>>Good morning and welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm here on set of the cube, my co-host John Farer. How you doing this morning, John? >>Doing great. Feeling fresh. Day two of three days of coverage, feeling >>Fresh. That is that for being in the heat of the conference. I love that attitude. It's gonna >>Be a great day today. We'll see you at the end of the day. Yeah, >>Well, we'll hold him to it. All right, everyone hold 'em accountable. Very excited to start the day off with an internet, a legend as well as a cube og. We are joined this morning by Matt Klein. Matt, welcome to the show. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Yep. >>It's so, what's the vibe? Day two, Everyone's buzzing. What's got you excited at the show? You've been here before, but it's been three years you >>Mentioned. I, I was saying it's been three years since I've been to a conference, so it's been interesting for me to see what is, what is the same and what is different pre and post covid. But just really great to see everyone here again and nice to not be sitting in my home by myself. >>You know, Savannah said you're an OG and we were referring before we came on camera that you were your first came on the Cub in 2017, second Cuban event. But you were, I think, on the first wave of what I call the contributor momentum, where CNCF really got the traction. Yeah. You were at Lift, Envoy was contributed and that was really hyped up and I remember that vividly. It was day zero they called it back then. Yeah. And you got so much traction. People are totally into it. Yeah. Now we've got a lot of that going on now. Right. A lot of, lot of day Zero events. They call 'em co, co-located events. You got web assembly, a lot of other hype out there. What do you see out there that you like? How would you look at some of these other Sure. Communities that are developing, What's the landscape look like as you look out? Because Envoy set the table, what is now a standard >>Practice. Yeah. What's been so interesting for me just to come here to the conference is, you know, we open source Envoy in 2016. We donated in 2017. And as you mentioned at that time, Envoy was, you know, everyone wanted to talk about Envoy. And you know, much to my amazement, Envoy is now pervasive. I mean, it's used everywhere around the world. It's like, never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it would be so widely used. And it's almost gotten to the point where it's become boring. You know, It's just assumed that Envoy is, is everywhere. And now we're hearing a lot about Eeb p f and Web assembly and GI ops and you know, AI and a bunch of other things. So it's, it's actually great. It's made me very happy that it's become so pervasive, but it's also fun. Yeah. We mention to, to look around all other stuff >>Like congratulate. It's just a huge accomplishment really. I think it's gonna be historic, historical moment for the industry too. But I like how it progressed. I mean, I don't mind hype cycles as long as it's some vetting. Sure. Of course. You know, use cases that are clearly defined, but you gotta get that momentum in the community, but then you start gotta get down to, to business. Yep. So, so to speak and get it deployed, get traction. Yep. What should projects look like? And, and give us the update on Envoy. Cause you guys have a, a great use case of how you got traction. Right. Take us through some of the early days of what made Envoy successful in your opinion. Great question. >>Yeah. You know, I, I think Envoy is fairly unique around this conference in the sense that Envoy was developed by Lyft, which is an end user company. And many of the projects in this ecosystem, you know, no judgment, for better or worse, they are vendor backed. And I think that's a different delivery mechanism when it's coming from an end user where you're solving a, a particular business case. So Envoy was really developed for Lyft in a, you know, very early scaling days and just, you know, trying to help Lyft solve its business problems. So I think when Envoy was developed, we were, you know, scaling, we were falling over and actually many other companies were having similar problems. So I think Envoy became very widely deployed because many companies were having similar issues. So Envoy just became pervasive among lift peer companies. And then we saw a lot of vendor uptake in the service mesh space in the API gateway space among large internet providers. So, I I I, I think it's just, it's an interesting case because I think when you're solving real problems on the ground, in some ways it's easier to actually get adoption than if you're trying to develop it from a commercial backing. >>And that's the class, I mean, almost, It's almost like open source product market fit. It is in its own way. Cause you have a problem. Absolutely. Other people have the same problem finding >>Too. I mean, it's, it's designed thinking from >>A different, When, when I talk to people about open source, I like to tell people that I do not think it's any different than starting a company. I actually think it's all the same problems finding pro product, market fit, hiring, like finding contributors and maintainers, like doing PR and marketing. Yeah. Getting team together, traction, getting, getting funding. I mean, you have to have money to do all these things. Yeah. So I think a lot of people think of open source as I, I don't know, you know, this fantastic collaborative effort and, and it is that, but there's a lot more to it. Yeah. And it is much more akin to starting a >>Company. Let's, let's just look at that for a second. Cause I think that's a good point. And I was having a conversation in the hallway two nights ago on this exact point. If the power dynamics of a startup in the open source, as you point out, is just different, it's community based. So there are things you just gotta be mindful of. It's not top down. >>Exactly. It's not like, >>Right. You know, go take that hill. It's really consensus based, but it is a startup. All those elements are in place. Absolutely. You need leadership, you gotta have debates, alignment, commit, You gotta commit to a vision. Yep. You gotta make adjustments. Build the trajectory. So based on that, I mean, do you see more end user traction? Cause I was, we were talking also about Intuit, they donated some of their tow code R goes out there. Yep. R go see the CDR goes a service. Where's the end user contributions to these days? Do you feel like it's good, still healthy? >>I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm biased. I would like to see more. I think backstage outta Spotify is absolutely fantastic. That's an area just in terms of developer portals and developer efficiency that I think has been very underserved. So seeing Backstage come outta Spotify where they've used it for years, and I think we've already seen they had a huge date, you know, day one event. And I, I think we're gonna see a lot more out of that >>Coming from, I'm an end user, pretend I'm an end user, so pretend I have some code. I want to, Oh man, I'm scared. I don't am I'm gonna lose my competitive edge. What's the, how do you talk to the enterprise out there that might be thinking about putting their project out there for whether it's the benefit of the community, developing talent, developing the product? >>Sure. Yeah. I would say that I, I would ask everyone to think through all of the pros and cons of doing that because it's not for free. I mean, doing open source is costly. It takes developer time, you know, it takes management time, it takes budgeting dollars. But the benefits if successful can be huge, right? I mean, it can be just in terms of, you know, getting people into your company, getting users, getting more features, all of that. So I would always encourage everyone to take a very pragmatic and realistic view of, of what is required to make that happen. >>What was that decision like at Lyft >>When you I I'm gonna be honest, it was very naive. I I think we've, of that we think we need to know. No, just didn't know. Yeah. I think a lot of us, myself included, had very minimal open source experience. And had we known, or had I known what would've happened, I, I still would've done it. But I, I'm gonna be honest, the last seven years have aged me what I feel like is like 70 or a hundred. It's been a >>But you say you look out in the landscape, you gotta take pride, look at what's happened. Oh, it's, I mean, it's like you said, it >>Matured fantastic. I would not trade it for anything, but it has, it has been a journey. What >>Was the biggest surprise? What was the most eye opening thing about the journey for you? >>I, I think actually just the recognition of all of the non-technical things that go into making these things a success. I think at a conference like this, people think a lot about technology. It is a technology conference, but open source is business. It really is. I mean, it, it takes money to keep it going. It takes people to keep >>It going. You gotta sell people on the concepts. >>It takes leadership to keep it going. It takes internal, it takes marketing. Yeah. So for me, what was most eyeopening is over the last five to seven years, I feel like I actually have not developed very many, if any technical skills. But my general leadership skills, you know, that would be applicable again, to running a business have applied so well to, to >>Growing off, Hey, you put it out there, you hear driving the ship. It's good to do that. They need that. It really needs it. And the results speak for itself and congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. What's the update on the project? Give us an update because you're seeing, seeing a lot of infrastructure people having the same problem. Sure. But it's also, the environments are a little bit different. Some people have different architectures. Absolutely different, more cloud, less cloud edges exploding. Yeah. Where does Envoy fit into the landscape they've seen and what's the updates? You've got some new things going on. Give the updates on what's going on with the project Sure. And then how it sits in the ecosystem vis-a-vis what people may use it for. >>Yeah. So I'm, from a core project perspective, honestly, things have matured. Things have stabilized a bit. So a lot of what we focus on now are less Big bang features, but more table stakes. We spend a lot of time on security. We spend a lot of time on software supply chain. A topic that you're probably hearing a lot about at this conference. We have a lot of software supply chain issues. We have shipped Quicken HTB three over the last year. That's generally available. That's a new internet protocol still work happening on web assembly where ha doing a lot of work on our build and release pipeline. Again, you would think that's boring. Yeah. But a lot of people want, you know, packages for their fedora or their ADU or their Docker images. And that takes a lot of effort. So a lot of what we're doing now is more table stakes, just realizing that the project is used around the world very widely. >>Yeah. The thing that I'm most interested in is, we announced in the last six months a project called Envoy Gateway, which is layered on top of Envoy. And the goal of Envoy Gateway is to make it easier for people to run Envoy within Kubernetes. So essentially as an, as an ingress controller. And Envoy is a project historically, it is a very sophisticated piece of software, very complicated piece of software. It's not for everyone. And we want to provide Envoy Gateway as a way of onboarding more users into the Envoy ecosystem and making Envoy the, the default API gateway or edge proxy within Kubernetes. But in terms of use cases, we see Envoy pervasively with service mesh, API gateway, other types of low balancing cases. I mean, honestly, it's, it's all over the place at >>This point. I'm curious because you mentioned it's expanded beyond your wildest dreams. Yeah. And how could you have even imagined what Envoy was gonna do? Is there a use case or an application that really surprised you? >>You know, I've been asked that before and I, it's hard for me to answer that. It's, it's more that, I mean, for example, Envoy is used by basically every major internet company in China. I mean, like, wow. Everyone in China uses Envoy, like TikTok, like Alibaba. I mean like everyone, all >>The large sale, >>Everyone. You know, and it's used, it's used in the, I'm just, it's not just even the us. So I, I think the thing that has surprised me more than individual use cases is just the, the worldwide adoption. You know, that something could be be everywhere. And that I think, you know, when I open my phone and I'm opening all of these apps on my phone, 80 or 90% of them are going through Envoy in some form. Yeah. You know, it's, it's just that pervasive, I blow your mind a little bit sometimes >>That does, that's why you say plumber on your Twitter handle as your title. Cause you're working on all these things that are like really important substrate issues, Right. For scale, stability, growth. >>And, you know, to, I, I guess the only thing that I would add is, my goal for Envoy has always been that it is that boring, transparent piece of technology. Kind of similar to Linux. Linux is everywhere. Right? But no one really knows that they're using Linux. It's, it's justs like Intel inside, we're not paying attention. It's just there, there's >>A core group working on, if they have pride, they understand the mission, the importance of it, and they make their job is to make it invisible. >>Right. Exactly. >>And that's really ease of use. What's some of the ease of use sways and, and simplicity that you're working on, if you can talk about that. Because to be boring, you gotta be simpler and easier. All boring complex is unique is not boring. Complex is stressful. No, >>I I think we approach it in a couple different ways. One of them is that because we view Envoy as a, as a base technology in the ecosystem, we're starting to see, you know, not only vendors, but other open source projects that are being built on top of Envoy. So things like API Gateway, sorry, Envoy Gateway or you know, projects like Istio or all the other projects that are out there. They use Envoy as a component, but in some sense Envoy is a, as a transparent piece of that system. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in the ecosystem that we need to continue to make cloud native easier for, for end users. I still think it's too complicated. And so I think we're there, we're, we're pushing up the stack a bit. >>Yeah. And that brings up a good point. When you start seeing people building on top of things, right? That's enabling. So as you look at the enablement of Envoy, what are some of the things you see out on the horizon if you got the 20 mile stare out as you check these boring boxes, make it more plumbing, Right? Stable. You'll have a disruptive enabling platform. Yeah. What do you see out there? >>I am, you know, I, again, I'm not a big buzzword person, but, so some people call it serverless functions as a service, whatever. I'm a big believer in platforms in the sense that I really believe in the next 10 to 15 years, developers, they want to provide code. You know, they want to call APIs, they want to use pub subsystems, they want to use cas and databases. And honestly, they don't care about container scheduling or networking or load balancing or any of >>These things. It's handled in the os >>They just want it to be part of the operating system. Yeah, exactly. So I, I really believe that whether it's an open source or in cloud provider, you know, package solutions, that we're going to be just moving increasingly towards systems likes Lambda and Fargate and Google Cloud Run and Azure functions and all those kinds of things. And I think that when you do that much of the functionality that has historically powered this conference like Kubernetes and Onvoy, these become critical but transparent components that people don't, they're not really aware of >>At that point. Yeah. And I think that's a great call out because one of the things we're seeing is the market forces of, of this evolution, what you just said is what has to happen Yep. For digital transformation to, to get to its conclusion. Yep. Which means that everything doesn't have to serve the business, it is the business. Right. You know it in the old days. Yep. Engineers, they serve the business. Like what does that even mean? Yep. Now, right. Developers are the business, so they need that coding environment. So for your statement to happen, that simplicity in visibility calling is invisible os has to happen. So it brings up the question in open source, the trend is things always work itself out on the wash, as we say. So when you start having these debates and the alignment has to come at some point, you can't get to those that stay without some sort of defacto or consensus. Yep. And even standards, I'm not a big be around hardcore standards, but we can all agree and have consensus Sure. That will align behind, say Kubernetes, It's Kubernetes a standard. It's not like an i e you know, but this next, what, what's your reaction to this? Because this alignment has to come after debate. So all the process contending for I am the this of that. >>Yeah. I'm a look, I mean, I totally see the value in like i e e standards and, and there's a place for that. At the same time, for me personally as a technologist, as an engineer, I prefer to let the, the market as it were sort out what are the defacto standards. So for example, at least with Envoy, Envoy has an API that we call Xds. Xds is now used beyond Envoy. It's used by gc, it's used by proprietary systems. And I'm a big believer that actually Envoy in its form is probably gonna go away before Xds goes away. So in some ways Xds has become a defacto standard. It's not an i e e standard. Yeah. We, we, we have been asked about whether we should do that. Yeah. But I just, I I think the >>It becomes a component. >>It becomes a component. Yeah. And then I think people gravitate towards these things that become de facto standards. And I guess I would rather let the people on the show floor decide what are the standards than have, you know, 10 people sitting in a room figure out >>The community define standards versus organizational institutional defined standards. >>And they both have places a >>Hundred percent. Yeah, sure. And, and there's social proof in both of them. Yep. >>Frankly, >>And we were saying on the cube that we believe that the developers will decide the standard. Sure. Because that's what you're basically saying. They're deciding what they do with their code. Right. And over time, as people realize the trade of, hey, if everyone's coding this right. And makes my life easier to get to that state of nirvana and enlightenment, as we would say. Yeah. Yeah. >>Starting strong this morning. John, I I love this. I'm curious, you mentioned Backstage by Spotify wonderful example. Do you think that this is a trend we're gonna see with more end users >>Creating open source projects? Like I, you know, I hope so. The flip side of that, and as we all know, we're entering an uncertain economic time and it can be hard to justify the effort that it takes to do it well. And what I typically counsel people when they are about to open source something is don't do it unless you're ready to commit the resources. Because opensourcing something and not supporting it. Yeah. I actually can be think, I think it'd be worse. >>It's an, it's insult that people, you're asking to commit to something. Exactly. Needs of time, need the money investment, you gotta go all in and push. >>So I, so I very much want to see it and, and I want to encourage that here, but it's hard for me to look into the crystal ball and know, you know, whether it's gonna happen more >>Or less at what point there were, are there too many projects? You know, I mean, but I'm not, I mean this in, in a, in a negative way. I mean it more in the way of, you know, you mentioned supply chain. We were riffing on the cube about at some point there's gonna be so much code open source continuing thundering away with, with the value that you're just gluing things. Right. I don't need the code, this code there. Okay. What's in the code? Okay. Maybe automation can help out on supply chain. Yeah. But ultimately composability is the new >>Right? It is. Yeah. And, and I think that's always going to be the case. Case. Good thing. It is good thing. And I, I think that's just, that's just the way of things for sure. >>So no code will be, >>I think, I think we're seeing a lot of no code situations that are working great for people. And, and, but this is actually really no different than my, than my serverless arguing from before. Just as a, as a, a slight digression. I'm building something new right now and you know, we're using cloud native technologies and all this stuff and it's still, >>What are you building? >>Even as a I'm, I'm gonna keep that, I'm gonna keep that secret. I know I'm, but >>We'll find out on Twitter. We're gonna find out now that we know it. Okay. Keep on mystery. You open that door. We're going down see in a couple weeks. >>Front >>Page is still an angle. >>But I, I was just gonna say that, you know, and I consider myself, you know, you're building something, I'm, I see myself an expert in the cloud native space. It's still difficult, It's difficult to, to pull together these technologies and I think that we will continue to make it easier for people. >>What's the biggest difficulties? Can you give us some examples? >>Well, just, I mean, we still live in a big mess of yammel, right? Is a, there's a, there's a lot of yaml out there. And I think just wrangling all of that in these systems, there's still a lot of cobbling together where I think that there can be unified platforms that make it easier for us to focus on our application logic. >>Yeah. I gotta ask you a question cuz I've talked to college kids all the time. My son's a junior in CS and he's, you know, he's coding away. What would you, how does a student or someone who's learning figure out where, who they are? Because there's now, you know, you're either into the infrastructure under the hood Yeah. Or you're, cuz that's coding there option now coding the way your infrastructure people are working on say the boring stuff so everyone else can have ease of use. And then what is just, I wanna just code, there's two types of personas. How does someone know who they are? >>My, when I give people career advice, my biggest piece of advice to them is in the first five to seven to 10 years of their career, I encourage people to do different things like every say one to two to three years. And that doesn't mean like quitting companies and changing companies, it could mean, you know, within a company that they join doing different teams, you know, working on front end versus back end. Because honestly I think people don't know. I think it's actually very, Yeah. Our industry is so broad. Yeah. That I think it's almost impossible to >>Know. You gotta get your hands dirty to jump >>In order to know what you like. And for me, in my career, you know, I've dabbled in different areas, but I've always come back to infrastructure, you know, that that's what I enjoy >>The most. Okay. You gotta, you gotta taste everything. See what you, what >>You like. Exactly. >>Right. Last question for you, Matt. It's been three years since you were here. Yep. What do you hope that we're able to say next year? That we can't say this year? Hmm. Beyond the secrets of your project, which hopefully we will definitely be discussing then. >>You know, I I, I don't have anything in particular. I would just say that I would like to see more movement towards projects that are synthesizing and making it easier to use a lot of the existing projects that we have today. So for example, I'm, I'm very bullish on backstage. Like I, I've, I've always said that we need better developer UIs that are not CLIs. Like I know it's a general perception among many people. Totally agree with you. Frankly, you're not a real systems engineer unless you type on the command line. I, I think better user interfaces are better for humans. Yep. So just for a project like Backstage to be more integrated with the rest of the projects, whether that be Envo or Kubernete or Argo or Flagger. I, I just, I think there's tremendous potential for further integration of some >>Of these projects. It just composability That makes total sense. Yep. Yep. You're, you're op you're operating and composing. >>Yep. And there's no reason that user experience can't be better. And then more people can create and build. So I think it's awesome. Matt, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, this has been fantastic. Be sure and check out Matt on Twitter to find out what that next secret project is. John, thank you for joining me this morning. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll be here all day live from the cube. We hope you'll be joining us throughout the evening until a happy hour today. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS re:invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of AWS re:invent 2020. It's virtual this year, just like everything is virtual this year. But it's still the biggest event in cloud, and we're excited to be back. I'd like to welcome in our next guest, he is Erez Yarkoni, head of cloud and telco technologies for checkpoint software technologies. There it is great to see you. >> Nice to see you, Jeff. Thank you for hosting me this morning. >> Absolutely, so let's jump into it. You've been in the cloud space. For a while I saw a great interview with you, I think like four or five years ago, when I was doing some research, and you're talking about, all the great innovation that's coming from cloud. That was years and years ago. Now, suddenly, we had COVID arrived. And I'm sure you've seen all the social media means who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we don't know what the answer is. So first off, I'd just love to get your perspective, you've been in this a long time now that we're here in 2020, both in terms of the development of the cloud and the adoption of the cloud, as well as this accelerant that came into our lives in March. >> Hey Jeff, You know I have been lucky that I got to participate in this kind of innovation cycle of IT and technology. Earlier, I was a CIO for an organization, large organization, and we were adopting cloud. At the same time, as an organization, we were selling technologies and networks to our customers, and they were asking to adopt cloud and so on. And these are probably some of the early interviews we looked at. So I got lucky that I had to look at my own organization and understand where cloud is beneficial. And obviously, now I work with cybersecurity and secure in the cloud. So it's all come together. I think that as as cloud technologies came in, it really came in to help many of us address the fundamental need to come to market with business capabilities and functionality faster. For those of us in technology, you know we were probably always the bottleneck of our business counterparts that said. Well, if you could only do this for me, I could grow the business, I could change your business, I can go to other places, I can incrementally bring more customers, revenues, and so on. The cloud platforms have done a tremendous job allowing developers and operators have technology to change the speed in which they service their businesses. But with speed comes security. And I think the cloud platforms disneynow. Specifically, here platforms like AWS build security into into the cloud as well. But there's other needs in it and the pandemic or COVID. All it did is it shifted some of these motions into another gear and then it created some new business needs that can only be service that digital mean, you are now having a collaboration session over a digital channel where otherwise would be probably sitting in the same studio. So definitely collaboration has changed. Commerce have changed, especially for some organizations that never planned to do commerce over digital channels, small businesses and so on. Just think about the food delivery industry and how many new customers have now sole, restaurants that have now signed up for food delivery services that must have exploded. These continuous changes brought continuous needs to address security as well. AWS is allowing people to build some amazing applications. I watched the commercials when I watch football on Sunday. Right? So peloton and zoom in education and many other things. And yeah, so when people build those amazing applications, the next thing they need to do is make sure that the zoom session is secure. And nobody's crashing in if you have a bunch of kids doing zoom for school. >> Erez you talked on so many topics on that. So let's break a few of them down. First off, I just, you know thank goodness for cloud, right? >> Yeah >> If this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we would not have been able those of us in the IT industry to shift so easily to cloud based or excuse me to working from home or working from anywhere because of the cloud based applications huge enabler. But it's funny now once on what you just talked about, did you talk about cost savings? And I still find there's a lot of people that are looking at cloud as a way to save costs. You been in it for a while, and you know the truth is all about agility and speed of business, speed of adoption, speed of innovation. You said it in every single one of your answers. But it still seems to be a lag for a lot of people now with with COVID, and, you know securing people work from home, one of the big issues go back to security is increasing attack surface. And we know the increasing sophistication of the bad guys. Now, I'm hearing from some people that they're actually using old techniques that they used to use back in the day because they know people are at home, and maybe things are as locked down. You talk about security needs to bake be baked in all long the way we're using all these, more and more cloud based apps. How do people think about the security perspective? How do you bake it into everything that you do? And how do you respond to the increased attack surfaces that have now suddenly opened up to look like for probably a little while not just going back to the old way, anytime soon? >> Yeah, so you know, you you touched on that, you said that you hear about people using old secure the old attack methods or vectors or so on, coming back, because people are now at home and no longer behind a very secure environment in their office or in the data center, people had to maybe move things that they never thought they would call center operations. That was by definition, you showed up to the call center for certain organizations and moved it out. And they may have not been ready to move those applications so on, so they had to address the security of it. I think that's exactly it, which is now some of the reaction we had to have for just staying in business. We used kind of very older, or, we increased what we know about security about remote access by increasing VPN capacity for the organization or, or those type of methodologies. Now people are looking at what happened to our topology to our architecture, where are people and machines coming in to execute their work over the network? Where are the applications residing? What have we moved to the cloud because we had to know flex for capacity and speed and maybe localize and move it into regions and so on. I don't think it was about cost saving, as you think it was about business agility, especially in this phase. I actually think that at the end of the day, the big benefit from cloud is business agility. Cost has to come with it, we cannot sacrifice costs and everything we do. And we look at overall how we use cloud technologies and other technologies and make sure that the cost fits into what our business demands from a cost structure but it is about business agility. Now, it's also about security agility. So people are building, you know methods and capabilities to match the business agility with security and security was, at least for me, for instance, as as a CIO, security was a bottleneck. So when business demanded the Agile development, you know iterations, sprints, deliver functionality in weeks, and, you know keep pouring it into the environment. One of the inhibitors was security, right, we weren't ready for it, we weren't ready to release it. So we had to find a way to adopt it. And then came in companies like AWS, saying, we built some of that security built into the platform. And companies like checkpoint saying we have cloud security that moves at cloud speed and allows you to integrate into your CICD, environmental or, or processes and allows you to match the speed of the business with the speed of security. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, again, I agree with you, 100%, it's all about agility, and speed of business. And being able to move faster just always surprises me how people how many people are still kind of stuck on the cost saving piece. And then the other thing, of course, which you're super aware of, if you've ever been to one of kind of the technical keynotes at AWS re:invent the amount of investment that they can make an infrastructure including security, in just, just completely over overshadows anything in an individual company can invest just in terms of the resources and then somebody like you guys can leverage on top of not only using the the massive Amazon, kind of core investments in security at the infrastructure layer, but then all the stuff that you guys can do in terms of securing the enterprise and helping make sure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time, but not a lot more than that. I wonder if you can talk about a new kind of zero trust in some of the evolution within security in terms of the posturing, and how you kind of make assumptions, as we said, it's no longer like a wall anymore, it's no longer talking about having these physical borders, or even logical borders, but it's really about access and breaking down access even to the person in the application and the data etc. >> Yeah, I think you asked specifically about zero trust, and I think that we want to move, maybe want to keep that the the theme here around the application security, I'll get to zero trust at the end. You know, so one of the things that that definitely is thematic, or what we see happening is, in the evolution in the maturity curve of adopting the cloud, the initial adoption was, maybe some lift shift from organizations and the IaaS layer was a big player. But the PaaS layers of the cloud are where all the interesting things happen, where all the exciting services, all the innovation coming from organizations like AWS, all the enablers for a business agility, and capabilities are coming from there. And when you start developing your applications for that PaaS layer, we start leveraging the services, the type of security changes, so you're no longer looking at network security, or maybe northeast, east west, north south, east west type of security on your network, you're now looking at security API's and securing the backplane of the cloud, from those services that they give you, you know you get to encrypt your buckets, you got to make sure your security groups are correct, you want to make sure your serverless functions are not executing anything malicious in them or, or talking to IP addresses, they shouldn't be. Same with your container, you want to make sure that your container code is scanned properly, you didn't download anything in there that's malicious. And obviously, have runtime security, both to make sure you're compliant from a posture perspective, you make compliance may require you to be PCI compliant one of those. So the elevation in which you execute to security changed from the from the stack from a kind of a traditional stack, requires different capabilities and between what AWS has built into the platform and what checkpoint puts together in cloud guard. This is big, the big target, then we get into, okay, so how do you access all these great things that we just built? Right? So we built these, this great application? It's sitting on AWS, it's using some of the great services there. How do you how do you get to it? Who gets to it? How do you get to it? This is where some of these, sassy and zero trusts come in. Because what happened is, you used to come into a lot of enterprise applications from the data center, then we moved some web apps, and you came over the web into the application. So we have some web firewalls and security for that. Now you're getting into every application from the edge of the network, because we are all at home, or we are we used to be traveling but a lot more of us are now at home coming over the edge of the network, we're adding IoT devices coming on via generic and so on, there's a lot more volume coming at you. And you get to find different ways than just VPN authentication of the traffic into so we are coming into the age of having to identify who's coming at the application at the capability at any given time. And that's where you come into the framework of zero trust, I, every time you come in, I'm going to authenticate that is you. And there's different methodologies in there. For instance, one of the things that we just added to our portfolio is the ability to put an agent, let's say in your around your AWS application, and allow remote access with no VPN to your enterprise app aah to an acquisition company we call odo without having to put a VPN so the administrator defines what applications are connected to the connector. They define who's the users that are allowed and authenticate them based on the authentication framework, let's say Octo, something like that, and allows them to come in and that that those are the type of capabilities you need in these new frameworks. So, how do you get to these great applications we're building? >> Right, right. And you touched on something really interesting, right, which is, which is the complexity is only going up? As you mentioned edge you mentioned a little bit of IoT, right, so as 5G comes on board, as IoT gets increasing amounts of traction. All these applications are API based there's all types of information flying back and forth, so I wonder if you can share kind of your guys thoughts on, applied machine learning and artificial intelligence to help, you know kind of get through all the all the signal or excuse me all the noise, find the signal, and really, you know bring more automation to help the security experts in the security systems be more effective at their jobs. >> Yeah, so I think a lot of what we talked about, until now was protecting establishing a new perimeter, there's not really a perimeter, right because we talked about the perimeter has grown and it's fuzzy and it's at scale that really doesn't allow you to say I have it for an undersea up to authentic everybody. But like you said, with that speed, and scale, came a lot of data, you got a lot of logs running in there, you're like got a lot of events, you got a lot of things that you can look into. And by looking into them, you can start with machine learning and those type of AI methodologies start looking both to identify things before they happen, or inform organizations and inform about things that are already happened and they're in and potentially remediate them. At checkpoint, for instance, we have something called the threat, the threat cloud, we collect these events from every gateway, every appliance, every virtual appliance, every type of security agent that we have around the world, into the flex cloud that processes and I'm going to throw a number there, that's the closer about 80 billion a day transactions. >> 80 billion with B >> Yeah, and that allows us to, to process to apply machine learning and AI algorithms to find threat, and then inform all these great checkpoint security agents out there of new threats and prevent those threats from ever happening in the in the environment. Right? If you're operating on a on an AWS environment, there's a lot of blood flows happening in your environment, there's a lot of things to collect and look at, right. So in cloud guard, we offer something called logic log.ic, which allows you to harvest those logs, we enrich them and then we allow threat hunting inside those environment, right. So those types of capabilities are definitely kind of the future of advanced security, right. So beyond just establishing, it's like, you establish your security around what you do. And then you have your intelligence unit starting to identify what signals are out there allowing you to both prevent security breaches or any type of threats, but also remediate anything, any, you find the traces of things that happened and remediate them. >> Right, right. Well, there is that's, that's a great illustration of, kind of baking security into the multiple steps of the process and all the steps of the process. That's not just a bolt on anymore. It's got to be, part of everything you do and baked into everything you do. I still, I still wonder how certain companies that that are run by having people click on links that they're not familiar with still happen today. But I guess, I guess they still do. So as I give you the final word, again, you've been in this space for a long time, as we kind of turned to turn the page on 2020. What are some of your priorities we are you excited about for 2021? >> I think the most exciting things for us in cloud security in 2021 is we're releasing more capabilities into into the environment, we're in the maturity curve, of protecting, your network in the cloud, and then protecting your posture in the cloud. We're moving very strongly into predicting your runtime and applications in the cloud, your API's, and working with organizations through that maturity curve and getting them up to all the way up to threat hunting capabilities. And I think that'll be exciting because I hear from customers that they need to move quickly through that maturity curve of cloud security as they have accelerated and continue there to accelerate their move to the cloud. >> Well, that's great. Well, I think, no shortage of job security in the cloud security space. So I'm sure it will be a busy year. Well, it was thanks for sharing your insight. Really appreciate the time and it was great catching up. >> Thank you, Jeff, for your time today. And it was great talking to you. >> Absolutely. All right. Well, he's Erez I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2020 Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCube. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante on our third day here at IBM Think 2019. The second kind of full day of the event. Dave, here we are with this beautiful San Francisco rain. Much needed in California >> I like being back in Moscone, its good. >> It is nice being back in Moscone. Speaking of being back, we are welcoming back to theCUBE Mary O'Brien, the general manager of IBM security. Mary, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, Dave. >> Mary. >> So we were just talking before we went live, this event is massive, about 30,000 people. It was standing room only to get into Ginni Rometty's keynote yesterday. >> No you couldn't get in. >> Couldn't get in, >> They closed, they shut the doors out >> I think she said this is the closest that she'll ever be to an iPhone launch. That must be like rockstar status. Four campuses, 2,000 different sessions, there is here a Security and Resiliency campus. >> Yes there is. >> Which must be exciting for you, >> It certainly is. >> but talk to us about security is such a pervasive challenge that any organization faces. You were saying, there's nearly two million by the year 2020 nearly two million unfilled security roles. Talk to us about security at IBM and how you're using technologies, like AI, to help combat the problem, this prolific problem that cyber security is bringing. >> Okay, so I can start by saying security is everybody's problem. It's a problem faced by every business, everyday and as businesses modernize and they become more digital and move to the Cloud, there's cyber security nightmares and cyber security problems are only getting greater, okay? So, you know couple that with the fact that, as you say, by 2020, and ever body has a different variation of this statistic, but we're working on the basis that by 2020, there will be in the region of two million, unfilled, cyber security posts around the world. So at IBM Security, we're looking to understand how we can reduce the complexity, reduce the need for vast numbers of staff and augment our capabilities, all of our products and services, with artificial intelligence in order to relieve this gross skills gap. >> Well, I have to say, this is our 10th year now doing theCUBE Lisa and I was downstairs earlier and I saw, I guess I call him my friend, Pat Gelsinger, was walking into the keynote and a little high five and nine years ago I asked Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE, is security a do-over because of Cloud and he said flat out yes, it actually is. So I wonder, so much has changed in the last decade. You mentioned data, you mentioned artificial intelligence, the bad guys have gotten way more sophisticated, you have this new thing called The Edge and so I don't know if it's a do-over or evolving rapidly, but what are your thoughts on the changing nature of security? >> Well I think the security landscape is changing for sure and the attack surface is changing because you've got to remember that as all of our and more and more devices and all of our devices become smarter and become connected to the internet, we're basically just increasing the attack surface and increasing the opportunity for cyber attacks and cyber criminals to hack in and get into our networks. Okay, so you know as we move to the Cloud and we embrace an API economy, so we're using API's to access you know our applications then you know once again, we're opening up our capabilities. Open means open to us and to others and so the need to design security into everything we do and not append security as a perimeter around what we create is becoming more and more important. >> Well we can't do that just 'cause I think something also that you mentioned, sorry David, with the proliferation of devices, you know billions of devices, the perimeter is so amorphis, there's en clays on top of en clays on top of en clays >> Absolutely. >> I'm curious though, how is AI from IBM going to help companies protect themselves from their people, who might not be doing things necessarily maliciously, unintentionally, but that's one of the biggest common denominators I think in security that's the biggest, how do we protect from people? >> You nailed it. I mean I can not remember the stat, but I do know that more than 50% of breeches result from the inside and that's not necessarily people being malicious. I mean you have a combination of people who just don't adopt the best security policies, so they're not using strong passwords, they're clicking on links, they're answering phone calls, they're doing something that's a little bit sloppy or a little bit insecure and then of course you'll have the malicious insider. There aren't very many of them, but they do exist. So the way the security industry is evolving to protect ourselves against the insider is firstly to look at access to our crowned jewels and to make sure that only the people who need access to our crowned jewels and to the most important assets within our businesses have that access. Okay, firstly, now secondly, we are developing capabilities that we call user based analytics, user behavioral analytics. So we actually profile, what is the normal behavior of a user. So a user, in their job role, who works the pattern that is normal for that user. You know, what is a normal behavior for that user so that we allow the machine and the algorithms to learn that normal behavior so that when that behavior becomes different or when that user does something anomalous, that we can trigger an action, we can trigger an alert, we can do something about it. So user behavior analytics is the way we apply machine learning, artificial intelligence, to the problem to keep us safe from the insider fumbling, yes. >> Another big change and I want to make a comment, is the way in which organizations approach security at the board level. It's become a board level topic. The conversation between whether its the CSO or the CIO and the board has evolved from really one of, oh yeah, we're doing everything we possibly can to we're going to get breached, it's all about our response to that breech and here's the response mechanism and so I wonder if based on your conversations Mary, with executives, what you're seeing, what are they asking from IBM, just in terms of helping them specifically respond to the inevitable breaches? >> Okay, so there's a wide range of responses to that question. And it depends where you are on the globe, how sensitized the board is to security situations. They're all sensitized, but there are some parts of the globe where a breach of a regulation can put a board member in prison. So you know, there's a motivation to >> They're paying attention >> They're paying attention okay, but you know across the board, we're seeing that the board has evolved their attention, based on the fact that security used to be driven by compliance. It used to be driven by ticking a box to say you had a database protection in place and you had x, y, z in place. People became more sensitized to the next attack so what was the next threat, what was the next attack on their, the next piece of malware, the next piece of ransomware, but now people have really got to the point and the board have really got to the point where they really realize that this isn't about when an adversary gets into your network or gets into your enterprise or your business. They get in. It's about how you respond to it, how you find them, how you remove them, how you respond to the breach so at IBM security, we put a huge focus on training boards and their teams in how to respond to an instance because we've got to get to a point where the response is muscle memory so that everybody knows their role, they know how they behave and we're back to the people discussion again because everybody, from the person who is at your reception desk, who may be the first person to meet the media as they come in your doors after an event, to the CSO who has responsibility to the President or CEO, needs to understand their role and when they parttake or when they back away and let the experts partake during the course of an incident. >> One of the things too that's been widely known is it's taken upwards of two to 300 days before breaches are detected. How is IBM helping infuse AI into, not just the portfolio, but also the practices and behaviors to start reducing that so it doesn't take as long to identify a breach that can cost millions of dollars? >> So yes, what were doing here is we're working to reduce the complexity in peoples cyber programs. So if you consider that in many of our clients shops, we will find up to 80 different security products from 40 different vendors and that's an average that has been taken over time and we use that statistic all the time. Basically you have all of these tools and all of these products that have been bought to solve a security threat djure over several decades and they're all residing, all of these products, not talking to one another. So at IBM Security, what we're doing is we're applying technology and our capabilities to bring together the insights from all of these tools and to ensure that we can actually knit them together, correlate those insights, to give a more holistic view, a faster view, of what's relevant, what's pertinent to you in your industry, in your geo, in your business. So we look for the insights that are indicative of the most significant threat to you to help you get there, sort it, eradicate it, quarantine, or whatever you need to do to eliminate it. >> How about the skills gap? We talk about that a lot on theCUBE. There's more security professionals needed than are out there. What can you do about that? Is machine intelligence a possible answer? Helping people automate a response? What do you see? >> Absolutely So there's a number of different responses. Absolutely, infusing artificial intelligence and finding ways of reducing the amount of the amount of security data, the amount of security alerts that need to be responded to. So firstly you need to reduce the noise so that you can find the needle in the haystack and our capabilities with machine learning and artificial intelligence and the various different algorithms we build into our products help along the way there. So you have that. In addition to that, you always have a need for the people, for the experts so making sure that we infuse all of our practices, the people who are foot soldiers on the street, our consultants, our practitioners, to make sure that we hire the best, the brightest and we put them around the geo so that they are distributed and able to help our clients. And then you heard Ginni yesterday talk about various different means of accelerating our ability to bring more people into the workforce using our P-TECH initiative within IBM, so we're looking to go out to schools, where you wouldn't necessarily have a feed or kids with an opportunity, to find jobs in the cyber security space or in many professional spaces. Finding them, training them, tapping them, encouraging them and we've seen several people come through the P-TECH schools into the cyber security space and we've also embraced the return to work for people who have taken career breaks either to mind elderly relatives or to bring up kids or whatever, so we have a number of programs running in various parts of the world where we're introducing people back into the workforce and training them to become cyber experts. >> I got to ask you, as a security executive, does Quantum keep you up at night? >> Um, Quantum does not keep me up at night because IBM are the leaders in this space and as leaders in this space, we work with the researchers and developers in the IBM research labs, to ensure that our security practices are keeping in lock-step with Quantum and our algorithms are changing so that we can stay ahead of the Quantum race. >> It's in the hands of the good guys right now. >> It certainly is >> Let's keep it that way if we can. >> Last question Mary, there is, as I mentioned in the very beginning, four campuses here where the 30,000 plus attendees can learn. What are some of the things that you're excited that the attendees here, customers, perspective customers, partners, analysts, press are going to see, touch and feel from the Security and Resiliency Campus? >> At the Security and Resiliency Campus, the people here can see some of our latest innovations and capabilities and they can see our new platform. Our new security platform is called IBM Security Connect and this is you know, our capability that we just launched to actually reduce the complexity in people's cyber programs and help bring lots of these products, these siloed products and the insights from them together, to give a much sharper view of the threat to your business. So there's a very good demonstration of that. You can see a very good demonstration of the breath of our portfolio. You can talk to some of our consultants. Talk to our instant response specialists, you know, you can be scared about what's out there and see that your security is in good hands if you work with us. >> It sounds like a security candy store down there. We should go check it out. >> Yeah >> It sure is. >> Check out the flavors. >> Exactly. Thanks so much for stopping by >> Thank you. >> Sharing with us what's new >> Great to see you again Mary. >> In IBM security and also how you guys are helping to influence behavior. I think that's a really important element. We thank you and we look forward to talking to you again. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, live IBM Think 2019 on theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back shortly with our next guest. (tech music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

(instrumental music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Velante. Welcome to the special wikibon community event. VMware, VMworld 2018, strong momentum but still choppy waters. How can you say that Dave? How can you say strong momentum but still choppy waters? The data center is on fire. We just came back from VMworld 2018, the eco system is exploding, revenues are up, profits are up, all looks good. Well we agree in general, but theCUBE was there. We had two sets. We interviewed over 100 guests. 75 segments on theCUBE and right now what we want to do in this special community event is share with you our community and hear from you what you thought of the event, what we thought of the event and let's collaborate and come up with some conclusions. So, what were the key points made on theCUBE by Michael Dell, Pat Kellsinger, Ray Ofarell, Andy Bechtelshtein and number of other folks, customers, practitioners, technologists and eco system partners on theCUBE? What did they say and what does it mean for users? AWS and VMware, a big theme on theCUBE last week was is the AWS VMware partnership a one way trip to the Hotel Cloudifornia or is it a boon for the data center? What about AWS with RDS, the data base, on prim, what does that mean? How effective will that be? What does it say about AWS's strategy and what does it mean for VMware and the eco system? What's VMware's play at the edge? What about containers? Containers are supposedly going to kill VMware or hurt VMware's momentum. What does the community think about that? And what about Dell's new capital structure? Dell is going public again. It's taking an 11 billion dollar dividend out of VMware's 13 billion dollars of cash. Is that the best use of VMware's cash? And is VMware constrained in terms of it's RND going forward? We're going to address these and other items with the following format. We're going to show you now highlights from VMworld 2018 from theCUBE and then we're going to come back in the crowd chat and discuss. So thanks for watching everybody. Take a look at these video clips and these statements from senior leaders and then we'll go into the crowd chat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, John Furrier, Stu Miniman at the end of day two of our continuing coverage guys of VMworld 2018, huge event. 25,000 plus people here. 100,000 plus expected to be engaging with the on demand, the live experiences, our biggest show, right. 94 interviews in the next three days, two of them down. >> And evolving over the years. I mean at VMworld's core, it is a technical conference. Right, so I would say that the base of the volume of the program is still catered towards a real hands on, technical practitioner and middle management but we are seeing more business executives come. They want to know what their teams are exploring. They want to understand vision and I think VMware you know, value proposition to enterprises is growing and therefore, it's starting to be more of a business conversation. So that is a segment of the audience that is growing. >> A few questions, I think first of all the Amazon news is already on VMware on premises is earth shattering news at many levels. One, Amazon's never done it before. Two, I think people are starting to understand this downstream a little bit later. But it's going to have a significant impact on the opportunities in multi cloud. So, I think Amazon's relationship with VMware is very deep at the level of technology and stay cold is at the top of both companies. Andy Jaci and Pat Gelsinger are both in this to win it together. It's obvious and anyone who says otherwise really isn't really informed. They're deep in the technical side, they have management at the top approving this, they're going to market together in the field. There is a legit synergy and they're going to win the long game. Gelsinger's making the big bet and remember, three years ago Pat Gelsinger was the gun. What's his role going to be? People were nervous about their cloud. Look it, VMware boxed the cloud and they're kicking ass right now with cloud. So they made the right moves. They steered the ship away from the rocks, they're out in the clear sailing. Love their strategy, Keno with Gelsinger was very specifically around the generational shift around VMware and the industry. He went through the bridging and I love the cleverness of the story telling, bridging tech trends of VMware ethos. He talked about the history, servers ESX, BYOD workspace, network NSX, cloud migration, that was their kind of initial private cloud, but right now its multi cloud and profit and people doing tech for good. So I think Gelsinger's laying down the generational shift that Vmware's going for and their making the huge bet on AWS, so it makes the question. What about Asher, what about Google? Is VMware going to be a one cloud game? Are they going to bridge to other clouds? That's going to be a very interesting tell sign 'cause the relationship on stage with Andy Jaci in fact Gelsinger is pretty significant. I think it's going to be a hard thing to go in to other clouds and say, I want to dig you too. >> Last year Pat said that networking has the potential to be the next decade bigger than what virtualization was for the wave and we are seeing good movement. I think I said it on our intro this morning but when Asira was acquired, the promise that we as a networking industry felt that they could be that inter weaving kind of glue for multi cloud and it kind of got hidden for a few years while they built that intersect, they made it really enterprise ready. They did really well with adoption. But now that vision is kind of back in full and that is what VMware can ride. Not to just be virtualization. V spheres great, they'll drive that for awhile, but the networking and security pieces is why VMware has the right to sit at the table in this multi cloud discussion. Now it was funny, I interviewed Keith Townsen and he said VMware, you know, he's now a VMware employee, VMware is the best position to help customers do that transformation. I said, hey Keith, I hear ya, but Microsoft and Amazon and a whole bunch of other management people might kind of step up and say, we've got a right to be at the table too. >> Of course all the legacy guys are trying to figure out, okay, their cloud strategies. But now all the major cloud guys are betting on Prim. We saw Google next, the on Prim strategy was certainly Assure with Assure Stack. Oracle has bets in cloud and with cloud customers got bets for On Prem. Now AWS throws its Admuring. James Kobielus, you sat in the analyst sessions all day. What did you learn? What were your big take aways? What do we need to know? >> Well first of all it's clear that AWS partnership VMware's all in with them. Look at the past year since they announced the customer adoption, partner enablement. They share variety and depth of the integrations that these partners have put together including today. It's pretty serious in terms of VMware's investment in that relationship, deepening that to the point where, there are no splashy Google partnership announcements or IBM or anybody else. It's clear that they're really, they're each others hybrid cloud partner par excolons. I don't think either of them, or I don't think the VMware is going to go anywhere near as deep with the other public club providers any time soon. But really my take away today from the analysis session was that VMware is going seriously to the edge and it's really interesting, they're building an appliance to take their entire stack and bring it down to edge deployment and distribute that around and then manage that for customer on a global basis with automation, there's going to be AI and machine learning built in so that if VMware will be able as a managed service to drive the software defined data center all the way out to the edges for its clients. And they're putting themselves in a position where they could actually, that could be there next major revenue producing business. As the traditional hypervisor VMworld begins to wane in terms of putting cube and server less and so forth on an appliance. Putting that in the clients sight and managing it for them. And then white boxing it potentially to other cloud providers to provide to their customers. This could be in the future coming in the next year or two. Something that can propel VMware to the next stage where they are everybody's preferred multi cloud management, edge management partner. >> Provide a slightly different version of one of the things you said. I definitely agree. I think what VMware hopes to do, I think they're not alone is to have AWS look like an appliance to their console, to have Assure look like an appliance to their console. So through free VMware, you can get access to whatever services you need including your VMware machines your VM's inside those clouds but that increasingly their goal is to be that control point, that management point for all of these different resources that are building and it is very compelling. I think that there's one area that I still think we need more from. As analysts we always got to look through what's more required. And I hear what you say about broad dimensions but I think that the edge story still requires a fair amount of work. >> Oh yeah. >> It's a project in place, but that's going to be an increasingly important focus of how architectures get laid out, how people think about applications in the future, how design happens, how methodologies for building software works. David, what do you think? When you look out, what is more is needed for you? >> So I think there are two things that give me a small concern. The edge, that's a long term view. So they have a lot of time to get that right. But the edge view is very much an IT view top down. And they are looking to put into place everything that they think the OT people should fit in with. I think that is personally not going to be a winning strategy. You have to take it from the bottom up. The world is going to go towards devices, very rich devices and sensors, lots of software, right on that device, the inference work on those devices. And the job of IT will be to integrate those devices. It won't be those devices taking on the standards of IT. It will be IT that has to shape itself to look after all those devices there. So that's the main viewpoint I think that needs adjustment and it will come I'm sure over time. >> But as you said, there's a lot of computer science, it's going to be an enormous amount of new partnerships are going to be fabricated. >> Exactly. >> Once you make this happen... >> I want to see the road map for Kuhernettys and server less. Last year they made an announcement of a server less project, I forgot what the code name is. Didn't hear a whole lot about it this year but they're going up the app stack. They got a coop distribution. They need a developer story. I mean developers are building functional apps and so forth. And they're also containerized. They need developer story and they need a server less story and they need to bring us up to speed on where they're going in that regard, because AWS, they're predominant partner, I mean they've got LAM dysfunctions and all that stuff. That's the development platform of the present and future and I'm not hearing an intersection of that story with VMware's story yet. >> Actually before VMware's was server installation it was work station. >> Work station, that's right. >> And we were an investor of VMware and we thought that was cool. Anyway, so fast forward to 2013, we go private. 2014, Joe Tuchi and I restart the discussion that we'd had earlier back in 2009 about combining together. 2015 we announced it and we thought that if we could combine everything together, that customers would really like it. And thankfully, as we found that that's been true, it's been more true then we thought. And the innovation engines are cranking on high. 12.8 billion dollars in RND invested in the last three years. And you see here at VMworld and in Dell technologies world the strength of the road maps. And so every turn of the crank, we're just getting stronger and stronger. We never believed that everything was going to go one place or the other. It's actually great that the edge is booming. Now if you said, did you know that five or ten years ago? No, I didn't really know, but you can kind of see some things starting to happen. But look, distributed computing will be even more distributed in the future. >> For your commentary, people at the convention of wisdom on that deal was it was a one way trip to the Hotel Cloudifornia and it's become a boon for the data center. Why the misconceptions? Why are you confident that it continues to be a boon for both companies? >> Yeah, and hey we got to go prove it. At the end of the day we have to go prove it. So, but the analysts were sort of viewing hey, there's this big sucking sound in the public cloud where everything congregates. You know point one, and three years ago that was the prevailing wisdom. Right, so that was going to be the case. Now everybody, you know, and like I had the big CIO who basically said, hey I've got 200 apps. I tried to move them to the public cloud. I got two done. I can build new things there, but this moving was really hard until we had the VMC service. So this ability to move things to the cloud and from the cloud, I call the three laws. The laws of physics, the laws of economics and the laws of the land. The laws of physics, hey if need 500 millisecond round trip to the cloud and the robotic arm needs a decision in 200 milliseconds. You know physics, economics. I'm not going to send every surveillance picture of the cat to the cloud. Ban would still cost, right. And then laws of the land right, where people say, government issues, GDPR, other things. So because of that we see this hybrid world and particularly as edge and IOT becomes more prominent, we fully expect that there's going to be more of that not less and as I showed in my key note last year, this pendulum of centralization and decentralization has been swinging through the industry for 40 years and we don't see that stopping and Edge will be a force of more data and compute pushing to the edge and that's obviously part of our key note as well. >> Yeah John, you know, we sat here analyzing this VMware AWS relationship. Is this a one way move to the public cloud? Is Amazon just going to take those 500,000 VMware customers and get them all to migrate? Even in the start of Andy and Pat up on stage you know, Andy goes, the number on use case is migrating our applications to the public cloud and Pat's like, and the number two use case is you know, bursting and on demand and things like that. So it's an interesting dynamic between what we call, you know, you got the gorilla in the data center of VMware and you've got the 800 pound gorilla in the cloud. Fast as the cheetah as Dave Velante says in AWS. But RDS on premises, this is a big deal. I tell you, I'm surprised, most people here are surprised with the discussion. We were at some shows recently when they're spanning the snowball use case. Snowballs great, it's edge, it's helping to migrate things to the data center. This is an Amazon service running into VMware on premise. Didn't think that we would be seeing this from Amazon who's goal was, we thought to get 100 percent of things in the public lap. >> Decisions on cloud. Okay, Andy Jaci comes on stage. You're personally involved with Andy on the Amazon analysis which is, I think people don't know how big that's going to be. But VMware and Amazon are seriously deep in a partnership. This is a big deal. This feels like a little wind tail kind of easy synergies across the board. >> Well you know, in some ways we'll say number one in public coming together with number one in private. That's a big deal. And you know, yesterday's announcement of RDS on premise to me sort of finishes this strategic picture that we were trying to paint where it really is a hybrid world, where we're taking workloads and giving people the access to this phenomenal rapidly growing public cloud. But we're also demonstrating that we can seamlessly connect to the private cloud and now we're bringing services back from the public cloud onto the private and neuron data center. And that's so profound because now customers can say, oh, I like the RDS API. I like the RDS management model. I can put the data wherever I need it for my business purposes and that hybrid bi directional highway is something that we're uniquely building with Amazon and hey, obviously we're working with other cloud providers. But they're our preferred partner and we're pretty thrilled. >> How are customers going to deal with the multiple clouds? I mean is there an infra ability framework coming? Do you see a real disruptive technology enable that'll have that kind of impact that TCP spawn massive opportunity and wealth creation and start ups and functionality? Is there a moment coming? >> So, TCP of course was the proper layering of an interact between the physical layer, you know layer one, layer two and the routing or the internet layer was just layer three. And without that, you know, this is back to the old internal argument, we wouldn't have what we have today on the internet. That was the only rational way to build a architecture that would actually. And I'm not sure if people had a notion in 1979 when TCP was started, that it would become that big. They probably would of picked a bigger adverspace if they had known. But it was, not just a longevity but the impact it had was just phenomenal, right. Now and that applied in terms of connectivity and how many things shift to interact between point a to point b. The NSX level of network management is a little different because it's much higher level. It's really a management plan, back to the point I made earlier about management plans, that allows you to integrate a cloud on your premise with one of Amazon or IBM or the future Google and so on in a way that you can have full visibility and you see, you know exactly what's going on, all the security policies. But this has been a dream for people to deliver but it requires to actually have a reasonable amount of cold in each of these places, both on user. It's not just a protocol, it's an implementation of accountability right. And VMware is the best solution that's available and I can see for that use case which is going to be very important to a large number of enterprises, many of which will want to have a small connection between on premise and off premise and in the future, to Edge, Telcol, and other things that will run a VM environment today but that will allow them to be fully securely linked >> I think, so we are seeing lots of customer energy around what we're doing in storage. There's huge momentum behind product like Vsend and our customers are truly embracing ACI in very mainstream use cases and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in meaning they're taking ACI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. It's a very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what ACI is about. You know, certainly, we started was virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been believer that HCI is a software architecture. I think now there's more recognition that. And it's also going from just computer storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center is expanding into the cloud as you see from VMCIWS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know we've announced Beta 4, you know V send to become the storage platform for Cupernetis NEV sphere environment. So lots of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI and if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC the boundary among these three is not very clear. I think they're all converging to work something that's very common. >> That's been proposed. Dell came out a while ago and sort of floated this idea of a reverse merger. Street puked all over it. And then all of a sudden they came up with this other idea of I called it the independence vig. Okay, VMware is having to pay a 11 billion dollar dividend. Nine billion of that is going to go to DVMT shareholders to clean that up. And you're going to get cash or prorata shares and the new Dell. Okay, so the question on the table is will that constrict VMware in anyway in terms of its ability to fund RND? My quick thoughts are short term no, long term, Dell has to walk a fine line between taking VMware cash, paying down it's debt and funding the future. Your thoughts. >> Yes, so here are my thoughts on this. So, I think that, first let's explain to the people what you just talked about, I'll translate. What you described is Michael Dell's going private, 60 billion dollars. That number was debt deal he did to buy Dell DMC so he has all this debt. Debt is like heroin, you get addicted to it, hard to get straight from that. So you gotta pay down the debt. He's been knockin' down the debt and big bag of money called Vmware's sitting there. As long as Vmware's thrown off cash flow that's going to be a key consideration. So, the independent vig as long as this cash flow's coming in, I think is fine. It's not going to really hurt it. But I think Dell's been brilliant in this because he's been essentially land grabbing the computer industry on the infrastructure side and he's going to make more money than ever before. He's going to pull it off and the only thing that could hurt him is either some side of force major or downturn or revenue not coming in from the sources whether either it's a public offering, acquisitions he's trying to sell off, and or VMware sputters which I don't think it will. Now with VM is on, even if they just go all in on Amazon and pull off all the other clouds, they'll still make a boat load of cash. >> I think it goes down in history as one of the greatest trades ever. I mean it's just phenomenal. >> Look, I mean Dave, we talked about when EMC bought VMware it was one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. >> 635 million. >> Right but. >> Now it's 60 billion value evaluation. >> Dell buying EMC, most people were like, I'm not sure what's going to happen but Michael will make a lot of money. VMware is doing so well that they can now fund Dell going public again based on this deal. So it's been one of those fascinating financial orchestration pieces to be out there. >> You ever feel constrained writing an 11 billion dollar dividend? Do you ever feel constrained in terms of your ability to fund the RND necessary to do some of those things? >> No. >> Rio said the same thing off camera but I ask you on camera. >> Yeah, generally I mean, am I constrained at how much RND I can do? Well hey, I've got a budget, we build a PNL, we communicate it to the street and everyday possible I'm pushing the growth of business faster so I can shove more dollars into one of two places. More dollars into RND or more dollars into sales and customer facing. Right and if Robin Matlock is here, I keep giving her the table scraps at the end of those things. But build products that are innovated, radical and break through. Sell products and support our customers using them. That's the two thing... >> And I think it's a really interesting point that after a lot of conversations with a lot of folks saying AWS is all going to go up to the cloud and wondering whether that also is a one way street for VMware customers. But now we're seeing it's much more of a bilateral relationship. >> It's moving it to the right place. And that's the second thing. The embracing of multi cloud by everybody. One cloud is not going to do everything. There's going to be fast clouds, there's going to be multiple places where people are going to put certain workloads because that's the best strategic fit for it. And the acceptance in the market place that that is where it's going to go. I think that gain is a major change. The hybrid cloud and multi cloud environments. And then the third thing is I think the richness of the eco system is amazing. The going on the floor and the number of people that have come to talk to us with new ideas really fascinating ideas is something I haven't seen at all for the last three, four years. >> Alright, we've heard from some of our guests on theCUBE and you've heard our teams initial analysis of the news from VMworld. Now we want to hear from you. Please hop into the crowd chat below, give us your feedback, want a community discussion and let's hear about what everybody thinks about VMware and VMworld 2018. Once again, thanks so much for joining us and look forward to the conversation.