(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

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

(light music) >> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain everyone. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE Dave Vellante, my co-host for the next four days. We're live in Barcelona, covering MWC23. This is only day one, but I'll tell you the theme of this conference this year is velocity. And I don't know about you Dave, but this day is flying by already. This is ecosystem day. We're going to have a great discussion on the ecosystem next. >> Well we're seeing the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, and that necessitates an ecosystem open- we're going to talk about Open RAN, we've been talking about even leading up to the show. It's a critical technology enabler and it's compulsory to have an ecosystem to support that. >> Absolutely compulsory. We've got two guests here joining us, Gautam Bhagra, Vice President partnerships at Dell, and Scott Walker, Vice President of global Telco ecosystem at Wind River. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Nice to be here. >> Thanks For having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you've got some news, this is day one of the conference, there's some news, Gautam, and let's start with you, unpack it. >> Yeah, well there's a lot of news, as you know, on Dell World. One of the things we are very excited to announce today is the launch of the Open Telecom Ecosystems Community. I think Dave, as you mentioned, getting into an Open RAN world is a challenge. And we know some of the challenges that our customers face. To help solve for those challenges, Dell wants to work with like-minded partners and customers to build innovative solutions, and join go-to-market. So we are launching that today. Wind River is one of our flagship partners for that, and I'm excited to be here to talk about that as well. >> Can you guys talk a little bit about the partnership, maybe a little bit about Wind River so the audience gets that context? >> Sure, absolutely, and the theme of the show, Velocity, is what this partnership is all about. We create velocity for operators if they want to adopt Open RAN, right? We simplify it. Wind River as a company has been around for 40 years. We were part of Intel at one point, and now we're independent, owned by a company called Aptiv. And with that we get another round of investment to help continue our acceleration into this market. So, the Dell partnership is about, like I said, velocity, accelerating the adoption. When we talk to operators, they have told us there are many roadblocks that they face, right? Like systems integration, operating at scale. 'Cause when you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it's very easy. It's works, it's been tested. When you break these components apart and disaggregate 'em, as we talked about David, it creates integration points and support issues, right? And what Dell and Wind River have done together is created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads, and essentially create a two layer cake. What we're, overall, what we're trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience, with the innovation agility and flexibility of Open RAN. And that's really what this partnership does. >> So these work, this workload innovation is interesting to me because you've got now developers, you know, the, you know, what's the telco developer look like, you know, is to be defined, right? I mean it's like this white sheet of paper that can create all this innovation. And to do that, you've got to have, as I said earlier, an ecosystem. But you've got now, I'm interested in your Open RAN agenda and how you see that sort of maturity model taking place. 'Cause today, you got disruptors that are going to lean right in say "Hey, yeah, that's great." The traditional carriers, they have to have a, you know, they have to migrate, they have to have a hybrid world. We know that takes time. So what's that look like in the marketplace today? >> Yeah, so I mean, I can start, right? So from a Dell's perspective, what we see in the market is yes, there is a drive towards, everyone understands the benefits of being open, right? There's the agility piece, the innovation piece. That's a no-brainer. The question is how do we get there? And I think that's where partnerships become critical to get there, right? So we've been working with partners like Wind River to build solutions that make it easier for customers to start adopting some of the foundational elements of an open network. The, one of the purposes in the agenda of building this community is to bring like-minded developers, like you said like we want those guys to come and work with the customers to create new solutions, and come up with something creative, which no one's even thought about, that accelerates your option even quicker, right? So that's exactly what we want to do as well. And that's one of the reasons why we launched the community. >> Yeah, and what we find with a lot of carriers, they are used to buying, like I said, traditional RAN solutions which are provided from a single provider like Erickson or Nokia and others, right? And we break this apart, and you cloudify that network infrastructure, there's usually a skills gap we see at the operator level, right? And so from a developer standpoint, they struggle with having the expertise in order to execute on that. Wind River helps them, working with companies like Dell, simplify that bottom portion of the stack, the infrastructure stack. So, and we lifecycle manage it, we test- we're continually testing it, and integrating it, so that the operator doesn't have to do that. In addition to that, wind River also has a history and legacy of working with different RAN vendors, both disruptors like Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, as well as traditional RAN providers like Samsung, Erickson, and others soon to be announced. So what we're doing on the northbound side is making it easy by integrating that, and on the southbound side with Dell, so that again, instead of four or five solutions that you need to put together, it's simply two. >> And you think about today how we- how you consume telco services are like there's these fixed blocks of services that you can buy, that has to change. It's more like the, the app stores. It's got to be an open marketplace, and that's where the innovation's going to come in, you know, from the developers, you know, top down maybe. I don't know, how do you see that maturity model evolving? People want to know how long it's going to take. So many questions, when will Open RAN be as reliable. Does it even have to be? You know, so many interesting dynamics going on. >> Yeah, and I think that's something we at Dell are also trying to find out, right? So we have been doing a lot of good work here to help our customers move in that direction. The work with Dish is an example of that. But I think we do understand the challenges as well in terms of getting, adopting the technologies, and adopting the innovation that's being driven by Open. So one of the agendas that we have as a company this year is to work with the community to drive this a lot further, right? We want to have customers adopt the technology more broadly with the tier one, tier two telcos globally. And our sales organizations are going to be working together with Wind Rivers to figure out who's the right set of customers to have these conversations with, so we can drop, drive, start driving this agenda a lot quicker than what we've seen historically. >> And where are you having those customer conversations? Is that at the operator level, is it higher, is it both? >> Well, all operators are deploying 5G in preparation for 6G, right? And we're all looking for those killer use cases which will drive top line revenue and not just make it a TCO discussion. And that starts at a very basic level today by doing things like integrating with Juniper, for their cloud router. So instead of at the far edge cell site, having a separate device that's doing the routing function, right? We take that and we cloudify that application, run it on the same server that's hosting the RAN applications, so you eliminate a device and reduce TCO. Now with Aptiv, which is primarily known as an automotive company, we're having lots of conversations, including with Dell and Intel and others about vehicle to vehicle communication, vehicle to anything communication. And although that's a little bit futuristic, there are shorter term use cases that, like, vehicle to vehicle accident avoidance, which are going to be much nearer term than autonomous driving, for example, which will help drive traffic and new revenue streams for operators. >> So, oh, that's, wow. So many other things (Scott laughs) that's just opened up there too. But I want to come back to, sort of, the Open RAN adoption. And I think you're right, there's a lot of questions that that still have to be determined. But my question is this, based on your knowledge so far does it have to be as hardened and reliable, obviously has to be low latency as existing networks, or can flexibility, like the cloud when it first came out, wasn't better than enterprise IT, it was just more flexible and faster, and you could rent it. And, is there a similar dynamic here where it doesn't have to replicate the hardened stack, it can bring in new benefits that drive adoption, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well there's a couple of things on that, because Wind River, as you know, where our legacy and history is in embedded devices like F-15 fighter jets, right? Or the Mars Rover or the James Web telescope, all run Wind River software. So, we know about can't fail ultra reliable systems, and operators are not letting us off the hook whatsoever. It has to be as hardened and locked down, as secure as a traditional RAN environment. Otherwise they will (indistinct). >> That's table stakes. >> That's table stakes that gets us there. And when River, with our legacy and history, and having operator experience running live commercial networks with a disaggregated stack in the tens of thousands of nodes, understand what this is like because they're running live commercial traffic with live customers. So we can't fail, right? And with that, they want their cake and eat it too, right? Which is, I want ultra reliable, I want what I have today, but I want the agility and flexibility to onboard third party apps. Like for example, this JCNR, this Juniper Cloud-Native Router. You cannot do something as simple as that on a traditional RAN Appliance. In an open ecosystem you can take that workload and onboard it because it is an open ecosystem, and that's really one of the true benefits. >> So they want the mainframe, but they want (Scott laughs) the flexibility of the developer cloud, right? >> That's right. >> They want their, have their cake eat it too and not gain weight. (group laughs) >> Yeah I mean David, I come from the public cloud world. >> We all don't want to do that. >> I used to work with a public cloud company, and nine years ago, public cloud was in the same stage, where you would go to a bank, and they would be like, we don't trust the cloud. It's not secure, it's not safe. It was the digital natives that adopted it, and that that drove the industry forward, right? And that's where the enterprises that realized that they're losing business because of all these innovative new companies that came out. That's what I saw over the last nine years in the cloud space. I think in the telco space also, something similar might happen, right? So a lot of this, I mean a lot of the new age telcos are understanding the value, are looking to innovate are adopting the open technologies, but there's still some inertia and hesitancy, for the reasons as Scott mentioned, to go there so quickly. So we just have to work through and balance between both sides. >> Yeah, well with that said, if there's still some inertia, but there's a theme of velocity, how do you help organizations balance that so they trust evolving? >> Yeah, and I think this is where our solution, like infrastructure block, is a foundational pillar to make that happen, right? So if we can take away the concerns that the organizations have in terms of security, reliability from the fundamental elements that build their infrastructure, by working with partners like Wind River, but Dell takes the ownership end-to-end to make sure that service works and we have those telco grade SLAs, then the telcos can start focusing on what's next. The applications and the customer services on the top. >> Customer service customer experience. >> You know, that's an interesting point Gautam brings up, too, because support is an issue too. We all talk about when you break these things apart, it creates integration points that you need to manage, right? But there's also, so the support aspect of it. So imagine if you will, you had one vendor, you have an outage, you call that one vendor, one necktie to choke, right, for accountability for the network. Now you have four or five vendors that you have to work. You get a lot of finger pointing. So at least at the infrastructure layer, right? Dell takes first call support for both the hardware infrastructure and the Wind River cloud infrastructure for both. And we are training and spinning them up to support, but we're always behind them of course as well. >> Can you give us a favorite customer example of- that really articulates the value of the partnership and the technologies that it's delivering to customers? >> Well, Infra Block- >> (indistinct) >> Is quite new, and we do have our first customer which is LG U plus, which was announced yesterday. Out of Korea, small customer, but a very important one. Okay, and I think they saw the value of the integrated system. They don't have the (indistinct) expertise and they're leveraging Dell and Wind River in order to make that happen. But I always also say historically before this new offering was Vodafone, right? Vodafone is a leader in Europe in terms of Open RAN, been very- Yago and Paco have been very vocal about what they're doing in Open RAN, and Dell and Wind River have been there with them every step of the way. And that's what I would say, kind of, led up to where we are today. We learned from engagements like Vodafone and I think KDDI as well. And it got us where we are today and understanding what the operators need and what the impediments are. And this directly addresses that. >> Those are two very different examples. You were talking about TCO before. I mean, so the earlier example is, that's an example to me of a disruptor. They'll take some chances, you know, maybe not as focused on TCO, of course they're concerned about it. Vodafone I would think very concerned about TCO. But I'm inferring from your comments that you're trying to get the industry, you're trying to check the TCO box, get there. And then move on to higher levels of value monetization. The TCO is going to come down to how many humans it takes to run the network, is it not, is that- >> Well a lot of, okay- >> Or is it devices- >> So the big one now, particularly with Vodafone, is energy cost, right? >> Of course, greening the network. >> Two-thirds of the energy consumption in RAN is the the Radio Access Network. Okay, the OPEX, right? So any reductions, even if they're 5% or 10%, can save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So we do things creatively with Dell to understand if there's a lot of traffic at the cell site and if it's not, we will change the C state or P state of the server, which basically spins it down, so it's not consuming power. But that's just at the infrastructure layer. Where this gets really powerful is working with the RAN vendors like Samsung and Ericson and others, and taking data from the traffic information there, applying algorithms to that in AI to shut it down and spin it back up as needed. 'Cause the idea is you don't want that thing powered up if there's no traffic on it. >> Well there's a sustainability, ESG, benefit to that, right? >> Yes. >> And, and it's very compute intensive. >> A hundred percent. >> Which is great for Dell. But at the same time, if you're not able to manage that power consumption, the whole thing fails. I mean it's, because there's going to be so much data, and such a intense requirement. So this is a huge issue. Okay, so Scott, you're saying that in the TCO equation, a big chunk is energy consumption? >> On the OPEX piece. Now there's also the CapEx, right? And Open RAN solutions are now, what we've heard from our customers today, are they're roughly at parity. 'Cause you can do things like repurpose servers after the useful life for a lower demand application which helps the TCO, right? Then you have situations like Juniper, where you can take, now software that runs on the same device, eliminating at a whole other device at the cell site. So we're not just taking a server and software point of view, we're taking a whole cell site point of view as it relates to both CapEx and OPEX. >> And then once that infrastructure it really gets adopted, that's when the innovation occurs. The ecosystem comes in. Developers now start to think of new applications that we haven't thought of yet. >> Gautam: Exactly. >> And that's where, that's going to force the traditional carriers to respond. They're responding, but they're doing so very carefully right now, it's understandable why. >> Yeah, and I think you're already seeing some news in the, I mean Nokia's announcement yesterday with the rebranding, et cetera. That's all positive momentum in my opinion, right? >> What'd you think of the logo? >> I love the logo. >> I liked it too. (group laughs) >> It was beautiful. >> I thought it was good. You had the connectivity down below, You need pipes, right? >> Exactly. >> But you had this sort of cool letters, and then the the pink horizon or pinkish, it was like (Scott laughs) endless opportunity. It was good, I thought it was well thought out. >> Exactly. >> Well, you pick up on an interesting point there, and what we're seeing, like advanced carriers like Dish, who has one of the true Open RAN networks, publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G network as part of the application. But we're also seeing the network equipment providers also enable carriers do that, 'cause carriers historically have not been advanced in that way. So there is a real recognition that in order for these networks to monetize new use cases, they need to be programmable, and they need to publish standard APIs, so you can access the 5G network capabilities through software. >> Yeah, and the problem from the carriers, there's not enough APIs that the carriers have produced yet. So that's where the ecosystem comes in, is going to >> A hundred percent >> I think there's eight APIs that are published out of the traditional carriers, which is, I mean there's got to be 8,000 for a marketplace. So that's where the open ecosystem really has the advantage. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> So it all makes sense on paper, now you just, you got a lot of work to do. >> We got to deliver. Yeah, we launched it today. We got to get some like-minded partners and customers to come together. You'll start seeing results coming out of this hopefully soon, and we'll talk more about it over time. >> Dave: Great Awesome, thanks for sharing with us. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you for sharing, stopping by, sharing what's going on with Dell and Wind River, and why the opportunity's in it for customers and the technological evolution. We appreciate it, you'll have to come back, give us an update. >> Our pleasure, thanks for having us. (Group talks over each other) >> All right, thanks guys >> Appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, Live from MWC23 in Barcelona. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone at Supercloud 2 event, live here in Palo Alto, theCUBE Studios live stage performance, virtually syndicating it all over the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here as Cube alumni, and special influencer guest, Howie Xu, VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler, also part-time as a CUBE analyst 'cause he is that good. Comes on all the time. You're basically a CUBE analyst as well. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for inviting me. >> John: Technically, you're not really a CUBE analyst, but you're kind of like a CUBE analyst. >> Happy New Year to everyone. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> Great to see you, Dave and John. >> John: We've been talking about ChatGPT online. You wrote a great post about it being more like Amazon, not like Google. >> Howie: More than just Google Search. >> More than Google Search. Oh, it's going to compete with Google Search, which it kind of does a little bit, but more its infrastructure. So a clever point, good segue into this conversation, because this is kind of the beginning of these kinds of next gen things we're going to see. Things where it's like an obvious next gen, it's getting real. Kind of like seeing the browser for the first time, Mosaic browser. Whoa, this internet thing's real. I think this is that moment and Supercloud like enablement is coming. So this has been a big part of the Supercloud kind of theme. >> Yeah, you talk about Supercloud, you talk about, you know, AI, ChatGPT. I really think the ChatGPT is really another Netscape moment, the browser moment. Because if you think about internet technology, right? It was brewing for 20 years before early 90s. Not until you had a, you know, browser, people realize, "Wow, this is how wonderful this technology could do." Right? You know, all the wonderful things. Then you have Yahoo and Amazon. I think we have brewing, you know, the AI technology for, you know, quite some time. Even then, you know, neural networks, deep learning. But not until ChatGPT came along, people realize, "Wow, you know, the user interface, user experience could be that great," right? So I really think, you know, if you look at the last 30 years, there is a browser moment, there is iPhone moment. I think ChatGPT moment is as big as those. >> Dave: What do you see as the intersection of things like ChatGPT and the Supercloud? Of course, the media's going to focus, journalists are going to focus on all the negatives and the privacy. Okay. You know we're going to get by that, right? Always do. Where do you see the Supercloud and sort of the distributed data fitting in with ChatGPT? Does it use that as a data source? What's the link? >> Howie: I think there are number of use cases. One of the use cases, we talked about why we even have Supercloud because of the complexity, because of the, you know, heterogeneous nature of different clouds. In order for me as a developer, in order for me to create applications, I have so many things to worry about, right? It's a complexity. But with ChatGPT, with the AI, I don't have to worry about it, right? Those kind of details will be taken care of by, you know, the underlying layer. So we have been talking about on this show, you know, over the last, what, year or so about the Supercloud, hey, defining that, you know, API layer spanning across, you know, multiple clouds. I think that will be happening. However, for a lot of the things, that will be more hidden, right? A lot of that will be automated by the bots. You know, we were just talking about it right before the show. One of the profound statement I heard from Adrian Cockcroft about 10 years ago was, "Hey Howie, you know, at Netflix, right? You know, IT is just one API call away." That's a profound statement I heard about a decade ago. I think next decade, right? You know, the IT is just one English language away, right? So when it's one English language away, it's no longer as important, API this, API that. You still need API just like hardware, right? You still need all of those things. That's going to be more hidden. The high level thing will be more, you know, English language or the language, right? Any language for that matter. >> Dave: And so through language, you'll tap services that live across the Supercloud, is what you're saying? >> Howie: You just tell what you want, what you desire, right? You know, the bots will help you to figure out where the complexity is, right? You know, like you said, a lot of criticism about, "Hey, ChatGPT doesn't do this, doesn't do that." But if you think about how to break things down, right? For instance, right, you know, ChatGPT doesn't have Microsoft stock price today, obviously, right? However, you can ask ChatGPT to write a program for you, retrieve the Microsoft stock price, (laughs) and then just run it, right? >> Dave: Yeah. >> So the thing to think about- >> John: It's only going to get better. It's only going to get better. >> The thing people kind of unfairly criticize ChatGPT is it doesn't do this. But can you not break down humans' task into smaller things and get complex things to be done by the ChatGPT? I think we are there already, you know- >> John: That to me is the real game changer. That's the assembly of atomic elements at the top of the stack, whether the interface is voice or some programmatic gesture based thing, you know, wave your hand or- >> Howie: One of the analogy I used in my blog was, you know, each person, each professional now is a quarterback. And we suddenly have, you know, a lot more linebacks or you know, any backs to work for you, right? For free even, right? You know, and then that's sort of, you should think about it. You are the quarterback of your day-to-day job, right? Your job is not to do everything manually yourself. >> Dave: You call the play- >> Yes. >> Dave: And they execute. Do your job. >> Yes, exactly. >> Yeah, all the players are there. All the elves are in the North Pole making the toys, Dave, as we say. But this is the thing, I want to get your point. This change is going to require a new kind of infrastructure software relationship, a new kind of operating runtime, a new kind of assembler, a new kind of loader link things. This very operating systems kind of concepts. >> Data intensive, right? How to process the data, how to, you know, process so gigantic data in parallel, right? That's actually a tough job, right? So if you think about ChatGPT, why OpenAI is ahead of the game, right? You know, Google may not want to acknowledge it, right? It's not necessarily they do, you know, not have enough data scientist, but the software engineering pieces, you know, behind it, right? To train the model, to actually do all those things in parallel, to do all those things in a cost effective way. So I think, you know, a lot of those still- >> Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question because we've had this conversation privately, but I want to do it while we're on stage here. Where are all the alpha geeks and developers and creators and entrepreneurs going to gravitate to? You know, in every wave, you see it in crypto, all the alphas went into crypto. Now I think with ChatGPT, you're going to start to see, like, "Wow, it's that moment." A lot of people are going to, you know, scrum and do startups. CTOs will invent stuff. There's a lot of invention, a lot of computer science and customer requirements to figure out. That's new. Where are the alpha entrepreneurs going to go to? What do you think they're going to gravitate to? If you could point to the next layer to enable this super environment, super app environment, Supercloud. 'Cause there's a lot to do to enable what you just said. >> Howie: Right. You know, if you think about using internet as the analogy, right? You know, in the early 90s, internet came along, browser came along. You had two kind of companies, right? One is Amazon, the other one is walmart.com. And then there were company, like maybe GE or whatnot, right? Really didn't take advantage of internet that much. I think, you know, for entrepreneurs, suddenly created the Yahoo, Amazon of the ChatGPT native era. That's what we should be all excited about. But for most of the Fortune 500 companies, your job is to surviving sort of the big revolution. So you at least need to do your walmart.com sooner than later, right? (laughs) So not be like GE, right? You know, hand waving, hey, I do a lot of the internet, but you know, when you look back last 20, 30 years, what did they do much with leveraging the- >> So you think they're going to jump in, they're going to build service companies or SaaS tech companies or Supercloud companies? >> Howie: Okay, so there are two type of opportunities from that perspective. One is, you know, the OpenAI ish kind of the companies, I think the OpenAI, the game is still open, right? You know, it's really Close AI today. (laughs) >> John: There's room for competition, you mean? >> There's room for competition, right. You know, you can still spend you know, 50, $100 million to build something interesting. You know, there are company like Cohere and so on and so on. There are a bunch of companies, I think there is that. And then there are companies who's going to leverage those sort of the new AI primitives. I think, you know, we have been talking about AI forever, but finally, finally, it's no longer just good, but also super useful. I think, you know, the time is now. >> John: And if you have the cloud behind you, what do you make the Amazon do differently? 'Cause Amazon Web Services is only going to grow with this. It's not going to get smaller. There's more horsepower to handle, there's more needs. >> Howie: Well, Microsoft already showed what's the future, right? You know, you know, yes, there is a kind of the container, you know, the serverless that will continue to grow. But the future is really not about- >> John: Microsoft's shown the future? >> Well, showing that, you know, working with OpenAI, right? >> Oh okay. >> They already said that, you know, we are going to have ChatGPT service. >> $10 billion, I think they're putting it. >> $10 billion putting, and also open up the Open API services, right? You know, I actually made a prediction that Microsoft future hinges on OpenAI. I think, you know- >> John: They believe that $10 billion bet. >> Dave: Yeah. $10 billion bet. So I want to ask you a question. It's somewhat academic, but it's relevant. For a number of years, it looked like having first mover advantage wasn't an advantage. PCs, spreadsheets, the browser, right? Social media, Friendster, right? Mobile. Apple wasn't first to mobile. But that's somewhat changed. The cloud, AWS was first. You could debate whether or not, but AWS okay, they have first mover advantage. Crypto, Bitcoin, first mover advantage. Do you think OpenAI will have first mover advantage? >> It certainly has its advantage today. I think it's year two. I mean, I think the game is still out there, right? You know, we're still in the first inning, early inning of the game. So I don't think that the game is over for the rest of the players, whether the big players or the OpenAI kind of the, sort of competitors. So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest, to get, you know, another shot to the OpenAI sort of the level?" You know, I did a- (laughs) >> Line up. >> That's classic VC. "How much does it cost me to replicate?" >> I'm pretty sure he asked the question to a bunch of guys, right? >> Good luck with that. (laughs) >> So we kind of did some napkin- >> What'd you come up with? (laughs) >> $100 million is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So 100 million. >> John: Hundreds of millions. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100 million order of magnitude is what I came up with. You know, we can get into details, you know, in other sort of the time, but- >> Dave: That's actually not that much if you think about it. >> Howie: Exactly. So when he heard me articulating why is that, you know, he's thinking, right? You know, he actually, you know, asked me, "Hey, you know, there's this company. Do you happen to know this company? Can I reach out?" You know, those things. So I truly believe it's not a billion or 10 billion issue, it's more like 100. >> John: And also, your other point about referencing the internet revolution as a good comparable. The other thing there is online user population was a big driver of the growth of that. So what's the equivalent here for online user population for AI? Is it more apps, more users? I mean, we're still early on, it's first inning. >> Yeah. We're kind of the, you know- >> What's the key metric for success of this sector? Do you have a read on that? >> I think the, you know, the number of users is a good metrics, but I think it's going to be a lot of people are going to use AI services without even knowing they're using it, right? You know, I think a lot of the applications are being already built on top of OpenAI, and then they are kind of, you know, help people to do marketing, legal documents, you know, so they're already inherently OpenAI kind of the users already. So I think yeah. >> Well, Howie, we've got to wrap, but I really appreciate you coming on. I want to give you a last minute to wrap up here. In your experience, and you've seen many waves of innovation. You've even had your hands in a lot of the big waves past three inflection points. And obviously, machine learning you're doing now, you're deep end. Why is this Supercloud movement, this wave of Supercloud and the discussion of this next inflection point, why is it so important? For the folks watching, why should they be paying attention to this particular moment in time? Could you share your super clip on Supercloud? >> Howie: Right. So this is simple from my point of view. So why do you even have cloud to begin with, right? IT is too complex, too complex to operate or too expensive. So there's a newer model. There is a better model, right? Let someone else operate it, there is elasticity out of it, right? That's great. Until you have multiple vendors, right? Many vendors even, you know, we're talking about kind of how to make multiple vendors look like the same, but frankly speaking, even one vendor has, you know, thousand services. Now it's kind of getting, what Kid was talking about what, cloud chaos, right? It's the evolution. You know, the history repeats itself, right? You know, you have, you know, next great things and then too many great things, and then people need to sort of abstract this out. So it's almost that you must do this. But I think how to abstract this out is something that at this time, AI is going to help a lot, right? You know, like I mentioned, right? A lot of the abstraction, you don't have to think about API anymore. I bet 10 years from now, you know, IT is one language away, not API away. So think about that world, right? So Supercloud in, in my opinion, sure, you kind of abstract things out. You have, you know, consistent layers. But who's going to do that? Is that like we all agreed upon the model, agreed upon those APIs? Not necessary. There are certain, you know, truth in that, but there are other truths, let bots take care of, right? Whether you know, I want some X happens, whether it's going to be done by Azure, by AWS, by GCP, bots will figure out at a given time with certain contacts with your security requirement, posture requirement. I'll think that out. >> John: That's awesome. And you know, Dave, you and I have been talking about this. We think scale is the new ratification. If you have first mover advantage, I'll see the benefit, but scale is a huge thing. OpenAI, AWS. >> Howie: Yeah. Every day, we are using OpenAI. Today, we are labeling data for them. So you know, that's a little bit of the- (laughs) >> John: Yeah. >> First mover advantage that other people don't have, right? So it's kind of scary. So I'm very sure that Google is a little bit- (laughs) >> When we do our super AI event, you're definitely going to be keynoting. (laughs) >> Howie: I think, you know, we're talking about Supercloud, you know, before long, we are going to talk about super intelligent cloud. (laughs) >> I'm super excited, Howie, about this. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, Howie Xu. Always a great analyst for us contributing to the community. VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler, industry legend and friend of theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing really, really great advice and insight into what this next wave means. This Supercloud is the next wave. "If you're not on it, you're driftwood," says Pat Gelsinger. So you're going to see a lot more discussion. We'll be back more here live in Palo Alto after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with the The Cube here. We've got Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on Cloud Chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud Architecture Kit. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for Supercloud 2. >> And so we're going to dig into it. We're going to do a Q&A. We're going to let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out there, it's really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss. Take it away. >> Yeah, well thank you. So, we had a great time at the original Supercloud event, since then, been talking to a lot of customers, and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time So, let's jump into it. Just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So, if we go to the the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today, going from what we call Cloud First into this phase that many customers are stuck in, called Cloud Chaos, and where they want to get to, and this is the term customers actually use, we didn't make this up, we heard it from customers. This notion of Cloud Smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with Cloud First. They usually select a single cloud that they're going to standardize on, and when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like, these are things that are non-negotiable, you've got to figure it out, and typically what they do is, they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud, and that's fine when you have just one cloud. But if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one, they're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is, they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud, and they do so in a kind of a siloed manner. This results in the Cloud Chaos term that that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are, they're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem and they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So, this is the situation, this is sort of that Cloud Chaos. So, the question is, how do we move from this phase to Cloud Smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture, I think, is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud, to something we call a Cross-Cloud service. Something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds, and that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera, and when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of Supercloud. This notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So, this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here, and I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services as well as that Supercloud concept of how all those services come together. >> Great presentation., thanks for sharing. If you could pop back to that slide, on the Cloud Chaos one. I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So, this slide here that I'm showing on the screen, that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. This is the one where I wanted though, that looks like a spaghetti code mix. >> Yes. >> So, do you turn this into a Supercloud stack, right? Is that? >> well, I think it's, it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples, like security. So, instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, "Hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds", right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expect it to be, and not something that some hacker has gotten into, and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that, typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So, now they could say, "Hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints." It could go to Google, or AWS, or on-prem, or wherever have you, right? So, that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. >> You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you've been on theCUBE all the time, and we, when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's, what's going on? They have the same complaint, "I don't want to build a team, a dev team, for that stack." So, if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that, that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So, the number one complaint we hear, and I want to get your reaction to that, "I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So, I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one, as a backup." Here, that's one, that's four, five, eight, ten, ten environments. >> Yeah, I got a lot. >> That's going to be the reality, so, what's the technical answer to that? >> Yeah, well first of all, let me just say, this picture is again not totally representative of reality oftentimes, because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not security, usually not some of these other things, right? So, I think from a technical standpoint, where you want to get to is, yes, that sort of common service, with a common operational team behind it, that is trained on that, that can work across clouds. And that's really I think the important evolution here, is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud. You can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. >> Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex. There's skill gaps and skill required, but at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud, and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So, if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So, what's the trade off, in your mind right now as customers start to look at okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on, that's an obvious one. Other ones? What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade offs? 'Cause you can't do it everything. >> No, it's a great question. So, that's actually a really good point and as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, you know, across cloud services or these set of Cross-Cloud services, the things that comprise the Supercloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice, in terms of what it wants to abstract, and I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now, what I find, is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective, by the best of breed services. What higher level application type services do you need? A database or AI, you know, ML systems, for your application, and that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to, want to allow those services to shine through, but for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to, and you know, things like cogs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So, those are the things in it that I see people wanting to focus on. >> So, there's a majority model. >> Yes. >> All right, and we heard of earlier from Walmart, who's fairly, you know, advanced, but at the same time their supercloud is pretty immature. So, what are you seeing in terms of supercloud momentum, crosscloud momentum? What's the starting point for customers? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right, on that that three-tiered journey that I talked about, this Cloud Smart notion is, that is adoption of what you might call a supercloud or architecture, and most folks aren't there yet. Even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones, and I think it's because of the fact that, we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of Cloud Chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it, but as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So, I think there's two, there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud, and are in this Cloud Chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross-cloud services through adoption of this sort of supercloud architecture, but the other thing I think is particularly exciting, 'cause I talked to a number of of businesses who are not yet in the Cloud Chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey, and I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through Cloud Chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this supercloud architecture from the beginning, and I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. >> It's interesting, 'cause we're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals later, and they, yes there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate, and so it's a business unit using that. So, they're not in Cloud Chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So, to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross-cloud services, prior to reaching cloud chaos. >> Well, I, actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if, 'cause you say they're not in Cloud Chaos, but are they, I mean oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine, in of themselves. >> Yes, exactly right, yes. >> But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization, I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wide standardizations. >> Well, this is a point. So, they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem, they want to start sharing data across those ecosystem, and that's when they will, you know, that Cloud Chaos will, you know, come, come to fore, you would think. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is, he kind of said, "Hey Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition a little bit." So, he said a supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So, you know, thank you, that was nice and simple. However others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nelu Mihai later, says, no, no, wait a minute, it's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture v. platform thing? >> I look at it as, I dunno if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing, but for me when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. A single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform, is that there is a simplicity usually consistency to it. >> They did the architecture. (laughing) >> Yeah, exactly but I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it, has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with Supercloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, inter-operating, working together, and so, that's why, for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of, well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of services, and then weave those together into an overall supercloud. >> Okay, so you're not pitching, necessarily the platform, you're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th, with the first Supercloud, because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. So he said, and this, I think your answer sort of confirms this. "I want to have my cake eat it too and not gain weight." >> (laughing) Right. Well and I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come, after we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So, I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. >> Because it depends too, 'cause I would say Snowflake has a platform, and they've just defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here, obviously, we're talking about something else. >> Well, I think that the Snowflake talks about, what he talks about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented, and I think that's the beginning of the trend and I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side. And to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place, and that's why I want to get your reaction. >> Quote from- >> Well I just have to interrupt since, later on, you're going to hear from near Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Network. He says architecture and security historically, they don't go hand in hand, 'cause it's a big mess. >> It depends if you're whacking the mole or you actually proactively building something. Well Kit, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about Supercloud, you know, "The Supercloud's great, there are issues around computer science rigors, and customer requirements." So, there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listen to the customer, 'cause if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right, so, but there's other, this tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling interconnecting among them, connectivity is a part of security, and then, once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data, and the customer requirements, they say "Supercloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services, ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time." What's your reaction to that sentiment? You like it, is that, does that sound good? >> Yeah, no, broadly aligns with my thinking, I think, and what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the, you know, listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking, and data and some of these aspects talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then, yeah, like I think at the end. >> On the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically going to change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things like that, from a science standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the more academic research type things. >> More tech, or more better tech or is it? >> Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece, around, you know, there's issues of data gravity, data mobility. How do you want to do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments, there's got to be some sort of hardware rooted trusts, and you know, a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. >> So, a lot of work still be done. >> Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this as, this is not a one year thing, or you know, it's going to be multi-years, and I think again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. >> So, as the world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now Cross-cloud services, supercloud, metacloud, whatever you want to call it, how have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approached the problem? Has it changed and how? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we at VMware, going through the same challenges as our customers and you know, any business, right? We use multiple clouds, we got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which, you see the evolution of a platform team, and so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams, to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building, while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So, they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services, but at the same, time we can abstract a lot of the details they don't need to be in. So, I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. >> You know, I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security and developers, on that slide, the last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction key areas that you guys at VMware are working? >> Those were just some groupings that we've come up with, but we like to debate them. >> I noticed data's in every one of them. >> Yeah, yep, data is key. >> It's not like, so, back to the data questions that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can. >> Standardize. >> Consistently rely on to have standard services. >> Yes. >> Which one do you start with? What's the, is there order of operations? >> Well, that's, I mean. >> 'Cause I think infrastructure's number one, but you had observability, you need to know what's going on. >> Yeah, well it really, it's highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to and what, I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities, right? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center, they want to evacuate the data center, and so what they want is then, consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them and we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, you know, security becomes top of mind, or maybe compliance, because they're in a regulated industry. So, those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So, I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, as it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. >> How about the deployment models kit? Do, does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to, you know, approach it a specific way? Can you address that? >> Yeah, I mean deployment models, you're talking about how they how they consume? >> So, for instance, yeah, running a control plane in the cloud. >> Got it, got it. >> And communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance, and? >> So, that's a good point actually, and you know, the white paper that we released back in August, around this sort of concept, the Cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So, you know when we talk about a Cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say in one public cloud, but it supports all of 'em. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds, and that customers can take dependencies on whichever one, depending on what their use cases are or the, even going further than that, there's a type of Cross-cloud service that could actually be instantiated even in an air gapped or offline environment, and we have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement, so I think, you know. >> Global don't forget global, regions, locales. >> Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that can be concerned about. So, most services today are the former, there are single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds, but I think what we're doing and where we're going with, you know, things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, will better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So, today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. >> If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of Supercloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry in flexible, 'cause I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP/IP, that's a little bit dated, we got people on the chat that are like, you know, 20 years old that weren't even born then. So, but this is a, one of those inflection points that's once in a generation inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology, and ultimately benefits the society. >> Yeah. Wow. Getting bigger. >> You have 10 seconds, go. >> I know. Yeah. (laughing) No, look, so I think it is what we're seeing is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? This notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together, traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. and what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation, and I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the businesses to, you know, make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going. Give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there, and I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do, and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally better for us as individuals in our experiences. >> And we're seeing that with ChatGPT, everyone's talking about, just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that, that are next gen, like obviously like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair moment. >> It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. >> All right, Kit Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the Supercloud architecture, Cloud Chaos, the Cloud Smart, there's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the supercloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE Be right back with more Supercloud coverage, here in Palo Alto after this break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Its first inaugural event. It's theCUBE's coverage. We were there at the first event for a KubeCon before CNCF kind of took it over. It was in Seattle. And so in Seattle this week is Cloud Native SecurityCon. Of course, theCUBE is there covering via our Palo Alto Studios and our experts around the world who are bringing in Bassam Tabbara who's the CEO and founder of upbound.io. That's the URL, but Upbound is the company. The creators of Crossplane. Really kind of looking at the Crossplane, across the abstraction layer, across clouds. A big part of, as we call supercloud trend. Bassam, great to see you. You've been legend in the open source community. Great to have you on. >> Thanks, John. Always good to be on theCUBE. >> I really wanted to bring you in 'cause I want to get your perspective. You've seen the movie, you've seen open source software grow, it continues to grow. Now you're starting to see the Linux Foundation, which has CNCF really expanding their realm. They got the CloudNativeCon, KubeCon, which is Kubernetes event. That's gotten so massive and so successful. We've been to every single one as you know. I've seen you there and all of them as well. So that's going great. Now they got this new event that's spins out dedicated to security. Everybody wants to know why the new event? What's the focus? Is it needed? What will they do? What's different from KubeCon? Where do I play? And so there's a little bit of a question mark in the ecosystem around this event. And so we've been reporting on it. Looking good so far. People are buzzing, again, they're keeping it small. So that kind of managing expectations like any good event would do. But I think it's been successful, which I wanted like to get your take on how you see it. Is this good? Are you indifferent? Are you excited by this? What's your take? >> I mean, look, it's super exciting to see all the momentum around cloud native. Obviously there are different dimensions of cloud native securities, an important piece. Networking, storage, compute, like all those things I think tie back together and in some ways you can look at this event as a focused event on the security aspect as it relates to cloud native. And there are lots of vendors in this space. There's lots of interesting projects in the space, but the unifying theme is that they come together and probably around the Kubernetes API and the momentum around cloud native and with Kubernetes at the center of it. >> On the focus on Kubernetes, it seems this event is kind of classic security where you want to have deep dives. Again, I call it the event operating system 'cause you decouple, make things highly cohesive, and you link them together. I don't see a problem with it. I kind of like this. I gave it good reviews if they stay focused because security is super critical. There was references to bind and DNS. There's a lot of things in the infrastructure plumbing that need to be looked at or managed or figured out or just refactored for modernization needs. And I know you've done a lot with storage, for instance, storage, networking, kernel. There's a lot of things in the old tech or tech in the cloud that needs to be kind, I won't say rebooted, but maybe reset or jump. Do you see it that way? Are there things that need to get done or is it just that there's so much complexity in the different cloud cluster code thing going on? >> It's obviously security is a very, very big space and there are so many different aspects of it that people you can go into. I think the thing that's interesting around the cloud native community is that there is a unifying theme. Like forget the word cloud native for a second, but the unifying theme is that people are building around what looks like a standardized play around Kubernetes and the Kubernetes API. And as a result you can recast a lot of the technologies that we are used to in the past in a traditional security sense. You can recast them on top of this new standardized approach or on Kubernetes, whether it's policy or protecting a supply chain or scanning, or like a lot of the access control authorization, et cetera. All of those things can be either revived to apply to this cloud native play and the Kubernetes play or creating new opportunities for companies to actually build new and interesting projects and companies around a standardized play. >> Do you think this also will help the KubeCon be more focused around the developer areas there and just touching on security versus figuring out how to take something so important in KubeCon, which the stakeholders in KubeCon have have grown so big, I can see security sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room there. So here you move it over, you keep it over here. Will anything change on the KubeCon site? We'll be there in in Amsterdam in April. What do you think the impact will be? Good? Is it good for the community? Just good swim lanes? What's your take? >> Yeah, I still think KubeCon will be an umbrella event for the whole cloud native community. I suspect that you'll see some of the same vendors and projects and everything else represented in KubeCon. The way I think about all the branched cloud native events are essentially a way to have a more focused discussion, get people together to talk about security topics or networking topics or things that are more focused way. But I don't think it changes the the effect of KubeCon being the umbrella around all of it. So I think you'll see the same presence and maybe larger presence going forward at Amsterdam. We're planning to be there obviously and I'm excited to be there and I think it'll be a big event and having a smaller event is not going to diminish the effect of KubeCon. >> And if you look at the developer community they've all been online for a long time, from IRC chat to now Slack and now new technologies and stuff like Discord out there. The event world has changed post-pandemic. So it makes sense. And we're seeing this with all vendors, by the way, and projects. The digital community angle is huge because if you have a big tent event like KubeCon you can make that a rallying moment in the industry and then have similar smaller events that are highly focused that build off that that are just connective tissue or subnets, if you will, or communities targeted for really deeper conversations. And they could be smaller events. They don't have to be monster events, but they're connected and traverse into the main event. This might be the event format for the future for all companies, whether it's AWS or a company that has a community where you create this network effect, if you will, around the people. >> That's right. And if you look at things like AWS re:Invent, et cetera, I mean, that's a massive events. And in some ways it, if it was a set of smaller sub events, maybe it actually will flourish more. I don't know, I'm not sure. >> They just killed the San Francisco event. >> That's right. >> But they have re:Inforce, all right, so they just established that their big events are re:Invent and re:Inforce as their big. >> Oh, I didn't hear about re:Inforce. That's news to me. >> re:Inforce is their third event. So they're doing something similar as CloudNativeCon, which is you have to have an event and then they're going to create a lot of sub events underneath. So I think they are trying to do that. Very interesting. >> Very interesting for sure. >> So let's talk about what you guys are up to. I know from your standpoint, you had a lot of security conversations. How is Crossplane doing? Obviously, you saw our Supercloud coverage. You guys fit right into that model where clients, customers, enterprises are going to want to have multiple cloud operating environments for whatever the use case, whether you're using ChatGPT, you got to get an Azure instance up and running for that. Now with APIs, we're hearing a lot of developers doing that. So you're going to start to see this cross cloud as VMware calls, what we call it supercloud. There's more need for Crossplane like thinking. What's the update? >> For sure, and we see this very clearly as well. So the fact that there is a standardization layer, there is a layer that lets you converge the different vendors that you have, the different clouds that you have, the different hype models that you have, whether it's hybrid or private, public, et cetera. The unifying theme is that you're literally bringing all those things under one control plane that enables you to actually centralize and standardize on security, access control, helps you standardize on cost control, quota policy, as well as create a self-service experience for your developers. And so from a security standpoint, the beauty of this is like, you could use really popular projects like open policy agent or Kyverno or others if you want to do policy and do so uniformly across your entire stack, your entire footprint of tooling, vendors, services and across deployment models. Those things are possible because you're standardizing and consolidating on a control plane on top of all. And that's the thing that gets our customers excited. That we're seeing in the community that they could actually now normalize standardize on small number of projects and tools to manage everything. >> We were talking about that in our summary of the keynote yesterday. Dave Vellante and I were talking about the idea of clients want to have a redo of their security. They've been, just the tooling has been building up. They got zero trust in place, maybe with some big vendor, but now got the cloud native opportunity to refactor and reset and reinvent their security paradigm. And so that's the positive thing we're hearing. Now we're seeing enterprises want this cross cloud capabilities or Crossplane like thinking that you guys are talking about. What are your customers telling you? Can you share from an enterprise perspective where they're at in this journey? Because part of the security problems that we've been reporting on has been because clients are moving from IT to cloud native and not everyone's moved over yet. So they're highly vulnerable to ransomware and all kinds of other crap. So another attacks, so they're wide open, But people who are moving into cloud native, are they stepping up their game on this Crossplane opportunity? Where are they at? Can you share data on that? >> Yeah, we're grateful to be talking to a lot of customers these days. And the interesting thing is even if you talked about large financial institutions, banks, et cetera, the common theme that we hear is that they bought tools for each of the different departments and however they're organized. Sometimes you see the folks that are running databases, networking, being separated from say, the computer app developers or they're all these different departments within an organization. And for each one of those, they've made localized decisions for tooling and services that they bought. What we're seeing now consistently is that they're all together, getting together, and trying to figure out how to standardize on a smaller one set of tooling and services that goes across all the different departments and all different aspects of the business that they're running. And this is where this discussion gets a lot very interesting. If instead of buying a different policy tool for each department, or once that fits it you could actually standardize on policy or the entire footprint of services that they're managing. And you get that by standardizing on a control plane or standardizing on effectively one point of control for everything that they're doing. And that theme is like literally, it gets all our customers excited. This is why they're engaging in all of this. It's almost the holy grail. The thing that I've been trying to do for a long time. >> I know. >> And it's finally happening. >> I know you and I have talked about this many times, but I got to ask you the one thing that jumps into everybody's head when you hear control plane is lock-in. So how do you discuss that lock-in, perception from the reality of the situation? How do you unpack that for the customer? 'Cause they want choice at the end of the day. There's the preferred vendors for sure on the hyperscale side and app side and open source, but what's the lock-in? What does the lock-in conversation look like? Or do they even have that conversation? >> Yeah. To be honest, I mean, so their lock-in could be a two dimensions here. Most of our customers and people are using Crossplane or using app on product around it. Most of our do, concentrated in, say a one cloud vendor and have others. So I don't think this is necessarily about multicloud per se or being locked into one vendor. But they do manage many different services and they have legacy tooling and they have different systems that they bought at different stages and they want to bring them all together. And by bringing them all together that helps them make choices about consulting or even replacing some of them. But right now everything is siloed, everything is separate, both organizationally as well as the code bases or investments and tooling or contracts. Everything is just completely separated and it requires humans to put them together. And organizations actually try to gather around and put them together. I don't know if lock-in is the driving goal for this, but it is standardization consolidation. That's the driving initiative. >> And so unification and building is the big driver. They're building out >> Correct, and you can ask why are they doing that? What does standardization help with? It helps them to become more productive. They can move faster, they can innovate faster. Not as a ton of, like literally revenue written all over. So it's super important to them that they achieved this, increase their pace of innovation around this and they do that by standardizing. >> The great point in all this and your success at Upbound and now CNCF success with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and now with the inaugural event of Cloud Native SecurityCon is that the customers are involved, a lot of end users are involved. There's a big driver not only from the industry and the developers and getting architecture right and having choice. The customers want this to happen. They're leaning in, they're part of it. So that's a big driver. Where does this go? If you had to throw a dart at the board five years from now Cloud Native SecurityCon, what does it look like if you had to predict the trajectory of this event and community? >> Yeah, I mean, look, I think the trajectory one is that we have what looks like a standardization layer emerging that is all encompassing. And as a result, there is a ton of opportunity for vendors, projects, communities to build around within on top of this layer. And essentially create, I think you talked about an operating system earlier and decentralized aspect of this, but it's an opportunity to actually, what it looks like for the first time we have a convergence happening industry-wide and through open source and open source foundations. And I think that means that there'll be new opportunity and lots of new projects and things that are created in the space. And it also means that if you don't attach this space, you'll likely be left out. >> Awesome. Bassam, great to have you on, great expert commentary, obviously multi CUBE alumni and supporter of theCUBE and as you become successful we really appreciate your support for helping us get the content out there. And best of luck to your team and thanks for weighing in on Cloud Native SecurityCon. >> Awesome. It's always good talking to you, John. Thank you. >> Great stuff. This is more CUBE coverage from Palo Alto, getting folks on the ground on location, getting us the stories in Seattle. Of course, Cloud Native SecurityCon, the inaugural event, which looks like will be the beginning of a series of multi-year journey for the CNCF, focusing on security. Of course, theCUBE's here to cover it, every angle of it, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> OpenAI The company, and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Microsoft reportedly is investing an additional 10 billion dollars into the company. But in our view, while the hype around ChatGPT is justified, we don't believe OpenAI will lock up the market with its first mover advantage. Rather, we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal, and the compute power that it could deploy to run its system. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the excitement around ChatGPT, and debate the premise that the company's early entry into the space may not confer winner take all advantage to OpenAI. And to do so, we welcome CUBE collaborator, alum, Sarbjeet Johal, (chuckles) and John Furrier, co-host of the Cube. Great to see you Sarbjeet, John. Really appreciate you guys coming to the program. >> Great to be on. >> Okay, so what is ChatGPT? Well, actually we asked ChatGPT, what is ChatGPT? So here's what it said. ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text. It could be fine tuned for a variety of language tasks, such as conversation, summarization, and language translation. So I asked it, give it to me in 50 words or less. How did it do? Anything to add? >> Yeah, think it did good. It's large language model, like previous models, but it started applying the transformers sort of mechanism to focus on what prompt you have given it to itself. And then also the what answer it gave you in the first, sort of, one sentence or two sentences, and then introspect on itself, like what I have already said to you. And so just work on that. So it it's self sort of focus if you will. It does, the transformers help the large language models to do that. >> So to your point, it's a large language model, and GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. >> And if you put the definition back up there again, if you put it back up on the screen, let's see it back up. Okay, it actually missed the large, word large. So one of the problems with ChatGPT, it's not always accurate. It's actually a large language model, and it says state of the art language model. And if you look at Google, Google has dominated AI for many times and they're well known as being the best at this. And apparently Google has their own large language model, LLM, in play and have been holding it back to release because of backlash on the accuracy. Like just in that example you showed is a great point. They got almost right, but they missed the key word. >> You know what's funny about that John, is I had previously asked it in my prompt to give me it in less than a hundred words, and it was too long, I said I was too long for Breaking Analysis, and there it went into the fact that it's a large language model. So it largely, it gave me a really different answer the, for both times. So, but it's still pretty amazing for those of you who haven't played with it yet. And one of the best examples that I saw was Ben Charrington from This Week In ML AI podcast. And I stumbled on this thanks to Brian Gracely, who was listening to one of his Cloudcasts. Basically what Ben did is he took, he prompted ChatGPT to interview ChatGPT, and he simply gave the system the prompts, and then he ran the questions and answers into this avatar builder and sped it up 2X so it didn't sound like a machine. And voila, it was amazing. So John is ChatGPT going to take over as a cube host? >> Well, I was thinking, we get the questions in advance sometimes from PR people. We should actually just plug it in ChatGPT, add it to our notes, and saying, "Is this good enough for you? Let's ask the real question." So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting that gets done. I think the ChatGPT is a phenomenal revolution. I think it highlights the use case. Like that example we showed earlier. It gets most of it right. So it's directionally correct and it feels like it's an answer, but it's not a hundred percent accurate. And I think that's where people are seeing value in it. Writing marketing, copy, brainstorming, guest list, gift list for somebody. Write me some lyrics to a song. Give me a thesis about healthcare policy in the United States. It'll do a bang up job, and then you got to go in and you can massage it. So we're going to do three quarters of the work. That's why plagiarism and schools are kind of freaking out. And that's why Microsoft put 10 billion in, because why wouldn't this be a feature of Word, or the OS to help it do stuff on behalf of the user. So linguistically it's a beautiful thing. You can input a string and get a good answer. It's not a search result. >> And we're going to get your take on on Microsoft and, but it kind of levels the playing- but ChatGPT writes better than I do, Sarbjeet, and I know you have some good examples too. You mentioned the Reed Hastings example. >> Yeah, I was listening to Reed Hastings fireside chat with ChatGPT, and the answers were coming as sort of voice, in the voice format. And it was amazing what, he was having very sort of philosophy kind of talk with the ChatGPT, the longer sentences, like he was going on, like, just like we are talking, he was talking for like almost two minutes and then ChatGPT was answering. It was not one sentence question, and then a lot of answers from ChatGPT and yeah, you're right. I, this is our ability. I've been thinking deep about this since yesterday, we talked about, like, we want to do this segment. The data is fed into the data model. It can be the current data as well, but I think that, like, models like ChatGPT, other companies will have those too. They can, they're democratizing the intelligence, but they're not creating intelligence yet, definitely yet I can say that. They will give you all the finite answers. Like, okay, how do you do this for loop in Java, versus, you know, C sharp, and as a programmer you can do that, in, but they can't tell you that, how to write a new algorithm or write a new search algorithm for you. They cannot create a secretive code for you to- >> Not yet. >> Have competitive advantage. >> Not yet, not yet. >> but you- >> Can Google do that today? >> No one really can. The reasoning side of the data is, we talked about at our Supercloud event, with Zhamak Dehghani who's was CEO of, now of Nextdata. This next wave of data intelligence is going to come from entrepreneurs that are probably cross discipline, computer science and some other discipline. But they're going to be new things, for example, data, metadata, and data. It's hard to do reasoning like a human being, so that needs more data to train itself. So I think the first gen of this training module for the large language model they have is a corpus of text. Lot of that's why blog posts are, but the facts are wrong and sometimes out of context, because that contextual reasoning takes time, it takes intelligence. So machines need to become intelligent, and so therefore they need to be trained. So you're going to start to see, I think, a lot of acceleration on training the data sets. And again, it's only as good as the data you can get. And again, proprietary data sets will be a huge winner. Anyone who's got a large corpus of content, proprietary content like theCUBE or SiliconANGLE as a publisher will benefit from this. Large FinTech companies, anyone with large proprietary data will probably be a big winner on this generative AI wave, because it just, it will eat that up, and turn that back into something better. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things to look at here. And certainly productivity's going to be off the charts for vanilla and the internet is going to get swarmed with vanilla content. So if you're in the content business, and you're an original content producer of any kind, you're going to be not vanilla, so you're going to be better. So I think there's so much at play Dave (indistinct). >> I think the playing field has been risen, so we- >> Risen and leveled? >> Yeah, and leveled to certain extent. So it's now like that few people as consumers, as consumers of AI, we will have a advantage and others cannot have that advantage. So it will be democratized. That's, I'm sure about that. But if you take the example of calculator, when the calculator came in, and a lot of people are, "Oh, people can't do math anymore because calculator is there." right? So it's a similar sort of moment, just like a calculator for the next level. But, again- >> I see it more like open source, Sarbjeet, because like if you think about what ChatGPT's doing, you do a query and it comes from somewhere the value of a post from ChatGPT is just a reuse of AI. The original content accent will be come from a human. So if I lay out a paragraph from ChatGPT, did some heavy lifting on some facts, I check the facts, save me about maybe- >> Yeah, it's productive. >> An hour writing, and then I write a killer two, three sentences of, like, sharp original thinking or critical analysis. I then took that body of work, open source content, and then laid something on top of it. >> And Sarbjeet's example is a good one, because like if the calculator kids don't do math as well anymore, the slide rule, remember we had slide rules as kids, remember we first started using Waze, you know, we were this minority and you had an advantage over other drivers. Now Waze is like, you know, social traffic, you know, navigation, everybody had, you know- >> All the back roads are crowded. >> They're car crowded. (group laughs) Exactly. All right, let's, let's move on. What about this notion that futurist Ray Amara put forth and really Amara's Law that we're showing here, it's, the law is we, you know, "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run." Is that the case, do you think, with ChatGPT? What do you think Sarbjeet? >> I think that's true actually. There's a lot of, >> We don't debate this. >> There's a lot of awe, like when people see the results from ChatGPT, they say what, what the heck? Like, it can do this? But then if you use it more and more and more, and I ask the set of similar question, not the same question, and it gives you like same answer. It's like reading from the same bucket of text in, the interior read (indistinct) where the ChatGPT, you will see that in some couple of segments. It's very, it sounds so boring that the ChatGPT is coming out the same two sentences every time. So it is kind of good, but it's not as good as people think it is right now. But we will have, go through this, you know, hype sort of cycle and get realistic with it. And then in the long term, I think it's a great thing in the short term, it's not something which will (indistinct) >> What's your counter point? You're saying it's not. >> I, no I think the question was, it's hyped up in the short term and not it's underestimated long term. That's what I think what he said, quote. >> Yes, yeah. That's what he said. >> Okay, I think that's wrong with this, because this is a unique, ChatGPT is a unique kind of impact and it's very generational. People have been comparing it, I have been comparing to the internet, like the web, web browser Mosaic and Netscape, right, Navigator. I mean, I clearly still remember the days seeing Navigator for the first time, wow. And there weren't not many sites you could go to, everyone typed in, you know, cars.com, you know. >> That (indistinct) wasn't that overestimated, the overhyped at the beginning and underestimated. >> No, it was, it was underestimated long run, people thought. >> But that Amara's law. >> That's what is. >> No, they said overestimated? >> Overestimated near term underestimated- overhyped near term, underestimated long term. I got, right I mean? >> Well, I, yeah okay, so I would then agree, okay then- >> We were off the charts about the internet in the early days, and it actually exceeded our expectations. >> Well there were people who were, like, poo-pooing it early on. So when the browser came out, people were like, "Oh, the web's a toy for kids." I mean, in 1995 the web was a joke, right? So '96, you had online populations growing, so you had structural changes going on around the browser, internet population. And then that replaced other things, direct mail, other business activities that were once analog then went to the web, kind of read only as you, as we always talk about. So I think that's a moment where the hype long term, the smart money, and the smart industry experts all get the long term. And in this case, there's more poo-pooing in the short term. "Ah, it's not a big deal, it's just AI." I've heard many people poo-pooing ChatGPT, and a lot of smart people saying, "No this is next gen, this is different and it's only going to get better." So I think people are estimating a big long game on this one. >> So you're saying it's bifurcated. There's those who say- >> Yes. >> Okay, all right, let's get to the heart of the premise, and possibly the debate for today's episode. Will OpenAI's early entry into the market confer sustainable competitive advantage for the company. And if you look at the history of tech, the technology industry, it's kind of littered with first mover failures. Altair, IBM, Tandy, Commodore, they and Apple even, they were really early in the PC game. They took a backseat to Dell who came in the scene years later with a better business model. Netscape, you were just talking about, was all the rage in Silicon Valley, with the first browser, drove up all the housing prices out here. AltaVista was the first search engine to really, you know, index full text. >> Owned by Dell, I mean DEC. >> Owned by Digital. >> Yeah, Digital Equipment >> Compaq bought it. And of course as an aside, Digital, they wanted to showcase their hardware, right? Their super computer stuff. And then so Friendster and MySpace, they came before Facebook. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first mobile device. So lots of failed examples, but there are some recent successes like AWS and cloud. >> You could say smartphone. So I mean. >> Well I know, and you can, we can parse this so we'll debate it. Now Twitter, you could argue, had first mover advantage. You kind of gave me that one John. Bitcoin and crypto clearly had first mover advantage, and sustaining that. Guys, will OpenAI make it to the list on the right with ChatGPT, what do you think? >> I think categorically as a company, it probably won't, but as a category, I think what they're doing will, so OpenAI as a company, they get funding, there's power dynamics involved. Microsoft put a billion dollars in early on, then they just pony it up. Now they're reporting 10 billion more. So, like, if the browsers, Microsoft had competitive advantage over Netscape, and used monopoly power, and convicted by the Department of Justice for killing Netscape with their monopoly, Netscape should have had won that battle, but Microsoft killed it. In this case, Microsoft's not killing it, they're buying into it. So I think the embrace extend Microsoft power here makes OpenAI vulnerable for that one vendor solution. So the AI as a company might not make the list, but the category of what this is, large language model AI, is probably will be on the right hand side. >> Okay, we're going to come back to the government intervention and maybe do some comparisons, but what are your thoughts on this premise here? That, it will basically set- put forth the premise that it, that ChatGPT, its early entry into the market will not confer competitive advantage to >> For OpenAI. >> To Open- Yeah, do you agree with that? >> I agree with that actually. It, because Google has been at it, and they have been holding back, as John said because of the scrutiny from the Fed, right, so- >> And privacy too. >> And the privacy and the accuracy as well. But I think Sam Altman and the company on those guys, right? They have put this in a hasty way out there, you know, because it makes mistakes, and there are a lot of questions around the, sort of, where the content is coming from. You saw that as your example, it just stole the content, and without your permission, you know? >> Yeah. So as quick this aside- >> And it codes on people's behalf and the, those codes are wrong. So there's a lot of, sort of, false information it's putting out there. So it's a very vulnerable thing to do what Sam Altman- >> So even though it'll get better, others will compete. >> So look, just side note, a term which Reid Hoffman used a little bit. Like he said, it's experimental launch, like, you know, it's- >> It's pretty damn good. >> It is clever because according to Sam- >> It's more than clever. It's good. >> It's awesome, if you haven't used it. I mean you write- you read what it writes and you go, "This thing writes so well, it writes so much better than you." >> The human emotion drives that too. I think that's a big thing. But- >> I Want to add one more- >> Make your last point. >> Last one. Okay. So, but he's still holding back. He's conducting quite a few interviews. If you want to get the gist of it, there's an interview with StrictlyVC interview from yesterday with Sam Altman. Listen to that one it's an eye opening what they want- where they want to take it. But my last one I want to make it on this point is that Satya Nadella yesterday did an interview with Wall Street Journal. I think he was doing- >> You were not impressed. >> I was not impressed because he was pushing it too much. So Sam Altman's holding back so there's less backlash. >> Got 10 billion reasons to push. >> I think he's almost- >> Microsoft just laid off 10000 people. Hey ChatGPT, find me a job. You know like. (group laughs) >> He's overselling it to an extent that I think it will backfire on Microsoft. And he's over promising a lot of stuff right now, I think. I don't know why he's very jittery about all these things. And he did the same thing during Ignite as well. So he said, "Oh, this AI will write code for you and this and that." Like you called him out- >> The hyperbole- >> During your- >> from Satya Nadella, he's got a lot of hyperbole. (group talks over each other) >> All right, Let's, go ahead. >> Well, can I weigh in on the whole- >> Yeah, sure. >> Microsoft thing on whether OpenAI, here's the take on this. I think it's more like the browser moment to me, because I could relate to that experience with ChatG, personally, emotionally, when I saw that, and I remember vividly- >> You mean that aha moment (indistinct). >> Like this is obviously the future. Anything else in the old world is dead, website's going to be everywhere. It was just instant dot connection for me. And a lot of other smart people who saw this. Lot of people by the way, didn't see it. Someone said the web's a toy. At the company I was worked for at the time, Hewlett Packard, they like, they could have been in, they had invented HTML, and so like all this stuff was, like, they just passed, the web was just being passed over. But at that time, the browser got better, more websites came on board. So the structural advantage there was online web usage was growing, online user population. So that was growing exponentially with the rise of the Netscape browser. So OpenAI could stay on the right side of your list as durable, if they leverage the category that they're creating, can get the scale. And if they can get the scale, just like Twitter, that failed so many times that they still hung around. So it was a product that was always successful, right? So I mean, it should have- >> You're right, it was terrible, we kept coming back. >> The fail whale, but it still grew. So OpenAI has that moment. They could do it if Microsoft doesn't meddle too much with too much power as a vendor. They could be the Netscape Navigator, without the anti-competitive behavior of somebody else. So to me, they have the pole position. So they have an opportunity. So if not, if they don't execute, then there's opportunity. There's not a lot of barriers to entry, vis-a-vis say the CapEx of say a cloud company like AWS. You can't replicate that, Many have tried, but I think you can replicate OpenAI. >> And we're going to talk about that. Okay, so real quick, I want to bring in some ETR data. This isn't an ETR heavy segment, only because this so new, you know, they haven't coverage yet, but they do cover AI. So basically what we're seeing here is a slide on the vertical axis's net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis's is presence in the dataset. Think of it as, like, market presence. And in the insert right there, you can see how the dots are plotted, the two columns. And so, but the key point here that we want to make, there's a bunch of companies on the left, is he like, you know, DataRobot and C3 AI and some others, but the big whales, Google, AWS, Microsoft, are really dominant in this market. So that's really the key takeaway that, can we- >> I notice IBM is way low. >> Yeah, IBM's low, and actually bring that back up and you, but then you see Oracle who actually is injecting. So I guess that's the other point is, you're not necessarily going to go buy AI, and you know, build your own AI, you're going to, it's going to be there and, it, Salesforce is going to embed it into its platform, the SaaS companies, and you're going to purchase AI. You're not necessarily going to build it. But some companies obviously are. >> I mean to quote IBM's general manager Rob Thomas, "You can't have AI with IA." information architecture and David Flynn- >> You can't Have AI without IA >> without, you can't have AI without IA. You can't have, if you have an Information Architecture, you then can power AI. Yesterday David Flynn, with Hammersmith, was on our Supercloud. He was pointing out that the relationship of storage, where you store things, also impacts the data and stressablity, and Zhamak from Nextdata, she was pointing out that same thing. So the data problem factors into all this too, Dave. >> So you got the big cloud and internet giants, they're all poised to go after this opportunity. Microsoft is investing up to 10 billion. Google's code red, which was, you know, the headline in the New York Times. Of course Apple is there and several alternatives in the market today. Guys like Chinchilla, Bloom, and there's a company Jasper and several others, and then Lena Khan looms large and the government's around the world, EU, US, China, all taking notice before the market really is coalesced around a single player. You know, John, you mentioned Netscape, they kind of really, the US government was way late to that game. It was kind of game over. And Netscape, I remember Barksdale was like, "Eh, we're going to be selling software in the enterprise anyway." and then, pshew, the company just dissipated. So, but it looks like the US government, especially with Lena Khan, they're changing the definition of antitrust and what the cause is to go after people, and they're really much more aggressive. It's only what, two years ago that (indistinct). >> Yeah, the problem I have with the federal oversight is this, they're always like late to the game, and they're slow to catch up. So in other words, they're working on stuff that should have been solved a year and a half, two years ago around some of the social networks hiding behind some of the rules around open web back in the days, and I think- >> But they're like 15 years late to that. >> Yeah, and now they got this new thing on top of it. So like, I just worry about them getting their fingers. >> But there's only two years, you know, OpenAI. >> No, but the thing (indistinct). >> No, they're still fighting other battles. But the problem with government is that they're going to label Big Tech as like a evil thing like Pharma, it's like smoke- >> You know Lena Khan wants to kill Big Tech, there's no question. >> So I think Big Tech is getting a very seriously bad rap. And I think anything that the government does that shades darkness on tech, is politically motivated in most cases. You can almost look at everything, and my 80 20 rule is in play here. 80% of the government activity around tech is bullshit, it's politically motivated, and the 20% is probably relevant, but off the mark and not organized. >> Well market forces have always been the determining factor of success. The governments, you know, have been pretty much failed. I mean you look at IBM's antitrust, that, what did that do? The market ultimately beat them. You look at Microsoft back in the day, right? Windows 95 was peaking, the government came in. But you know, like you said, they missed the web, right, and >> so they were hanging on- >> There's nobody in government >> to Windows. >> that actually knows- >> And so, you, I think you're right. It's market forces that are going to determine this. But Sarbjeet, what do you make of Microsoft's big bet here, you weren't impressed with with Nadella. How do you think, where are they going to apply it? Is this going to be a Hail Mary for Bing, or is it going to be applied elsewhere? What do you think. >> They are saying that they will, sort of, weave this into their products, office products, productivity and also to write code as well, developer productivity as well. That's a big play for them. But coming back to your antitrust sort of comments, right? I believe the, your comment was like, oh, fed was late 10 years or 15 years earlier, but now they're two years. But things are moving very fast now as compared to they used to move. >> So two years is like 10 Years. >> Yeah, two years is like 10 years. Just want to make that point. (Dave laughs) This thing is going like wildfire. Any new tech which comes in that I think they're going against distribution channels. Lina Khan has commented time and again that the marketplace model is that she wants to have some grip on. Cloud marketplaces are a kind of monopolistic kind of way. >> I don't, I don't see this, I don't see a Chat AI. >> You told me it's not Bing, you had an interesting comment. >> No, no. First of all, this is great from Microsoft. If you're Microsoft- >> Why? >> Because Microsoft doesn't have the AI chops that Google has, right? Google is got so much core competency on how they run their search, how they run their backends, their cloud, even though they don't get a lot of cloud market share in the enterprise, they got a kick ass cloud cause they needed one. >> Totally. >> They've invented SRE. I mean Google's development and engineering chops are off the scales, right? Amazon's got some good chops, but Google's got like 10 times more chops than AWS in my opinion. Cloud's a whole different story. Microsoft gets AI, they get a playbook, they get a product they can render into, the not only Bing, productivity software, helping people write papers, PowerPoint, also don't forget the cloud AI can super help. We had this conversation on our Supercloud event, where AI's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting around understanding observability and managing service meshes, to managing microservices, to turning on and off applications, and or maybe writing code in real time. So there's a plethora of use cases for Microsoft to deploy this. combined with their R and D budgets, they can then turbocharge more research, build on it. So I think this gives them a car in the game, Google may have pole position with AI, but this puts Microsoft right in the game, and they already have a lot of stuff going on. But this just, I mean everything gets lifted up. Security, cloud, productivity suite, everything. >> What's under the hood at Google, and why aren't they talking about it? I mean they got to be freaked out about this. No? Or do they have kind of a magic bullet? >> I think they have the, they have the chops definitely. Magic bullet, I don't know where they are, as compared to the ChatGPT 3 or 4 models. Like they, but if you look at the online sort of activity and the videos put out there from Google folks, Google technology folks, that's account you should look at if you are looking there, they have put all these distinctions what ChatGPT 3 has used, they have been talking about for a while as well. So it's not like it's a secret thing that you cannot replicate. As you said earlier, like in the beginning of this segment, that anybody who has more data and the capacity to process that data, which Google has both, I think they will win this. >> Obviously living in Palo Alto where the Google founders are, and Google's headquarters next town over we have- >> We're so close to them. We have inside information on some of the thinking and that hasn't been reported by any outlet yet. And that is, is that, from what I'm hearing from my sources, is Google has it, they don't want to release it for many reasons. One is it might screw up their search monopoly, one, two, they're worried about the accuracy, 'cause Google will get sued. 'Cause a lot of people are jamming on this ChatGPT as, "Oh it does everything for me." when it's clearly not a hundred percent accurate all the time. >> So Lina Kahn is looming, and so Google's like be careful. >> Yeah so Google's just like, this is the third, could be a third rail. >> But the first thing you said is a concern. >> Well no. >> The disruptive (indistinct) >> What they will do is do a Waymo kind of thing, where they spin out a separate company. >> They're doing that. >> The discussions happening, they're going to spin out the separate company and put it over there, and saying, "This is AI, got search over there, don't touch that search, 'cause that's where all the revenue is." (chuckles) >> So, okay, so that's how they deal with the Clay Christensen dilemma. What's the business model here? I mean it's not advertising, right? Is it to charge you for a query? What, how do you make money at this? >> It's a good question, I mean my thinking is, first of all, it's cool to type stuff in and see a paper get written, or write a blog post, or gimme a marketing slogan for this or that or write some code. I think the API side of the business will be critical. And I think Howie Xu, I know you're going to reference some of his comments yesterday on Supercloud, I think this brings a whole 'nother user interface into technology consumption. I think the business model, not yet clear, but it will probably be some sort of either API and developer environment or just a straight up free consumer product, with some sort of freemium backend thing for business. >> And he was saying too, it's natural language is the way in which you're going to interact with these systems. >> I think it's APIs, it's APIs, APIs, APIs, because these people who are cooking up these models, and it takes a lot of compute power to train these and to, for inference as well. Somebody did the analysis on the how many cents a Google search costs to Google, and how many cents the ChatGPT query costs. It's, you know, 100x or something on that. You can take a look at that. >> A 100x on which side? >> You're saying two orders of magnitude more expensive for ChatGPT >> Much more, yeah. >> Than for Google. >> It's very expensive. >> So Google's got the data, they got the infrastructure and they got, you're saying they got the cost (indistinct) >> No actually it's a simple query as well, but they are trying to put together the answers, and they're going through a lot more data versus index data already, you know. >> Let me clarify, you're saying that Google's version of ChatGPT is more efficient? >> No, I'm, I'm saying Google search results. >> Ah, search results. >> What are used to today, but cheaper. >> But that, does that, is that going to confer advantage to Google's large language (indistinct)? >> It will, because there were deep science (indistinct). >> Google, I don't think Google search is doing a large language model on their search, it's keyword search. You know, what's the weather in Santa Cruz? Or how, what's the weather going to be? Or you know, how do I find this? Now they have done a smart job of doing some things with those queries, auto complete, re direct navigation. But it's, it's not entity. It's not like, "Hey, what's Dave Vellante thinking this week in Breaking Analysis?" ChatGPT might get that, because it'll get your Breaking Analysis, it'll synthesize it. There'll be some, maybe some clips. It'll be like, you know, I mean. >> Well I got to tell you, I asked ChatGPT to, like, I said, I'm going to enter a transcript of a discussion I had with Nir Zuk, the CTO of Palo Alto Networks, And I want you to write a 750 word blog. I never input the transcript. It wrote a 750 word blog. It attributed quotes to him, and it just pulled a bunch of stuff that, and said, okay, here it is. It talked about Supercloud, it defined Supercloud. >> It's made, it makes you- >> Wow, But it was a big lie. It was fraudulent, but still, blew me away. >> Again, vanilla content and non accurate content. So we are going to see a surge of misinformation on steroids, but I call it the vanilla content. Wow, that's just so boring, (indistinct). >> There's so many dangers. >> Make your point, cause we got to, almost out of time. >> Okay, so the consumption, like how do you consume this thing. As humans, we are consuming it and we are, like, getting a nicely, like, surprisingly shocked, you know, wow, that's cool. It's going to increase productivity and all that stuff, right? And on the danger side as well, the bad actors can take hold of it and create fake content and we have the fake sort of intelligence, if you go out there. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we are as humans are consuming this as language. Like we read that, we listen to it, whatever format we consume that is, but the ultimate usage of that will be when the machines can take that output from likes of ChatGPT, and do actions based on that. The robots can work, the robot can paint your house, we were talking about, right? Right now we can't do that. >> Data apps. >> So the data has to be ingested by the machines. It has to be digestible by the machines. And the machines cannot digest unorganized data right now, we will get better on the ingestion side as well. So we are getting better. >> Data, reasoning, insights, and action. >> I like that mall, paint my house. >> So, okay- >> By the way, that means drones that'll come in. Spray painting your house. >> Hey, it wasn't too long ago that robots couldn't climb stairs, as I like to point out. Okay, and of course it's no surprise the venture capitalists are lining up to eat at the trough, as I'd like to say. Let's hear, you'd referenced this earlier, John, let's hear what AI expert Howie Xu said at the Supercloud event, about what it takes to clone ChatGPT. Please, play the clip. >> So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest to get a, you know, another shot to the openAI sort of the level." You know, I did a (indistinct) >> Line up. >> A hundred million dollar is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So a hundred- >> Guys a hundred million dollars, that's an astoundingly low figure. What do you make of it? >> I was in an interview with, I was interviewing, I think he said hundred million or so, but in the hundreds of millions, not a billion right? >> You were trying to get him up, you were like "Hundreds of millions." >> Well I think, I- >> He's like, eh, not 10, not a billion. >> Well first of all, Howie Xu's an expert machine learning. He's at Zscaler, he's a machine learning AI guy. But he comes from VMware, he's got his technology pedigrees really off the chart. Great friend of theCUBE and kind of like a CUBE analyst for us. And he's smart. He's right. I think the barriers to entry from a dollar standpoint are lower than say the CapEx required to compete with AWS. Clearly, the CapEx spending to build all the tech for the run a cloud. >> And you don't need a huge sales force. >> And in some case apps too, it's the same thing. But I think it's not that hard. >> But am I right about that? You don't need a huge sales force either. It's, what, you know >> If the product's good, it will sell, this is a new era. The better mouse trap will win. This is the new economics in software, right? So- >> Because you look at the amount of money Lacework, and Snyk, Snowflake, Databrooks. Look at the amount of money they've raised. I mean it's like a billion dollars before they get to IPO or more. 'Cause they need promotion, they need go to market. You don't need (indistinct) >> OpenAI's been working on this for multiple five years plus it's, hasn't, wasn't born yesterday. Took a lot of years to get going. And Sam is depositioning all the success, because he's trying to manage expectations, To your point Sarbjeet, earlier. It's like, yeah, he's trying to "Whoa, whoa, settle down everybody, (Dave laughs) it's not that great." because he doesn't want to fall into that, you know, hero and then get taken down, so. >> It may take a 100 million or 150 or 200 million to train the model. But to, for the inference to, yeah to for the inference machine, It will take a lot more, I believe. >> Give it, so imagine, >> Because- >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Go ahead. But because it consumes a lot more compute cycles and it's certain level of storage and everything, right, which they already have. So I think to compute is different. To frame the model is a different cost. But to run the business is different, because I think 100 million can go into just fighting the Fed. >> Well there's a flywheel too. >> Oh that's (indistinct) >> (indistinct) >> We are running the business, right? >> It's an interesting number, but it's also kind of, like, context to it. So here, a hundred million spend it, you get there, but you got to factor in the fact that the ways companies win these days is critical mass scale, hitting a flywheel. If they can keep that flywheel of the value that they got going on and get better, you can almost imagine a marketplace where, hey, we have proprietary data, we're SiliconANGLE in theCUBE. We have proprietary content, CUBE videos, transcripts. Well wouldn't it be great if someone in a marketplace could sell a module for us, right? We buy that, Amazon's thing and things like that. So if they can get a marketplace going where you can apply to data sets that may be proprietary, you can start to see this become bigger. And so I think the key barriers to entry is going to be success. I'll give you an example, Reddit. Reddit is successful and it's hard to copy, not because of the software. >> They built the moat. >> Because you can, buy Reddit open source software and try To compete. >> They built the moat with their community. >> Their community, their scale, their user expectation. Twitter, we referenced earlier, that thing should have gone under the first two years, but there was such a great emotional product. People would tolerate the fail whale. And then, you know, well that was a whole 'nother thing. >> Then a plane landed in (John laughs) the Hudson and it was over. >> I think verticals, a lot of verticals will build applications using these models like for lawyers, for doctors, for scientists, for content creators, for- >> So you'll have many hundreds of millions of dollars investments that are going to be seeping out. If, all right, we got to wrap, if you had to put odds on it that that OpenAI is going to be the leader, maybe not a winner take all leader, but like you look at like Amazon and cloud, they're not winner take all, these aren't necessarily winner take all markets. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, but let's call it winner take most. What odds would you give that open AI 10 years from now will be in that position. >> If I'm 0 to 10 kind of thing? >> Yeah, it's like horse race, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, even money, 10 to 1, 50 to 1. >> Maybe 2 to 1, >> 2 to 1, that's pretty low odds. That's basically saying they're the favorite, they're the front runner. Would you agree with that? >> I'd say 4 to 1. >> Yeah, I was going to say I'm like a 5 to 1, 7 to 1 type of person, 'cause I'm a skeptic with, you know, there's so much competition, but- >> I think they're definitely the leader. I mean you got to say, I mean. >> Oh there's no question. There's no question about it. >> The question is can they execute? >> They're not Friendster, is what you're saying. >> They're not Friendster and they're more like Twitter and Reddit where they have momentum. If they can execute on the product side, and if they don't stumble on that, they will continue to have the lead. >> If they say stay neutral, as Sam is, has been saying, that, hey, Microsoft is one of our partners, if you look at their company model, how they have structured the company, then they're going to pay back to the investors, like Microsoft is the biggest one, up to certain, like by certain number of years, they're going to pay back from all the money they make, and after that, they're going to give the money back to the public, to the, I don't know who they give it to, like non-profit or something. (indistinct) >> Okay, the odds are dropping. (group talks over each other) That's a good point though >> Actually they might have done that to fend off the criticism of this. But it's really interesting to see the model they have adopted. >> The wildcard in all this, My last word on this is that, if there's a developer shift in how developers and data can come together again, we have conferences around the future of data, Supercloud and meshs versus, you know, how the data world, coding with data, how that evolves will also dictate, 'cause a wild card could be a shift in the landscape around how developers are using either machine learning or AI like techniques to code into their apps, so. >> That's fantastic insight. I can't thank you enough for your time, on the heels of Supercloud 2, really appreciate it. All right, thanks to John and Sarbjeet for the outstanding conversation today. Special thanks to the Palo Alto studio team. My goodness, Anderson, this great backdrop. You guys got it all out here, I'm jealous. And Noah, really appreciate it, Chuck, Andrew Frick and Cameron, Andrew Frick switching, Cameron on the video lake, great job. And Alex Myerson, he's on production, manages the podcast for us, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and our newsletters. Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, does some great editing, thanks to all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, wherever you listen. Publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Want to get in touch, email me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post. And by all means, check out etr.ai. They got really great survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, We'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (electronic music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey guys and girls. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage at Palo Alto Ignite '22. We're live at the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of our coverage. We've been talking with execs from Palo Alto, Partners, but one of our most exciting things is talking with Founders day. We get to do that next. >> The thing is, it's like I wrote this weekend in my breaking analysis. Understanding the problem in cybersecurity is really easy, but figuring out how to fix it ain't so much. >> It definitely isn't. >> So I'm excited to have Nir here. >> Very excited. Nir Zuk joins us, the founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks. Welcome, Nir. Great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> So Palo Alto Networks, you founded it back in 2005. It's hard to believe that's been 18 years, almost. You did something different, which I want to get into. But tell us, what was it back then? Why did you found this company? >> I thought the world needed another cybersecurity company. I thought it's because there were so many cybersecurity vendors in the world, and just didn't make any sense. This industry has evolved in a very weird way, where every time there was a new challenge, rather than existing vendors dealing with a challenge, you had new vendors dealing with it, and I thought I could put a stop to it, and I think I did. >> You did something differently back in 2005, looking at where you are now, the leader, what was different in your mind back then? >> Yeah. When you found a new company, you have really two good options. There's also a bad option, but we'll skip that. You can either disrupt an existing market, or you can create a new market. So first, I decided to disrupt an existing market, go into an existing market first, network security, then cyber security, and change it. Change the way it works. And like I said, the challenges that every problem had a new vendor, and nobody just stepped back and said, "I think I can solve it with the platform." Meaning, I think I can spend some time not solving a specific problem, but building a platform that then can be used to solve many different problems. And that's what I've done, and that's what Palo Alto Networks has done, and that's where we are today. >> So you look back, you call it now, I think you call it a next gen firewall, but nothing in 2005, can it be next gen? Do you know the Silicon Valley Show? Do you know the show Silicon Valley? >> Oh! Yeah. >> Yeah, of course. >> You got to have a box. But it was a different kind of box- >> Actually. >> Explain that. >> Actually, it's exactly the same thing. You got to have a box. So I actually wanted to call it a necessary evil. Marketing wouldn't go for that. >> No. >> And the reason I wanted to call it a necessary evil, because one of the things that we've done in order to platform our cyber security, again, first network security now, also cloud security, and security operations, is to turn it into a SaaS delivered industry. Today every cyber security professional knows that, when they buy cyber security, they buy usually a SaaS delivered service. Back then, people thought I was crazy to think that customers are going to send their data to their vendor in order to process, and they wanted everything on premise and so on, but I said, "No, customers are going to send information to us for processing, because we have much more processing power than they have." And we needed something in the infrastructure to send us the information. So that's why I wanted to call it the necessary evil. We ended up calling it next generation firewall, which was probably a better term. >> Well, even Veritas. Remember Veritas? They had the no hardware agenda. Even they have a box. So it is like you say, you got to have it. >> It's necessary. >> Okay. You did this, you started this on your own cloud, kind of like Salesforce, ServiceNow. >> Correct. >> Similar now- >> Build your own data centers. >> Build your own data center. Okay, I call it a cloud, but no. >> No, it's the same. There's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. >> According to Larry Ellison, he was actually probably right about that. But over time, you've had this closer partnership with the public clouds. >> Correct. >> What does that bring you and your customers, and how hard was that to navigate? >> It wasn't that hard for us, because we didn't have that many services. Usually it's harder. Of course, we didn't do a lift and shift, which is their own thing to do with the cloud. We rebuild things for the cloud, and the benefits, of course, are time to market, scale, agility, and in some cases also, cost. >> Yeah, some cases. >> In some cases. >> So you have a sort of a hybrid model today. You still run your own data centers, do you not? >> Very few. >> Really? >> There are very, very few things that we have to do on hardware, like simulating malware and things that cannot be done in a virtual machine, which is pretty much the only option you have in the cloud. They provide bare metal, but doesn't serve our needs. I think that we don't view cloud, and your viewers should not be viewing cloud, as a place where they're going to save money. It's a place where they're going to make money. >> I like that. >> You make much more money, because you're more agile. >> And that's why this conversation is all about, your cost of goods sold they're going to be so high, you're going to have to come back to your own data centers. That's not on your mind right now. What's on your mind is advancing the unit, right? >> Look, my own data center would limit me in scale, would limit my agility. If you want to build something new, you don't have all the PaaS services, the platform as a service, services like database, and AI, and so on. I have to build them myself. It takes time. So yeah, it's going to be cheaper, but I'm not going to be delivering the same thing. So my revenues will be much lower. >> Less top line. What can humans do better than machines? You were talking about your keynote... I'm just going to chat a little bit. You were talking about your keynote. Basically, if you guys didn't see the keynote, that AI is going to run every soc within five years, that was a great prediction that you made. >> Correct. >> And they're going to do things that you can't do today, and then in the future, they're going to do things that you can't... Better than you can do. >> And you just have to be comfortable with that. >> So what do you think humans can do today and in the future better than machines? >> Look, humans can always do better than machines. The human mind can do things that machines cannot do. We are conscious, I don't think machines will be conscious. And you can do things... My point was not that machines can do things that humans cannot do. They can just do it better. The things that humans do today, machines can do better, once machines do that, humans will be free to do things that they don't do today, that machines cannot do. >> Like what? >> Like finding the most difficult, most covert attacks, dealing with the most difficult incidents, things that machines just can't do. Just that today, humans are consumed by finding attacks that machines can find, by dealing with incidents that machines can deal with. It's a waste of time. We leave it to the machines and go and focus on the most difficult problems, and then have the machines learn from you, so that next time or a hundred or a thousand times from now, they can do it themselves, and you focus on the even more difficult. >> Yeah, just like after 9/11, they said that we lack the creativity. That's what humans have, that machines don't, at least today. >> Machines don't. Yeah, look, every airplane has two pilots, even though airplanes have been flying themselves for 30 years now, why do you have two pilots, to do the things that machines cannot do? Like land on the Hudson, right? You always need humans to do the things that machines cannot do. But to leave the things that machines can do to the machines, they'll do it better. >> And autonomous vehicles need breaks. (indistinct) >> In your customer conversations, are customers really grappling with that, are they going, "Yeah, you're right?" >> It depends. It's hard for customers to let go of old habits. First, the habit of buying a hundred different solutions from a hundred different vendors, and you know what? Why would I trust one vendor to do everything, put all my eggs in the same basket? They have all kind of slogans as to why not to do that, even though it's been proven again and again that, doing everything in one system with one brain, versus a hundred systems with a hundred brains, work much better. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we always have the same issue that we've had, I think, since the industrial revolution, of what machines are going to take away my job. No, they're just going to make your job better. So I think that some of our customers are also grappling with that, like, "What do I do if the machines take over?" And of course, like we've said, the machines aren't taking over. They're going to do the benign work, you're going to do the interesting work. You should embrace it. >> When I think about your history as a technology pro, from Check Point, a couple of startups, one of the things that always frustrated you, is when when a larger company bought you out, you ended up getting sucked into the bureaucratic vortex. How do you avoid that at Palo Alto Networks? >> So first, you mean when we acquire company? >> Yes. >> The first thing is that, when we acquire companies, we always acquire for integration. Meaning, we don't just buy something and then leave it on the side, and try to sell it here and there. We integrate it into the core of our products. So that's very important, so that the technology lives, thrives and continues to grow as part of our bigger platform. And I think that the second thing that is very important, from past experience what we've learned, is to put the people that we acquire in key positions. Meaning, you don't buy a company and then put the leader of that company five levels below the CEO. You always put them in very senior positions. Almost always, we have the leaders of the companies that we acquire, be two levels below the CEO, so very senior in the company, so they can influence and make changes. >> So two questions related to that. One is, as you grow your team, can you be both integrated? And second part of the question, can you be both integrated and best of breed? Second part of the question is, do you even have to be? >> So I'll answer it in the third way, which is, I don't think you can be best of breed without being integrated in cybersecurity. And the reason is, again, this split brain that I've mentioned twice. When you have different products do a part of cybersecurity and they don't talk to each other, and they don't share a single brain, you always compromise. You start looking for things the wrong way. I can be a little bit technical here, but please. Take the example of, traditionally you would buy an IDS/IPS, separately from your filtering, separately from DNS security. One of the most important things we do in network security is to find combining control connections. Combining control connections where the adversaries controlling something behind your firewall and is now going around your network, is usually the key heel of the attack. That's why attacks like ransomware, that don't have a commanding control connection, are so difficult to deal with, by the way. So commanding control connections are a key seal of the attacks, and there are three different technologies that deal with it. Neural filtering for neural based commanding control, DNS security for DNS based commanding control, and IDS/IPS for general commanding control. If those are three different products, they'll be doing the wrong things. The oral filter will try to find things that it's not really good at, that the IPS really need to find, and the DN... It doesn't work. It works much better when it's one product doing everything. So I think the choice is not between best of breed and integrated. I think the only choice is integrated, because that's the only way to be best of breed. >> And behind that technology is some kind of realtime data store, I'll call it data lake, database. >> Yeah. >> Whatever. >> It's all driven by the same data. All the URLs, all the domain graph. Everything goes to one big data lake. We collect about... I think we collect about, a few petabytes per day. I don't write the exact number of data. It's all going to the same data lake, and all the intelligence is driven by that. >> So you mentioned in a cheeky comment about, why you founded the company, there weren't enough cybersecurity companies. >> Yeah. >> Clearly the term expansion strategy that Palo Alto Networks has done has been very successful. You've been, as you talked about, very focused on integration, not just from the technology perspective, but from the people perspective as well. >> Correct. >> So why are there still so many cybersecurity companies, and what are you thinking Palo Alto Networks can do to change that? >> So first, I think that there are a lot of cybersecurity companies out there, because there's a lot of money going into cybersecurity. If you look at the number of companies that have been really successful, it's a very small percentage of those cybersecurity companies. And also look, we're not going to be responsible for all the innovation in cybersecurity. We need other people to innovate. It's also... Look, always the question is, "Do you buy something or do you build it yourself?" Now we think we're the smartest people in the world. Of course, we can build everything, but it's not always true that we can build everything. Know that we're the smartest people in the world, for sure. You see, when you are a startup, you live and die by the thing that you build. Meaning if it's good, it works. If it's not good, you die. You run out of money, you shut down, and you just lost four years of your life to this, at least. >> At least. >> When you're a large company, yeah, I can go and find a hundred engineers and hire them. And especially nowadays, it becomes easier, as it became easier, and give them money, and have them go and build the same thing that the startup is building, but they're part of a bigger company, and they'll have more coffee breaks, and they'll be less incentive to go and do that, because the company will survive with or without them. So that's why startups can do things much better, sometimes than larger companies. We can do things better than startups, when it comes to being data driven because we have the data, and nobody can compete against the amount of data that we have. So we have a good combination of finding the right startups that have already built something, already proven that it works with some customers, and of course, building a lot of things internally that we cannot do outside. >> I heard you say in one of the, I dunno, dozens of videos I've listened to you talked to. The industry doesn't need or doesn't want another IoT stovepipe. Okay, I agree. So you got on-prem, AWS, Azure, Google, maybe Alibaba, IoT is going to be all over the place. So can you build, I call it the security super cloud, in other words, a consistent experience with the same policies and edicts across all my estates, irrespective of physical location? Is that technically feasible? Is it what you are trying to do? >> Certainly, what we're trying to do with Prisma Cloud, with our cloud security product, it works across all the clouds that you mentioned, and Oracle as well. It's almost entirely possible. >> Almost. >> Almost. Well, the things that... What you do is you normalize the language that the different cloud scale providers use, into one language. This cloud calls it a S3, and so, AWS calls it S3, and (indistinct) calls it GCS, and so on. So you normalize their terminology, and then build policy using a common terminology that your customers have to get used to. Of course, there are things that are different between the different cloud providers that cannot be normalized, and there, it has to be cloud specific. >> In that instance. So is that, in part, your strategy, is to actually build that? >> Of course. >> And does that necessitate running on all the major clouds? >> Of course. It's not just part of our strategy, it's a major part of our strategy. >> Compulsory. >> Look, as a standalone vendor that is not a cloud provider, we have two advantages. The first one is we're security product, security focused. So we can do much better than them when it comes to security. If you are a AWS, GCP, Azure, and so on, you're not going to put your best people on security, you're going to put them on the core business that you have. So we can do much better. Hey, that's interesting. >> Well, that's not how they talk. >> I don't care how they talk. >> Now that's interesting. >> When something is 4% of your business, you're not going to put it... You're not going to put your best people there. It's just, why would you? You put your best people on 96%. >> That's not driving their revenue. >> Look, it's simple. It's not what we- >> With all due respect. With all due respect. >> So I think we do security much better than them, and they become the good enough, and we become the premium. But certainly, the second thing that give us an advantage and the right to be a standalone security provider, is that we're multicloud, private cloud and all the major cloud providers. >> But they also have a different role. I mean, your role is not the security, the Nitro card or the Graviton chip, or is it? >> They are responsible for securing up to the operating system. We secure everything. >> They do a pretty good job of that. >> No, they do, certainly they have to. If they get bridged at that level, it's not just that one customer is going to suffer, the entire customer base. They have to spend a lot of time and money on it, and frankly, that's where they put their best security people. Securing the infrastructure, not building some cloud security feature. >> Absolutely. >> So Palo Alto Networks is, as we wrap here, on track to nearly double its revenues to nearly seven billion in FY '23, just compared to 2020, you were quoted in the press by saying, "We will be the first $100 billion cyber company." What is next for Palo Alto to achieve that? >> Yeah, so it was Nikesh, our CEO and chairman, that was quoted saying that, "We will double to a hundred billion." I don't think he gave it a timeframe, but what it takes is to double the sales, right? We're at 50 billion market cap right now, so we need to double sales. But in reality, you mentioned that we're growing the turn by doing more and more cybersecurity functions, and taking away pieces. Still, we have a relatively small, even though we're the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world, we have a very low market share that shows you how fragmented the market is. I would also like to point out something that is less known. Part of what we do with AI, is really take the part of the cybersecurity industry, which are service oriented, and that's about 50% of the cybersecurity industry services, and turn it into products. I mean, not all of it. But a good portion of what's provided today by people, and tens of billions of dollars are spent on that, can be done with products. And being one of the very, very few vendors that do that, I think we have a huge opportunity at turning those tens of billions of dollars in human services to AI. >> It's always been a good business taking human labor and translating into R and D, vendor R and D. >> Especially- >> It never fails if you do it well. >> Especially in difficult times, difficult economical times like we are probably experiencing right now around the world. We, not we, but we the world. >> Right, right. Well, congratulations. Coming up on the 18th anniversary. Tremendous amount of success. >> Thank you. >> Great vision, clear vision, STEM expansion strategy, really well underway. We are definitely going to continue to keep our eyes. >> Big company, a hundred billion, that's market capital, so that's a big company. You said you didn't want to work for a big company unless you founded it, is that... >> Unless it acts like a small company. >> There's the caveat. We'll keep our eye on that. >> Thank you very much. >> It's such a pleasure having you on. >> Thank you. >> Same here, thank you. >> All right, for our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We are live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand Hotel, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, covering our first time covering Palo Alto Ignite. 22 in person. Dave, we've had some great conversations so far. We've got two days of wall to wall coverage. We're gonna be talking with Palo Alto execs, leaders, customers, partners, and we're gonna be talking about the partner ecosystem >>Next. Wow. Super important. You know, it's funny you talk about for a minute, you didn't know where we were. I, I came to Vegas in May. I feel like I never left two weeks ago reinvent, which was I, I thought the most awesome reinvent ever. And it was really all about the ecosystem and the marketplace. So super excited to have that >>Conversation. Yeah, we've got Wet Whit Krump joining us, director of America's business development worldwide channels and customer programs at AWS marketplace. Wet, welcome to the Cube. Great to have >>You. Thanks for having me. Give >>Us a, you got a big title there. Give us a little bit of flavor of your scope of work at aws. >>Yeah, sure. So I, I've been with the marketplace team now almost eight years and originally founded our channel programs. And my scope has expanded to not just cover channels, but all things related to customers. So if you think about marketplace having sort of two sides, one being very focused on the isv, I tend to manage all things related to our in customer and our, our channel partners. >>What are some of the feedback that you're getting from customers and channel partners as the marketplace has has evolved so much? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's been interesting to watch over the course of the years, getting to see it start its infancy and grow up. One of the things that we hear often from customers and from our channel partners, and maybe not so directly, is it's not about finding the things they necessarily want to buy, although that's important, but it's the actual act of how they're able to purchase things and making that a much more streamlined process, especially in large enterprises where there's a lot of complexity. We wanna make that a lot simple, simpler for our customers. >>I mean, vendor management is such a hassle, right? But, so when I come into the marketplace, it's all there. I gotta console, it's integrated, I choose what I want. The billing is simplified. How has that capability evolved since the time that you've been at aws and where do you, where do you want to take it? >>Yeah, so when we, we first started Marketplace, it was really a pay as you go model customer come, they buy whatever, you know, whatever the, the whatever the solution was. And then it was, you know, charged by the hour and then the year. And one of the things that we discovered through customer and partner feedback was especially when they're dealing with large enterprise purchases, you know, they want to be able to instantiate those custom price and terms, you know, into that contract while enjoying the benefits of, of marketplace. And that's been, I think the biggest evolution started in 2017 with private offers, 2018 with consulting partner private offers. And then we've added things on over time to streamline procurement for, for >>Customers. So one of the hottest topics right now, everybody wants to talk about the macro and the headwinds and everything else, but when you talk to customers like, look, I gotta do more with less, less, that's the big theme. Yeah. And, and I wanna optimize my spend. Cloud allows me to do that because I can dial down, I can push storage to, to lower tiers. There's a lot of different things that I can do. Yeah. What are the techniques that people are using in the ecosystem Yeah. To bring in the partner cost optimization. Yeah. >>And so one of the key things that, that partners are, are, are doing for customers, they act as that trusted advisor. And, you know, when using marketplace either directly or through a partner, you know, customers are able to really save money through a licensing flexibility. They're also able to streamline their procurement. And then if there's an at-risk spin situation, they're able to, to manage that at-risk spend by combining marketplace and AWS spin into into one, you know, basically draws down their commitments to, to the company. >>And we talk about ask at-risk spend, you might talk about user or lose IT type of spend, right? Yeah. And so you, you increase the optionality in terms of where you can get value from your cloud spend. That's >>All right. Customers are thinking about their, their IT spend more strategically now more than ever. And so they're not just thinking about how do I buy infrastructure here and then software here, data services, they wanna combine this into one place. It's a lot less to keep up with a lot, a lot less overhead for them. But also just the simplification that you alluded to earlier around, you know, all the billing and vendor management is, and now in one, one streamlined, one streamlined process. Talk >>About that as a facilitator of organizations being able to reduce their risk profile. >>Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that, that came out earlier this year with Forrester was a to were total economic impact studies for both an ISV and for the end customer. But there was also a thought leadership study done where they surveyed over 700 customers worldwide to sort of get their thoughts on procurement and risk profile management. And, and one of the things that was really, you know, really surprising was is was that, you know, I guess it was like over 78% of of respondents DEF stated that they didn't feel like their, their companies had a really well-defined governance model and that over half of software and data purchases actually went outside of procurement. And so the companies aren't really able to, don't, they don't really have eyes on all of this spin and it's substantial >>And that's a, a huge risk for the organization. >>Yeah. Huge risk for the organization. And, and you know, half of the respondents stated outright that like they viewed marketplaces a way for them to reduce their risk profile because they, they were able to have a better governance model around that. >>So what's the business case can take us through that. How, how should a customer think about that? So, okay, I get that the procurement department likes it and the CFO probably likes it, but how, what, what's the dynamic around the business? So if I'm a, let's say I'm, I'm a bus, I'm a business person, I'm a, and running the process, I got my little, I get my procurement reach around. Yeah. What does the data suggest that what's in it from me, right? From a company wide standpoint, you know, what are the, maybe the Forester guys address this. So yeah, that overall business case I think is important. >>Yeah, I think, I think one of the big headlines for the end customer is because of license flexibility is that is is about a 10% cost savings in, in license cost. They're able to right size their purchases to buy the things they actually need. They're not gonna have these big overarching ELAs. There's gonna be a lot of other things in there that, that they don't, they don't really aren't gonna really directly use. You're talking about shelfware, you know, that sort of the classic term buy something, it never gets used, you know, also from just a, a getting things done perspective, big piece of feedback from customers is the contracting process takes a long time. It takes several months, especially for a large purchase. And a lot of those discussions are very repetitive. You know, you're talking about the same things over and over again. And we actually built a feature called standardized contract where we talked to a number of customers and ISVs distilled a contract down into a, a largely a set of terms that both sides already agreed to. And it cuts that, that contract time down by 90%. So if you're a legal team in a company, there's only so many of you and you have a lot of things to get done. If you can shave 90% off your time, that that's, that's now you can now work on a lot of other things for the, the corporation. Right. >>A lot of business impact there. You think faster time to value, faster time to market workforce optimization. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, you know, from an ISV standpoint, the measurement is they're, they're able to close deals about 40% faster, which is great for the isv. I mean obviously they love that. But if you're a customer, you're actually getting the innovative technologies you need 40% faster. So you can actually do the work you want to take it to your customers and drive the business. >>You guys recently launched, what is it, vendor Insights? Yeah. Talk a little bit about that, the value. What are some of the things that you're seeing with that? >>Yeah, so that goes into the, the onboarding value add of marketplaces. The number of things that go into, to cutting that time according to Forrester by 75%. But Vendor Insights was based on a key piece, offa impact from customers. So, you know, marketplace is used for, one of the reasons is discoverability by customers, Hey, what is the broader landscape? Look for example of security or storage partners, you know, trying to, trying to understand what is even available. And then the double click is, alright, well how does that company, or how does that vendor fit into my risk profile? You know, understanding what their compliance metrics are, things of that nature. And so historically they would have to, a customer would've to go to an ISV and say, all right, I want you to fill out this form, you know that my questionnaire. And so they would trade this back and forth as they have questions. Now with vendor insights, a customer can actually subscribe to this and they're able to actually see the risk profile of that vendor from the inside out, you know, from the inside of their SaaS application, what does it look like on a real time basis? And they can go back and look at that whenever they want. And you know, the, the, the feedback since the launch has been fantastic. And that, and I think that helps us double down on the already the, the onboarding benefits that we are providing customers. >>This, this, I wanna come back to this idea of cost optimization and, and try to tie it into predictability. You know, a lot of people, you know, complain, oh, I got surprised at the end of the month. So if I understand it wit by, by leveraging the marketplace and the breadth that you have in the marketplace, I can say, okay, look, I'm gonna spend X amount on tech. Yeah. And, and this approach allows me to say, all right, because right now procurement or historically procurement's been a bunch of stove pipes, I can't take from here and easily put it over there. Right. You're saying that this not only addresses the sort of cost optimization, does it also address the predictability challenge? >>Yeah, and I, I think another way to describe that is, is around cost controls. And you know, just from a reporting perspective, you know, we, we have what are called cost utilization reports or curve files. And we provide those to customers anytime they want and they can load those into Tableau, use whatever analysis tools that they want to be able to use. And so, and then you can actually tag usage in those reports. And what we're really talking about is helping customers adopt thin op practices. So, you know, develop directly for the cloud customers are able to understand, okay, who's using what, when and where. So everyone's informed that creates a really collaborative environment. It also holds people accountable for their spin. So that, you know, again, talking about shelfware, we bought things we're not gonna use or we're overusing people are using software that they probably don't really need to. And so that's, that adds to that predictable is everyone has great visibility into what's happening. And there's >>Another, I mean, of course saving money is, is, is in vogue right now because you know, the headwinds and the economics, et cetera. But there's also another side of the equation, which is, I mean, I see this a lot. You know, the CFO says financial people, why is our cloud bill so high? Well it's because we're actually driving all this revenue. And so, you know, you've seen it so many so often in companies, you know, the, the spreadsheet analysis says, oh, cut that. Well, what happens to revenue if you cut that? Right? Yeah. So with that visibility, the answer may be, well actually if we double down on that, yeah, we're actually gonna make more money cuz we actually have a margin on this and it's, it's got operating leverage. So if we double that, you know, we could, so that kind of cross organization communication to make better decisions, I think is another key factor. Yeah. >>Huge impact there. Talk ultimately about how the buyer's journey seems to have been really transformed >>The >>Correct. Right? So if you're, if you're a buyer, you know, initially to your point is, you know, I'm just looking for a point solution, right? And then you move on to the next one and the next one. And now, you know, working with our teams and using the platform, you know, and frankly customers are thinking more strategically about their IT spend holistically. The conversations that we're having with us is, it's not about how do I find the solution today, but here's my forward looking software spend, or I'm going through a migration, I wanna rationalize the software portfolio I have today as I'm gonna lift and shift it to aws. You know, what is going to make the trip? What are we gonna discard entirely because it's not really optimized for the cloud. Or there's that shelf wheel component, which is, hey, you know, maybe 15 to 25% of my portfolio, it's just not even getting utilized. And that, and that's a sunk cost to your point, which is, you know, that's, that's money I could be using on something that really impacts the bottom line in various areas of the business. Right. >>What would you say is the number one request you get or feedback you get from the end customers? And how is that different from what you hear from the channel partners? How aligned or Yeah. Are those >>Vectors? I would say from a customer perspective, one of the key things I hear about is around visibility of spin, right? And I was just talking about these reports and you know, using cost optimization tools, being able to use features like identity and access management, managing entitlements, private marketplaces. Basically them being able to have a stronger governance model in the cloud. For one thing, it's, it's, you know, keeping everybody on track like some of the points I was talking about earlier, but also cost, cost optimization around, you know, limiting vendor sprawl. Are we actually really using all the things that we need? And then from a channel partner perspective, you know, some of the things I talked about earlier about that 40% faster sales cycle, you know, that that TEI or the total economic impact study that was done by Forrester was, was built for the isv. >>But if you're a channel partner sitting between the customer and the isv, you kind of get to, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds, right? You're acting as that, you're acting as that that advisor. And so if you're a channel partner, the procurement streamlining is a huge benefit because the, you know, like you said, saving money is in vogue right now. You're trying to do more with less. So if you're thinking about 20, 27% faster win rates, 40% faster time to close, and you're the customer who's trying to impact the bottom line by, by innovating more, more quickly, those two pieces of feedback are really coming together and meeting in, in the middle >>Throughout 2021, or sorry, 2022, our survey partner, etr Enterprise Technology Research has asked their panel a question is what's your strategy for, you know, doing more with less? By far the number one response has been consolidating redundant vendors. Yes. And then optimizing cloud was, you know, second, but, but way, way lower than that. The number from last survey went from 34%. It's now up to 44% in the January survey, which is in the field, which they gave me a glimpse to last night. So you're seeing dramatic uptick Yeah. In that point. Yeah. And then you guys are helping, >>We, we definitely are. I mean, it, there's the reporting piece so they have a better visibility of what they're doing. And then you think about a, a feature like private marketplace and manage entitlements. So private marketplace enables a customer to create their own private marketplace as the name states where they can limit access to it for certain types of software to the actual in customer who needs to use that software. And so, you know, not everybody needs a license to software X, right? And so that helps with the sprawl comment to your point, that's, that's on the increase, right? Am I actually spending money on things that we need to use? >>But also on the consolidation front, you, we, we talked with nikesh an hour or so ago, he was mentioning on stage, if you, if you just think of this number of security tools or cybersecurity tools that an organization has on its network, 30 to 50. And we were talking about, well, how does Palo Alto Networks what's realistic in terms of consolidation? But it sounds like what you're doing in the marketplace is giving organizations the visibility, correct, for sure. Into what they're running, usage spend, et cetera, to help facilitate ultimately at some point facilitate a strategic consolidation. >>It's, that's exactly right. And if you, you think about cost optimization, our procurement features, you know, the, the practice that we're trying to help customers around, around finops, it's all about helping customers build a, a modern procurement practice and supply chain. And so that helps with, with that point exactly. The keynotes >>Point. Exactly. So last question for you. What, what's next? What can we expect? >>Oh, so what's next for me is, you know, I, I really want to, you know, my channel business for example, you know, I want to think about enabling new types of partners. So if we've worked really heavily with resellers, we worked very heavily with Palo Alto on the reseller community, how are we bringing in more services partners of various types? You know, the gsi, the distributors, cloud service providers, managed security service providers was in a keynote yesterday listening to Palo Alto talk about their five routes to market. And, you know, they had these bubbles. And so I was like, gosh, that's exactly how I'm thinking about the business is how am I expanding my own footprint to customers that have deeper, I mean, excuse me, to partners that have deeper levels of cloud knowledge, can be more of that advisor, help customers really understand how to maximize their business on aws. And, and you know, my job is to really help facilitate that, that innovative technology through those partners. >>So sounds like powerful force, that ecosystem. Exactly. Great alignment. AWS and Palo Alto, thank you so much for joining us with, we >>Appreciate, thanks for having >>With what's going on at aws, the partner network, the mp, and all that good stuff. That's really the value in it for customers, ISVs and channel partners. I like. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. >>Our guests and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Lee Leer in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

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

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

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. It's the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022. This is our fourth day of coverage. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gillen. Paul, we started Monday night, we filmed and streamed for about three hours. We have had shammed pack days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. What's your takeaway? >>We're routed final turn as we, as we head into the home stretch. Yeah. This is as it has been since the beginning, this show with a lot of energy. I'm amazed for the fourth day of a conference, how many people are still here I am too. And how, and how active they are and how full the sessions are. Huge. Proud for the keynote this morning. You don't see that at most of the day four conferences. Everyone's on their way home. So, so people come here to learn and they're, and they're still >>Learning. They are still learning. And we're gonna help continue that learning path. We have an alumni back with us, Toron joins us, the CPO and co-founder of Dremeo. Tomer, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Yeah, thanks for, for having me here. And thanks for keeping the, the best session for the fourth day. >>Yeah, you're right. I like that. That's a good mojo to come into this interview with Tomer. So last year, last time I saw you was a year ago here in Vegas at Reinvent 21. We talked about the growth of data lakes and the data lake houses. We talked about the need for open data architectures as opposed to data warehouses. And the headline of the Silicon Angle's article on the interview we did with you was, Dremio Predicts 2022 will be the year open data architectures replace the data warehouse. We're almost done with 2022. Has that prediction come true? >>Yeah, I think, I think we're seeing almost every company out there, certainly in the enterprise, adopting data lake, data lakehouse technology, embracing open source kind of file and table formats. And, and so I think that's definitely happening. Of course, nothing goes away. So, you know, data warehouses don't go away in, in a year and actually don't go away ever. We still have mainframes around, but certainly the trends are, are all pointing in that direction. >>Describe the data lakehouse for anybody who may not be really familiar with that and, and what it's, what it really means for organizations. >>Yeah. I think you could think of the data lakehouse as the evolution of the data lake, right? And so, you know, for, for, you know, the last decade we've had kind of these two options, data lakes and data warehouses and, you know, warehouses, you know, having good SQL support, but, and good performance. But you had to spend a lot of time and effort getting data into the warehouse. You got locked into them, very, very expensive. That's a big problem now. And data lakes, you know, more open, more scalable, but had all sorts of kind of limitations. And what we've done now as an industry with the Lake House, and especially with, you know, technologies like Apache Iceberg, is we've unlocked all the capabilities of the warehouse directly on object storage like s3. So you can insert and update and delete individual records. You can do transactions, you can do all the things you could do with a, a database directly in kind of open formats without getting locked in at a much lower cost. >>But you're still dealing with semi-structured data as opposed to structured data. And there's, there's work that has to be done to get that into a usable form. That's where Drio excels. What, what has been happening in that area to, to make, I mean, is it formats like j s o that are, are enabling this to happen? How, how we advancing the cause of making semi-structured data usable? Yeah, >>Well, I think first of all, you know, I think that's all changed. I think that was maybe true for the original data lakes, but now with the Lake house, you know, our bread and butter is actually structured data. It's all, it's all tables with the schema. And, you know, you can, you know, create table insert records. You know, it's, it's, it's really everything you can do with a data warehouse you can now do in the lakehouse. Now, that's not to say that there aren't like very advanced capabilities when it comes to, you know, j s O and nested data and kind of sparse data. You know, we excel in that as well. But we're really seeing kind of the lakehouse take over the, the bread and butter data warehouse use cases. >>You mentioned open a minute ago. Talk about why it's, why open is important and the value that it can deliver for customers. >>Yeah, well, I think if you look back in time and you see all the challenges that companies have had with kind of traditional data architectures, right? The, the, the, a lot of that comes from the, the, the problems with data warehouses. The fact that they are, you know, they're very expensive. The data is, you have to ingest it into the data warehouse in order to query it. And then it's almost impossible to get off of these systems, right? It takes an enormous effort, tremendous cost to get off of them. And so you're kinda locked in and that's a big problem, right? You also, you're dependent on that one data warehouse vendor, right? You can only do things with that data that the warehouse vendor supports. And if you contrast that to data lakehouse and open architectures where the data is stored in entirely open formats. >>So things like par files and Apache iceberg tables, that means you can use any engine on that data. You can use s SQL Query Engine, you can use Spark, you can use flin. You know, there's a dozen different engines that you can use on that, both at the same time. But also in the future, if you ever wanted to try something new that comes out, some new open source innovation, some new startup, you just take it and point out the same data. So that data's now at the core, at the center of the architecture as opposed to some, you know, vendors logo. Yeah. >>Amazon seems to be bought into the Lakehouse concept. It has big announcements on day two about eliminating the ETL stage between RDS and Redshift. Do you see the cloud vendors as pushing this concept forward? >>Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I'm, I'm Amazon's a great, great partner of ours. We work with, you know, probably 10 different teams there. Everything from, you know, the S3 team, the, the glue team, the click site team, you know, everything in between. And, you know, their embracement of the, the, the lake house architecture, the fact that they adopted Iceberg as their primary table format. I think that's exciting as an industry. We're all coming together around standard, standard ways to represent data so that at the end of the day, companies have this benefit of being able to, you know, have their own data in their own S3 account in open formats and be able to use all these different engines without losing any of the functionality that they need, right? The ability to do all these interactions with data that maybe in the past you would have to move the data into a database or, or warehouse in order to do, you just don't have to do that anymore. Speaking >>Of functionality, talk about what's new this year with drio since we've seen you last. >>Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of new things with, with Drio. So yeah, we now have full Apache iceberg support, you know, with DML commands, you can do inserts, updates, deletes, you know, copy into all, all that kind of stuff is now, you know, fully supported native part of the platform. We, we now offer kind of two flavors of dr. We have, you know, Dr. Cloud, which is our SaaS version fully hosted. You sign up with your Google or, you know, Azure account and, and, and you're up in, you're up and running in, in, in a minute. And then dral software, which you can self host usually in the cloud, but even, even even outside of the cloud. And then we're also very excited about this new idea of data as code. And so we've introduced a new product that's now in preview called Dr. >>Arctic. And the idea there is to bring the concepts of GI or GitHub to the world of data. So things like being able to create a branch and work in isolation. If you're a data scientist, you wanna experiment on your own without impacting other people, or you're a data engineer and you're ingesting data, you want to transform it and test it before you expose it to others. You can do that in a branch. So all these ideas that, you know, we take for granted now in the world of source code and software development, we're bringing to the world of data with Jamar. And when you think about data mesh, a lot of people talking about data mesh now and wanting to kind of take advantage of, of those concepts and ideas, you know, thinking of data as a product. Well, when you think about data as a product, we think you have to manage it like code, right? You have to, and that's why we call it data as code, right? The, all those reasons that we use things like GI have to build products, you know, if we wanna think of data as a product, we need all those capabilities also with data. You know, also the ability to go back in time. The ability to undo mistakes, to see who changed my data and when did they change that table. All of those are, are part of this, this new catalog that we've created. >>Are you talk about data as a product that's sort of intrinsic to the data mesh concept. Are you, what's your opinion of data mesh? Is the, is the world ready for that radically different approach to data ownership? >>You know, we are now in dozens of, dozens of our customers that are using drio for to implement enterprise-wide kind of data mesh solutions. And at the end of the day, I think it's just, you know, what most people would consider common sense, right? In a large organization, it is very hard for a centralized single team to understand every piece of data, to manage all the data themselves, to, you know, make sure the quality is correct to make it accessible. And so what data mesh is first and foremost about is being able to kind of federate the, or distribute the, the ownership of data, the governance of the data still has to happen, right? And so that is, I think at the heart of the data mesh, but thinking of data as kind of allowing different teams, different domains to own their own data to really manage it like a product with all the best practices that that we have with that super important. >>So we we're doing a lot with data mesh, you know, the way that cloud has multiple projects and the way that Jamar allows you to have multiple catalogs and different groups can kind of interact and share data among each other. You know, the fact that we can connect to all these different data sources, even outside your data lake, you know, with Redshift, Oracle SQL Server, you know, all the different databases that are out there and join across different databases in addition to your data lake, that that's all stuff that companies want with their data mesh. >>What are some of your favorite customer stories that where you've really helped them accelerate that data mesh and drive business value from it so that more people in the organization kind of access to data so they can really make those data driven decisions that everybody wants to make? >>I mean, there's, there's so many of them, but, you know, one of the largest tech companies in the world creating a, a data mesh where you have all the different departments in the company that, you know, they, they, they were a big data warehouse user and it kinda hit the wall, right? The costs were so high and the ability for people to kind of use it for just experimentation, to try new things out to collaborate, they couldn't do it because it was so prohibitively expensive and difficult to use. And so what they said, well, we need a platform that different people can, they can collaborate, they can ex, they can experiment with the data, they can share data with others. And so at a big organization like that, the, their ability to kind of have a centralized platform but allow different groups to manage their own data, you know, several of the largest banks in the world are, are also doing data meshes with Dr you know, one of them has over over a dozen different business units that are using, using Dremio and that ability to have thousands of people on a platform and to be able to collaborate and share among each other that, that's super important to these >>Guys. Can you contrast your approach to the market, the snowflakes? Cause they have some of those same concepts. >>Snowflake's >>A very closed system at the end of the day, right? Closed and very expensive. Right? I think they, if I remember seeing, you know, a quarter ago in, in, in one of their earnings reports that the average customer spends 70% more every year, right? Well that's not sustainable. If you think about that in a decade, that's your cost is gonna increase 200 x, most companies not gonna be able to swallow that, right? So companies need, first of all, they need more cost efficient solutions that are, you know, just more approachable, right? And the second thing is, you know, you know, we talked about the open data architecture. I think most companies now realize that the, if you want to build a platform for the future, you need to have the data and open formats and not be locked into one vendor, right? And so that's kind of another important aspect beyond that's ability to connect to all your data, even outside the lake to your different databases, no sequel databases, relational databases, and drs semantic layer where we can accelerate queries. And so typically what you have, what happens with data warehouses and other data lake query engines is that because you can't get the performance that you want, you end up creating lots and lots of copies of data. You, for every use case, you're creating a, you know, a pre-joy copy of that data, a pre aggregated version of that data. And you know, then you have to redirect all your data. >>You've got a >>Governance problem, individual things. It's expensive. It's expensive, it's hard to secure that cuz permissions don't travel with the data. So you have all sorts of problems with that, right? And so what we've done because of our semantic layer that makes it easy to kind of expose data in a logical way. And then our query acceleration technology, which we call reflections, which transparently accelerates queries and gives you subsecond response times without data copies and also without extracts into the BI tools. Cause if you start doing bi extracts or imports, again, you have lots of copies of data in the organization, all sorts of refresh problems, security problems, it's, it's a nightmare, right? And that just collapsing all those copies and having a, a simple solution where data's stored in open formats and we can give you fast access to any of that data that's very different from what you get with like a snowflake or, or any of these other >>Companies. Right. That, that's a great explanation. I wanna ask you, early this year you announced that your Dr. Cloud service would be a free forever, the basic DR. Cloud service. How has that offer gone over? What's been the uptake on that offer? >>Yeah, it, I mean it is, and thousands of people have signed up and, and it's, I think it's a great service. It's, you know, it's very, very simple. People can go on the website, try it out. We now have a test drive as well. If, if you want to get started with just some sample public sample data sets and like a tutorial, we've made that increasingly easy as well. But yeah, we continue to, you know, take that approach of, you know, making it, you know, making it easy, democratizing these kind of cloud data platforms and, and kinda lowering the barriers to >>Adoption. How, how effective has it been in driving sales of the enterprise version? >>Yeah, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of business with, you know, that, that we do like when it comes to, to selling is, you know, folks that, you know, have educated themselves, right? They've started off, they've followed some tutorials. I think generally developers, they prefer the first interaction to be with a product, not with a salesperson. And so that's, that's basically the reason we did that. >>Before we ask you the last question, I wanna just, can you give us a speak peek into the product roadmap as we enter 2023? What can you share with us that we should be paying attention to where Drum is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, actually a couple, couple days ago here at the conference, we, we had a press release with all sorts of new capabilities that we, we we just released. And there's a lot more for, for the coming year. You know, we will shortly be releasing a variety of different performance enhancements. So we'll be in the next quarter or two. We'll be, you know, probably twice as fast just in terms of rock qu speed, you know, that's in addition to our reflections and our career acceleration, you know, support for all the major clouds is coming. You know, just a lot of capabilities in Inre that make it easier and easier to use the platform. >>Awesome. Tomer, thank you so much for joining us. My last question to you is, if you had a billboard in your desired location and it was going to really just be like a mic drop about why customers should be looking at Drio, what would that billboard say? >>Well, DRIO is the easy and open data lake house and, you know, open architectures. It's just a lot, a lot better, a lot more f a lot more future proof, a lot easier and a lot just a much safer choice for the future for, for companies. And so hard to argue with those people to take a look. Exactly. That wasn't the best. That wasn't the best, you know, billboards. >>Okay. I think it's a great billboard. Awesome. And thank you so much for joining Poly Me on the program, sharing with us what's new, what some of the exciting things are that are coming down the pipe. Quite soon we're gonna be keeping our eye Ono. >>Awesome. Always happy to be here. >>Thank you. Right. For our guest and for Paul Gillin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live and emerging 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)