity explodes, right? Running a piece of hardware, running a single server is not a problem, even with all the many cores and everything like that. It's when you start adding in the networking, and making it so that you have many of them. And then when it's going across whole different data centers, you know, so, at that level the way you solve this is not manually (group laughs) and not procedurally. You have to change the language so it's intent based, it's a declarative model, and what you're stating is what is intended, and you're leaving it to more advanced techniques, like machine learning to decide how to instantiate that service across the cluster, which is what Kubernetes does, or how to instantiate the data across the diverse storage infrastructure. And that's what we do. >> So that's a very good point because actually what has been neglected with HyperClouds is really optimization and automation. But in order to be able to do both of these things, you need, I'm going back and I'm stubborn, you need to have a mathematical model, a theoretical model because what does automation mean? It means that we have to put machines to do the work instead of us, and machines work with what? Formula, with algorithms, they don't work with services. So I think Supercloud is an opportunity to underscore the importance of optimization and automation- >> Totally agree. >> In HyperCloud, and actually by doing that, we can also have an interesting connotation. We are also contributing to save our planet, because if you think right now. we're consuming a lot of energy on this HyperClouds and also all this AI applications, and I think we can do better and build the same kind of application using less energy. >> So yeah, great point, love that call out, the- you know, Dave and I always joke about the old, 'cause we're old, we talk about, you know, (Nelu Laughs) old history, OS/2 versus DOS, okay, OS's, OS/2 is silly better, first threaded OS, DOS never went away. So how does legacy play into this conversation? Because I buy the theoretical, I love the conversation. Okay, I think it's an OS, totally see it that way myself. What's the blocker? Is there a legacy that drags it back? Is the anchor dragging from legacy? Is there a DOS OS/2 moment? Is there an opportunity to flip the script? This is- >> I think that's a perfect example of why we need to support the existing interfaces, Operating Systems, real operating systems like Linux, understands how to present data, it's called a file system, block devices, things that that plumb in there. And by, you know, going to a REST interface and S3 and telling people they have to rewrite their applications, you can't even consume your application binaries that way, the OS doesn't know how to pull that sort of thing. So we, to get to cloud, to get to the ability to host massive numbers of tenants within a centralized infrastructure, you know, we abandoned these lower level interfaces to the OS and we have to go back to that. It's the reason why DOS ultimately won, is it had the momentum of the install base. We're seeing the same thing here. Whatever it is, it has to be a real file system and not a come down file system >> Nelu, what's your reaction, 'cause you're in the theoretical bandwagon. Let's get your reaction. >> No, I think it's a good, I'll give, you made a good analogy between OS/2 and DOS, but I'll go even farther saying, if you think about the evolution operating system didn't stop the evolution of underlying microprocessors, hardware, and so on and so forth. On the contrary, it was a catalyst for that. So because everybody could develop their own hardware, without worrying that the applications on top of operating system are going to modify. The same thing is going to happen with Supercloud. You're going to have the AWSs, you're going to have the Azure and the the GCP continue to evolve in their own way proprietary. But if we create on top of it the right interface >> The open, this is why open is important. >> That's correct, because actually you're going to see sometime ago, everybody was saying, remember venture capitals were saying, "AWS killed the world, nobody's going to come." Now you see what Oracle is doing, and then you're going to see other players. >> It's funny, Amazon's trying to be more like Microsoft. Microsoft's trying to be more like Amazon and Google- Oracle's just trying to say they have cloud. >> That's, that's correct, (group laughs) so, my point is, you're going to see a multiplication of this HyperClouds and cloud technology. So, the system has to be open in order to accommodate what it is and what is going to come. Okay, so it's open. >> So the the legacy- so legacy is an opportunity, not a blocker in your mind. And you see- >> That's correct, I think we should allow them to continue to to to be their own actually. But maybe you're going to find a way to connect with it. >> Amazon's the processor, and they're on the 80 80 80 right? >> That's correct. >> You're saying you love people trying to get put to work. >> That's a good analogy. >> But, performance levels you say good luck, right? >> Well yeah, we have to be able to take traditional applications, high performance applications, those that consume file system and persistent data. Those things have to be able to run anywhere. You need to be able to put, put them onto, you know, more elastic infrastructure. So, we have to actually get cloud to where it lives up to its billing. >> And that's what you're solving for, with Hammerspace, >> That's what we're solving for, making it possible- >> Give me the bumper sticker. >> Solving for how do you have massive quantities of unstructured file data? At the end of the day, all data ultimately is unstructured data. Have that persistent data available, across any data center, within any cloud, within any region on-prem, at the edge. And have not just the same APIs, but have the exact same data sets, and not sucked over a straw remote, but at extreme high performance, local access. So how do you have local access to globally shared distributed data? And that's what we're doing. We are orchestrating data globally across all different forms of storage infrastructure, so you have a consistent access at the highest performance levels, at the lowest level innate built into the OS, how to consume it as (indistinct) >> So are you going into the- all the clouds and natively building in there, or are you off cloud? >> So This is software that can run on cloud instances and provide high performance file within the cloud. It can take file data that's on-prem. Again, it's software, it can run in virtual or on physical servers. And it abstracts the data from the existing storage infrastructure, and makes the data visible and consumable and orchestratable across any of it. >> And what's the elevator pitch for Cloud of Cloud, give that too. >> Well, Cloud of Clouds creates a theoretical model of cloud, and it describes every single object in the cloud. Where is data, execution units, and connectivity, with one single class of very simple object. And I can, I can give you (indistinct) >> And the problem that solves is what? >> The problem that solves is, it creates this mathematical model that is necessary in order to do other interesting things, such as optimization, using sata engines, using automation, applying ML for instance. Or deep learning to automate all this clouds, if you think about in the industrial field, we know how to manage and automate huge plants. Why wouldn't it do the same thing in cloud? It's the same thing you- >> That's what you mean by theoretical model. >> Nelu: That's correct. >> Lay out the architecture, almost the bones of skeleton or something, or, and then- >> That's correct, and then on top of it you can actually build a platform, You can create your services, >> when you say math, you mean you put numbers to it, you kind of index it. >> You quantify this thing and you apply mathematical- It's really about, I can disclose this thing. It's really about describing the cloud as a knowledge graph for every single object in the graph for node, an edge is a vector. And then once you have this model, then you can apply the field theory, and linear algebra to do operation with these vectors. And it's, this creates a very interesting opportunity to let the math do this thing for us. >> Okay, so what happens with hyperscale, or it's like AWS in your model. >> So in, in my model actually, >> Are they happy with this, or they >> I'm very happy with that. >> Will they be happy with you? >> We create an interface to every single HyperCloud. We actually, we don't need to interface with the thousands of APIs, but you know, if we have the 80 20 rule, and we map these APIs into this graph, and then every single operation that is done in this graph is done from the beginning, in an optimized manner and also automation ready. >> That's going to be great. David, I want us to go back to you before we close real quick. You've had a lot of experience, multiple ventures on the front end. You talked to a lot of customers who've been innovating. Where are the classic (indistinct)? Cause you, you used to sell and invent product around the old school enterprises with storage, you know that that trajectory storage is still critical to store the data. Where's the classic enterprise grade mindset right now? Those customers that were buying, that are buying storage, they're in the cloud, they're lifting and shifting. They not yet put the throttle on DevOps. When they look at this Supercloud thing, Are they like a deer in the headlights, or are they like getting it? What's the, what's the classic enterprise look like? >> You're seeing people at different stages of adoption. Some folks are trying to get to the cloud, some folks are trying to repatriate from the cloud, because they've realized it's better to own than to rent when you use a lot of it. And so people are at very different stages of the journey. But the one thing that's constant is that there's always change. And the change here has to do with being able to change the location where you're doing your computing. So being able to support traditional workloads in the cloud, being able to run things at the edge, and being able to rationalize where the data ought to exist, and with a declarative model, intent-based, business objective-based, be able to swipe a mouse and have the data get redistributed and positioned across different vendors, across different clouds, that, we're seeing that as really top of mind right now, because everybody's at some point on this journey, trying to go somewhere, and it involves taking their data with them. (John laughs) >> Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on, for John, Dave. Stay tuned, we got a great analyst power panel coming right up. More from Palo Alto, Supercloud 2. Be right back. (bouncy music)

>>Hey everyone, it's Vegas. Welcome back. We know you've been watching all day. We appreciate that. We always love being able to bring you some great content on the Cube Live from AWS Reinvented 22. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill. And Paul, we've had such a great event. We've, I think we've done nearly 70 interviews since we started on the Cube on >>Monday night. I believe we just hit 70. Yeah, we just hit 70. You must feel like you've done half of >>Them. I really do. But we've been having great conversations. There's so much innovation going on at aws. Nothing slowed them down during the pandemic. We love also talking about the innovation, the flywheel that is their partner ecosystem. We're gonna have a great conversation about that >>Next. And as we've said, going back to day one, the energy of the show is remarkable. And here we are, we're getting late in the afternoon on day two, and there's just as much activity, just as much energy out there as, as the beginning of the first day. I have no doubt day three will be the >>Same. I agree. There's been no slowdown. We've got two guests here. We're gonna have a great conversation. Chuck Kubota joins us, senior Director of Cloud Services, GTM at Red Hat. Great to have you on the program. And Ted Stanton, global head of Sales, red Hat at IBM at aws. Welcome. >>Thanks for having us. >>How's the show going so far for you guys? >>It's a blur. Is it? Oh my gosh. >>Don't they all >>Blur? Well, yes, yes. I actually like last year a bit better. It was half the size. Yeah. And a lot easier to get around, but this is back to normal, so >>It is back to normal. Yeah. And and Ted, we're hearing north of 50,000 in-person attendees. I heard a, something I think was published. I heard the second hand over like 300,000 online attendees. This is maybe the biggest one we ever had. >>Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And frankly, it's my first time here, so I am massively impressed with the overall show, the meeting with partners, the meeting with customers, the announcements that were made, just fantastic. And >>If you remember back to two years ago, there were a lot of questions about whether in-person conferences would ever return and the volume that we used to see them. And that appears to be >>The case. I think we, I think we've answered, I think AWS has answered that for us, which I'm very pleased to see. Talk about some of those announcements. Ted. There's been so much that that's always one of the things we know and love about re men is there's slew of announcements. You were saying this morning, Paul, and then keynote, you lost, you stopped counting after I >>Lost 15, I lost count for 15. I think it was over 30 announcements this morning alone >>Where IBM and Red Hat are concern. What are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of some of the news, the innovation, and where the partnership is going? >>Well, definitely where the partnership is going, and I think even as we're speaking right now, is a keynote going on with Aruba, talking about some of the partners and the way in which we support partners and the new technologies and the new abilities for partners to take advantage of these technologies to frankly delight our customers is really what most excites me. >>Chuck, what about you? What's going on with Red Hat? You've been there a long time. Sales, everything, picking up customers, massively transforming. What are some of the things that you're seeing and that you're excited >>About? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you know, as customers have, you know, years ago discovered it's not competitively advantageous to manage their own data centers in most cases. So they would like to, you know, give that responsibility to Amazon. We're seeing them move further up the stack, right? So that would be more beyond the operating system, the application platforms like OpenShift. And now we have a managed application platform built on OpenShift called Red Out OpenShift service on AWS or Rosa. And then we're even further going up the stack with that with, we just announced this week that red out OpenShift data science is available in the AWS marketplace, runs on Rosa, helps break the land speed record to getting those data models out there that are so important to make, you know, help organizations become more, much more data driven to remain competitive themselves. >>So talk about Rosa and how it differs from previous iterations of, of OpenShift. I mean, you had, you had an online version of OpenShift several years ago. What's different about Rosa? >>Yeah, so the old OpenShift online that was several years old, right? For one thing, wasn't a joint partnership between Amazon and Red Hat. So we work together, right? Very closely on this, which is great. Also, the awesome thing about Rosa, you know, if you think about like OpenShift for, for, as a matter of fact, Amazon is the number one cloud that OpenShift runs on, right? So a lot of those customers want to take advantage of their committed spins, their EDPs, they want one bill. And so Rosa comes through the one bill comes through the marketplace, right? Which is, which is totally awesome. Not only that or financially backing OpenShift with a 99.95% financially backed sla, right? We didn't have that before either, right? >>When you say financially backed sla, >>What do you mean? That means that if we drop below 99.95% of availability, we're gonna give you some money back, right? So we're really, you know, for lack of better words, putting our money where our mouth is. Absolutely right. >>And, and some of the key reasons that we even work together to build Rosa was frankly we've had a mirror of customers and virtually every single region, every single industry been using OpenShift on AWS for years, right? And we listened to them, they wanted a more managed version of it and we worked very closely together. And what's really great about Rosa too is we built some really fantastic integrations with some of the AWS native services like API gateway, Amazon rds, private link, right? To make it very simple and easy for customers to get started. We talked a little bit about the marketplace, but it's also available just on the AWS console, right? So customers can get started in a pay as you go fashion start to use it. And if they wanna move into a more commitment, more of a set schedule of payments, they can move into a marketplace private offer. >>Chuck, talk about, how about Rosen? How is unlocking the power of technology like containers Kubernetes for customers while dialing down some of the complexity that's >>There? Yeah, I mean if you think about, you know, kind of what we did, you know, earlier on, right? If you think about like virtualization, how it dialed down the complexity of having to get something rack, get a blade rack, stack cable and cooled every time you wanted to deploy new application, right? So what we do is we, our message is this, we want developers to focus on what matters most. And that's build, deploy, and running applications. Most of our customers are not in the business of building app platforms. They're not in the business of building platforms like banks, I, you know, financials, right? Government, et cetera. Right? So what we do is we allow those developers that are, enable those developers that know Java and Node and springing and what have you, just to keep writing what they know. And then, you know, I don't wanna get too technical here, but get pushed through way and, and OpenShift takes care of the rest, builds it for them, runs it through a pipeline, a CICD pipeline, goes through all the testing and quality gates and things like that, deploys it, auto wires it up, you know, to monitoring which is what you need. >>And we have all kinds of other, you know, higher order services and an ecosystem around that. And oh, by the way, also plugging into and taking advantage of the services like rds, right? If you're gonna write an application, a tradition, a cloud native application on Amazon, you're probably going to wanna run it in Rosa and consuming one of those databases, right? Like RDS or Aurora, what have you. >>And I, and I would say it's not even just the customers. We have a variety of ecosystem partners, both of our partners leveraging it as well. We have solos built their executive management system that they go ahead and turn and sell to their customers, streamlines data and collects data from a variety of different sources. They decided, you know, it's better to run that on top of Rosa than manage OpenShift themselves. We've seen IBM restack a lot of their software, you know, to run on top of Rose, take advantage of that capabilities. So lots of partners as well as customers are taking advantage of fully managed stack of that OpenShift that that turnkey capabilities that it provides >>For, for OpenShift customers who wanna move to Rose, is that gonna be a one button migration? Is that gonna be, can they run both environments simultaneously and migrate over time? What kind of tools are you giving them? >>We have quite, we have quite a few migration tools such as conveyor, right? That's one of our projects, part of our migration application toolkit, right? And you know, with those, there's also partners like Trilio, right? Who can help move, you know, applications back 'em up. In fact, we're working on a pretty cool joint go to market with that right now. But generally speaking, the OpenShift experience that the customers that we have know and love and those who have never used OpenShift either are coming to it as well via Rosa, right? The experience is primarily the same. You don't have to really retrain your people, right? If anything, there's a reduction in operational cost. We increase developer productivity cuz we manage so much of the stack for you. We have SRE site reliability engineers that are backing the platform that proactively get ahead of anything that may go wrong. So maybe you don't even notice if something went wrong, wrong. And then also reactively fixing it if it comes to that, right? So, you know, all those kind of things that your customers are having to do on their own or hire a contractor, a consultant, what have to do Now we benefit from a managed offering in the cloud, right? In Amazon, right? And your developers still have that great experience too, like to say, you know, again, break the land speed record to prod. >>I >>Like that. And, and I would actually say migrations from OpenShift are on premise. OpenShift to Rosa maybe only represents about a third of the customers we have. About another third of the customers is frankly existing AWS customers. Maybe they're doing Kubernetes, do it, the, you know, do it themselves. We're struggling with some of the management of that. And so actually started to lean on top of using Rosa as a better platform to actually build upon their applications. And another third, we have quite a few customers that were frankly new OpenShift customers, new Red Hat customers and new AWS customers that were looking to build that next cloud native application. Lots of in the startup space that I've actually chosen to go with Rosa. >>It's funny you mention that because the largest Rosa consumer is new to OpenShift. Oh wow. Right. That's pretty, that's pretty powerful, right? It's not just for existing OpenShift customers, existing OpenShift. If you're running OpenShift, you know, on EC two, right. Self-managed, there's really no better way to run it than Rosa. You know, I think about whether this is the 10th year, 10 year anniversary of re right? Right. Yep. This is also the 10 year anniversary of OpenShift. Yeah, right. I think it one oh came out about sometime around a week, 10 years ago, right? When I came over to Red Hat in 2015. You know, if you, if you know your Kubernetes history was at July 25th, I think was when Kubernetes ga, July 25th, 2015 is when it g you have >>A good >>Memory. Well I remember those days back then, right? Those were fun, right? The, we had a, a large customer roll out on OpenShift three, which is our OpenShift RE based on Kubernetes. And where do you think they ran Amazon, right? Naturally. So, you know, as you move forward and, and, and OpenShift V four came out, the, reduces the operational complexity and becomes even more powerful through our operator framework and things like that. Now they revolved up to Rosa, right? And again, to help those customers focus on what matters most. And that's the applications, not the containers, not those underlying implementation and technical details while critically important, are not necessarily core to the business to most of our customers. >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in a decade, >>Pardon me? >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in the >>Last decade. Oh absolutely. And, and and tons more to come like every day. Right. I think what you're gonna see more of is, you know, as Kubernetes becomes more, more and more of the plumbing, you know, I call 'em productive abstractions on top of it, as you mentioned earlier, unlocking the power of these technologies while minimizing, even hiding the complexity of them so that you can just move fast Yeah. And safely move fast. >>I wanna be sure we get to, to marketplaces because you have been, red Hat has made, has really stepped up as commitment to the AWS marketplace. Why are you doing that now and how are, how are the marketplaces evolving as a channel for you? >>Well, cuz our customers want us to be there, right? I mean we, we, we are customer centric, customer first approach. Our customers want to buy through the marketplace. If you're an Amazon, if you're an Amazon customer, it's really easy for you to go procure software through the marketplace and have, instead of having to call up Red Hat and get on paper and write a second check, right? One stop shop one bill. Right? That is very, very attractive to our customers. Not only that, it opens up other ways to buy, you know, Ted mentioned earlier, you know, pay as you go buy the drink pricing using exactly what you need right now. Right? You know, AWS pioneered that, right? That provides that elasticity, you know, one of the core tenants at aws, AWS cloud, right? And we weren't able to get that with the traditional self-managed on Red Hat paper subscriptions. >>Talk a little bit about the go to market, what's, you talked about Ted, the kind of the three tenants of, of customer types. But talk a little bit about the gtm, the joint go to market, the joint engineering, so we get an understanding of how customers engage multiple options. >>Yeah, I mean, so if you think about go to market, you know, and the way I think of it is it's the intersection of a few areas, right? So the product and the product experience that we work together has to be so good that a customer or user, actually many start talk, talking about users now cuz it's self-service has a more than likely chance of getting their application to prod without ever talking to a person. Which is historically not what a lot of enterprise software companies are able to do, right? So that's one of those biggest things we do. We want customers to just be successful, turn it on, get going, be productive, right? At the same time we wanna to position the product in such a way that's differentiating that you can't get that experience anywhere else. And then part of that is ensuring that the education and enablement of our customers and our partners as such that they use the platform the right way to get as much value out of as possible. >>All backed by, you know, a very smart field that ensures that the customer get is making the right decision. A customer success org, this is attached to my org now that we can go on site and team with our customers to make sure that they get their first workloads up as quickly as possible, by the way, on our date, our, our dime. And then SRE and CEA backing that up with support and operational integrity to ensure that the service is always up and available so you can sleep, sleep, sleep well at night. Right? Right. One of our PMs of, of of Rosa, he says, what does he say? He says, Rosa allows organizations, enables organizations to go from 24 7 operations to nine to five innovation. Right? And that's powerful. That's how our customers remain more competitive running on Rosa with aws, >>When you're in customer conversations and you have 30 seconds, what are the key differentiators of the solution that you go boom, boom, boom, and they just go, I get it. >>Well, I mean, my 32nd elevator pitch, I think I've already said, I'll say it again. And that is OpenShift allows you to focus on your applications, build, deploy, and run applications while unlocking the power of the technologies like containers and Kubernetes and hiding or minimizing those complexities. So you can do as fast as possible. >>Mic drop Ted, question for you? Sure. Here we are at the, this is the, I leave the 11th reinvent, 10th anniversary, 11th event. You've been in the industry a long time. What is your biggest takeaway from what's been announced and discussed so far at Reinvent 22, where the AWS and and its partner ecosystem is concerned? If you had 30 seconds or if you had a bumper sticker to put on your DeLorean, what would you say? >>I would say we're continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers, but making sure we bring all of our partners and ecosystems along in that innovation. >>Yeah. I love the customer obsession on both sides there. Great work guides. Congrats on the 10th anniversary of OpenShift and so much evolution, the customer obsession is really clear for both of you guys. We appreciate your time. You're gonna have to come back now. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. For our guests and for Paul Gillin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hello friends and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are live from the show floor at AWS Reinvent. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host John Furrier. John, how was your lunch? >>My lunch was great. Wasn't very complex like it is today, so it was very easy, >>Appropriate for the conversation we're about >>To have. Great, great guests coming up Cube alumni and great question around complexity and how is wellbeing teams be good? >>Yes. And, and and on that note, let's welcome John from DeWit as well as Danny from Inox. I swear I'll be able to say that right by the end of this. Thank you guys so much for being here. How's the show going for you? >>Excellent so far. It's been a great, a great event. You know, back back to pre Covid days, >>You're still smiling day three. That's an awesome sign. John, what about you? >>Fantastic. It's, it's been busier than ever >>That that's exciting. I, I think we certainly feel that way here on the cube. We're doing dozens of videos, it's absolutely awesome. Just in case. So we can dig in a little deeper throughout the rest of the segment just in case the audience isn't familiar, let's get them acquainted with your companies. Let's start with do it John. >>Yeah, thanks Savannah. So do it as a global technology company and we're partnering with deleted cloud providers around the world and digital native companies to provide value and solve complexity. John, to your, to your introductory point with all of the complexities associated with operating in the cloud, scaling a business in the cloud, a lot of companies are just looking to sort of have somebody else take care of that problem for them or have somebody they can call when they run into, you know, into problems scaling. And so with a combination of tech, advanced technology, some of the best cloud experts in the world and unlimited tech support or we're offloading a lot of those problems for our customers and we're doing that on a global basis. So it's, it's an exciting time. >>I can imagine pretty much everyone here on the show floor is dealing with that challenge of complexity. So a couple customers for you in the house. What about you Danny? >>I, I come from a company which operates in a financial industry market. So we essentially a global broker, financial trading broker. Which what this means for those people who don't really understand, essentially we allow clients to be able to trade digitally and speculate with different pricing, pricing tools online. We offer a different products for different type of clients. We have institutional clients, we've got our affiliates, partners programs and we've got a retail clients and this is where AWS and Doit comes handy allows us to offer our products digitally across the globe. And one of the key values for us here is that we can actually offer a product in regions where other people don't. So for example, we don't compete in North America, we don't compete in EME in Europe, but we just do it in AWS to solve our complex challenges in regions that naturally by, depending on where they base, they have like issues and that's how we deliver our product. >>And which regions, Latin >>America, Latin, the entire Africa, subcontinent, middle East, southeast Asia, the culture is just demographic is different. And what you used to have here is not exactly what you have over there. And obviously that brings a lot of challenges with onboarding and clients, deposit, trading activities, CDN latency, all of >>That stuff. It's interesting how each region's different in their, their posture with the cloud. Someone roll their own, someone outta the box. So again, this brings up this theme this year guys, which is about end to end seeing purpose built like specialty solutions. A lot of solutions going end to end with data makes kind of makes it more complicated. So again, we got more complexity coming, but the greatest the cloud is, you can abstract that away. So we are seeing this is a big opportunity for partners to innovate. You're seeing a lot of joint engineering, a lot more complexities coming still, but still end to end is the end game so to speak. >>A absolutely John, I mean one, one of the sort of ways we describe what we try to do for our customers like Equinox is to be your co-pilot in the cloud, which essentially means, you know, >>What an apt analogy. >>I think so, yeah, >>Well, well >>Done there. I think it works. Yvanna. Yeah, so, so as I mentioned, these are the majority or almost all of our customers are pretty sophisticated tech savvy companies. So they don't, you know, they know for most, for the most part what they're trying to achieve. They're approaching scale, they're at scale or they're, or they're through that scale point and they, they just wanna have somebody they can call, right? They need technology to help abstract away the complex problem. So they're not doing so much manual cloud operational work or sometimes they just need help picking the next tech right to solve the end to end use case that that they're, that they're dealing with >>In business. And Danny, you're rolling out solutions so you're on, you're on the front lines, you gotta make it easier. You didn't want to get in the weeds on something that should be taken care of. >>Correct. I mean one of the reasons we go do it is you need to, in order to involve do it, you need to know your problems, understand your challenges, also like a self review only. And you have to be one way halfway through the cloud journey. You need to know your problems, what you want to achieve, where you want to end up a roadmap for the next five years, what you want to achieve. Are we fixing or developing a building? And then involve those guys to come and help you because they cannot just come with magic one and fix all your problems. You need to do that yourself. It's not like starting the journey by yourself. >>Yeah. One thing that's not played up in this event, I will say they may, I don't, they missed, maybe Verner will hit it tomorrow, but I think they kind of missed it a little bit. But the developer productivity's been a big issue. We've seen that this year. One of the big themes on the cube is developer productivity, more velocity on the development side to keep pace with what's on, what solutions are rolling out the customers. And the other one is skills gap. So, and people like, and people have old skills, like we see VMware being bought by Broadcom for instance, got a lot of IT operators at VMware, they gotta go cloud somewhere. So you got new talent, existing talent, skill gaps, people are comfortable, yet the new stuff's there, developers gotta be more productive. How do you guys see that? Cuz that's gonna be how that plays now, it's gonna impact the channel, the partnership relationship, your ability to deliver. >>What's your reaction to that first? Well I think we obviously have a tech savvy team. We've got developers, we've got dev, we've got infrastructure guys, but we only got so much resource that we can afford. And essentially by evolving due it, I've doubled our staff. So we got a tech savvy senior solution architects which comes to do the sexy stuff, actually develop and design a new better offering, better product that makes us competitive. And this is where we involved, essentially we use the due IT staff as an staff employees that our demand is richly army of qualified people. We can actually cherry pick who we want for the call to do X, Y, and Z. And they're there to, to support you. We just have to ask for help. And this is how we fill our gap from technical skills or budget constrained within, you know, within recruitment. >>And I think, I think what, what Danny is touching on, John, what you mentioned is, is really the, the sort of the core family principle of the company, right? It's hard enough for companies like Equinox to hire staff that can help them build their business and deliver the value proposition that they're, that they see, right? And so our reason for existence is to sort of take care of the rest, right? We can help, you know, operate your cloud, show you the most effective way to do that. Whether they're finops problems, whether they're DevOps problems, whether dev SEC ops problems, all of these sort of classic operational problems that get 'em the way of the core business mission. You're not in the business of running the cloud, you're in the business of delivering customer value. We can help you, you know, manage your cloud >>And it's your job to do it. >>It is to do it >>Can, couldn't raise this upon there. How long have y'all been working together? >>I would say 15 months. We took, we took a bit of a conservative approach. We hope for the baseball, prepare for the worst. So I didn't trust do it. I give them one account, start with DEF U A C because you cannot, you just have to learn the journey yourself. So I think I would, my advice for clients is give it the six months. Once you establish a relationship, build a relationship, give them one by one start slowly. You actually understand by yourself the skills, the capacity that they have. And also the, for me consultants is really important And after that just opens up and we are now involving them. We've got new project, we've got problem statement. The first thing we do, we don't Google it, we just say do it. Log a ticket, we got the team. You're >>A verb. >>Yeah. So >>In this case we have >>The puns are on list here on the Cuban general. But with something like that, it's great. >>I gotta ask you a question cuz this is interesting John. You know, we talked last year on the cube and, and again this is an example of how innovations playing out. If you look at the announcements, Adam Celski did and then sw, he had 13 or so announcements. I won't say it's getting boring, but when you hear boring, boring is good. When you start getting into these, these gaps in the platforms as it grows. I won't say they was boring cause that really wasn't boring. I like the data >>Itself. It's all fascinating, John, >>But it, but it's a lot of gap filling, you know, 50 connectors you got, you know, yeah. All glue layers being built in AI's critical. The match cloud is there. What's the innovation? You got a lot of gaps being filled, boring is good. Like Kubernetes, we say there boring means, it's being invisible. That means it's going away. What's the exciting things from your perspective in cloud here? >>Well, I think, I mean, boring is an interesting word to use cuz a company with the heritage of AWS is constantly evolving. I mean, at the core of that company's culture is innovation, technology, development and innovation. And they're building for builders as, as you know, just as well as I do. Yeah. And so, but what we find across our customer base is that companies that are scaling or at scale are using maybe a smaller set of those services, but they're really leveraging them in interesting ways. And there is a very long tail of deeper, more sophisticated fit for purpose, more specific services. And Adam announced, you know, who knows him another 20 or 30 services and it's happening year after year after year. And I think one of the things that, that Danny might attest to is, I, I spoke about the reason we exist and the reason we form the company is we hold it very, a very critical part of our mission is to stay abreast of all of those developments as they emerge so that Danny and and his crew don't have to, right? And so when they have a, a, a question about SageMaker or they have a question about sort of the new big data service that Adam has announced, we take it very seriously. Our job is to be able to answer that question quickly and >>Accurately. And I notice your shirt, if you could just give a little shirt there, ops, cloud ops, DevOps do it. The intersection of the finance, the tuning is now we're hearing a lot of price performance, cost recovery, not cost recovery, but cost management. Yeah. Optimizing. So we're seeing building scale, but now, now tuning almost a craft, the craft of the cloud is here. What's your reaction to that? It, >>It absolutely is. And this is a story as old as the cloud, honestly. And companies, you know, they'll, they'll, companies tend to follow the same sort of maturity journey when they first start, whether they're migrating to the cloud or they were born in the cloud as most of our customers are. There's a, there's a, there's an, there's an access to visibility and understanding and optimization to tuning a craft to use your term. And, and cost management truly is a 10 year old problem that is as prevalent and relevant today as it was, you know, 10 years ago. And there's a lot of talk about the economics associated with the cloud and it's not, certainly not always cheaper to run. In fact, it rarely is cheaper to run your business from any of the public cloud providers. The key is to do it and right size it and make sure it's operating in accordance and alignment with your business, right? It's okay for cloud process to go up so long as your top line is also >>Selling your proportion. You spend more cloud to save cloud. That's it's >>Penny wise, pound full. It's always a little bit, always a little bit of a, of a >>Dilemma on, on the cost saving. We didn't want to just save money. If you want to save money, just shut down your services, right? So it's about making money. So this is where do it comes, like we actually start making, okay, we spend a bit more now, but in about six months time I will be making more money. And we've just did that. We roll out the new application for all the new product offering host to AWS fully with the guys support, a lot of long, boring, boring, boring calls, but they're productive because we actually now have a better product, competitive, it's tailored for our clients, it's cost effective. And we are actually making money >>When something's invisible. It's working, you know, talking about it means it's, it's, it's operational. >>It's exactly, it's, >>Well to that point, John, one of the things we're most proud of in, you know, know this year was, was the launch of our product we called Flex Save, which essentially does exactly what you've described. It's, it's looking for automation and, and, and, and automatic ways of, yes. Saving money, but offering the opportunities to, to to improve the economics associated with your cloud infrastructure. >>Yeah. And improving the efficiency across the board. A hundred percent. It, it's, oh, it's awesome. Let's, and, and it's, it's my understanding there's some reporting and insights that you're able to then translate through from do it to your CTO and across the company. Denny, what's that like? What do you get to see working >>With them? Well, the problem is, like the CTO asked me to do all of that. It is funny he thinks that he's doing it, but essentially they have a excellent portal that basically looks up all of our instances on the one place. You got like good analytics on your cost, cost, anomalies, budget, costal location. But I didn't want to do that either. So what I have done is taken the next step. I actually sold this to the, to my company completely. So my finance teams goes there, they do it themselves, they log in, check, check, all the billing, the costal location. I actually has zero iteration with them if I don't hear anything from them, which is one of the benefits. But also there is lot of other products like the Flexe is virtually like you just click a finger and you start saving money just like that. Easy >>Is that easy button we've been talking about on >>The show? Yeah, exactly, exactly how it is. But there is obviously outside of the cost management, you actually can look at what is the resource you using do actually need it, how often you use it, think about the long term goal, what you're trying to achieve, and use the analytics to, and actually I have to say the analytics much better than AWS in, in, in, in cmp. It's, it's just more user friendly, more interactive as opposed to, you know, building the one in aws. >>It's good business model. Make things easy for your customers. Easy, simple >>To use. >>It's gotta be nice to hear John. >>Well, so first of all, thank you daddy. >>We, we work, but in all seriousness, you know, we, we work, Danny mentioned the trust word earlier. This is at the core of if we don't, if we're not able to build trust with our clients, our business is dead. It, it just doesn't exist. It can't scale. In fact, it'll go the opposite direction. And so we're, we work very, very hard to earn that trust and we're willing to start small to Danny's example, start small and grow. And that's why we're very, one of the things we're most proud of is, is how few customers tend to leave us year over year. We have customers that have been with us for 10 years. >>You know, Andy, Jesse always has, I just saw an interview, he was on the New York Times event in New York today as a CEO of Amazon. But he's always said in these build out phases, you gotta work backwards from the customer and innovate on behalf of the customer. Cause that's the answer that will always be a good answer for the outcome versus optimizing for just profit, you know what I'm saying? Or other things. So we're still in build out mode, >>You know, as a, as a, as a core fundamental sort of product concept. If you're not solving important problems for our customer, what are you, why, why are you investing? It just >>Doesn't make it. This is the beauty we do it. We actually, they wait for you to come to do the next step. They don't sell me anything. They don't bug me with emails. They're ready. When you're ready to make that journey, you just log a ticket and then come and help you. And this is the beauty. You just, it's just not your, your journey. >>I love it. That's a, that's a beautiful note to lead us to our new tradition on the cube. We have a little bit of a challenge for the both of you. We're looking for your 32nd Instagram real thought leadership sizzle anecdote. Either one of you wanna go first. John looks a little nauseous. Danny, you wanna give it a go? >>Well, we've got a few expressions, but we don't Google it. We just do it. And the key take, that's what we do now at, at, and also what we do is actually using their stuff as an influence employees richly. Like that's what we do. >>Well done, well done. Didn't even need the 30 seconds. Fantastic work, Danny. I love that. All right, John, now you do have to go. Okay, >>I'll goodness. You know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll I'll go back to what I mentioned earlier, if that's okay. I think we, you know, we exist as a company to sort of help our customers get back to focusing on why they started the business in the first place, which is innovating and delivering value to customers. And we'll help you take care of the rest. It's as simple as that. Awesome. >>Well done. You absolutely nailed it. I wanna just acknowledge your fan club over there watching. Hello everyone from the doit team. Good job team. I love, it's very cute when guests show up with an entourage to the cube. We like to see it. You obviously deserve the entourage. You're, you're both wonderful. Thanks again for being here on the show with Oh yeah, go ahead >>John. Well, I would just like to thank Danny for, for agreeing to >>Discern, thankfully >>Great to spend time with you. Absolutely. Let's do it. >>Thank you. Yeah, >>Yeah. Fantastic gentlemen. Well thank you all for tuning into this wonderful start to the afternoon here from AWS Reinvent. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furier. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are here on the show floor at AWS re:Invent. We are theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, afternoon, day two, we are in full swing. >> Yes. >> What's got you most excited? >> Just got lunch, got the food kicking in. No, we don't get coffee. (Savannah laughing) >> Way to bring the hype there, John. >> No, there's so many people here just in Amazon. We're back to 2019 levels of crowd. The interest levels are high. Next gen, cloud security, big part of the keynote. This next segment, I am super excited about. CUBE Alumni, going back to 2013, 10 years ago he was on theCUBE. Now, 10 years later we're at re:Invent, looking forward to this guest and it's about security, great topic. >> I don't want to delay us anymore, please welcome Mark. Mark, thank you so much for being here with us. Massive day for you and the team. I know you oversee three different units at Amazon, Inspector, Detective, and the most recently announced, Security Lake. Tell us about Amazon Security Lake. >> Well, thanks Savannah. Thanks John for having me. Well, Security Lake has been in the works for a little bit of time and it got announced today at the keynote as you heard from Adam. We're super excited because there's a couple components that are really unique and valuable to our customers within Security Lake. First and foremost, the foundation of Security Lake is an open source project we call OCFS, Open Cybersecurity Framework Schema. And what that allows is us to work with the vendor community at large in the security space and develop a language where we can all communicate around security data. And that's the language that we put into Security Data Lake. We have 60 vendors participating in developing that language and partnering within Security Lake. But it's a communal lake where customers can bring all of their security data in one place, whether it's generated in AWS, they're on-prem, or SaaS offerings or other clouds, all in one location in a language that allows analytics to take advantage of that analytics and give better outcomes for our customers. >> So Adams Selipsky big keynote, he spent all the bulk of his time on data and security. Obviously they go well together, we've talked about this in the past on theCUBE. Data is part of security, but this security's a little bit different in the sense that the global footprint of AWS makes it uniquely positioned to manage some security threats, EKS protection, a very interesting announcement, runtime layer, but looking inside and outside the containers, probably gives extra telemetry on some of those supply chains vulnerabilities. This is actually a very nuanced point. You got Guard Duty kind of taking its role. What does it mean for customers 'cause there's a lot of things in this announcement that he didn't have time to go into detail. Unpack all the specifics around what the security announcement means for customers. >> Yeah, so we announced four items in Adam's keynote today within my team. So I'll start with Guard Duty for EKS runtime. It's complimenting our existing capabilities for EKS support. So today Inspector does vulnerability assessment on EKS or container images in general. Guard Duty does detections of EKS workloads based on log data. Detective does investigation and analysis based on that log data as well. With the announcement today, we go inside the container workloads. We have more telemetry, more fine grain telemetry and ultimately we can provide better detections for our customers to analyze risks within their container workload. So we're super excited about that one. Additionally, we announced Inspector for Lambda. So Inspector, we released last year at re:Invent and we focused mostly on EKS container workloads and EC2 workloads. Single click automatically assess your environment, start generating assessments around vulnerabilities. We've added Lambda to that capability for our customers. The third announcement we made was Macy sampling. So Macy has been around for a while in delivering a lot of value for customers providing information around their sensitive data within S3 buckets. What we found is many customers want to go and characterize all of the data in their buckets, but some just want to know is there any sensitive data in my bucket? And the sampling feature allows the customer to find out their sensitive data in the bucket, but we don't have to go through and do all of the analysis to tell you exactly what's in there. >> Unstructured and structured data. Any data? >> Correct, yeah. >> And the fourth? >> The fourth, Security Data Lake? (John and Savannah laughing) Yes. >> Okay, ocean theme. data lake. >> Very complimentary to all of our services, but the unique value in the data lake is that we put the information in the customer's control. It's in their S3 bucket, they get to decide who gets access to it. We've heard from customers over the years that really have two options around gathering large scale data for security analysis. One is we roll our own and we're security engineers, we're not data engineers. It's really hard for them to build these distributed systems at scale. The second one is we can pick a vendor or a partner, but we're locked in and it's in their schemer and their format and we're there for a long period of time. With Security Data Lake, they get the best of both worlds. We run the infrastructure at scale for them, put the data in their control and they get to decide what use case, what partner, what tool gives them the most value on top of their data. >> Is that always a good thing to give the customers too much control? 'Cause you know the old expression, you give 'em a knife they play with and they they can cut themselves, I mean. But no, seriously, 'cause what's the provisions around that? Because control was big part of the governance, how do you manage the security? How does the customer worry about, if I have too much control, someone makes a mistake? >> Well, what we finding out today is that many customers have realized that some of their data has been replicated seven times, 10 times, not necessarily maliciously, but because they have multiple vendors that utilize that data to give them different use cases and outcomes. It becomes costly and unwieldy to figure out where all that data is. So by centralizing it, the control is really around who has access to the data. Now, ultimately customers want to make those decisions and we've made it simple to aggregate this data in a single place. They can develop a home region if they want, where all the data flows into one region, they can distribute it globally. >> They're in charge. >> They're in charge. But the controls are mostly in the hands of the data governance person in the company, not the security analyst. >> So I'm really curious, you mentioned there's 60 AWS partner companies that have collaborated on the Security lake. Can you tell us a little bit about the process? How long does it take? Are people self-selecting to contribute to these projects? Are you cherry picking? What does that look like? >> It's a great question. There's three levels of collaboration. One is around the open source project that we announced at Black Hat early in this year called OCSF. And that collaboration is we've asked the vendor community to work with us to build a schema that is universally acceptable to security practitioners, not vendor specific and we've asked. >> Savannah: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but is this a first of its kind? >> There's multiple schemes out there developed by multiple parties. They've been around for multiple years, but they've been built by a single vendor. >> Yeah, that's what I'm drill in on a little bit. It sounds like the first we had this level of collaboration. >> There's been collaborations around them, but in a handful of companies. We've really gone to a broad set of collaborators to really get it right. And they're focused around areas of expertise that they have knowledge in. So the EDR vendors, they're focused around the scheme around EDR. The firewall vendors are focused around that area. Certainly the cloud vendors are in their scope. So that's level one of collaboration and that gets us the level playing field and the language in which we'll communicate. >> Savannah: Which is so important. >> Super foundational. Then the second area is around producers and subscribers. So many companies generate valuable security data from the tools that they run. And we call those producers the publishers and they publish the data into Security Lake within that OCSF format. Some of them are in the form of findings, many of them in the form of raw telemetry. Then the second one is in the subscriber side and those are usually analytic vendors, SIM vendors, XDR vendors that take advantage of the logs in one place and generate analytic driven outcomes on top of that, use cases, if you will, that highlight security risks or issues for customers. >> Savannah: Yeah, cool. >> What's the big customer focus when you start looking at Security Lakes? How do you see that planning out? You said there's a collaboration, love the open source vibe on that piece, what data goes in there? What's sharing? 'Cause a big part of the keynote I heard today was, I heard clean rooms, I've cut my antenna up. I'd love to hear that. That means there's an implied sharing aspect. The security industry's been sharing data for a while. What kind of data's in that lake? Give us an example, take us through. >> Well, this a number of sources within AWS, as customers run their workloads in AWS. We've identified somewhere around 25 sources that will be natively single click into Amazon Security Lake. We were announcing nine of them. They're traditional network logs, BBC flow, cloud trail logs, firewall logs, findings that are generated across AWS, EKS audit logs, RDS data logs. So anything that customers run workloads on will be available in data lake. But that's not limited to AWS. Customers run their environments hybridly, they have SaaS applications, they use other clouds in some instances. So it's open to bring all that data in. Customers can vector it all into this one single location if they decide, we make it pretty simple for them to do that. Again, in the same format where outcomes can be generated quickly and easily. >> Can you use the data lake off on premise or it has to be in an S3 in Amazon Cloud? >> Today it's in S3 in Amazon. If we hear customers looking to do something different, as you guys know, we tend to focus on our customers and what they want us to do, but they've been pretty happy about what we've decided to do in this first iteration. >> So we got a story about Silicon Angle. Obviously the ingestion is a big part of it. The reporters are jumping in, but the 53rd party sources is a pretty big number. Is that coming from the OCSF or is that just in general? Who's involved? >> Yeah, OCSF is the big part of that and we have a list of probably 50 more that want to join in part of this. >> The other big names are there, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Peloton Networks, all the big dogs are in there. >> All big partners of AWS, anyway, so it was an easy conversation and in most cases when we started having the conversation, they were like, "Wow, this has really been needed for a long time." And given our breadth of partners and where we sit from our customers perspective in the center of their cloud journey that they've looked at us and said, "You guys, we applaud you for driving this." >> So Mark, take us through the conversations you're having with the customers at re:Inforce. We saw a lot of meetings happening. It was great to be back face to face. You guys have been doing a lot of customer conversation, security Data Lake came out of that. What was the driving force behind it? What were some of the key concerns? What were the challenges and what's now the opportunity that's different? >> We heard from our customers in general. One, it's too hard for us to get all the data we need in a single place, whether through AWS, the industry in general, it's just too hard. We don't have those resources to data wrangle that data. We don't know how to pick schema. There's multiple ones out there. Tell us how we would do that. So these three challenges came out front and center for every customer. And mostly what they said is our resources are limited and we want to focus those resources on security outcomes and we have security engines. We don't want to focus them on data wrangling and large scale distributed systems. Can you help us solve that problem? And it came out loud and clear from almost every customer conversation we had. And that's where we took the challenge. We said, "Okay, let's build this data layer." And then on top of that we have services like Detective and Guard Duty, we'll take advantage of it as well. But we also have a myriad of ISV third parties that will also sit on top of that data and render out. >> What's interesting, I want to get your reaction. I know we don't have much time left, but I want to get your thoughts. When I see Security Data Lake, which is awesome by the way, love the focus, love how you guys put that together. It makes me realize the big thing in re:Invent this year is this idea of specialized solutions. You got instances for this and that, use cases that require certain kind of performance. You got the data pillars that Adam laid out. Are we going to start seeing more specialized data lakes? I mean, we have a video data lake. Is there going to be a FinTech data lake? Is there going to be, I mean, you got the Great Lakes kind of going on here, what is going on with these lakes? I mean, is that a trend that Amazon sees or customers are aligning to? >> Yeah, we have a couple lakes already. We have a healthcare lake and a financial lake and now we have a security lake. Foundationally we have Lake Formation, which is the tool that anyone can build a lake. And most of our lakes run on top of Lake Foundation, but specialize. And the specialization is in the data aggregation, normalization, enridgement, that is unique for those use cases. And I think you'll see more and more. >> John: So that's a feature, not a bug. >> It's a feature, it's a big feature. The customers have ask for it. >> So they want roll their own specialized, purpose-built data thing, lake? They can do it. >> And customer don't want to combine healthcare information with security information. They have different use cases and segmentation of the information that they care about. So I think you'll see more. Now, I also think that you'll see where there are adjacencies that those lakes will expand into other use cases in some cases too. >> And that's where the right tools comes in, as he was talking about this ETL zero, ETL feature. >> It be like an 80, 20 rule. So if 80% of the data is shared for different use cases, you can see how those lakes would expand to fulfill multiple use cases. >> All right, you think he's ready for the challenge? Look, we were on the same page. >> Okay, we have a new challenge, go ahead. >> So think of it as an Instagram Reel, sort of your hot take, your thought leadership moment, the clip we're going to come back to and reference your brilliance 10 years down the road. I mean, you've been a CUBE veteran, now CUBE alumni for almost 10 years, in just a few weeks it'll be that. What do you think is, and I suspect, I think I might know your answer to this, so feel free to be robust in this. But what do you think is the biggest story, key takeaway from the show this year? >> We're democratizing security data within Security Data Lake for sure. >> Well said, you are our shortest answer so far on theCUBE and I absolutely love and respect that. Mark, it has been a pleasure chatting with you and congratulations, again, on the huge announcement. This is such an exciting day for you all. >> Thank you Savannah, thank you John, pleasure to be here. >> John: Thank you, great to have you. >> We look forward to 10 more years of having you. >> Well, maybe we don't have to wait 10 years. (laughs) >> Well, more years, in another time. >> I have a feeling it'll be a lot of security content this year. >> Yeah, pretty hot theme >> Very hot theme. >> Pretty odd theme for us. >> Of course, re:Inforce will be there this year again, coming up 2023. >> All the res. >> Yep, all the res. >> Love that. >> We look forward to see you there. >> All right, thanks, Mark. >> Speaking of res, you're the reason we are here. Thank you all for tuning in to today's live coverage from AWS re:Invent. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. We are theCUBE and we are the leading source for high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello cloud computing friends and welcome back to theCUBE, where we are live from Las Vegas, Nevada, here at AWS re:Invent all week. My name is Savannah Peterson, very excited to be joined by Paul Gillan today. How are you doing? >> I'm doing great, Savannah. It's my first re:Invent. >> I was just going to ask you >> So it's quite an experience. >> If you've ever been to re:Invent. >> It's dazzling much like the sequins on your top. It's dazzling. >> Yes. >> It's a jam packed affair. I came to the COMDEX Conference for many years in Las Vegas, which was huge event and this really rivals it in terms of these crowd sizes. But I think there's more intensity here. There's more excitement. People are just jazzed about being here to the extent that I never saw at other computer conferences. >> I thought I would agree with you. It's my first re:Invent as well. I'm glad we could share this experience together. And the vibe, the pulse, I think being back in person is really contagious as well. Ooh, maybe the wrong word to use, but in a great way. The energy is definitely radiating between people here. I'll watch my words a little bit better. >> And in person we have with us Samuel Nicholls, the director of public cloud at Global Product Marketing at Veeam Software. Sam, is it Sam or Samuel? >> Depends if I'm in trouble, Paul. >> Savannah: But it depends on who's saying it out loud. >> Yeah, yeah. It's typically, Samuel is usually reserved for my mother, so- >> Yeah. >> (laughs) Well, Sam, thanks for joining us. >> We'll stick with Sam on the show. >> Yeah. >> So Veeam been a red hot company for several years. Really made its, uh, its reputation in the VMware world. Now you've got this whole-sail shift to the cloud, not that VMware is not important still, but how is that affecting, you're shifting with it, how is that affecting your role as a product manager and the business overall? >> Yeah, it's a fantastic question. Obviously Veeam was pioneered in terms of being the purpose-built backup and recovery company for VMware. And as these workloads are being transitioned from the data center into the cloud or just net new workloads being created in the cloud, there is that equal need for backup and recovery there. So it's incredibly important that we were able to provide a purpose-built backup and recovery solution for workloads that live in AWS as well. >> Paul: And how different is it backing up an AWS workload compared to a VMware workload? >> I think it depends on what kind of service a user is, is, is utilizing, right? There's infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. And given the differences in what is exposed to that customer that can make backup and recovery quite challenging. So I would say that the primary thing that we want to look at is utilizing native snapshots is our first line of defense when it comes to backup and recovery, irrespective of what workload that right might be whether it's a virtual machine, Amazon EC2, some sort of database on Amazon RDS, a file share, so on. >> Savannah: I bet you're seeing a lot across verticals and across the industry given the support that you're giving customers. What are you seeing in the market and in customer environments? What are some of those trends? >> So I think the major trends that we highlight in our data protection trend support, which is a new update is coming very shortly in the new year, is- >> Savannah: We have to check that out. >> Yeah, absolutely. The physical server is on a decline within the data center. Virtualized workloads, namely VMware is relatively static, kind of flat. The real hockey stick is with the cloud workloads. And as I mentioned before, that is partially because workloads are being transitioned from physical to virtual machines to being cloud hosted but also we're creating more applications and the cloud has become lead de facto standard for new workloads. So you hear about cloud first initiatives, digital transformation, the cloud is central to that. >> You mentioned snapshotting, which is a relatively new phenomenon, although it's taken a hold rapidly, how does snapshotting work in the cloud versus in on your on-prem environment? >> Samuel: It's not wildly different at all. I think the snapshots is again, a great first line of defense for helping users achieve very low recovery point objectives. So the frequency that they can protect their data as well as very low recovery time objectives, how quickly that I can recover the data. Because that's why we're backing up, right? We need the ability to recover. However, snapshots certainly have their limitations as well. They are not independent of the workload that is being protected. So if there were to be some sort of cybersecurity event like ransomware that is prolific throughout pretty much every business, every vertical. When that snapshot is not independent, if the production system becomes compromised that snapshot's likely to be compromised as well. And then going back to the recovery piece, not going to have something to recover from. >> And it's not a one and done with ransomware. >> No. >> It's, yeah. So how, so what is the role that backup plays? I mean a lot of people, I feel like security is such a hot topic here in the show and just in general, attacks are coming in unique form factors for everyone. I mean, I feel like backup is, no pun intended, the backbone of a system here. How does that affect what you're creating, I mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, like you say the backup is core to any comprehensive security strategy, right? I think when we talk about security, everyone tends to focus on the preventative, the proactive piece, stopping the bad guys from getting in. However, there is that remediative aspect as well because like you say, ransomware is relentless, right? You, you as a good guy have to pretty much fend off each and every single attack that comes your way. And that can be an infinite number of attacks. We're all human beings, we're fallible, right? And sometimes we can't defend against everything. So having a secure backup strategy is part of that remediative recovery component for a cybersecurity strategy is critical. And that includes things like encryption, immutability, logical separation of data and so forth. >> Paul: We know that ransomware is a scourge on-premises, typically begins with the end users, end user workstation. How does ransomware work in the cloud? And do the cloud providers have adequate protections against ransomware? Or can they? >> Samuel: Yeah, it's a, it's a fantastic question as well. I think when we look at the cloud, one of the common misconceptions is as we transition workloads to the cloud, we are transitioning responsibility to that cloud provider. And again, it's a misconception, right? It is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider in this case, AWS and the user. So as we transition these workloads across varying different services, infrastructure, platform, software as a service, we're always, always transitioning varying degrees of responsibility. But we always own our data and it is our responsibility to protect and secure that data, for the actual infrastructure components, the hardware that is on the onus of the cloud provider, so I'd say that's the major difference. >> Is ransomware as big a threat in the cloud as it is on-prem? >> Absolutely. There's no difference between a ransomware attack on-premises or in the cloud. Irrespective of where you are choosing to run your workloads, you need to have that comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in order to defend against that and ultimately recover as well if there's a successful attempt. >> Yeah, it's, ooh, okay. Let's get us out at the dark shadows real quick (laughs) and bring us back to a little bit of the business use case here. A lot of people using AWS. What do you think are some of the considerations, they should have when they're thinking about this, thinking about growing their (indistinct)? >> Well, if we're going to stick down the dark shadows, the cybersecurity piece. >> We can be the darkness. >> You and me kind of dark shadows business. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We can go rainbows and unicorns, nice and happy if you like. I think there's a number of considerations they need to keep up. Security is, is, is number one. The next piece is around the recovery as well. I think folks, when they, when we talk about backup and recovery, the focus is always on the backup piece of it. But again, we need to focus on why we're doing the backup. It's the recovery, it's the recovery component. So making sure that we have a clean verifiable backup that we're able to restore data from. Can we do that in a, in efficient and timely manner? And I think the other major consideration is looking at the entirety of our environments as well. Very few companies are a hundred percent sole sourced on a single cloud provider. It is typically hybrid cloud. It's around 80% of organizations are hybrid, right? So they have their on-premises data and they also have workloads running in one or multiple clouds. And when it comes to backup and recovery of all of these different infrastructures and environments, the way that we approach it is very different. And that often leads to multiple different point products from multiple different vendors. The average company utilizes three different backup products, sometimes as many as seven and that can introduce a management nightmare that's very complex, very resource intensive, expensive. So looking at the entirety of the environment and looking to utilize a backup provider that can cover the entirety of that environment while centralizing everything under a single management console helps folks be a lot more efficient, a lot more cost effective and ultimately better when it comes to data protection. >> Amazon and all cloud providers really are increasingly making regions transparent. Just at this conference, Amazon introduced failover controls from multiple multi-region access points. So you can, you can failover from one access from one region to another. What kind of challenges does that present to you as a backup provider? >> I don't think it represents any challenges. When we look at the native durability of the cloud, we look at availability zones, we look at multi-region failover. That is, that durability is ultimately founded on, on replication. And I wouldn't say that replication and backup, you would use one or the other. I would say that they are complimentary. So for replication, that is going to help with the failover scenario, that durability component. But then backup again is that independent copy. Because if we look at replication, if let's say the source data were to be compromised by ransomware or there was accidental deletion or corruption, that's simply going to be copied over to the target destination as well. Having that backup as an independent copy, again compliments that strategy as well. >> Paul: You need it in either, in any scenario. >> Samuel: In any scenario. >> I think the average person would probably say that backup is not the most exciting technology aspect of this industry. But, but you guys certainly made, build a great business on it. What excites you about what's coming in backup? What are the new technologies, new advancements that perhaps we haven't seen and productized yet that you think are going to change the game? >> I think actually what we offer right now is the most exciting piece which is just choice flexibility. So Veeam again is synonymous with VMware backup but we cover a multitude of environments including AWS, containerized workloads, Kubernetes physical systems and the mobility pieces is critical because as organizations look to act on their digital transformation, cloud first initiatives, they need to be able to mobilize their workloads across different infrastructures, maybe from on-premises into the cloud, one cloud to another, maybe it's cloud back to on-premises, 'cause we do also see that. That flexibility of choice is what excites me about Veeam because it's ultimately giving the users best in class data protection tool sets without any prescriptive approach from us in terms of where you should be running your workloads. That is the choice that you use. >> Yeah, Veeam is definitely more than VMware. We actually had a chance to chat with you all like KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Detroit. So we, we've seen the multitude of things that you touch. I want to bring it back to something and something kind of fun because you talked a lot about the community and being able to serve them. It's very clear, actually I shouldn't say this, I shouldn't say it's very clear, but to me it appears clear that community is a big priority for Veeam. I just want to call this out 'cause this was one of the cooler pieces of swag. You all gave out a hundred massage guns. Okay, very hot topic. Hot Christmas gift for 2022. I feel like Vanna White right now. And, but I thought that I was actually really compelled by this because we do a swag segment on theCUBE but it's not just about the objects or getting stuff. It's really about who's looking out for their community and how are they saying thanks. I mean, swag is a brand activation but it's also a thank you and I loved that you were giving out massage guns to the AWS Heroes and Community Builders. >> Yep. >> What role does community play in the culture and the product development at Veeam? >> So community has always been at the heart of Veeam. If you have a look at pretty much every single development across all of our versions, across all of our products it's always did by the community, right? We have a wonderful Veeam forum where we got 400,000 plus users actively providing feedback on the product what they would like to see. And that is ultimately what steers the direction of the product. Of course market trends and technology chain. >> A couple other factors, I'm sure. >> A couple of other factors, but community is huge for us. And the same goes for AWS. So, you know, talking with the AWS Heroes, the Community Builders helps Veeam reach further into that, into that community and the AWS user base and empower those folks with data protection tools and massage guns, when your feet are tired from, you know, being standing on them all day in Vegas. >> (laughs) Yeah, well, I mean, everybody, everybody's working hard and it's nice to say, it's nice to say, thank you. So I love, I love to hear that and it's, it's clear from the breadth of products that you're creating, the ways that you're supporting your customers that you already, they care a lot about community. We have a new challenge on theCUBE this year at AWS re:Invent. Think of it as an Instagram reel of your thought leadership, your hot take on the show, key themes as we look into 2023. What do you think is the most important story or trend or thing going on here at the show? >> I think it's just the continuation of cybersecurity and the importance of backup as a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. You know, some folks might say that secure backup is your last line of defense. Again, ransomware is relentless. These folks are going to keep coming and even if they're successful, it's not a one and done thing. It's going to happen again and again and again. So, you know, we have a look around the show floor, the presentations there is a huge cybersecurity focus and really just what folks should be doing as their best practice to secure their AWS environments. >> That's awesome. Well, Paul, any final, any final thoughts or questions? >> I just quickly, you've mentioned data security, you mentioned data protection and backup sort of interchangeably but they're not really the same thing, are they? I mean, what businesses do you see Veeam as being here? >> I would say that we are a data protection company because of, yes, there is backup, but there's also the replication component. There's the continuous data protection component where we've got, you know, near-zero RTOs and then we again look at the cybersecurity components of that. What can we do to really protect that data? So I would say that the two are different. Backup is a subset of data protection. >> Sam, thank you so much for being here with us on theCUBE. It's been a super insightful conversation. Hopefully we'll get you back soon and more of the teams, there seem to be celebrities here with us on theCUBE. Paul Gillan, thank you so much for being here with me. >> Pleasure Savannah. >> And I'm glad we get to celebrate our first re:Invent and most importantly, thank you to the audience for tuning in. Without you, we don't get to hang out here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're live from the show floor at AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillan. We're theCUBE and we are the leading source for high-tech coverage. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Good morning fellow cloud community nerds and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, we're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You can tell by my sequence. My name's Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be here with theCUBE. Joining me this morning is a packed house. We have three fabulous guests from AWS's global startup program. Immediately to my right is Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> We've also got Jimmy and Jeff. Before we get into the questions, how does it feel? This is kind of a show off moment for you all. Is it exciting to be back on the show floor? >> Always, I mean, you live for this event, right? I mean, we've got 50,000. >> You live for this? >> Yeah, I mean, 50,000 customers. Like we really appreciate the fact that time, money and resources they spend to be here. So, yeah, I love it. >> Savanna: Yeah, fantastic. >> Yeah, everyone in the same place at the same time, energy is just pretty special, so, it's fun. >> It is special. And Jimmy, I know you joined the program during the pandemic. This is probably the largest scale event you've been at with AWS. >> First time at re:Invent. >> Welcome >> (mumbles) Customers, massive. And I love seeing some of the startups that I partner with directly behind me here from theCUBE set as well. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. First time on theCUBE, welcome. >> Jimmy: Thank you. >> We hope to have you back. >> Jimmy: Proud to be here. >> Jimmy, I'm going to keep it on you to get us started. So, just in case someone hasn't heard of the global startup program with AWS. Give us the lay of the land. >> Sure, so flagship program at AWS. We partner with venture backed, product market fit B2B startups that are building on AWS. So, we have three core pillars. We help them co-built, co-market, and co-sell. Really trying to help them accelerate their cloud journey and get new customers build with best practices while helping them grow. >> Savanna: Yeah, Jeff, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I would say we try our best to find the best technology out there that our customers are demanding today. And basically, give them a fast track to the top resources we have to offer to help them grow their business. >> Yeah, and not a casual offering there at AWS. I just want to call out some stats so everyone knows just how many amazing startups and businesses that you touch. We've talked a lot about unicorns here on the show, and one of Adam's quotes from the keynote was, "Of the 1200 global unicorns, 83% run on AWS." So, at what stage are most companies trying to come and partner with you? And Eric we'll go to you for that. >> Yeah, so I run the North American startup team and our mission is to get and support startups as early as inception as possible, right? And so we've got kind of three, think about three legs of stool. We've got our business development team who works really closely with everything from seed, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, top tier VCs. And then we've got a sales team, we've got a BD team. And so really, like we're even looking before customers start even building or billing, we want to find those stealth startups, help them understand kind of product, where they fit within AWS, help them understand kind of how we can support them. And then as they start to build, then we've got a commercial team of solution architects and sales professionals that work with them. So, we actually match that life cycle all the way through. >> That's awesome. So, you are looking at seed, stealth. So, if I'm a founder listening right now, it doesn't matter what stage I'm at. >> No, I mean, really we want to get, and so we have credit programs, we have enablement programs, focus everything from very beginning to hyper scale. And that's kind of how we think about it. >> That's pretty awesome. So Jeff, what are the keys to success for a startup in working with you all? >> Yeah, good question. Highly differentiated technology is absolutely critical, right? There's a lot of startups out there but finding those that have differentiated technology that meets the demands of AWS customers, by far the biggest piece right there. And then it's all about figuring out how to lean into the partnership and really embrace what Jimmy said. How do you do the co build, the co-marketing, co-sell to put the full package together to make sure that your software's going to have the greatest visibility with our customers out there. >> Yeah, I love that. Jimmy, how do you charm them? What do the startups see in working with AWS? (indistinct) >> But that aside, Jeff just alluded to it. It's that better together story and it takes a lot of buy-in from the partner to get started. It is what we say, a partner driven flywheel. And the successful partners that I work with understand that and they're committing the resources to the relationship because we manage thousands and thousands of startups and there's thousands listed on Marketplace. And then within our co-sell ISV Accelerate program, there's hundreds of startups. So startups have to, one, differentiate themselves with their technology, but then two, be able to lean in to do the tactical engagement that myself and my PDM peers help them manage. >> Awesome, yeah. So Eric. >> Yes. >> Let's say I talk to a lot of founders because I do, and how would I pitch an AWS partnership through the global startup program to them? >> Yeah, well, so this... >> Give me my sound back. >> Yeah, yeah, look for us, like it's all about scaling your business, right? And so my team, and we have a partnership. I run the North American startup team, they run the global startup program, okay? So what my job is initially is to help them build up their services and their programs and products. And then as they get to product market fit, and we see synergy with selling with Amazon, the whole idea is to lead them into the go-to market programs, right? And so really for us, that pitch is this, simply put, we're going to help you extend your reach, right? We're going to take what you know about your service and having product market fit understanding your sales cycle, understanding your customer and your value, and then we're going to amplify that voice. >> Sounds good to me, I'm sold. I like that, I mean, I doubt there's too many companies with as much reach as you have. Let's dig in there a little bit. So, how much is the concentration of the portfolio in North America versus globally? I know you've got your fingers all over the place. >> Jimmy: Yeah. >> Go for it, Jeff. >> Jimmy: Well, yeah, you start and I'll... >> On the partnership side, it's pretty balanced between North America and AMEA and APJ, et cetera, but the type of partners is very different, right? So North America, we have a high focus on infrastructure led partners, right? Where that might be a little different in other regions internationally. >> Yeah, so I have North America, I have a peer that has AMEA, a peer that has Latin America and a peer that has APJ. And so, we have the startup team which is global, and we break it up regionally, and then the global startup program, which is partnership around APN, Amazon Partner Network, is also global. So like, we work in concert, they have folks married up to our team in each region. >> Savannah, what I'm hearing is you want do a global startup showcase? >> Yeah. (indistinct) >> We're happy to sponsor. >> Are you reading my mind? We are very aligned, Jimmy. >> I love it, awesome. >> I'm going to ask you a question, since you obviously are in sync with me all ready. You guys see what you mentioned, 50,000 startups in the program? 100, 000, how many? >> Well you're talking about for the global startup program, the ISV side? >> Sure, yeah, let's do both the stats actually. >> So, the global startup program's a lot smaller than that, right? So globally, there might be around 1,000 startups that are in the program. >> Savanna: Very elite little spot. >> Now, a lot bigger world on Eric's side. >> Eric: Yeah, globally over 200,000. >> Savanna: Whoa. >> Yeah, I mean, you think about, so just think about the... >> To keep track, those all in your head? >> Yeah, I can't keep track. North America's quite large. Yeah, no, because look, startups are getting created every day, right? And then there's positive exits and negative exits, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it's impressive. And particularly over the last two years, over the last two years are a little bit crazy, bonkers with the money coming. (mumbles) And yet the creation that's going to happen right now in the market disruption is going to mirror what happened in 2008, 2009. And so, the creation is not going to slow down. >> Savanna: No, hopefully not. >> No. >> No, and our momentum, I mean everyone's doing things faster, more data, it's all that we're talking about, do more and make it easier for everybody in the same central location. Jimmy, of those thousand global startups that you're working with, can you tell us some of the trends? >> Yeah, so I think one of the big things, especially, I cover data analytics startups specifically. So, one moving from batch to real time analytics. So, whether that's IOT, gaming, leader boards, querying data where it sits in an AWS data, like companies need to make operational decisions now and not based off of historic data from a week ago or last night or a month ago. So, that's one. And then I'm going to steal one of John's lines, is data is code. That is becoming that base layer that a lot of startups are building off of and operationalizing. So, I think those are the two big things I'm seeing, but would love... >> Curious to both, Jeff, let's go to you next, I'm curious, yeah. >> Yeah, totally. I think from a broader perspective, the days of completely free money and infinite resources are coming to a close, if not already closed. >> We all work with startups, we can go ahead and just talk about all the well is just a little (indistinct)... >> So, I think it's closed, and so because of that, it's how do you deal with a lot? How do you produce the results on the go to market side with fewer resources, right? And so it's incumbent on our team to figure out how to make it an easier, simpler process to partner with AWS, knowing those constraints are very real now. >> Savanna: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and to build on that. I think mid stage, it's all about cash preservation, right? And it's in that runway... >> Especially right now. >> Yeah, and so part of that is getting into the right infrastructure, when you had a lot of people, suddenly you don't have as many people moving into managed services, making sure that you can scale at a cost efficient way versus at any cost. That's kind of the latter stage. Now what's really been fascinating more at the at the early stages, I call it the rise of the AIML native. And so, where you say three years ago, you saw customers bolting on AI, now they're building AI from the start, right? And that's pervasive across every industry, whether it's in FinTech, life sciences, healthcare, climate tech, you're starting to see it all the way across the board. And then of course the other thing is, yeah, the other one is just the rise of just large language models, right? And just, I think there's the hype and there's the promise, but you know, over time, like the amount of customers big and small, whom are used in large language models is pretty fascinating. >> Yeah, you must have fascinating jobs. I mean, genuinely, it's so cool to get to not only see and have your finger on the pulse of what's coming next, essentially that's what startups are, but also be able to support them and to collaborate with them. And it's clear, the commitment to community and to the customers that you're serving. Last question for each of you, and then we're talking about your DJing. >> Oh yeah, I definitely, I want to see that. >> No, we're going to close with that as a little pitch for everyone watching this show. So, we make sure the crowd's just packed for that. This is your show, as you said, you live for this show, love that. >> Yeah. >> Give us your 30 second hot take, most important soundbites, think of this as your thought leadership shining moment. What's the biggest takeaway from the show? Biggest trend, thing that has you most excited? >> Oh, that's a difficult one. There's a lot going on. >> There is a lot going on. I mean, you can say a couple things. I'll allow you more than 30 seconds if you want. >> No, I mean, look, I just think the, well, what's fascinating to me in having this is my third or fourth re:Invent is just the volume of new announcements that come out. It's impressive, right? I mean it's impressive in terms of number of services, but then the depth of those services and the building on, I think it's just really amazing. I think that the trend you're going to continue to see and there's going to be more keynotes tomorrow, so, I can't let anything out. But just the AI, ML, real excited about that, analytic space, serverless, just continue to see the maturation of that space, particularly for startups. I think that to me is what's really exciting. And just seeing folks come together, start exchanging ideas, and I think the last piece I'll do is a pitch for my own team, like we have like 18 different sessions from the North American startup team. And so, I mean, shout out to our solution architects putting those sessions together, geared towards startups for startups, and so, that's probably what I'm most excited about. >> Casual, that was good, and you pitched it in time. I think that was great. >> There you go. >> All right, Jeff, you just had a little practice time while he was going. Let's (indistinct). >> No, so it's just exciting to see all the partners that we support here, so many of them have booths here and are showcasing their technology. And being able to connect them with customers to show how advanced their capabilities are that they're bringing to the table to supplement and compliment all the new capabilities that AWS is launching. So, to be able to see all of that in the same place at the same time and really hear what they need from a partnership perspective, that's what's special for us. >> Savanna: This is special. All right, Jimmy. >> My thoughts on re:Invent or? >> Not DJ yet. >> Not DJ. Not DJ, but I mean, your first re:Invent. Probably your first time getting to interact with a lot of the people that you chat with face to face. How does it feel? What's your hot take? Your look through the crystal ball, if you want to take it farther out in front. >> I think it's finally getting FaceTime with some of the relationships that I've built purely over Chime and virtual calls over the past two years has been incredible. And then secondly, to the technical enablement piece, I can announce this 'cause it was already announced earlier, is AWS Security Lake, one of my partners, Cribl, was actually a launch partner for that service. So, a little too to the Horn for Global Startup program, one of the coolest things at the tactical level as a PDM is working with them throughout the year and my partner solution architect finding these unique alignment opportunities with native AWS services and then seeing it build all the way through fruition at the finish line, announced at re:Invent, their logo up on screen, like that's, I can sleep well tonight. >> Job well done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty cool. >> That is cool. >> So, I've already told you before you even got here that you're a DJ and you happen to be DJing at re:Invent. Where can we all go dance and see you? >> So, shout out to Mission Cloud, who has sponsored Tao, Day Beach Club on Wednesday evening. So yes, I do DJ, I appreciate AWS's flexibility work life balance. So, I'll give that plug right here as well. But no, it's something I picked up during COVID, it's a creative outlet for me. And then again, to be able to do it here is just an incredible opportunity. So, Wednesday night I hope to see all theCUBE and everyone that... >> We will definitely be there, be careful what you wish for. >> What's your stage name? >> Oh, stage name, DJ Hot Hands, so, find me on SoundCloud. >> DJ Hot Hands. >> All right, so check out DJ Hot Hands on SoundCloud. And if folks want to learn more about the Global Startup program, where do they go? >> AWS Global Startup Program. We have a website you can easily connect with. All our startups are listed on AWS Marketplace. >> Most of them are Marketplace, you can go to our website, (mumbles) global startup program and yeah, find us there. >> Fantastic. Well, Jeff, Jimmy, Eric, it was an absolute pleasure starting the day. We got startups for breakfast. I love that. And I can't wait to go dance to you tomorrow night or tonight actually. I'm here for the fist bumps. This is awesome. And you all are great. Hope to have you back on theCUBE again very soon and we'll have to coordinate on that global Startup Showcase. >> Jimmy: All right. >> I think it's happening, 2023, get ready folks. >> Jimmy: Here we go. >> Get ready. All right, well, this was our first session here at AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the leader in high tech reporting. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, wonderful cloud community, and welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson, and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant gentlemen today. Please welcome Keith from Cockroach Labs and Jeff from AMD. Thank you both for tuning in, coming in from the East coast. How you doing? >> Not too bad. A little cold, but we're going >> Doing great. >> Love that and I love the enthusiasm Keith, you're definitely bringing the heat in the green room before we got on, so I'm going to open this up with you. Cockroach Labs puts out a pretty infamous and useful cloud report each year. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the approach and the data that you report on? >> Yeah, so Cockroach Labs builds a distributed SQL database that we are able to run across multiple cloud regions, multiple sites, multiple data centers. Frequently is running a hybrid kind of a use case and it's important for our customers to be able to compare the performance of configurations when they don't have exact the same hardware available to them in every single location. So since we were already doing this internally for ourselves and for our customers, we decided to turn it into something we shared with the greater community. And it's been a great experience for us. A lot of people come and ask us every year, "Hey, when's the new cloud report coming out?" Because they want to read it. It's been a great win for us. >> How many different things are you looking at? I mean, when you're comparing configurations I imagine there's a lot of different complex variables there. Just how much are you taking into consideration when you publish this report? >> Yeah, so we look at micro benchmarks around CPU network and storage. And then our flagship benchmark is we use the database itself where we have the most expertise to create a real world benchmark on across all of these instances. This year I think we tested over 150 different discrete configurations and it's a bit of a labor of love for us because we then not only do we consume it for best practices for our own as a service offering, but we share it with our customers. We use it internally to make all kinds of different decisions. >> Yeah, 150 different comparisons is not a small number. And Jeff, I know that AMD's position in this cloud report is really important. Where do you fit into all of this and what does it mean for you? >> Right, so what it means for us and for our customers is, there's a good breath and depth of testing that has gone of from the lab. And you look at this cloud report and it helps them traverse this landscape of, why to go on instance A, B, or C on certain workloads. And it really is very meaningful because they now have the real data across all those dimensional kinds of tests. So this definitely helps not only the customers but also for ourselves. So we can now look at ourselves more independently for feedback loops and say, "Hey, here's where we're doing well, here's where we're doing okay, here's where we need to improve on." All those things are important for us. So love seeing the lab present out such a great report as I've seen, very comprehensive, so I very much appreciate it. >> And specifically I love that you're both fans of each other, obviously, specifically digging in there, what does it mean that AMD had the best performance ratio tested on AWS instances? >> Yeah, so when we're looking at instances, we're not just looking at how fast something is, we're also looking at how much it costs to get that level of performance because CockroachDB as a distributed system has the opportunity to scale up and out. And so rather than necessarily wanting the fastest single instance performance, which is an important metric for certain use cases for sure, the comparison of price for performance when you can add notes to get more performance can be a much more economical thing for a lot of our customers. And so AMD has had a great showing on the price performance ratio for I think two years now. And it makes it hard to justify other instance types in a lot of circumstances simply because it's cheaper to get, for each transaction per second that you need, it's cheaper to use an AMD instance than it would be a competitive instance from another vendor. >> I mean, everyone I think no matter their sector wants to do things faster and cheaper and you're able to achieve both, it's easy to see why it's a choice that many folks would like to make. So what do these results mean for CIOs and CTOs? I can imagine there's a lot of value here in the FinOps world. >> Yep. Oh, I'll start a few of 'em. So from the C-suite when they're really looking at the problem statement, think of it as less granular, but higher level. So they're really looking at CapEx, OpEx, sustainability, security, sort of ecosystem on there. And then as Keith pointed out, hey, there's this TCO conversation that has to happen. In other words, as they're moving from sort of this lift and shift from their on-prem into the cloud, what does that mean to them for spend? So now if you're looking at the consistency around sort of the performance and the total cost of running this to their insights, to the conclusions, less time, more money in their pocket and maybe a reduction for their own customers so they can provide better for the customer side. What you're actually seeing is that's the challenge that they're facing in that landscape that they're driving towards that they need guidance and help with towards that. And we find AMD lends itself well to that scale out architecture that connects so well with how cloud microservices are run today. >> It's not surprising to hear that. Keith, what other tips and tricks do you have for CIOs and CTOs trying to reduce FinOps and continue to excel as they're building out? >> Yeah, so there were a couple of other insights that we learned this year. One of those two insights that I'd like to mention is that it's not always obvious what size and shape infrastructure you need to acquire to maximize your cost productions, right? So we found that smaller instance types were by and large had a better TCO than larger instances even across the exact same configurations, we kept everything else the same. Smaller instances had a better price performance ratio than the larger instances. The other thing that we discovered this year that was really interesting, we did a bit of a cost analysis on networking. And largely because we're distributed system, we can scan span across availability zones, we can span across regions, right? And one of the things we discovered this year is the amount of cost for transferring data between availability zones and the amount of cost for transferring data across regions at least in the United States was the same. So you could potentially get more resiliency by spanning your infrastructure across regions, then you would necessarily just spanning across availability zones. So you could be across multiple regions at the same cost as you were across availability zones, which for something like CockroachDB, we were designed to support those workloads is a really big and important thing for us. Now you have to be very particular about where you're purchasing your infrastructure and where those regions are. Because those data transfer rates change depending on what the source and the target is. But at least within the United States, we found that there was a strong correlation to being more survivable if you were in a multi-region deployment and the cost stayed pretty flat. >> That's interesting. So it's interesting to see what the correlation is between things and when you think there may be relationship between variables and when there maybe isn't. So on that note, since it seems like you're both always learning, I can imagine, what are you excited to test or learn about looking forward? Jeff, let's start with you actually. >> For sort of future testing. One of those things is certainly those more scale out sort of workloads with respect to showing scale. Meaning as I'm increasing the working set, as I'm increasing the number of connections, variability is another big thing of showing that minimization from run to run because performance is interesting but consistency is better. And as the lower side is from the instant sizes as I was talking about earlier, a (indistinct) architecture lends itself so well to it because they have the local caching and the CCDs that you can now put a number of vCPUs that will benefit from that delivery of the local caching and drive better performance at the lower side for that scale out sort of architecture, which is so consistent with the microservices. So I would be looking for more of those dimensional testings variability across a variety of workloads that you can go from memory intense workloads to database persistence store as well as a blend of the two, Kafka, et cetera. So there's a great breath and depth of testing that I am looking for and to more connect with sort of the CTOs and CIOs, the higher level that really show them that that CapEx, OpEx, sustainability and provide a bit more around that side of it because those are are the big things that they're focused on as well as security, the fact that based on working sets et cetera, AMD has the ability with confidential compute around those kind of offerings that can start to drive to those outcomes and help from what the CTOs and CIOs are looking for from compliance as well. So set them out (indistinct). >> So you're excited about a lot. No, that's great. That means you're very excited about the future. >> It's a journey that continues as Keith knows, there's always something new. >> Yeah, absolutely. What about you Keith? What is the most excited on the journey? >> Yeah, there are a couple of things I'd like to see us test next year. One of those is to test a multi-region CockroachDB config. We have a lot of customers running in that configuration and production but we haven't scaled that testing up to the same breadth that we we do with our single region testing which is what we've based the cloud report on for the past four years. The other thing that I'd really love to see us do,, I'm a Kubernetes SME, at least that's kind of my technical background. I would love to see us get to a spot where we're comparing the performance of raw EC2 instances to using that same infrastructure running CockroachDB via EKS and kind of see what the differences are there. The vast majority of CockroachDB customers are running at least a portion of their infrastructure in Kubernetes. So I feel like that would be a real great value add to the report for the next time that we go around but go about publishing it. >> If I don't mind adding to that just to volley it back for a moment. And also as I was saying about the ScaleOut and how it leverages our AMD architecture so well with EKS specifically around the spin up, spin down. So you think of a whole development life cycle. As they grow and shrink the resources over time, time of those spin ups to spin downs are expensive. So that has to be as reduced as much as possible. And I think they'll see a lot of benefits in AMD's architecture with EKS running on it as well. >> The future is bright. There's a lot of hype about many of the technologies that you both just mentioned, so I'm very curious to see what the next cloud report looks like. Thank you Keith, and the team for the labor of love that you put into that every year. And Jeff, I hope that you continue to be as well positioned as everyone's innovation journey continues. Keith and Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. As you know, this is a continuation of our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you for our next fascinating segment. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Good morning. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage at Supercomputing Conference 2022, live here in Dallas. I'm Dave Nicholson with my co-host Paul Gillin. So far so good, Paul? It's been a fascinating morning Three days in, and a fascinating guest, Ian from AWS. Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> What are we going to talk about? Batch computing, HPC. >> We've got a lot, let's get started. Let's dive right in. >> Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about. I mean, first thing is we recently announced our batch support for EKS. EKS is our Kubernetes, managed Kubernetes offering at AWS. And so batch computing is still a large portion of HPC workloads. While the interactive component is growing, the vast majority of systems are just kind of fire and forget, and we want to run thousands and thousands of nodes in parallel. We want to scale out those workloads. And what's unique about our AWS batch offering, is that we can dynamically scale, based upon the queue depth. And so customers can go from seemingly nothing up to thousands of nodes, and while they're executing their work they're only paying for the instances while they're working. And then as the queue depth starts to drop and the number of jobs waiting in the queue starts to drop, then we start to dynamically scale down those resources. And so it's extremely powerful. We see lots of distributed machine learning, autonomous vehicle simulation, and traditional HPC workloads taking advantage of AWS Batch. >> So when you have a Kubernetes cluster does it have to be located in the same region as the HPC cluster that's going to be doing the batch processing, or does the nature of batch processing mean, in theory, you can move something from here to somewhere relatively far away to do the batch processing? How does that work? 'Cause look, we're walking around here and people are talking about lengths of cables in order to improve performance. So what does that look like when you peel back the cover and you look at it physically, not just logically, AWS is everywhere, but physically, what does that look like? >> Oh, physically, for us, it depends on what the customer's looking for. We have workflows that are all entirely within a single region. And so where they could have a portion of say the traditional HPC workflow, is within that region as well as the batch, and they're saving off the results, say to a shared storage file system like our Amazon FSx for Lustre, or maybe aging that back to an S3 object storage for a little lower cost storage solution. Or you can have customers that have a kind of a multi-region orchestration layer to where they say, "You know what? "I've got a portion of my workflow that occurs "over on the other side of the country "and I replicate my data between the East Coast "and the West Coast just based upon business needs. "And I want to have that available to customers over there. "And so I'll do a portion of it in the East Coast "a portion of it in the West Coast." Or you can think of that even globally. It really depends upon the customer's architecture. >> So is the intersection of Kubernetes with HPC, is this relatively new? I know you're saying you're, you're announcing it. >> It really is. I think we've seen a growing perspective. I mean, Kubernetes has been a long time kind of eating everything, right, in the enterprise space? And now a lot of CIOs in the industrial space are saying, "Why am I using one orchestration layer "to manage my HPC infrastructure and another one "to manage my enterprise infrastructure?" And so there's a growing appreciation that, you know what, why don't we just consolidate on one? And so that's where we've seen a growth of Kubernetes infrastructure and our own managed Kubernetes EKS on AWS. >> Last month you announced a general availability of Trainium, of a chip that's optimized for AI training. Talk about what's special about that chip or what is is customized to the training workloads. >> Yeah, what's unique about the Trainium, is you'll you'll see 40% price performance over any other GPU available in the AWS cloud. And so we've really geared it to be that most price performance of options for our customers. And that's what we like about the silicon team, that we're part of that Annaperna acquisition, is because it really has enabled us to have this differentiation and to not just be innovating at the software level but the entire stack. That Annaperna Labs team develops our network cards, they develop our ARM cards, they developed this Trainium chip. And so that silicon innovation has become a core part of our differentiator from other vendors. And what Trainium allows you to do is perform similar workloads, just at a lower price performance. >> And you also have a chip several years older, called Inferentia- >> Um-hmm. >> Which is for inferencing. What is the difference between, I mean, when would a customer use one versus the other? How would you move the workload? >> What we've seen is customers traditionally have looked for a certain class of machine, more of a compute type that is not as accelerated or as heavy as you would need for Trainium for their inference portion of their workload. So when they do that training they want the really beefy machines that can grind through a lot of data. But when you're doing the inference, it's a little lighter weight. And so it's a different class of machine. And so that's why we've got those two different product lines with the Inferentia being there to support those inference portions of their workflow and the Trainium to be that kind of heavy duty training work. >> And then you advise them on how to migrate their workloads from one to the other? And once the model is trained would they switch to an Inferentia-based instance? >> Definitely, definitely. We help them work through what does that design of that workflow look like? And some customers are very comfortable doing self-service and just kind of building it on their own. Other customers look for a more professional services engagement to say like, "Hey, can you come in and help me work "through how I might modify my workflow to "take full advantage of these resources?" >> The HPC world has been somewhat slower than commercial computing to migrate to the cloud because- >> You're very polite. (panelists all laughing) >> Latency issues, they want to control the workload, they want to, I mean there are even issues with moving large amounts of data back and forth. What do you say to them? I mean what's the argument for ditching the on-prem supercomputer and going all-in on AWS? >> Well, I mean, to be fair, I started at AWS five years ago. And I can tell you when I showed up at Supercomputing, even though I'd been part of this community for many years, they said, "What is AWS doing at Supercomputing?" I know you care, wait, it's Amazon Web Services. You care about the web, can you actually handle supercomputing workloads? Now the thing that very few people appreciated is that yes, we could. Even at that time in 2017, we had customers that were performing HPC workloads. Now that being said, there were some real limitations on what we could perform. And over those past five years, as we've grown as a company, we've started to really eliminate those frictions for customers to migrate their HPC workloads to the AWS cloud. When I started in 2017, we didn't have our elastic fabric adapter, our low-latency interconnect. So customers were stuck with standard TCP/IP. So for their highly demanding open MPI workloads, we just didn't have the latencies to support them. So the jobs didn't run as efficiently as they could. We didn't have Amazon FSx for Lustre, our managed lustre offering for high performant, POSIX-compliant file system, which is kind of the key to a large portion of HPC workloads is you have to have a high-performance file system. We didn't even, I mean, we had about 25 gigs of networking when I started. Now you look at, with our accelerated instances, we've got 400 gigs of networking. So we've really continued to grow across that spectrum and to eliminate a lot of those really, frictions to adoption. I mean, one of the key ones, we had a open source toolkit that was jointly developed by Intel and AWS called CFN Cluster that customers were using to even instantiate their clusters. So, and now we've migrated that all the way to a fully functional supported service at AWS called AWS Parallel Cluster. And so you've seen over those past five years we have had to develop, we've had to grow, we've had to earn the trust of these customers and say come run your workloads on us and we will demonstrate that we can meet your demanding requirements. And at the same time, there's been, I'd say, more of a cultural acceptance. People have gone away from the, again, five years ago, to what are you doing walking around the show, to say, "Okay, I'm not sure I get it. "I need to look at it. "I, okay, I, now, oh, it needs to be a part "of my architecture but the standard questions, "is it secure? "Is it price performant? "How does it compare to my on-prem?" And really culturally, a lot of it is, just getting IT administrators used to, we're not eliminating a whole field, right? We're just upskilling the people that used to rack and stack actual hardware, to now you're learning AWS services and how to operate within that environment. And it's still key to have those people that are really supporting these infrastructures. And so I'd say it's a little bit of a combination of cultural shift over the past five years, to see that cloud is a super important part of HPC workloads, and part of it's been us meeting the the market segment of where we needed to with innovating both at the hardware level and at the software level, which we're going to continue to do. >> You do have an on-prem story though. I mean, you have outposts. We don't hear a lot of talk about outposts lately, but these innovations, like Inferentia, like Trainium, like the networking innovation you're talking about, are these going to make their way into outposts as well? Will that essentially become this supercomputing solution for customers who want to stay on-prem? >> Well, we'll see what the future lies, but we believe that we've got the, as you noted, we've got the hardware, we've got the network, we've got the storage. All those put together gives you a a high-performance computer, right? And whether you want it to be redundant in your local data center or you want it to be accessible via APIs from the AWS cloud, we want to provide that service to you. >> So to be clear, that's not that's not available now, but that is something that could be made available? >> Outposts are available right now, that have this the services that you need. >> All these capabilities? >> Often a move to cloud, an impetus behind it comes from the highest levels in an organization. They're looking at the difference between OpEx versus CapEx. CapEx for a large HPC environment, can be very, very, very high. Are these HPC clusters consumed as an operational expense? Are you essentially renting time, and then a fundamental question, are these multi-tenant environments? Or when you're referring to batches being run in HPC, are these dedicated HPC environments for customers who are running batches against them? When you think about batches, you think of, there are times when batches are being run and there are times when they're not being run. So that would sort of conjure, in the imagination, multi-tenancy, what does that look like? >> Definitely, and that's been, let me start with your second part first is- >> Yeah. That's been a a core area within AWS is we do not see as, okay we're going to, we're going to carve out this super computer and then we're going to allocate that to you. We are going to dynamically allocate multi-tenant resources to you to perform the workloads you need. And especially with the batch environment, we're going to spin up containers on those, and then as the workloads complete we're going to turn those resources over to where they can be utilized by other customers. And so that's where the batch computing component really is powerful, because as you say, you're releasing resources from workloads that you're done with. I can use those for another portion of the workflow for other work. >> Okay, so it makes a huge difference, yeah. >> You mentioned, that five years ago, people couldn't quite believe that AWS was at this conference. Now you've got a booth right out in the center of the action. What kind of questions are you getting? What are people telling you? >> Well, I love being on the show floor. This is like my favorite part is talking to customers and hearing one, what do they love, what do they want more of? Two, what do they wish we were doing that we're not currently doing? And three, what are the friction points that are still exist that, like, how can I make their lives easier? And what we're hearing is, "Can you help me migrate my workloads to the cloud? "Can you give me the information that I need, "both from a price for performance, "for an operational support model, "and really help me be an internal advocate "within my environment to explain "how my resources can be operated proficiently "within the AWS cloud." And a lot of times it's, let's just take your application a subset of your applications and let's benchmark 'em. And really that, AWS, one of the key things is we are a data-driven environment. And so when you take that data and you can help a customer say like, "Let's just not look at hypothetical, "at synthetic benchmarks, let's take "actually the LS-DYNA code that you're running, perhaps. "Let's take the OpenFOAM code that you're running, "that you're running currently "in your on-premises workloads, "and let's run it on AWS cloud "and let's see how it performs." And then we can take that back to your to the decision makers and say, okay, here's the price for performance on AWS, here's what we're currently doing on-premises, how do we think about that? And then that also ties into your earlier question about CapEx versus OpEx. We have models where actual, you can capitalize a longer-term purchase at AWS. So it doesn't have to be, I mean, depending upon the accounting models you want to use, we do have a majority of customers that will stay with that OpEx model, and they like that flexibility of saying, "Okay, spend as you go." We need to have true ups, and make sure that they have insight into what they're doing. I think one of the boogeyman is that, oh, I'm going to spend all my money and I'm not going to know what's available. And so we want to provide the, the cost visibility, the cost controls, to where you feel like, as an HPC administrator you have insight into what your customers are doing and that you have control over that. And so once you kind of take away some of those fears and and give them the information that they need, what you start to see too is, you know what, we really didn't have a lot of those cost visibility and controls with our on-premises hardware. And we've had some customers tell us we had one portion of the workload where this work center was spending thousands of dollars a day. And we went back to them and said, "Hey, we started to show this, "what you were spending on-premises." They went, "Oh, I didn't realize that." And so I think that's part of a cultural thing that, at an HPC, the question was, well on-premises is free. How do you compete with free? And so we need to really change that culturally, to where people see there is no free lunch. You're paying for the resources whether it's on-premises or in the cloud. >> Data scientists don't worry about budgets. >> Wait, on-premises is free? Paul mentioned something that reminded me, you said you were here in 2017, people said AWS, web, what are you even doing here? Now in 2022, you're talking in terms of migrating to cloud. Paul mentioned outposts, let's say that a customer says, "Hey, I'd like you to put "in a thousand-node cluster in this data center "that I happen to own, but from my perspective, "I want to interact with it just like it's "in your data center." In other words, the location doesn't matter. My experience is identical to interacting with AWS in an AWS data center, in a CoLo that works with AWS, but instead it's my physical data center. When we're tracking the percentage of IT that's that is on-prem versus off-prem. What is that? Is that, what I just described, is that cloud? And in five years are you no longer going to be talking about migrating to cloud because people go, "What do you mean migrating to cloud? "What do you even talking about? "What difference does it make?" It's either something that AWS is offering or it's something that someone else is offering. Do you think we'll be at that point in five years, where in this world of virtualization and abstraction, you talked about Kubernetes, we should be there already, thinking in terms of it doesn't matter as long as it meets latency and sovereignty requirements. So that, your prediction, we're all about insights and supercomputing- >> My prediction- >> In five years, will you still be talking about migrating to cloud or will that be something from the past? >> In five years, I still think there will be a component. I think the majority of the assumption will be that things are cloud-native and you start in the cloud and that there are perhaps, an aspect of that, that will be interacting with some sort of an edge device or some sort of an on-premises device. And we hear more and more customers that are saying, "Okay, I can see the future, "I can see that I'm shrinking my footprint." And, you can see them still saying, "I'm not sure how small that beachhead will be, "but right now I want to at least say "that I'm going to operate in that hybrid environment." And so I'd say, again, the pace of this community, I'd say five years we're still going to be talking about migrations, but I'd say the vast majority will be a cloud-native, cloud-first environment. And how do you classify that? That outpost sitting in someone's data center? I'd say we'd still, at least I'll leave that up to the analysts, but I think it would probably come down as cloud spend. >> Great place to end. Ian, you and I now officially have a bet. In five years we're going to come back. My contention is, no we're not going to be talking about it anymore. >> Okay. >> And kids in college are going to be like, "What do you mean cloud, it's all IT, it's all IT." And they won't remember this whole phase of moving to cloud and back and forth. With that, join us in five years to see the result of this mega-bet between Ian and Dave. I'm Dave Nicholson with theCUBE, here at Supercomputing Conference 2022, day three of our coverage with my co-host Paul Gillin. Thanks again for joining us. Stay tuned, after this short break, we'll be back with more action. (lively music)

>> From every ISV to solve the problems. You want there to be tools in place that you can use, either open source tools or whatever it is that help you build it. And slowly over time, that building will become easier and easier. So my question to you was, where do you see you playing? Do you see yourself playing to ISVs as a set of tools, which will make their life a lot easier and provide that work? >> Absolutely. >> If they don't have, so they don't have to do it. Or you're providing this for the end users? Or both? >> So it's a progression. If you go to the ISVs first, you're doomed to starved before you have time for that other option. >> Yeah. >> Right? So it's a question of phase, the phasing of it. And also if you go directly to end users, you can demonstrate the power of it and get the attention of the ISVs. I believe that the ISVs, especially those with the biggest footprints and the most, you know, coveted estates, they have already made massive investments at trying to solve decentralization of their software stack. And I believe that they have used it as a hook to try to move to a software as a service model and rope people into leasing their infrastructure. So if you look at the clouds that have been propped up by Autodesk or by Adobe, or you name the company, they are building proprietary makeshift solutions for decentralizing or hybrid clouding. Or maybe they're not even doing that at all and all they're is saying hey, if you want to get location agnosticness, then what you should just, is just move into our cloud. >> Right. >> And then they try to solve on the background how to decentralize it between different regions so they can have decent offerings in each region. But those who are more advanced have already made larger investments and will be more averse to, you know, throwing that stuff away, all of their makeshift machinery away, and using a platform that gives them high performance parallel, low level file system access, while at the same time having metadata-driven, you know, policy-based, intent-based orchestration to manage the diffusion of data across a decentralized infrastructure. They are not going to be as open because they've made such an investment and they're going to look at how do they monetize it. So what we have found with like the movie studios who are using us already, many of the app they're using, many of those software offerings, the ISVs have their own cloud that offers that software for the cloud. But what we got when I asked about this, 'cause I was dealt specifically into this question because I'm very interested to know how we're going to make that leap from end user upstream into the ISVs where I believe we need to, and they said, look, we cannot use these software ISV-specific SAS clouds for two reasons. Number one is we lose control of the data. We're giving it to them. That's security and other issues. And here you're talking about we're doing work for Disney, we're doing work for Netflix, and they're not going to let us put our data on those software clouds, on those SAS clouds. Secondly, in any reasonable pipeline, the data is shared by many different applications. We need to be agnostic as to the application. 'Cause the inputs to one application, you know, the output for one application provides the input to the next, and it's not necessarily from the same vendor. So they need to have a data platform that lets them, you know, go from one software stack, and you know, to run it on another. Because they might do the rendering with this and yet, they do the editing with that, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the further you go up the stack in the structured data and dedicated applications for specific functions in specific verticals, the further up the stack you go, the harder it is to justify a SAS offering where you're basically telling the end users you need to park all your data with us and then you can run your application in our cloud and get this. That ultimately is a dead end path versus having the data be open and available to many applications across this supercloud layer. >> Okay, so-- >> Is that making any sense? >> Yes, so if I could just ask a clarifying question. So, if I had to take Snowflake as an example, I think they're doing exactly what you're saying is a dead end, put everything into our proprietary system and then we'll figure out how to distribute it. >> Yeah. >> And and I think if you're familiar with Zhamak Dehghaniis' data mesh concept. Are you? >> A little bit, yeah. >> But in her model, Snowflake, a Snowflake warehouse is just a node on the mesh and that mesh is-- >> That's right. >> Ultimately the supercloud and you're an enabler of that is what I'm hearing. >> That's right. What they're doing up at the structured level and what they're talking about at the structured level we're doing at the underlying, unstructured level, which by the way has implications for how you implement those distributed database things. In other words, implementing a Snowflake on top of Hammerspace would have made building stuff like in the first place easier. It would allow you to easily shift and run the database engine anywhere. You still have to solve how to shard and distribute at the transaction layer above, so I'm not saying we're a substitute for what you need to do at the app layer. By the way, there is another example of that and that's Microsoft Office, right? It's one thing to share that, to have a file share where you can share all the docs. It's something else to have Word and PowerPoint, Excel know how to allow people to be simultaneously editing the same doc. That's always going to happen in the app layer. But not all applications need that level of, you know, in-app decentralization. You know, many of them, many workflows are pipelined, especially the ones that are very data intensive where you're doing drug discovery or you're doing rendering, or you're doing machine learning training. These things are human in the loop with large stages of processing across tens of thousands of cores. And I think that kind of data processing pipeline is what we're focusing on first. Not so much the Microsoft Office or the Snowflake, you know, parking a relational database because that takes a lot of application layer stuff and that's what they're good at. >> Right. >> But I think... >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Later entrance in these markets will find Hammerspace as a way to accelerate their work so they can focus more narrowly on just the stuff that's app-specific, higher level sharing in the app. >> Yes, Snowflake founders-- >> I think it might be worth mentioning also, just keep this confidential guys, but one of our customers is Blue Origin. And one of the things that we have found is kind of the point of what you're talking about with our customers. They're needing to build this and since it's not commercially available or they don't know where to look for it to be commercially available, they're all building themselves. So this layer is needed. And Blue is just one of the examples of quite a few we're now talking to. And like manufacturing, HPC, research where they're out trying to solve this problem with their own scripting tools and things like that. And I just, I don't know if there's anything you want to add, David, but you know, but there's definitely a demand here and customers are trying to figure out how to solve it beyond what Hammerspace is doing. Like the need is so great that they're just putting developers on trying to do it themselves. >> Well, and you know, Snowflake founders, they didn't have a Hammerspace to lean on. But, one of the things that's interesting about supercloud is we feel as though industry clouds will emerge, that as part of company's digital transformations, they will, you know, every company's a software company, they'll begin to build their own clouds and they will be able to use a Hammerspace to do that. >> A super pass layer. >> Yes. It's really, I don't know if David's speaking, I don't want to speak over him, but we can't hear you. May be going through a bad... >> Well, a regional, regional talks that make that possible. And so they're doing these render farms and editing farms, and it's a cloud-specific to the types of workflows in the median entertainment world. Or clouds specifically to workflows in the chip design world or in the drug and bio and life sciences exploration world. There are large organizations that are kind of a blend of end users, like the Broad, which has their own kind of cloud where they're asking collaborators to come in and work with them. So it starts to even blur who's an end user versus an ISV. >> Yes. >> Right? When you start talking about the massive data is the main gravity is to having lots of people participate. >> Yep, and that's where the value is. And that's where the value is. And this is a megatrend that we see. And so it's really important for us to get to the point of what is and what is not a supercloud and, you know, that's where we're trying to evolve. >> Let's talk about this for a second 'cause I want to, I want to challenge you on something and it's something that I got challenged on and it has led me to thinking differently than I did at first, which Molly can attest to. Okay? So, we have been looking for a way to talk about the concept of cloud of utility computing, run anything anywhere that isn't addressed in today's realization of cloud. 'Cause today's cloud is not run anything anywhere, it's quite the opposite. You park your data in AWS and that's where you run stuff. And you pretty much have to. Same with with Azure. They're using data gravity to keep you captive there, just like the old infrastructure guys did. But now it's even worse because it's coupled back with the software to some degree, as well. And you have to use their storage, networking, and compute. It's not, I mean it fell back to the mainframe era. Anyhow, so I love the concept of supercloud. By the way, I was going to suggest that a better term might be hyper cloud since hyper speaks to the multidimensionality of it and the ability to be in a, you know, be in a different dimension, a different plane of existence kind of thing like hyperspace. But super and hyper are somewhat synonyms. I mean, you have hyper cars and you have super cars and blah, blah, blah. I happen to like hyper maybe also because it ties into the whole Hammerspace notion of a hyper-dimensional, you know, reality, having your data centers connected by a wormhole that is Hammerspace. But regardless, what I got challenged on is calling it something different at all versus simply saying, this is what cloud has always meant to be. This is the true cloud, this is real cloud, this is cloud. And I think back to what happened, you'll remember, at Fusion IO we talked about IO memory and we did that because people had a conceptualization of what an SSD was. And an SSD back then was low capacity, low endurance, made to go military, aerospace where things needed to be rugged but was completely useless in the data center. And we needed people to imagine this thing as being able to displace entire SAND, with the kind of capacity density, performance density, endurance. And so we talked IO memory, we could have said enterprise SSD, and that's what the industry now refers to for that concept. What will people be saying five and 10 years from now? Will they simply say, well this is cloud as it was always meant to be where you are truly able to run anything anywhere and have not only the same APIs, but you're same data available with high performance access, all forms of access, block file and object everywhere. So yeah. And I wonder, and this is just me throwing it out there, I wonder if, well, there's trade offs, right? Giving it a new moniker, supercloud, versus simply talking about how cloud is always intended to be and what it was meant to be, you know, the real cloud or true cloud, there are trade-offs. By putting a name on it and branding it, that lets people talk about it and understand they're talking about something different. But it also is that an affront to people who thought that that's what they already had. >> What's different, what's new? Yes, and so we've given a lot of thought to this. >> Right, it's like you. >> And it's because we've been asked that why does the industry need a new term, and we've tried to address some of that. But some of the inside baseball that we haven't shared is, you remember the Web 2.0, back then? >> Yep. >> Web 2.0 was the same thing. And I remember Tim Burners Lee saying, "Why do we need Web 2.0? "This is what the Web was always supposed to be." But the truth is-- >> I know, that was another perfect-- >> But the truth is it wasn't, number one. Number two, everybody hated the Web 2.0 term. John Furrier was actually in the middle of it all. And then it created this groundswell. So one of the things we wrote about is that supercloud is an evocative term that catalyzes debate and conversation, which is what we like, of course. And maybe that's self-serving. But yeah, HyperCloud, Metacloud, super, meaning, it's funny because super came from Latin supra, above, it was never the superlative. But the superlative was a convenient byproduct that caused a lot of friction and flack, which again, in the media business is like a perfect storm brewing. >> The bad thing to have to, and I think you do need to shake people out of their, the complacency of the limitations that they're used to. And I'll tell you what, the fact that you even have the terms hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, private cloud, edge computing, those are all just referring to the different boundaries that isolate the silo that is the current limited cloud. >> Right. >> So if I heard correctly, what just, in terms of us defining what is and what isn't in supercloud, you would say traditional applications which have to run in a certain place, in a certain cloud can't run anywhere else, would be the stuff that you would not put in as being addressed by supercloud. And over time, you would want to be able to run the data where you want to and in any of those concepts. >> Or even modern apps, right? Or even modern apps that are siloed in SAS within an individual cloud, right? >> So yeah, I guess it's twofold. Number one, if you're going at the high application layers, there's lots of ways that you can give the appearance of anything running anywhere. The ISV, the SAS vendor can engineer stuff to have the ability to serve with low enough latency to different geographies, right? So if you go too high up the stack, it kind of loses its meaning because there's lots of different ways to make due and give the appearance of omni-presence of the service. Okay? As you come down more towards the platform layer, it gets harder and harder to mask the fact that supercloud is something entirely different than just a good regionally-distributed SAS service. So I don't think you, I don't think you can distinguish supercloud if you go too high up the stack because it's just SAS, it's just a good SAS service where the SAS vendor has done the hard work to give you low latency access from different geographic regions. >> Yeah, so this is one of the hardest things, David. >> Common among them. >> Yeah, this is really an important point. This is one of the things I've had the most trouble with is why is this not just SAS? >> So you dilute your message when you go up to the SAS layer. If you were to focus most of this around the super pass layer, the how can you host applications and run them anywhere and not host this, not run a service, not have a service available everywhere. So how can you take any application, even applications that are written, you know, in a traditional legacy data center fashion and be able to run them anywhere and have them have their binaries and their datasets and the runtime environment and the infrastructure to start them and stop them? You know, the jobs, the, what the Kubernetes, the job scheduler? What we're really talking about here, what I think we're really talking about here is building the operating system for a decentralized cloud. What is the operating system, the operating environment for a decentralized cloud? Where you can, and that the main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are the process scheduler, the thing that's scheduling what is running where and when and so forth, and the file system, right? The thing that's supplying a common view and access to data. So when we talk about this, I think that the strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk of it, talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications. >> Would you exclude--? >> Not a specific application that's been engineered as a SAS. (audio distortion) >> He'll come back. >> Are you there? >> Yeah, yeah, you just cut out for a minute. >> I lost your last statement when you broke up. >> We heard you, you said that not the specific application. So would you exclude Snowflake from supercloud? >> Frankly, I would. I would. Because, well, and this is kind of hard to do because Snowflake doesn't like to, Frank doesn't like to talk about Snowflake as a SAS service. It has a negative connotation. >> But it is. >> I know, we all know it is. We all know it is and because it is, yes, I would exclude them. >> I think I actually have him on camera. >> There's nothing in common. >> I think I have him on camera or maybe Benoit as saying, "Well, we are a SAS." I think it's Slootman. I think I said to Slootman, "I know you don't like to say you're a SAS." And I think he said, "Well, we are a SAS." >> Because again, if you go to the top of the application stack, there's any number of ways you can give it location agnostic function or you know, regional, local stuff. It's like let's solve the location problem by having me be your one location. How can it be decentralized if you're centralizing on (audio distortion)? >> Well, it's more decentralized than if it's all in one cloud. So let me actually, so the spectrum. So again, in the spirit of what is and what isn't, I think it's safe to say Hammerspace is supercloud. I think there's no debate there, right? Certainly among this crowd. And I think we can all agree that Dell, Dell Storage is not supercloud. Where it gets fuzzy is this Snowflake example or even, how about a, how about a Cohesity that instantiates its stack in different cloud regions in different clouds, and synchronizes, however magic sauce it does that. Is that a supercloud? I mean, so I'm cautious about having too strict of a definition 'cause then only-- >> Fair enough, fair enough. >> But I could use your help and thoughts on that. >> So I think we're talking about two different spectrums here. One is the spectrum of platform to application-specific. As you go up the application stack and it becomes this specific thing. Or you go up to the more and more structured where it's serving a specific application function where it's more of a SAS thing. I think it's harder to call a SAS service a supercloud. And I would argue that the reason there, and what you're lacking in the definition is to talk about it as general purpose. Okay? Now, that said, a data warehouse is general purpose at the structured data level. So you could make the argument for why Snowflake is a supercloud by saying that it is a general purpose platform for doing lots of different things. It's just one at a higher level up at the structured data level. So one spectrum is the high level going from platform to, you know, unstructured data to structured data to very application-specific, right? Like a specific, you know, CAD/CAM mechanical design cloud, like an Autodesk would want to give you their cloud for running, you know, and sharing CAD/CAM designs, doing your CAD/CAM anywhere stuff. Well, the other spectrum is how well does the purported supercloud technology actually live up to allowing you to run anything anywhere with not just the same APIs but with the local presence of data with the exact same runtime environment everywhere, and to be able to correctly manage how to get that runtime environment anywhere. So a Cohesity has some means of running things in different places and some means of coordinating what's where and of serving diff, you know, things in different places. I would argue that it is a very poor approximation of what Hammerspace does in providing the exact same file system with local high performance access everywhere with metadata ability to control where the data is actually instantiated so that you don't have to wait for it to get orchestrated. But even then when you do have to wait for it, it happens automatically and so it's still only a matter of, well, how quick is it? And on the other end of the spectrum is you could look at NetApp with Flexcache and say, "Is that supercloud?" And I would argue, well kind of because it allows you to run things in different places because it's a cache. But you know, it really isn't because it presumes some central silo from which you're cacheing stuff. So, you know, is it or isn't it? Well, it's on a spectrum of exactly how fully is it decoupling a runtime environment from specific locality? And I think a cache doesn't, it stretches a specific silo and makes it have some semblance of similar access in other places. But there's still a very big difference to the central silo, right? You can't turn off that central silo, for example. >> So it comes down to how specific you make the definition. And this is where it gets kind of really interesting. It's like cloud. Does IBM have a cloud? >> Exactly. >> I would say yes. Does it have the kind of quality that you would expect from a hyper-scale cloud? No. Or see if you could say the same thing about-- >> But that's a problem with choosing a name. That's the problem with choosing a name supercloud versus talking about the concept of cloud and how true up you are to that concept. >> For sure. >> Right? Because without getting a name, you don't have to draw, yeah. >> I'd like to explore one particular or bring them together. You made a very interesting observation that from a enterprise point of view, they want to safeguard their store, their data, and they want to make sure that they can have that data running in their own workflows, as well as, as other service providers providing services to them for that data. So, and in in particular, if you go back to, you go back to Snowflake. If Snowflake could provide the ability for you to have your data where you wanted, you were in charge of that, would that make Snowflake a supercloud? >> I'll tell you, in my mind, they would be closer to my conceptualization of supercloud if you can instantiate Snowflake as software on your own infrastructure, and pump your own data to Snowflake that's instantiated on your own infrastructure. The fact that it has to be on their infrastructure or that it's on their, that it's on their account in the cloud, that you're giving them the data and they're, that fundamentally goes against it to me. If they, you know, they would be a pure, a pure plate if they were a software defined thing where you could instantiate Snowflake machinery on the infrastructure of your choice and then put your data into that machinery and get all the benefits of Snowflake. >> So did you see--? >> In other words, if they were not a SAS service, but offered all of the similar benefits of being, you know, if it were a service that you could run on your own infrastructure. >> So did you see what they announced, that--? >> I hope that's making sense. >> It does, did you see what they announced at Dell? They basically announced the ability to take non-native Snowflake data, read it in from an object store on-prem, like a Dell object store. They do the same thing with Pure, read it in, running it in the cloud, and then push it back out. And I was saying to Dell, look, that's fine. Okay, that's interesting. You're taking a materialized view or an extended table, whatever you're doing, wouldn't it be more interesting if you could actually run the query locally with your compute? That would be an extension that would actually get my attention and extend that. >> That is what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. And that's why I'm saying I think Hammerspace is more progressive on that front because with our technology, anybody who can instantiate a service, can make a service. And so I, so MSPs can use Hammerspace as a way to build a super pass layer and host their clients on their infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. And their clients can have their own private data centers and the MSP or the public clouds, and Hammerspace can be instantiated, get this, by different parties in these different pieces of infrastructure and yet linked together to make a common file system across all of it. >> But this is data mesh. If I were HPE and Dell it's exactly what I'd be doing. I'd be working with Hammerspace to create my own data. I'd work with Databricks, Snowflake, and any other-- >> Data mesh is a good way to put it. Data mesh is a good way to put it. And this is at the lowest level of, you know, the underlying file system that's mountable by the operating system, consumed as a real file system. You can't get lower level than that. That's why this is the foundation for all of the other apps and structured data systems because you need to have a data mesh that can at least mesh the binary blob. >> Okay. >> That hold the binaries and that hold the datasets that those applications are running. >> So David, in the third week of January, we're doing supercloud 2 and I'm trying to convince John Furrier to make it a data slash data mesh edition. I'm slowly getting him to the knothole. I would very much, I mean you're in the Bay Area, I'd very much like you to be one of the headlines. As Zhamak Dehghaniis going to speak, she's the creator of Data Mesh, >> Sure. >> I'd love to have you come into our studio as well, for the live session. If you can't make it, we can pre-record. But you're right there, so I'll get you the dates. >> We'd love to, yeah. No, you can count on it. No, definitely. And you know, we don't typically talk about what we do as Data Mesh. We've been, you know, using global data environment. But, you know, under the covers, that's what the thing is. And so yeah, I think we can frame the discussion like that to line up with other, you know, with the other discussions. >> Yeah, and Data Mesh, of course, is one of those evocative names, but she has come up with some very well defined principles around decentralized data, data as products, self-serve infrastructure, automated governance, and and so forth, which I think your vision plugs right into. And she's brilliant. You'll love meeting her. >> Well, you know, and I think.. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Peter. >> Just like to work one other interface which I think is important. How do you see yourself and the open source? You talked about having an operating system. Obviously, Linux is the operating system at one level. How are you imagining that you would interface with cost community as part of this development? >> Well, it's funny you ask 'cause my CTO is the kernel maintainer of the storage networking stack. So how the Linux operating system perceives and consumes networked data at the file system level, the network file system stack is his purview. He owns that, he wrote most of it over the last decade that he's been the maintainer, but he's the gatekeeper of what goes in. And we have leveraged his abilities to enhance Linux to be able to use this decentralized data, in particular with decoupling the control plane driven by metadata from the data access path and the many storage systems on which the data gets accessed. So this factoring, this splitting of control plane from data path, metadata from data, was absolutely necessary to create a data mesh like we're talking about. And to be able to build this supercloud concept. And the highways on which the data runs and the client which knows how to talk to it is all open source. And we have, we've driven the NFS 4.2 spec. The newest NFS spec came from my team. And it was specifically the enhancements needed to be able to build a spanning file system, a data mesh at a file system level. Now that said, our file system itself and our server, our file server, our data orchestration, our data management stuff, that's all closed source, proprietary Hammerspace tech. But the highways on which the mesh connects are actually all open source and the client that knows how to consume it. So we would, honestly, I would welcome competitors using those same highways. They would be at a major disadvantage because we kind of built them, but it would still be very validating and I think only increase the potential adoption rate by more than whatever they might take of the market. So it'd actually be good to split the market with somebody else to come in and share those now super highways for how to mesh data at the file system level, you know, in here. So yeah, hopefully that answered your question. Does that answer the question about how we embrace the open source? >> Right, and there was one other, just that my last one is how do you enable something to run in every environment? And if we take the edge, for example, as being, as an environment which is much very, very compute heavy, but having a lot less capability, how do you do a hold? >> Perfect question. Perfect question. What we do today is a software appliance. We are using a Linux RHEL 8, RHEL 8 equivalent or a CentOS 8, or it's, you know, they're all roughly equivalent. But we have bundled and a software appliance which can be instantiated on bare metal hardware on any type of VM system from VMware to all of the different hypervisors in the Linux world, to even Nutanix and such. So it can run in any virtualized environment and it can run on any cloud instance, server instance in the cloud. And we have it packaged and deployable from the marketplaces within the different clouds. So you can literally spin it up at the click of an API in the cloud on instances in the cloud. So with all of these together, you can basically instantiate a Hammerspace set of machinery that can offer up this file system mesh. like we've been using the terminology we've been using now, anywhere. So it's like being able to take and spin up Snowflake and then just be able to install and run some VMs anywhere you want and boom, now you have a Snowflake service. And by the way, it is so complete that some of our customers, I would argue many aren't even using public clouds at all, they're using this just to run their own data centers in a cloud-like fashion, you know, where they have a data service that can span it all. >> Yeah and to Molly's first point, we would consider that, you know, cloud. Let me put you on the spot. If you had to describe conceptually without a chalkboard what an architectural diagram would look like for supercloud, what would you say? >> I would say it's to have the same runtime environment within every data center and defining that runtime environment as what it takes to schedule the execution of applications, so job scheduling, runtime stuff, and here we're talking Kubernetes, Slurm, other things that do job scheduling. We're talking about having a common way to, you know, instantiate compute resources. So a global compute environment, having a common compute environment where you can instantiate things that need computing. Okay? So that's the first part. And then the second is the data platform where you can have file block and object volumes, and have them available with the same APIs in each of these distributed data centers and have the exact same data omnipresent with the ability to control where the data is from one moment to the next, local, where all the data is instantiate. So my definition would be a common runtime environment that's bifurcate-- >> Oh. (attendees chuckling) We just lost them at the money slide. >> That's part of the magic makes people listen. We keep someone on pin and needles waiting. (attendees chuckling) >> That's good. >> Are you back, David? >> I'm on the edge of my seat. Common runtime environment. It was like... >> And just wait, there's more. >> But see, I'm maybe hyper-focused on the lower level of what it takes to host and run applications. And that's the stuff to schedule what resources they need to run and to get them going and to get them connected through to their persistence, you know, and their data. And to have that data available in all forms and have it be the same data everywhere. On top of that, you could then instantiate applications of different types, including relational databases, and data warehouses and such. And then you could say, now I've got, you know, now I've got these more application-level or structured data-level things. I tend to focus less on that structured data level and the application level and am more focused on what it takes to host any of them generically on that super pass layer. And I'll admit, I'm maybe hyper-focused on the pass layer and I think it's valid to include, you know, higher levels up the stack like the structured data level. But as soon as you go all the way up to like, you know, a very specific SAS service, I don't know that you would call that supercloud. >> Well, and that's the question, is there value? And Marianna Tessel from Intuit said, you know, we looked at it, we did it, and it just, it was actually negative value for us because connecting to all these separate clouds was a real pain in the neck. Didn't bring us any additional-- >> Well that's 'cause they don't have this pass layer underneath it so they can't even shop around, which actually makes it hard to stand up your own SAS service. And ultimately they end up having to build their own infrastructure. Like, you know, I think there's been examples like Netflix moving away from the cloud to their own infrastructure. Basically, if you're going to rent it for more than a few months, it makes sense to build it yourself, if it's at any kind of scale. >> Yeah, for certain components of that cloud. But if the Goldman Sachs came to you, David, and said, "Hey, we want to collaborate and we want to build "out a cloud and essentially build our SAS system "and we want to do that with Hammerspace, "and we want to tap the physical infrastructure "of not only our data centers but all the clouds," then that essentially would be a SAS, would it not? And wouldn't that be a Super SAS or a supercloud? >> Well, you know, what they may be using to build their service is a supercloud, but their service at the end of the day is just a SAS service with global reach. Right? >> Yeah. >> You know, look at, oh shoot. What's the name of the company that does? It has a cloud for doing bookkeeping and accounting. I forget their name, net something. NetSuite. >> NetSuite. NetSuite, yeah, Oracle. >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> Oracle acquired them, right? Is NetSuite a supercloud or is it just a SAS service? You know? I think under the covers you might ask are they using supercloud under the covers so that they can run their SAS service anywhere and be able to shop the venue, get elasticity, get all the benefits of cloud in the, to the benefit of their service that they're offering? But you know, folks who consume the service, they don't care because to them they're just connecting to some endpoint somewhere and they don't have to care. So the further up the stack you go, the more location-agnostic it is inherently anyway. >> And I think it's, paths is really the critical layer. We thought about IAS Plus and we thought about SAS Minus, you know, Heroku and hence, that's why we kind of got caught up and included it. But SAS, I admit, is the hardest one to crack. And so maybe we exclude that as a deployment model. >> That's right, and maybe coming down a level to saying but you can have a structured data supercloud, so you could still include, say, Snowflake. Because what Snowflake is doing is more general purpose. So it's about how general purpose it is. Is it hosting lots of other applications or is it the end application? Right? >> Yeah. >> So I would argue general purpose nature forces you to go further towards platform down-stack. And you really need that general purpose or else there is no real distinguishing. So if you want defensible turf to say supercloud is something different, I think it's important to not try to wrap your arms around SAS in the general sense. >> Yeah, and we've kind of not really gone, leaned hard into SAS, we've just included it as a deployment model, which, given the constraints that you just described for structured data would apply if it's general purpose. So David, super helpful. >> Had it sign. Define the SAS as including the hybrid model hold SAS. >> Yep. >> Okay, so with your permission, I'm going to add you to the list of contributors to the definition. I'm going to add-- >> Absolutely. >> I'm going to add this in. I'll share with Molly. >> Absolutely. >> We'll get on the calendar for the date. >> If Molly can share some specific language that we've been putting in that kind of goes to stuff we've been talking about, so. >> Oh, great. >> I think we can, we can share some written kind of concrete recommendations around this stuff, around the general purpose, nature, the common data thing and yeah. >> Okay. >> Really look forward to it and would be glad to be part of this thing. You said it's in February? >> It's in January, I'll let Molly know. >> Oh, January. >> What the date is. >> Excellent. >> Yeah, third week of January. Third week of January on a Tuesday, whatever that is. So yeah, we would welcome you in. But like I said, if it doesn't work for your schedule, we can prerecord something. But it would be awesome to have you in studio. >> I'm sure with this much notice we'll be able to get something. Let's make sure we have the dates communicated to Molly and she'll get my admin to set it up outside so that we have it. >> I'll get those today to you, Molly. Thank you. >> By the way, I am so, so pleased with being able to work with you guys on this. I think the industry needs it very bad. They need something to break them out of the box of their own mental constraints of what the cloud is versus what it's supposed to be. And obviously, the more we get people to question their reality and what is real, what are we really capable of today that then the more business that we're going to get. So we're excited to lend the hand behind this notion of supercloud and a super pass layer in whatever way we can. >> Awesome. >> Can I ask you whether your platforms include ARM as well as X86? >> So we have not done an ARM port yet. It has been entertained and won't be much of a stretch. >> Yeah, it's just a matter of time. >> Actually, entertained doing it on behalf of NVIDIA, but it will absolutely happen because ARM in the data center I think is a foregone conclusion. Well, it's already there in some cases, but not quite at volume. So definitely will be the case. And I'll tell you where this gets really interesting, discussion for another time, is back to my old friend, the SSD, and having SSDs that have enough brains on them to be part of that fabric. Directly. >> Interesting. Interesting. >> Very interesting. >> Directly attached to ethernet and able to create a data mesh global file system, that's going to be really fascinating. Got to run now. >> All right, hey, thanks you guys. Thanks David, thanks Molly. Great to catch up. Bye-bye. >> Bye >> Talk to you soon.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(light music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's special presentation with Horizon3.ai with Rainer Richter, Vice President of EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific, APAC Horizon3.ai. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So Horizon3.ai, driving global expansion, big international news with a partner-first approach. You guys are expanding internationally. Let's get into it. You guys are driving this new expanse partner program to new heights. Tell us about it. What are you seeing in the momentum? Why the expansion? What's all the news about? >> Well, I would say in international, we have, I would say a similar situation like in the US. There is a global shortage of well-educated penetration testers on the one hand side. On the other side, we have a raising demand of network and infrastructure security. And with our approach of an autonomous penetration testing, I believe we are totally on top of the game, especially as we have also now starting with an international instance. That means for example, if a customer in Europe is using our service, NodeZero, he will be connected to a NodeZero instance, which is located inside the European Union. And therefore, he doesn't have to worry about the conflict between the European GDPR regulations versus the US CLOUD Act. And I would say there, we have a total good package for our partners that they can provide differentiators to their customers. >> You know, we've had great conversations here on theCUBE with the CEO and the founder of the company around the leverage of the cloud and how successful that's been for the company. And obviously, I can just connect the dots here, but I'd like you to weigh in more on how that translates into the go-to-market here because you got great cloud scale with the security product you guys are having success with. Great leverage there, I'm seeing a lot of success there. What's the momentum on the channel partner program internationally? Why is it so important to you? Is it just the regional segmentation? Is it the economics? Why the momentum? >> Well, there are multiple issues. First of all, there is a raising demand in penetration testing. And don't forget that in international, we have a much higher level number or percentage in SMB and mid-market customers. So these customers, typically, most of them even didn't have a pen test done once a year. So for them, pen testing was just too expensive. Now with our offering together with our partners, we can provide different ways how customers could get an autonomous pen testing done more than once a year with even lower costs than they had with a traditional manual pen test, and that is because we have our Consulting PLUS package, which is for typically pen testers. They can go out and can do a much faster, much quicker pen test at many customers after each other. So they can do more pen test on a lower, more attractive price. On the other side, there are others or even the same one who are providing NodeZero as an MSSP service. So they can go after SMP customers saying, "Okay, you only have a couple of hundred IP addresses. No worries, we have the perfect package for you." And then you have, let's say the mid-market. Let's say the thousand and more employees, then they might even have an annual subscription. Very traditional, but for all of them, it's all the same. The customer or the service provider doesn't need a piece of hardware. They only need to install a small piece of a Docker container and that's it. And that makes it so smooth to go in and say, "Okay, Mr. Customer, we just put in this virtual attacker into your network, and that's it and all the rest is done." And within three clicks, they can act like a pen tester with 20 years of experience. >> And that's going to be very channel-friendly and partner-friendly, I can almost imagine. So I have to ask you, and thank you for calling out that breakdown and segmentation. That was good, that was very helpful for me to understand, but I want to follow up, if you don't mind. What type of partners are you seeing the most traction with and why? >> Well, I would say at the beginning, typically, you have the innovators, the early adapters, typically boutique-size of partners. They start because they are always looking for innovation. Those are the ones, they start in the beginning. So we have a wide range of partners having mostly even managed by the owner of the company. So they immediately understand, okay, there is the value, and they can change their offering. They're changing their offering in terms of penetration testing because they can do more pen tests and they can then add others ones. Or we have those ones who offered pen test services, but they did not have their own pen testers. So they had to go out on the open market and source pen testing experts to get the pen test at a particular customer done. And now with NodeZero, they're totally independent. They can go out and say, "Okay, Mr. Customer, here's the service. That's it, we turn it on. And within an hour, you are up and running totally." >> Yeah, and those pen tests are usually expensive and hard to do. Now it's right in line with the sales delivery. Pretty interesting for a partner. >> Absolutely, but on the other hand side, we are not killing the pen tester's business. We are providing with NodeZero, I would call something like the foundational work. The foundational work of having an ongoing penetration testing of the infrastructure, the operating system. And the pen testers by themselves, they can concentrate in the future on things like application pen testing, for example. So those services, which we are not touching. So we are not killing the pen tester market. We are just taking away the ongoing, let's say foundation work, call it that way. >> Yeah, yeah. That was one of my questions. I was going to ask is there's a lot of interest in this autonomous pen testing. One because it's expensive to do because those skills are required are in need and they're expensive. (chuckles) So you kind of cover the entry-level and the blockers that are in there. I've seen people say to me, "This pen test becomes a blocker for getting things done." So there's been a lot of interest in the autonomous pen testing and for organizations to have that posture. And it's an overseas issue too because now you have that ongoing thing. So can you explain that particular benefit for an organization to have that continuously verifying an organization's posture? >> Certainly. So I would say typically, you have to do your patches. You have to bring in new versions of operating systems, of different services, of operating systems of some components, and they are always bringing new vulnerabilities. The difference here is that with NodeZero, we are telling the customer or the partner the package. We're telling them which are the executable vulnerabilities because previously, they might have had a vulnerability scanner. So this vulnerability scanner brought up hundreds or even thousands of CVEs, but didn't say anything about which of them are vulnerable, really executable. And then you need an expert digging in one CVE after the other, finding out is it really executable, yes or no? And that is where you need highly-paid experts, which where we have a shortage. So with NodeZero now, we can say, "Okay, we tell you exactly which ones are the ones you should work on because those are the ones which are executable. We rank them accordingly to risk level, how easily they can be used." And then the good thing is converted or in difference to the traditional penetration test, they don't have to wait for a year for the next pen test to find out if the fixing was effective. They run just the next scan and say, "Yes, closed. Vulnerability is gone." >> The time is really valuable. And if you're doing any DevOps, cloud-native, you're always pushing new things. So pen test, ongoing pen testing is actually a benefit just in general as a kind of hygiene. So really, really interesting solution. Really bringing that global scale is going to be a new coverage area for us, for sure. I have to ask you, if you don't mind answering, what particular region are you focused on or plan to target for this next phase of growth? >> Well, at this moment, we are concentrating on the countries inside the European Union plus United Kingdom. And of course, logically, I'm based in the Frankfurt area. That means we cover more or less the countries just around. So it's like the so-called DACH region, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, plus the Netherlands. But we also already have partners in the Nordic, like in Finland and Sweden. So we have partners already in the UK and it's rapidly growing. So for example, we are now starting with some activities in Singapore and also in the Middle East area. Very important, depending on let's say, the way how to do business. Currently, we try to concentrate on those countries where we can have, let's say at least English as an accepted business language. >> Great, is there any particular region you're having the most success with right now? Sounds like European Union's kind of first wave. What's the most- >> Yes, that's the first. Definitely, that's the first wave. And now with also getting the European INSTANCE up and running, it's clearly our commitment also to the market saying, "Okay, we know there are certain dedicated requirements and we take care of this." And we are just launching, we are building up this one, the instance in the AWS service center here in Frankfurt. Also, with some dedicated hardware, internet, and a data center in Frankfurt, where we have with the DE-CIX, by the way, the highest internet interconnection bandwidth on the planet. So we have very short latency to wherever you are on the globe. >> That's a great call out benefit too. I was going to ask that. What are some of the benefits your partners are seeing in EMEA and Asia Pacific? >> Well, I would say, the benefits for them, it's clearly they can talk with customers and can offer customers penetration testing, which they before even didn't think about because penetration testing in a traditional way was simply too expensive for them, too complex, the preparation time was too long, they didn't have even have the capacity to support an external pen tester. Now with this service, you can go in and even say, "Mr. Customer, we can do a test with you in a couple of minutes. We have installed a Docker container. Within 10 minutes, we have the pen test started. That's it and then we just wait." And I would say we are seeing so many aha moments then. On the partner side, when they see NodeZero the first time working, it's like they say, "Wow, that is great." And then they walk out to customers and show it to their typically at the beginning, mostly the friendly customers like, "Wow, that's great, I need that." And I would say the feedback from the partners is that is a service where I do not have to evangelize the customer. Everybody understands penetration testing, I don't have to describe what it is. The customer understanding immediately, "Yes. Penetration testing, heard about that. I know I should do it, but too complex, too expensive." Now for example, as an MSSP service provided from one of our partners, it's getting easy. >> Yeah, and it's great benefit there. I mean, I got to say I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. I like this continuous automation. That's a major benefit to anyone doing DevOps or any kind of modern application development. This is just a godsend for them, this is really good. And like you said, the pen testers that are doing it, they were kind of coming down from their expertise to kind of do things that should have been automated. They get to focus on the bigger ticket items. That's a really big point. >> Exactly. So we free them, we free the pen testers for the higher level elements of the penetration testing segment, and that is typically the application testing, which is currently far away from being automated. >> Yeah, and that's where the most critical workloads are, and I think this is the nice balance. Congratulations on the international expansion of the program, and thanks for coming on this special presentation. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. >> Okay, this is theCUBE special presentation, you know, checking on pen test automation, international expansion, Horizon3.ai. A really innovative solution. In our next segment, Chris Hill, Sector Head for Strategic Accounts, will discuss the power of Horizon3.ai and Splunk in action. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (steady music)

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the Cube's day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah, the big >>Set and we're very excited to be welcoming back. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but >>First time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west >>Nice. Well, I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or high. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives who was on my board, bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. >>I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago. And now COER so that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors, Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Sure. Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah. I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of an overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassy at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian at IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NEX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet in the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and VSAN and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could enhance VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player it's gonna be out. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multicloud. So I can go to an a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control, plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna play the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multi-cloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform, >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 20, >>Quite a bit in that session. Yeah. So he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be so I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep and I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right. For disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimble and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right? And snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank sluman doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational. See you no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I, you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X bike cheaper, faster with the Webscale, a glass or for the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just back recovery. Right. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes hitting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no lay than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys of penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar of what? >>Yep. And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's >>Not. And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not bolted on, okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, >>This security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things we've talking about, Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you know, I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look incredibly, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shocks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed. And, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You seen, I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company. Officer of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to wear this. I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank movement. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo, DIA and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually a kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows mot very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the snowflakes had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB open source to data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most, what are you most anxious about? And what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come to world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies, I would worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but they're are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of 'em and it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's step Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me, it's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought out the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda NA Tago. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels and going write that sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a mid-size company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you too. Best of luck. Congratulations on the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanja. We always appreciate having thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanjay poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)