>> In this session, we will be reviewing the power and benefits of implementing a secure software supply chain and how we can gain a cloud like experience with the flexibility, speed and security of modern software delivering. Hi, I'm Matt Bentley and I run our technical pre-sales team here at Mirantis. I spent the last six years working with customers on their containerization journey. One thing almost every one of my customers has focused on is how they can leverage the speed and agility benefits of containerizing their applications while continuing to apply the same security controls. One of the most important things to remember is that we are all doing this for one reason and that is for our applications. So now let's take a look at how we can provide flexibility to all layers of the stack from the infrastructure on up to the application layer. When building a secure supply chain for container focused platforms, I generally see two different mindsets in terms of where their responsibilities lie between the developers of the applications and the operations teams who run the middleware platforms. Most organizations are looking to build a secure, yet robust service that fits their organization's goals around how modern applications are built and delivered. First, let's take a look at the developer or application team approach. This approach falls more of the DevOps philosophy, where a developer and application teams are the owners of their applications from the development through their life cycle, all the way to production. I would refer to this more of a self service model of application delivery and promotion when deployed to a container platform. This is fairly common, organizations where full stack responsibilities have been delegated to the application teams. Even in organizations where full stack ownership doesn't exist, I see the self service application deployment model work very well in lab development or non production environments. This allows teams to experiment with newer technologies, which is one of the most effective benefits of utilizing containers. In other organizations, there is a strong separation between responsibilities for developers and IT operations. This is often due to the complex nature of controlled processes related to the compliance and regulatory needs. Developers are responsible for their application development. This can either include dock at the development layer or be more traditional, throw it over the wall approach to application development. There's also quite a common experience around building a center of excellence with this approach where we can take container platforms and be delivered as a service to other consumers inside of the IT organization. This is fairly prescriptive in the manner of which application teams would consume it. Yeah when examining the two approaches, there are pros and cons to each. Process, controls and compliance are often seen as inhibitors to speed. Self-service creation, starting with the infrastructure layer, leads to inconsistency, security and control concerns, which leads to compliance issues. While self-service is great, without visibility into the utilization and optimization of those environments, it continues the cycles of inefficient resource utilization. And a true infrastructure as a code experience, requires DevOps, related coding skills that teams often have in pockets, but maybe aren't ingrained in the company culture. Luckily for us, there is a middle ground for all of this. Docker Enterprise Container Cloud provide the foundation for the cloud like experience on any infrastructure without all of the out of the box security and controls that our professional services team and your operations teams spend their time designing and implementing. This removes much of the additional work and worry around ensuring that your clusters and experiences are consistent, while maintaining the ideal self service model. No matter if it is a full stack ownership or easing the needs of IT operations. We're also bringing the most natural Kubernetes experience today with Lens to allow for multi-cluster visibility that is both developer and operator friendly. Lens provide immediate feedback for the health of your applications, observability for your clusters, fast context switching between environments and allowing you to choose the best in tool for the task at hand, whether it is the graphic user interface or command line interface driven. Combining the cloud like experience with the efficiencies of a secure supply chain that meet your needs brings you the best of both worlds. You get DevOps speed with all the security and controls to meet the regulations your business lives by. We're talking about more frequent deployments, faster time to recover from application issues and better code quality. As you can see from our clusters we have worked with, we're able to tie these processes back to real cost savings, real efficiency and faster adoption. This all adds up to delivering business value to end users in the overall perceived value. Now let's look and see how we're able to actually build a secure supply chain to help deliver these sorts of initiatives. In our example secure supply chain, where utilizing Docker desktop to help with consistency of developer experience, GitHub for our source control, Jenkins for our CACD tooling, the Docker trusted registry for our secure container registry and the Universal Control Plane to provide us with our secure container runtime with Kubernetes and Swarm, providing a consistent experience, no matter where our clusters are deployed. You work with our teams of developers and operators to design a system that provides a fast, consistent and secure experience. For my developers, that works for any application, Brownfield or Greenfield, Monolith or Microservice. Onboarding teams can be simplified with integrations into enterprise authentication services, calls to GitHub repositories, Jenkins access and jobs, Universal Control Plan and Docker trusted registry teams and organizations, Kubernetes namespace with access control, creating Docker trusted registry namespaces with access control, image scanning and promotion policies. So, now let's take a look and see what it looks like from the CICD process, including Jenkins. So let's start with Docker desktop. From the Docker desktop standpoint, we'll actually be utilizing visual studio code and Docker desktop to provide a consistent developer experience. So no matter if we have one developer or a hundred, we're going to be able to walk through a consistent process through Docker container utilization at the development layer. Once we've made our changes to our code, we'll be able to check those into our source code repository. In this case, we'll be using GitHub. Then when Jenkins picks up, it will check out that code from our source code repository, build our Docker containers, test the application that will build the image, and then it will take the image and push it to our Docker trusted registry. From there, we can scan the image and then make sure it doesn't have any vulnerabilities. Then we can sign them. So once we've signed our images, we've deployed our application to dev, we can actually test our application deployed in our real environment. Jenkins will then test the deployed application. And if all tests show that as good, we'll promote our Docker image to production. So now, let's look at the process, beginning from the developer interaction. First of all, let's take a look at our application as it's deployed today. Here, we can see that we have a change that we want to make on our application. So our marketing team says we need to change containerize NGINX to something more Mirantis branded. So let's take a look at visual studio code, which we'll be using for our ID to change our application. So here's our application. We have our code loaded and we're going to be able to use Docker desktop on our local environment with our Docker desktop plugin for visual studio code, to be able to build our application inside of Docker, without needing to run any command line specific tools. Here with our code, we'll be able to interact with Docker maker changes, see it live and be able to quickly see if our changes actually made the impact that we're expecting our application. So let's find our updated tiles for application and let's go ahead and change that to our Mirantis sized NGINX instead of containerized NGINX. So we'll change it in a title and on the front page of the application. So now that we've saved that changed to our application, we can actually take a look at our code here in VS code. And as simple as this, we can right click on the Docker file and build our application. We give it a name for our Docker image and VS code will take care of the automatic building of our application. So now we have a Docker image that has everything we need in our application inside of that image. So, here we can actually just right click on that image tag that we just created and do run. This will interactively run the container for us. And then once our containers running, we can just right click and open it up in a browser. So here we can see the change to our application as it exists live. So, once we can actually verify that our applications working as expected, we can stop our container. And then from here, we can actually make that change live by pushing it to our source code repository. So here, we're going to go ahead and make a commit message to say that we updated to our Mirantis branding. We will commit that change and then we'll push it to our source code repository. Again, in this case, we're using GitHub to be able to use as our source code repository. So here in VS code, we'll have that pushed here to our source code repository. And then, we'll move on to our next environment, which is Jenkins. Jenkins is going to be picking up those changes for our application and it checked it out from our source code repository. So GitHub notifies Jenkins that there's a change. Checks out the code, builds our Docker image using the Docker file. So we're getting a consistent experience between the local development environment on our desktop and then in Jenkins where we're actually building our application, doing our tests, pushing it into our Docker trusted registry, scanning it and signing our image in our Docker trusted registry and then deploying to our development environment. So let's actually take a look at that development environment as it's been deployed. So, here we can see that our title has been updated on our application, so we can verify that it looks good in development. If we jump back here to Jenkins, we'll see that Jenkins go ahead and runs our integration tests for our development environment. Everything worked as expected, so it promoted that image for our production repository in our Docker trusted registry. We're then, we're going to also sign that image. So we're assigning that yes, we've signed off that has made it through our integration tests and it's deployed to production. So here in Jenkins, we can take a look at our deployed production environment where our application is live in production. We've made a change, automated and very secure manner. So now, let's take a look at our Docker trusted registry, where we can see our name space for our application and our simple NGINX repository. From here, we'll be able to see information about our application image that we've pushed into the registry, such as the image signature, when it was pushed by who and then, we'll also be able to see the results of our image. In this case, we can actually see that there are vulnerabilities for our image and we'll actually take a look at that. Docker trusted registry does binary level scanning. So we get detailed information about our individual image layers. From here, these image layers give us details about where the vulnerabilities were located and what those vulnerabilities actually are. So if we click on the vulnerability, we can see specific information about that vulnerability to give us details around the severity and more information about what exactly is vulnerable inside of our container. One of the challenges that you often face around vulnerabilities is how exactly we would remediate that in a secure supply chain. So let's take a look at that. In the example that we were looking at, the vulnerability is actually in the base layer of our image. In order to pull in a new base layer for our image, we need to actually find the source of that and update it. One of the ways that we can help secure that as a part of the supply chain is to actually take a look at where we get our base layers of our images. Docker hub really provides a great source of content to start from, but opening up Docker hub within your organization, opens up all sorts of security concerns around the origins of that content. Not all images are made equal when it comes to the security of those images. The official images from Docker hub are curated by Docker, open source projects and other vendors. One of the most important use cases is around how you get base images into your environment. It is much easier to consume the base operating system layer images than building your own and also trying to maintain them. Instead of just blindly trusting the content from Docker hub, we can take a set of content that we find useful such as those base image layers or content from vendors and pull that into our own Docker trusted registry, using our mirroring feature. Once the images have been mirrored into a staging area of our Docker trusted registry, we can then scan them to ensure that the images meet our security requirements. And then based off of the scan result, promote the image to a public repository where you can actually sign the images and make them available to our internal consumers to meet their needs. This allows us to provide a set of curated content that we know is secure and controlled within our environment. So from here, we can find our updated Docker image in our Docker trusted registry, where we can see that the vulnerabilities have been resolved. From a developer's point of view, that's about as smooth as the process gets. Now, let's take a look at how we can provide that secure content for our developers in our own Docker trusted registry. So in this case, we're taking a look at our Alpine image that we've mirrored into our Docker trusted registry. Here, we're looking at the staging area where the images get temporarily pulled because we have to pull them in order to actually be able to scan them. So here we set up mirroring and we can quickly turn it on by making it active. And then we can see that our image mirroring, we'll pull our content from Docker hub and then make it available in our Docker trusted registry in an automatic fashion. So from here, we can actually take a look at the promotions to be able to see how exactly we promote our images. In this case, we created a promotion policy within Docker trusted registry that makes it so that content gets promoted to a public repository for internal users to consume based off of the vulnerabilities that are found or not found inside of the Docker image. So our actual users, how they would consume this content is by taking a look at the public to them, official images that we've made available. Here again, looking at our Alpine image, we can take a look at the tags that exist and we can see that we have our content that has been made available. So we've pulled in all sorts of content from Docker hub. In this case, we've even pulled in the multi architecture images, which we can scan due to the binary level nature of our scanning solution. Now let's take a look at Lens. Lens provides capabilities to be able to give developers a quick opinionated view that focuses around how they would want to view, manage and inspect applications deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. Lens integrates natively out of the box with Universal Control Plane clam bundles. So you're automatically generated TLS certificates from UCP, just work. Inside our organization, we want to give our developers the ability to see their applications in a very easy to view manner. So in this case, let's actually filter down to the application that we just employed to our development environment. Here, we can see the pod for application. And when we click on that, we get instant detailed feedback about the components and information that this pod is utilizing. We can also see here in Lens that it gives us the ability to quickly switch contexts between different clusters that we have access to. With that, we also have capabilities to be able to quickly deploy other types of components. One of those is helm charts. Helm charts are a great way to package up applications, especially those that may be more complex to make it much simpler to be able to consume and inversion our applications. In this case, let's take a look at the application that we just built and deployed. In this case, our simple NGINX application has been bundled up as a helm chart and is made available through Lens. Here, we can just click on that description of our application to be able to see more information about the helm chart. So we can publish whatever information may be relevant about our application. And through one click, we can install our helm chart. Here, it will show us the actual details of the helm charts. So before we install it, we can actually look at those individual components. So in this case, we can see this created an ingress rule. And then this will tell Kubernetes how did it create this specific components of our application. We'd just have to pick a namespace to deploy it to and in this case, we're actually going to do a quick test here because in this case, we're trying to deploy the application from Docker hub. In our Universal Control Plane, we've turned on Docker content trust policy enforcement. So this is actually going to fail to deploy. Because we're trying to employ our application from Docker hub, the image hasn't been properly signed in our environment. So the Docker content trust policy enforcement prevents us from deploying our Docker image from Docker hub. In this case, we have to go through our approved process through our secure supply chain to be able to ensure that we know where our image came from and that meets our quality standards. So if we comment out the Docker hub repository and comment in our Docker trusted registry repository and click install, it will then install the helm chart with our Docker image being pulled from our DTR, which then it has a proper signature. We can see that our application has been successfully deployed through our home chart releases view. From here, we can see that simple NGINX application and in this case, we'll get details around the actual deployed helm chart. The nice thing is, is that Lens provides us this capability here with helm to be able to see all of the components that make up our application. From this view, it's giving us that single pane of glass into that specific application, so that we know all of the components that is created inside of Kubernetes. There are specific details that can help us access the applications such as that ingress rule that we just talked about, gives us the details of that, but it also gives us the resources such as the service, the deployment and ingress that has been created within Kubernetes to be able to actually have the application exist. So to recap, we've covered how we can offer all the benefits of a cloud like experience and offer flexibility around DevOps and operations control processes through the use of a secure supply chain, allowing our developers to spend more time developing and our operators, more time designing systems that meet our security and compliance concerns.

>> So, hi, my name is Daniel Terry, I work as Lead Designer at SEB. So, today we will go through why we are why we are Mirantis' customer, why we choose Docker Enterprise, and mainly what challenges we were facing before we chose to work with Docker, and where we are today, and our keys to success. >> Hi, my name is Johan, I'm a senior developer and a Tech Lead at SEB. I was in the beginning with Docker for like, four years ago. And as Daniel was saying here, we are going to present to you our journey with Docker and the answers. >> Yeah, who are we? We are SEB group. So we are a classic, financial large institutions. So, classic and traditional banking services. In Sweden, we are quite a big bank, one of the largest. And we are on a journey of transforming the bank so it has to be online 24-seven. People can do their banking business every day, whenever they want, nothing should stop them to be online. So this is putting a lot of pressure on us on infrastructure to be able to give them that service. (drum fill) >> So our timeline here. Is look, we started out with how to facilitate the container technology it has to be. 2016. And, in 2018, we had the first Docker running in SEB in a standalone mode. You need that. We didn't have any swarm, or given up this cluster since a while. For 2019, we have our first Docker-prise enterprise cluster at SEB. And today, 2020, we have the latest and greatest version of Docker installed. We are running around approximately two and a fifth at 450 specs. Around a thousand services and around 1500 containers. So, developer challenges. As for me as a developer, previous to Docker was really, really hard to get things in production. Times. It took big things and ordering services and infrastructures was a pain in the... yeah, you know what I mean? So for me, it was all about processes. We use natural processes and meaning that I wasn't able to, to see maintaining my system in production. I was handing that over to our operations teams and operation teams in that time, they didn't know how the application works. They didn't know how to troubleshoot it and see, well, what's going wrong. They were experts on the infrastructure and the platforms, but not on our applications. We were working in silos, meaning that I as a developer, only did developing things. The operations side did their things, and the security side did their things. But we didn't work as a team. I mean, today we have a completely different way of working. We will not see shapes. I mean, we have persons that were really good in maybe MQ technologies, or in some programming language and so on, but we didn't have the knowledge in the team techs to solve things, as we should have. Long lead times. I mean, everything we were trying to do had to follow the processes as we had. I mean that we should fill in some forms, send it away, hopefully someone was getting, getting back to us and saying, yeah guys, we can help you out with these services or this infrastructure, but it takes a really long time to do that. I mean, ordering infrastructure is when you're not an expert on that really hard to do. And often the orders we made or placed were wrong. When we have forms to fill in, it wasn't possible for us to do things automatically. Meaning that we didn't have the code, or the infrastructure as code. Meaning that if we didn't get the right persons into the meetings the first time, we didn't have the possibility to do it the right way, meaning that we had to redo and redo, and hopefully sometimes we got the right. We didn't have consistent set ups between the environments. When we order, as for example, a test environment, we could maybe order it with some minor resources, less CPU, so less memory, less disc or whatever. Or actually less performance on the hardware, but then we moved up to production. We realized that we have different hardware, different discs, different memories, and that could actually cause some serious problems in applications, access-wise. I mean, everyone likes to have exercise, especially if you are the maintainer of the system. That was really, really hard to get. I mean, every system has their own services, their own service, and therefore they need to apply for access to those other services. But today there's a complete difference since we only have one class to produce. Since we don't have infrastructure as a code back then, there were really lots of human errors. I mean, everyone was doing things manually. When you're coming from the Windows perspective, everything is a UI. You tend to prefer that way of working, meaning that if you used to click something in between the environments, the environments will not look the same. Life cycles. I mean, just imagine. When we have the server installed, it's like a pet. You have everything configured all from certificates to port openings, cartels, install patches, you name it. And then imagine that Windows are terminating a version and you need to reinstall that. Everything needs to be redone from the beginning. So there was a really long time taking to, to do the LCM activities, General lack of support of Microservice architecture was really also, a thing that are driving us forward with the containers technology, since we can't scale our applications in the same way as for containers. We, for example, couldn't have two applications or two processes using the same TCP port. For example, if you'd like to scale a web server, you can't do that on the same hardware. You need to have two different servers. And just imagine replacing all the excesses, replacing all the orders again for more hardware, and then manually a setting up there. The low balancer in front is a really huge task to do. And necessarily if you don't have the knowledge how the infrastructure is where you're working, then it's also really hard for you as a developer to do things right. Traditionalist. I mean, the services for us are like pets. They were really, really hard to set up. It'd take maybe a week or so. And if something was wrong with them, we will try to fix them as a pet. I mean, we couldn't just kill them and throw them away. It will actually destroy the application as this, our, like a unit box where all our things are installed. >> So, coming in from the infrastructure part of this, we've also seen challenges. For my team, we're coming from a Windows environment. So doing like a DevOps journey, which we want to do, makes it harder due to our nature in our environments. We are not used to, maybe use API, so we are not used to giving open APIs to our developers to do changes on the servers. Since we are a bank, we don't allow users to log into the servers, which means we have to do things for them all the time. This was very time consuming. And a lot of the challenges we actually still are seeing is the existing infrastructure. You can't just put that container platform on it, and thinking you're sold and everything. One of the biggest issues for us is, has been to getting servers. Windows servers usually takes like 15 minutes, Linux servers can takes up to two week in a bad day. So we really lack like, infrastructure as code. If we want a low balancer, that is also an order form. If we want the firewall opening, that's an order form. Hopefully they will not deny it. So it will go faster. So it's a lot of old processes that we need to go through. So what we wanted to do is that we want to move all of these things to the developers, so they can do it. They can own up their problems, but with our old infrastructure, that wasn't possible. We are a heavily ITIL-based organization, meaning that everything went from a cab. Still does in some way, we have one major service window every month where we take everything down. There is a lot of people involved in everything. So it's quite hard to know what will be done during the maintenance window. We lack supporting tools, or we lacked supporting tools, like log-in, good log-in tools. We have a bunch of CI/CD tools, but the maturity level of the infrastructure team wasn't that good. Again, order form and processes. If we want to, like, procure, do our procurement on a new like, storage system, or a backup system, we talk about here. So to do it is, for us, with containers, it would solve a lot of problems, because we cause we would then move the problems, not maybe move the problems to the developer, but we would make it able for them to own their own problems. So everything that we have talked about up till now boils down to business drivers. So the management's gave- gave us some policies to, or what they, how they want to change the company, so we can be this agile and fast moving bank. So one of the biggest drivers are cloud readiness, where Containers comes in perfectly. So we can build it on premises, and then we can move it to the cloud when we are ready but we can't, but we also need an exit strategy to move it back on premises if we need, due to hard regulations. Maybe you can throw it in the air. >> Absolutely. I definitely can. You're absolutely right. We need to develop things in a certain way. So we can move from infrastructure to infrastructure depending, or regardless of the vendor. Meaning that if we are able to run it on-prem, we should be able to run it in cloud or vice versa. We should also be able to move between clouds, and not be forced into one cloud provider. So that's really important for us at SEB. Short time to market is also a thing here. I mean, we are working with the huge customers. I can't name them, but they're really huge. And they need to have us being moving forward. I mean, able to really fast switch from one technology, maybe to another, we are here for them. And it's really important to us to be really fast for us to get new things out in production. All right, maybe. Nothing else? >> I don't, don't really. From the upside, we are in a huge staff DevOps transition. So, or a forced DevOps transition, which means we need to start looking at new infrastructure solutions, maybe deploy our infrastructure parts inside of containers to be able to use it the same way in the cloud. That's what we do prior, do here on premises, we have private clouds which are built on techno- technology, container technology today. So this fits quite good to have the Docker platform being one part of that one. >> Yeah. And this is solid, we are also working really, really actively on open source platforms and open source drivers. We can see that we have a huge amount of vendors in SEB, really huge ones, but we can also see that we can, facilitate open source platforms, and open source technology as well. So container technology will bring that for us. I mean, instead of having a SaaS platform and SaaS services, we can actually instantiate our own with containers and stuff. >> Also we are, since we are quite heavily regulated, the process of going through to you as like a SaaS service can take up to two years for us to go through, and then maybe the SaaS service, is it, is it what we want to use anymore? So, also we want to develop the things in our own premises and maybe, and scale it to the cloud if we need. And also we want to be an attractive employer, where maybe it's not that, the coolest thing for a young student to work in mainframe, we have a mainframe it's, it's not going anywhere, but it's hard to get people, and we want to be an attractive employer, and everyone is talking Kubernetics and containers or, and clouds. So we need to transition into those technologies. >> Yeah, we need to be open minded and necessarily facilitate the new technologies. So we can actually attract new employees. So it's really important to us to have an open mind. Our experience with Docker Containers. I mean, as I said before, scalability is a really important thing for us today. When we are using a more microservice architecture, we need to be able to Skype. We need to be scaling horizontally instead of vertically. So for that, containers are perfect storage. As we said before, we have a huge problem with environments being differently set up, since it was often manually done. Today, as we have a infrastructure as a code, it's really, really nice to have the same things exactly configured, the same in all environments. And we also have the same tooling, meaning that if I can run it on my machine, it's the same tooling I will be using to run it for test purposes or in production. That's a huge benefit for us as a developer. Time to market. I mean, today, we don't have to order service, we are using the service approach here. So we have a container cluster that are actually just sitting there waiting for our services to be hosted. So no more forms, no more calls, no more meetings before we can set up anything. We also own our problems. I mean, before, as I said, we have the processes, meaning that we ship our applications to any server. And then the operation sites take over. That's not the case now. We are actually using this as we should in DevOps. Meaning the other teams are actually responsible for all their errors as well. Even if it's on the infrastructure part, it's completely different if it's a platform's problem, because then it's the platform's team, and we can use different windows. We can try stuff out, we have an open mind. And that says that I can download and try any container image I would like on my developer machine. It's not maybe, okay to run it in production without having the security people look at it. But normally it's really, really much faster instead of waiting maybe six months, we can maybe wait one week or so. And of course less to none LCM activities. I mean, as I said before, it will take months, maybe, to do an LCM activity on multiple servers. Today, our LCM activities more or less are just switching to a new version of the image from Docker hub. That's all we have to do. So that's actually maintained during the processes we have in CI/CD pipelines. >> And the last one. So our keys to success: you should get demanded from the managers and management that everything should be a container. All the new development has to go through a container before you start ordering servers. Everything shall go through a CI/CD pipeline. We don't actually, here at SEB. Our developers build their own CI/CD pipeline. We just provide a platform for them to use it against, and the CI/CD to systems, but they build everything for themselves. Cause they know how their application works, how it should be deployed, with what tools. We just provide them with a tool set. Build a Cross Team. So you should incorporate all the processes that you need, but you should focus on the developer part, because you are building a platform for the developers, not for operations or security. >> And then maybe >> A lot of... >> you'll be able to take flight >> Yeah. Luck has nothing to do with it? Yes, it has. Of course, luck has something to do with it, even if you're really passionate, even if you're really good at some things. I mean, we got some really nice help from Dr. Inc. We were really... Came in with the technology in the right time for us to be, and we had really engaged people with these projects and that's a really luck for us to have. >> Yeah. And also we... I want to thank our colleagues, because we have another container team who started before us. And they have actually run into a lot of organizational problems, which they have sold, so we could piggyback on that, on those solutions. Also, start small and scale it. This is where Docker swarm comes, fits perfectly. So we have actually, we started with swarm. We are moving into Kubernetics in this platform. We will not force-move anything. The developers just should show us, what their- fits their needs. Thank you! >> Thank you very much.

>>this session will be reviewing the power benefits of implementing a secure software supply chain and how we can gain a cloud like experience with flexibility, speed and security off modern software delivery. Hi, I'm Matt Bentley, and I run our technical pre sales team here. Um Iran. Tous I spent the last six years working with customers on their container ization journey. One thing almost every one of my customers is focused on how they can leverage the speed and agility benefits of contain arising their applications while continuing to apply the same security controls. One of the most important things to remember is that we are all doing this for one reason, and that is for our applications. So now let's take a look at how we could provide flexibility all layers of the stack from the infrastructure on up to the application layer. When building a secure supply chain for container focus platforms, I generally see two different mindsets in terms of where the responsibilities lie between the developers of the applications and the operations teams who run the middleware platforms. Most organizations are looking to build a secure yet robust service that fits the organization's goals around how modern applications are built and delivered. Yeah. First, let's take a look at the developer or application team approach. This approach follows Mawr of the Dev ops philosophy, where a developer and application teams are the owners of their applications. From the development through their life cycle, all the way to production. I would refer this more of a self service model of application, delivery and promotion when deployed to a container platform. This is fairly common organizations where full stack responsibilities have been delegated to the application teams, even in organizations were full stack ownership doesn't exist. I see the self service application deployment model work very well in lab development or non production environments. This allows teams to experiment with newer technologies, which is one of the most effective benefits of utilizing containers and other organizations. There's a strong separation between responsibilities for developers and I T operations. This is often do the complex nature of controlled processes related to the compliance and regulatory needs. Developers are responsible for their application development. This can either include doctorate the development layer or b'more traditional throw it over the wall approach to application development. There's also quite a common experience around building a center of excellence with this approach, where we can take container platforms and be delivered as a service to other consumers inside of the I T organization. This is fairly prescriptive, in the manner of which application teams would consume it. When examining the two approaches, there are pros and cons to each process. Controls and appliance are often seen as inhibitors to speak. Self service creation, starting with the infrastructure layer, leads to inconsistency, security and control concerns, which leads to compliance issues. While self service is great without visibility into the utilization and optimization of those environments, it continues the cycles of inefficient resource utilization and the true infrastructure is a code. Experience requires Dev ops related coding skills that teams often have in pockets but maybe aren't ingrained in the company culture. Luckily for us, there is a middle ground for all of this Doc Enterprise Container Cloud provides the foundation for the cloud like experience on any infrastructure without all of the out of the box security and controls that are professional services Team and your operations team spend their time designing and implementing. This removes much of the additional work and worry Run, ensuring that your clusters and experiences are consistent while maintaining the ideal self service model, no matter if it is a full stack ownership or easing the needs of I T operations. We're also bringing the most natural kubernetes experience today with winds to allow for multi cluster visibility that is both developer and operator friendly. Let's provides immediate feedback for the health of your applications. Observe ability for your clusters. Fast context, switching between environments and allowing you to choose the best in tool for the task at hand. Whether is three graphical user interface or command line interface driven. Combining the cloud like experience with the efficiencies of a secure supply chain that meet your needs brings you the best of both worlds. You get Dave off speed with all the security controls to meet the regulations your business lives by. We're talking about more frequent deployments. Faster time to recover from application issues and better code quality, as you can see from our clusters we have worked with were able to tie these processes back to real cost savings, riel efficiency and faster adoption. This all adds up to delivering business value to end users in the overall perceived value. Now let's look at see how we're able to actually build a secure supply chain. Help deliver these sorts of initiatives in our example. Secure Supply chain. We're utilizing doctor desktop to help with consistency of developer experience. Get hub for our source Control Jenkins for a C A C D. Tooling the doctor trusted registry for our secure container registry in the universal control playing to provide us with our secure container run time with kubernetes and swarm. Providing a consistent experience no matter where are clusters are deployed. You work with our teams of developers and operators to design a system that provides a fast, consistent and secure experience for my developers that works for any application. Brownfield or Greenfield monolith or micro service on boarding teams could be simplified with integrations into enterprise authentication services. Calls to get help repositories. Jenkins Access and Jobs, Universal Control Plan and Dr Trusted registry teams and organizations. Cooper down his name space with access control, creating doctor trusted registry named spaces with access control, image scanning and promotion policies. So now let's take a look and see what it looks like from the C I c D process, including Jenkins. So let's start with Dr Desktop from the doctor desktop standpoint, what should be utilizing visual studio code and Dr Desktop to provide a consistent developer experience. So no matter if we have one developer or 100 we're gonna be able to walk through the consistent process through docker container utilization at the development layer. Once we've made our changes to our code will be able to check those into our source code repository in this case, abusing Get up. Then, when Jenkins picks up, it will check out that code from our source code repository, build our doctor containers, test the application that will build the image, and then it will take the image and push it toward doctor trusted registry. From there, we can scan the image and then make sure it doesn't have any vulnerabilities. Then we consign them. So once we signed our images, we've deployed our application to Dev. We can actually test their application deployed in our real environment. Jenkins will then test the deployed application, and if all tests show that is good, will promote the r R Dr and Mr Production. So now let's look at the process, beginning from the developer interaction. First of all, let's take a look at our application as is deployed today. Here, we can see that we have a change that we want to make on our application. So marketing Team says we need to change containerized injure next to something more Miranda's branded. So let's take a look at visual studio coat, which will be using for I D to change our application. So here's our application. We have our code loaded, and we're gonna be able to use Dr Desktop on our local environment with our doctor desktop plug in for visual studio code to be able to build our application inside of doctor without needing to run any command line. Specific tools here is our code will be able to interact with docker, make our changes, see it >>live and be able to quickly see if our changes actually made the impact that we're expecting our application. Let's find our updated tiles for application and let's go and change that to our Miranda sized into next. Instead of containerized in genetics, so will change in the title and on the front page of the application, so that we save. That changed our application. We can actually take a look at our code here in V s code. >>And as simple as this, we can right click on the docker file and build our application. We give it a name for our Docker image and V s code will take care of the automatic building of our application. So now we have a docker image that has everything we need in our application inside of that image. So here we can actually just right click on the image tag that we just created and do run this winter, actively run the container for us and then what's our containers running? We could just right click and open it up in a browser. So here we can see the change to our application as it exists live. So once we can actually verify that our applications working as expected, weaken, stop our container. And then from here, we can actually make that change live by pushing it to our source code repository. So here we're going to go ahead and make a commit message to say that we updated to our Mantis branding. We will commit that change and then we'll push it to our source code repository again. In this case we're using get Hub to be able to use our source code repository. So here in V s code will have that pushed here to our source code repository. And then we'll move on to our next environment, which is Jenkins. Jenkins is gonna be picking up those changes for our application, and it checked it out from our source code repository. So get Hub Notifies Jenkins. That there is a change checks out. The code builds our doctor image using the doctor file. So we're getting a consistent experience between the local development environment on our desktop and then and Jenkins or actually building our application, doing our tests, pushing in toward doctor trusted registry, scanning it and signing our image. And our doctor trusted registry, then 2.4 development environment. >>So let's actually take a look at that development environment as it's been deployed. So here we can see that our title has been updated on our application so we can verify that looks good and development. If we jump back here to Jenkins, will see that Jenkins go >>ahead and runs our integration tests for a development environment. Everything worked as expected, so it promoted that image for production repository and our doctor trusted registry. Where then we're going to also sign that image. So we're signing that. Yes, we have signed off that has made it through our integration tests, and it's deployed to production. So here in Jenkins, we could take a look at our deployed production environment where our application is live in production. We've made a change automated and very secure manner. >>So now let's take a look at our doctor trusted registry where we can see our game Space for application are simple in genetics repository. From here we will be able to see information about our application image that we've pushed into the registry, such as Thean Midge signature when it was pushed by who and then we'll also be able to see the scan results of our image. In this case, we can actually see that there are vulnerabilities for our image and we'll actually take a look at that. Dr Trusted registry does binary level scanning, so we get detailed information about our individual image layers. From here, these image layers give us details about where the vulnerabilities were located and what those vulnerabilities actually are. So if we click on the vulnerability, we can see specific information about that vulnerability to give us details around the severity and more information about what, exactly is vulnerable inside of our container. One of the challenges that you often face around vulnerabilities is how, exactly we would remediate that and secure supply chain. So let's take a look at that and the example that we were looking at the vulnerability is actually in the base layer of our image. In order to pull in a new base layer of our image, we need to actually find the source of that and updated. One of the ways that we can help secure that is a part of the supply chain is to actually take a look at where we get our base layers of our images. Dr. Help really >>provides a great source of content to start from, but opening up docker help within your organization opens up all sorts of security concerns around the origins of that content. Not all images are made equal when it comes to the security of those images. The official images from Docker, However, curated by docker, open source projects and other vendors, one of the most important use cases is around how you get base images into your environment. It is much easier to consume the base operating system layer images than building your own and also trying to maintain them instead of just blindly trusting the content from doctor. How we could take a set >>of content that we find useful, such as those base image layers or content from vendors, and pull that into our own Dr trusted registry using our rearing feature. Once the images have been mirrored into a staging area of our DACA trusted registry, we can then scan them to ensure that the images meet our security requirements and then, based off the scan result, promote the image toe a public repository where we can actually sign the images and make them available to our internal consumers to meet their needs. This allows us to provide a set of curated content that we know a secure and controlled within our environment. So from here we confined our updated doctor image in our doctor trust registry, where we can see that the vulnerabilities have been resolved from a developers point of view, that's about a smooth process gets. Now let's take a look at how we could provide that secure content for developers and our own Dr Trusted registry. So in this case, we're taking a look at our Alpine image that we've mirrored into our doctor trusted registry. Here we're looking at the staging area where the images get temporarily pulled because we have to pull them in order to actually be able to scan them. So here we set up nearing and we can quickly turn it on by making active. Then we can see that our image mirroring will pull our content from Dr Hub and then make it available in our doctor trusted registry in an automatic fashion. So from here, we can actually take a look at the promotions to be able to see how exactly we promote our images. In this case, we created a promotion policy within docker trusted registry that makes it so. That content gets promoted to a public repository for internal users to consume based off of the vulnerabilities that are found or not found inside of the docker image. So are actually users. How they would consume this content is by taking a look at the public to them official images that we've made available here again, Looking at our Alpine image, we can take a look at the tags that exist. We could see that we have our content that has been made available, so we've pulled in all sorts of content from Dr Hub. In this case, we have even pulled in the multi architectural images, which we can scan due to the binary level nature of our scanning solution. Now let's take a look at Len's. Lens provides capabilities to be able to give developers a quick, opinionated view that focuses around how they would want to view, manage and inspect applications to point to a Cooper Days cluster. Lindsay integrates natively out of the box with universal control playing clam bundles so you're automatically generated. Tell certificates from UCP. Just work inside our organization. We want to give our developers the ability to see their applications and a very easy to view manner. So in this case, let's actually filter down to the application that we just deployed to our development environment. Here we can see the pot for application and we click on that. We get instant, detailed feedback about the components and information that this pot is utilizing. We can also see here in Linz that it gives us the ability to quickly switch context between different clusters that we have access to. With that, we also have capabilities to be able to quickly deploy other types of components. One of those is helm charts. Helm charts are a great way to package of applications, especially those that may be more complex to make it much simpler to be able to consume inversion our applications. In this case, let's take a look at the application that we just built and deployed. This case are simple in genetics. Application has been bundled up as a helm chart and has made available through lens here. We can just click on that description of our application to be able to see more information about the helm chart so we can publish whatever information may be relevant about our application, and through one click, we can install our helm chart here. It will show us the actual details of the home charts. So before we install it, we can actually look at those individual components. So in this case, we could see that's created ingress rule. And then it's well, tell kubernetes how to create the specific components of our application. We just have to pick a name space to to employ it, too. And in this case, we're actually going to do a quick test here because in this case, we're trying to deploy the application from Dr Hub in our universal Control plane. We've turned on Dr Content Trust Policy Enforcement. So this is actually gonna fail to deploy because we're trying to deploy application from Dr Hub. The image hasn't been properly signed in our environment. So the doctor can to trust policy enforcement prevents us from deploying our doctor image from Dr Hub. In this case, we have to go through our approved process through our secure supply chain to be able to ensure that we know our image came from, and that meets our quality standards. So if we comment out the doctor Hub repository and comment in our doctor trusted registry repository and click install, it will then install the helm chart with our doctor image being pulled from our GTR, which then has a proper signature, we can see that our application has been successfully deployed through our home chart releases view. From here, we can see that simple in genetics application, and in this case we'll get details around the actual deploy and help chart. The nice thing is that Linds provides us this capability here with home. To be able to see all the components that make up our application from this view is giving us that single pane of glass into that specific application so that we know all the components that is created inside of kubernetes. There are specific details that can help us access the applications, such as that ingress world that we just talked about gives us the details of that. But it also gives us the resource is such as the service, the deployment in ingress that has been created within kubernetes to be able to actually have the application exist. So to recap, we've covered how we can offer all the benefits of a cloud like experience and offer flexibility around dev ups and operations controlled processes through the use of a secure supply chain, allowing our developers to spend more time developing and our operators mawr time designing systems that meet our security and compliance concerns

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation everybody welcome back to the cube this is Dave Volante and you're watching a special presentation data ops enacted made possible by IBM you know what's what's happening is the innovation engine in the IT economy is really shifted used to be Moore's Law today it's applying machine intelligence and AI to data really scaling that and operationalizing that new knowledge the challenges that is it's not so easy to operationalize AI and infuse it into the data pipeline but what we're doing in this program is bringing in practitioners who have actually had a great deal of success in doing just that and I'm really excited to have it Kumal a the tumor lang Manali is here she's the executive head of data management or personal and business banking at Standard Bank of South Africa the tumor length thanks so much for coming in the cube thank you for having me Dave you're very welcome and first of all how you holding up with this this bovid situation how are things in Johannesburg um things in Johannesburg are fine and we've been on lockdown now I think it's day 33 if I'm not mistaken lost count and but we're really grateful for the swift action of government we only I mean we have less than 4,000 places in the country and infection rate is is really slow so we've really I think been able to flatten the curve and we're grateful for being able to be protected in this way so we're all working from home or learning the new normal and we're all in this together that's great to hear why don't you tell us a little bit about your your role you're a data person we're really going to get in with here with us you know how you spend your time okay well I hit up a date operations function in a data management function which really is the foundational part of the data value chain that then allows other parts of the organization to monetize data and leverage it as as the use cases apply we monetize it ourselves as well but really we're an enterprise wide organization that ensures that data quality is managed data is governed that we have the effective practices applied to the entire lineage of the data ownership and curation is in place and everything else from a regulatory as well as opportunity perspective then is able to be leveraged upon so historically you know data has been viewed as sort of this expense it's it's big it's growing it needs to be managed deleted after a certain amount of time and then you know ten years ago the Big Data move data became an asset you had a lot of shadow ID people going off and doing things that maybe didn't comply to the corporate ethics probably drove here here you're a part of the organization crazy but talk about that how what has changed but they in the last you know five years or so just in terms of how people approach data oh I mean you know the story I tell my colleague who are all bankers obviously is the fact that um the banker in 1989 had to mainly just know debits credit and be able to look someone in the eye and know whether or not they'd be a credit risk or not you know if we lend you money and you pay it back um the the banker of the late 90s had to then contend with the emergence of technologies that made their lives easier and allowed for automation and processes to run much more smoothly um in the early two-thousands I would say that digitization was a big focus and in fact my previous role was head of digital banking and at the time we thought digital was the panacea it is the be-all and end-all is the thing that's gonna make organizations edit lo and behold we realized that once you've gotten all your digital platforms ready they are just the plate or the pipe and nothing is flowing through it and there's no food on the plate if data is not the main so really um it's always been an acid I think organizations just never consciously knew that data was there okay so so it sounds like once you've made that sort of initial digital transformation you really had to work it and what we're hearing from a lot of practitioners like toughest challenges related to that involve different parts of the organization different skill sets of challenges and sort of getting everybody to work together on the same page it's better but maybe you could take us back to sort of when you started on this initiative around data ops what was that like what were some of the challenges that you faced and how'd you get through them first and foremost Dave organizations used to believe that data was I t's problem and that's probably why you you then saw the emergence of things like shadow IP but when you really acknowledge that data is and si just like money is an asset then you you have to then take accountability for it just the same way as you would any other asset in the organization and you will not add the a its management to a separate function that's not code to the business and oftentimes IT are seen as a support for an enabling but not quite the main show in most organizations right so what we we then did is first emphasize that data is a business capability a business function it presides in business next to product management next to marketing makes to everything else that the business needs for data management also has to be for to every role in every function to different degrees and varying bearing events and when you take accountability as an owner of a business unit you also take accountability for the data in the systems that support the business unit for us that was the first picture um and convincing my colleagues that data was their problem and not something that we had to worry about and they just kind of leave us to - it was was also a journey but that was kind of the first step in - in terms of getting the data operations journey going um you had to first acknowledge please carry on no you just had to first acknowledge that it's something you must take accountability of as a banker not just need to a different part of the organization that's a real cultural mindset you know in the game of rock-paper-scissors you know culture kinda beats everything doesn't it it's almost like a yep a trump card and so so the businesses embrace that but but what did you do to support that is there has to be trust in the data that it has to be a timeliness and so maybe you could pick us through how you achieve those objectives and maybe some other objectives that business the man so the one thing I didn't mention Davis that obviously they didn't embrace it in the beginning it wasn't a it wasn't there oh yeah that make sense they do that type of conversation um what what he had was a few very strategic people with the right mindset that I could partner with that understood the case for data management and while we had that as as an in we developed a framework for a fully matured data operations capability in the organization and what that would look like in a target date scenario and then what you do is you wait for a good crisis so we had a little bit of a challenge in that our local regulator found us a little bit wanting in terms of our data quality and from that perspective it then brought the case for data quality management to the whole so now there's a burning platform you have an appetite for people to partner with you and say okay we need this to comply to help us out and when they start seeing their opt-in action do they stick then buy into into the concepts so sometimes you need to just wait for a good price and leverage it and only do that which the organization will appreciate at that time you don't have to go Big Bang data quality management was the use case at the time five years ago so we focused all our energy on that and after that it gave us leeway and license really bring to maturity or the other capabilities of the business might not well understand as well so when that crisis hit of thinking about people process in technology you probably had to turn some knobs in each of those areas can you talk about that so from a technology perspective that that when we partnered with with IBM to implement information analyzer for us in terms of making sure that then we could profile the data effectively what was important for us is to to make strides in terms of showing the organization progress but also being able to give them access to self-service tools that will give them insight into their data from a technology perspective that was kind of I think that the genesis of of us implementing and the IBM suite in earnest from a data management perspective people wise we really then um also began a data stewardship journey in which we implemented business unit stewards of data I don't like using the word steward because in my organization it's taken lightly it's almost like a part-time occupation so we converted them we call them data managers and and the analogy I would give is every department with a pl any department worth its salt has a FD or financial director and if money is important to you you have somebody helping you take accountability and execute on your responsibilities and managing that that money so if data is equally important as an asset you will have a leader a manager helping you execute on your data ownership accountability and that was the people journey so firstly I had kind of soldiers planted in each department which were data managers that would then continue building the culture maturing the data practices as as applicable to each business unit use cases so what was important is that every manager in every business unit to the Data Manager focus their energy on making that business unit happy by ensuring that their data was of the right compliance level and the right quality the right best practices from a process and management perspective and was governed through and then in terms of process really it's about spreading through the entire ecosystem data management as a practice and can be quite lonely in the sense that unless the core business of an organization is managing data they worried about doing what they do to make money and most people in most business units will be the only unicorn relative to everybody else who does what they do and so for us it was important to have a community of practice a process where all the data managers across business as well as the technology parts and the specialists who were data management professionals coming together and making sure that we we work together on on specific use so I wonder if I can ask you so the the industry sort of likes to market this notion of of DevOps applied to data and data op have you applied that type of mindset approach agile of continuous improvement is I'm trying to understand how much is marketing and how much actually applicable in the real world can you share well you know when I was reflecting on this before this interview I realized that our very first use case of data officers probably when we implemented information analyzer in our business unit simply because it was the first time that IT and business as well as data professionals came together to spec the use case and then we would literally in an agile fashion with a multidisciplinary team come together to make sure that we got the outcomes that we required I mean for you to to firstly get a data quality management paradigm where we moved from 6% quality at some point from our client data now we're sitting at 99 percent and that 1% literally is just the timing issue to get from from 6 to 99 you have to make sure that the entire value chain is engaged so our business partners were the fundamental determinant of the business rules apply in terms of what does quality mean what are the criteria of quality and then what we do is translate that into what we put in the catalog and ensure that the profiling rules that we run are against those business rules that were defined at first so you'd have upfront determination of the outcome with business and then the team would go into an agile cycle of maybe two-week sprints where we develop certain things have stand-ups come together and then the output would be - boarded in a prototype in a fashion where business then gets to go double check that out so that was the first iterate and I would say we've become much more mature at it and we've got many more use cases now and there's actually one that it's quite exciting that we we recently achieved over the end of 2019 into the beginning of this year so what we did was they've am worried about the sunlight coming through the window you look crazy to me like the sunset in South Africa we've been on the we've been on CubeSat sometimes it's so bright we have to put on sunglasses but so the most recent one which was in in late 2019 coming in too early this year we we had long kind of achieved the the compliance and the regulatory burning platform issues and now we are in a place of I think opportunity and luxury where we can now find use cases that are pertinent to business execution and business productivity the one that comes to mind is where a hundred and fifty eight years old as an organization right so so this Bank was born before technology it was also born in the days of light no no no integration because every branch was a standalone entity you'd have these big ledges that transactions were were documented in and I think once every six months or so these Ledger's would be taken by horse-drawn carriage to a central place to give go reconcile between branches and paper but the point is if that is your legacy the initial kind of ERP implementations would have been focused on process efficiency based on old ways of accounting for transactions and allocating information so it was not optimized for the 21st century our architecture had has had huge legacy burden on it and so going into a place where you can be agile with data is something that we're constantly working toward so we get to a place where we have hundreds of branches across the country and all of them obviously telling to client servicing clients as usual and and not being able for any person needing sales teams or executional teams they were not able in a short space of time to see the impact of the tactic from a data perspective um we were in a place where in some cases based on how our Ledger's roll up in the reconciliation between various systems and accounts work it would take you six weeks to verify whether your technique were effective or not because to actually see the revenue hitting our our general ledger and our balance sheet might take that long that is an ineffective way to operate in a such a competitive environment so what you had our frontline sales agents literally manually documenting the sales that they had made but not being able to verify whether that or not is bringing revenue until six weeks later so what we did then is we sat down and defined all the requirements from a reporting perspective and the objective was moved from six weeks latency to 24 hours um and even 24 hours is not perfect our ideal would be that bite rows of day you're able to see what you've done for that day but that's the next the next epoch that will go through however um we literally had the frontline teams defining what they'd want to see in a dashboard the business teams defining what the business rules behind the quality and the definitions would be and then we had an entire I'm analytics team and the data management team working around sourcing the data optimising and curating it and making sure that the latency had done that's I think only our latest use case for data art um and now we're in a place where people can look at a dashboard it's a cubed self-service they can Logan at any time I see the sales they've made which is very important right now and the time of overt nineteen from a from a productivity and executional competitiveness listing those are two great use cases of cooling so the first one you know going from data quality 6% the 99% I mean 6% is all you do is spend time arguing about the data stills probity and then 99% you're there and you said it's just basically a timing issue use latency in the timing and then the second one is is instead of paving the cow path with an outdated you know ledger Barratt data process week you've now compressed that down to 24 hours you want to get the end of day so you've built in the agility into your data pipeline I'm gonna ask you then so when GDP are hit were you able to very quickly leverage this capability and and imply and then maybe other of compliance edik as well Oh actually you know what we just now was post gdpr us um and and we got GDP all right about three years ago but literally all we got right was reporting for risk and compliance purposes the use cases that we have now are really around business opportunity lists so the risk so we prioritize compliance report a long time ago were able to do real-time reporting of a single transaction perspective I'm suspicious transactions etc I'm two hours in Bank and our governor so from that perspective that was what was prioritize in the beginning which was the initial crisis so what you found is an entire engine geared towards making sure that data quality was correct for reporting and regulatory purposes but really that is not the be-all and end-all of it and if that's all we did I believe we really would not have succeeded or could have stayed dead we succeeded because data monetization is actually the penisy the leveraging of data for business opportunity is is actually then what tells you whether you've got the right culture or not you're just doing it to comply then it means the hearts and minds of the rest of the business still aren't in the data game I love this story because it's me it's nirvana for so many years we've been pouring money to mitigate risk and you have no choice do it you know the general council signs off on it the the CFO but grudgingly signs off on it but it's got to be done but for years decades we've been waiting to use these these risk initiatives to actually drive business value you know kind of happened with enterprise data warehouse but it was too slow it was complicated it certainly didn't happen with with email archiving that was just sort of a tech balk it sounds like you know we're at that point today and I want to ask you to me like you know you we talking earlier about you know the crisis gonna perpetuated this this cultural shift and you took advantage of that so we're on the mother nature dealt up a crisis like we've never seen before how do you see your data infrastructure your data pipeline your data ops what kind of opportunities do you see in front of you today as a result of mobit nineteen well I mean because of of the quality of mind data that we had now we were able to very quickly respond to to pivot nineteen in in our context where the government and put us on lockdown relatively early in in the curve in disciple of infection and what it meant is it brought a little bit of a shock to the economy because small businesses all of a sudden didn't have a source of revenue for potentially three to six weeks and based on the data quality work that we did before it was actually relatively easy to be agile enough to do the things that we did so within the first weekend of of lockdown in South Africa we were the first bank to proactively and automatically offer small businesses and student um students with loans on our books a instant preman payment holiday assuming they were in good standing and we did that upfront though it was actually an up out process rather than you had to fall in and arrange for that to happen and I don't believe we would have been able to do that if our data quality was not with um we have since made many more initiatives to try and keep the economy going to try and keep our clients in in a state of of liquidity and so you know data quality at that point and that Dharma is critical to knowing who you're talking to who needs what and in which solutions would best be fitted towards various segments I think the second component is um you know working from home now brings an entirely different normal right so so if we have not been able to provide productivity dashboard and and sales and dashboards to to management and all all the users that require it we would not be able to then validate or say what our productivity levels are and other people are working from home I mean we still have essential services workers that physically go into work but a lot of our relationship bankers are operating from home and that face the baseline and the foundation that we said productivity packing for various metric being able to be reported on in a short space of time has been really beneficial the next opportunity for us is we've been really good at doing this for the normal operational and front line and type of workers but knowledge workers have also know not necessarily been big productivity reporters historically they kind of get an output then the output might be six weeks down the line um but in a place where teams now are not locate co-located and work needs to flow in an edge of passion we need to start using the same foundation and and and data pipeline that we've laid down as a foundation for the reporting of knowledge work and agile team type of metric so in terms of developing new functionality and solutions there's a flow in a multidisciplinary team and how do those solutions get architected in a way where data assists in the flow of information so solutions can be optimally developed well it sounds like you're able to map a metric the business lines care about you know into these dashboards you using the sort of data mapping approach if you will which makes it much more relevant for the business as you said before they own the data that's got to be a huge business benefit just in terms of again we talked about cultural we talked about speed but but the business impact of being able to do that it has to be pretty substantial it really really is um and and the use cases really are endless because every department finds their own opportunity to utilize in terms of their also I think the accountability factor has has significantly increased because as the owner of a specific domain of data you know that you're not only accountable to yourself and your own operation but people downstream to you as a product and and an outcome depend on you to ensure that the quality of the data you produces is of a high nature so so curation of data is a very important thing and business is really starting to understand that so you know the cards Department knows that they are the owners of card data right and you know the vehicle asset Department knows that they are the owners of vehicle they are linked to a client profile and all of that creates an ecosystem around the plan I mean when you come to a bank you you don't want to be known as a number and you don't want to be known just for one product you want to be known across everything that you do with that with that organization but most banks are not structured that way they still are product houses and product systems on which your data reside and if those don't act in concert then we come across extremely schizophrenic as if we don't know our clients and so that's very very important to me like I could go on for an hour talking about this topic but unfortunately we're out of time thank you so much for sharing your deep knowledge and your story it's really an inspiring one and congratulations on all your success and I guess I'll leave it with you know what's next you gave us you know a glimpse of some of the things you wanted to do pressing some of the the elapsed times and the time cycle but but where do you see this going in the next you know kind of mid term and longer term currently I mean obviously AI is is a big is a big opportunity for all organizations and and you don't get automation of anything right if the foundations are not in place so you believe that this is a great foundation for anything AI to to be applied in terms of the use cases that we can find the second one is really um providing an API economy where certain data product can be shared with third parties I think that probably where we want to take things as well we are ready utilizing external third-party data sources I'm in our data quality management suite to ensure validity of client identity and and and residents and things of that nature but going forward because been picked and banks and other organizations are probably going to partner to to be more competitive going forward we need to be able to provide data product that can then be leveraged by external parties and vice-versa the trooper like thanks again great having you thank you very much Dave appreciate the opportunity and thank you for watching everybody that we go we are digging in the data offs we've got practitioners we've got influencers we've got experts we're going in the crowd chat it's the crowd chat dot net flash data ops but keep it right there way back but more coverage this is Dave Volante for the cube [Music]

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, welcome to another Wikibon digital community event, this one sponsored by BMC Software. Every organization faces the challenge of how to do service management and operations management better. The ideal is to start bringing them together, but traditionally, they've been undertaken by different groups, often utilizing different tools. And that's what we're going to talk about today in today's digital community event. What can we do to improve our digital business operations, competitiveness, and customer experience, by doing a better job of bringing together those core resources that handle service management and operations management activities. As with all digital community events, this one's going to feature some upfront conversations with a number of thought leaders in this crucial space, and then we're going to run a crowd chat, which will be your opportunity to share your insights, ask your questions, and ultimately, communicate with others like you in the community that focuses on this important issue. So stay through to the end and help us participate in that digital community event. Now, recently, I had an opportunity to attend BMC Helix's Immersion Day, and while there, theCUBE was able to conduct a number of different interviews. One of the best ones we had was a great conversation with Nayaki Nayyar, who is the president of service management and operations management at the BMC Helix division, and Mihir Shukla, who is the CEO of Automation Anywhere. Let's hear what they had to say about the potential of bringing service management and operations management together. >> So, Nayaki, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital services platform is going to evolve to do more types of work for people. How has BMC's Helix platform evolved in that time? >> So, if you remember last time, it was almost a year back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on prem, made it available in Cloud, containerized, so customers can run in cloud of their choice, and provided experience through various channels, bought as a channel of that customer experience. This is what we had released last time, we call it the three C's for Helix, everything in cloud, containerized, with cognitive capabilities, so customers can transform their experience. In this version, what we are extending Helix is with the operations side, so all the ITOM capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part of Helix, so we have one end-to-end platform, so that customers can discover every asset that they have on prem and cloud, monitor those assets, detect any anomalies, service both for lines of business and for IT, remediate any issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system, and automatically optimize capacity and cost and holistically, this whole closed loop of operations and service coming together is what this next wave of innovations that we are launching with BMC Helix. >> So, Mihir, Nayaki's talked about, very successfully, and Helix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience, but up front I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore, we're now talking about software as users. RPA, robotic process automation, is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how robotic process automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service in operations management capability. >> Sure, think in a high level, you have to think of the new organization as augmented organization that are human and bots working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so in a specific example of a service organization, where BMC Helix is taking this is, think of this as a utility, where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC Helix, and behind it you have augmented workflows of chart bots, RPA bots, human beings, each doing what they're best at, and giving a far superior customer experience, unlike any other. That is happening now, and that's the future of service industry. >> But when you plug a human, so to speak, metaphorically, into that system, there's a certain amount of time, there's a certain amount of training, and as a consequence you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity, but RPA seems, the potential of RPA seems that you're going to increase the rate at which these users, in this case, digital users, are going to enter into the system, you don't have a training regimen you can attach to them, they have to be tested, they have to be discovered, they have to be put in operation with reliability, how is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? >> I think if you think of these bots as digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them, in terms of, you configure them, you train them with cognitive capabilities, and then the one difference is they monitor themselves, without any bias, they can give their own performance rating card. But the beauty of this is when human and bots work together, because there are some functions that the bots can do well and then at some point they can hand off to the human beings, and human beings do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment call, customer service, all of that. So that the combination is the end goal for everybody. >> And to add to what Mihir said, right, that customer experience, whether you're providing an experience to employees or consumers or end customers, that is the ultimate goal, that's the ultimate result of what you want to get, and the speed at which you provide that experience is the accuracy at which you provide experience, the cost at which you provide that experience becomes a comparative differentiation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that they're doing with humans and bots, is what enables us to do that, right? For all large enterprise customers, major service organizations trying to transform into that future goal. >> But increasingly it seems as though the things that we have to do, to orchestrate and administrate, more users, digital and human, undertaking more complex tasks where each is best applied, is really driving a lot of new data, as I mentioned upfront, an enormous amount of new software, and you said new experiences, but those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure, they have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami. What are some of the key things that you think enterprises are going to have to do to start engaging that? >> Yeah, and whether we call it revolution, whether we call it digital transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is a tsunami, tech tsunami, right, tsunami of clouds where you have professional clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds. Tsunami of devices, not just the mobile devices, but also as everything is getting connected, IoT devices. Tsunami of channels, as an end user, I want to experience that in the channel of my preference, Slack as a channel, SM as a channel. A tsunami of bots, of conversation bots and RPA bots, so in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is, how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually you have to augment it, with of course, intelligence AIML, but then of course bots become a big part of that augmentation to orchestrate all of that back to back process. >> I would say that this is no longer nice to have, because if you look at it from a more consumer's perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies from Amazons and Googles of the world, Netflix and others, they have created this mindset of instant customer gratification. And we all been trained for it, so what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives. And so this new standard of instant result, instant outcome, instant respond, instant delivery, we just expect it, right? Once your end consumer begins to do that, we as a business no longer have a choice, that's writing on the wall. And so what these new platforms are doing, like with BMC Helix and Automation Anywhere, is delivering that instant gratification, right? And when you think about it more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate to, so again, this is not nice to have. It is the only way world will operate, right? >> We're going to turn back to the conversation that I had with Nayaki and Mihir shortly, but first, let's see what BMC's actually doing as they try to bring together service management and operations management, by watching a quick demo that they've prepared. (techno music) (music continues) >> Great demonstration of how these technologies are coming together in a real world sense. Now let's hear more of the conversation I had with Nayaki and Mihir about bringing together service management and operations management, but specifically focusing on how this class of technology is going to be extended, and made even more powerful for business as they think about not just IT, but other classes of automation. Let's hear what they had to say. >> So if you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications. Sometimes 400, 800, few thousand. And what we have been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between these applications, and we have operated that way for too long, and that's the world today. >> So humans are the interface, they're the system interfaces. >> Humans are the bridges between applications, and we often call it a swivel chair operations, that's an easiest way to describe it. So what Automation Anywhere does, is it offers this technology platform, robotic process automation, AI in an RTX platform, that integrates all of it together into a seamless automation bot that can go across, and with AI it can make intelligent choices. And so now we can take that, combined with the BMC Helix, and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver a superior experience. >> So we've got now the swivel chair users, now being software, which means that we can discover them more easily, we can monitor them more easily, and that feeds Helix. >> Absolutely, so you know in our consumer world, in our day to day life, we are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels. That experience that we have in our day to day life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right, walk into the enterprise, which every IT organization is trying to figure out how do they get to that level of maturity. So this is what the combination of what we are doing with Helix and Automation Anywhere, brings that consumer grid experiences into an enterprise world. >> So Mihir, when we think about RPA, we're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success, give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success, and then what's the future of RPA, how's that going to evolve over the next few years? >> Sure, so RPA has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department. So there are many ways to get started and all of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization wherein that organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started, but eventually we learn that the federated way's the best way to end. Where hundreds of offices all over the world, if you're especially a large organization, each business unit is doing it with IT providing governance and central security and policies, and actual bots running and being implemented all over the world. Eventually for a large-scale transformation, there is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. >> And where do you think this pattern going to evolve, as enterprises gain more familiarity with it, innovate in new and interesting ways, and as Automation Anywhere and others advance the state of the art, where do you think it's going to end up? >> The rate it's going is, is I define it as an app store experience or a Google Play experience. So if you think about how we operate our mobile devices today, if you want something on your device, you will look for an app that does that. We are getting to a point where there is bot for everything, and a digital worker for everything, so if you need certain job done, you first go to a bot store, that is an Automation Anywhere website, look for a bot that does something, hire or download that bot, get the work done, and it comes prebuilt like many there are works with BMC Helix, and many others. So that is your first way you will look for getting your work done in a new bot economy, and if there's no bot available, then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of work. >> In many respects, it's the gig economy with perfect contractor, right? And it leads to some very interesting challenges, ultimately, when we start thinking about services. So Nayaki, based on what Mihir just talked about, where does digital services go as RPA joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new profit points and new value propositions? >> It becomes a compare of how you provide that service, can become a big competitive differentiation for financial institutions, for Telcos, which is a service industry, right, you provide that service, and like to Mihir's point, when the user hits that switch, they expect the light to come on, so if I'm an end user, the consumer, wanting a service from my Telco provider or from my financial institution, I expect that service to be instantaneous, and the highest accuracy, accuracy at which you provide is going to start driving competitive differentiation from financial institution to financial institution, Telco to Telco, and that's how I see companies differentiating and really surviving or thriving in the long term. >> Now let's hear from a really important partner, a CDO, someone who's thinking about how these technologies are going to be applied to the front lines of business change. Sanjay Srivastava is the CDO at Genpact, and he and I had a great conversation at BMC Immersion Days about what this means to digital business transformation. How will service management and operations management in combination accelerate and make more successful businesses' efforts to transform digitally. Let's hear what Sanjay had to say. >> So tell us a little bit about, what is a digital service outcome and why is it so important? >> Yeah, well I think the reality is that what technology is doing is it's disintermediating the ecosystem, so many of the industries are clients-operated, and they have to go back and reimagine their value proposition at the core of what they do with the use of new, innovative technologies, and it's that intersection of new capabilities, of new innovative business models that really use emerging technologies, but intersect them with their business models, with their business processes, and the requirements of their clients, and help them rethink, reimagine, and deliver their new value proposition. That's really what it's all about. >> So a digital service outcome would then be the things that the business must do and must do well, but ideally, with a different experience or with a different degree of flexibility and agility, or with a different cost profile, have I got that right? >> Correct. >> So when we think about that, what are some of the key elements of a digital service success? >> We like to think about three critical success factors in driving any digital transformation. The first one is the notion of experience, and what I mean by that is not user interface for a piece of software, but the journey of a customer, an employee, a provider, a partner, in engaging with you and your business model. When we think about journey mapping that scientifically, we think about design, thinking on the back of that, and we think about re-imagining what the new experience looks like. One of the largest things we've got in the industry is digital transformation on the back of cost take out of productivity or efficiency is insufficient drive and optimize the value that digital can bring. And using experience as the compass, as sort of the north star in that journey is a meaningful differentiator and driver of business benefit, so that's number one. I think the second area that's become increasingly apparent is the intersection of domain with digital. And the thinking there is that to materialize the benefit of digital in an enterprise, you have to intersect it with the specifics of that business, how users interact, what clients seek, how does business actually happen? We talk about artificial intelligence a lot, we do a lot of work in AI as an example, and the key thing about machine learning is goal orientation, and what is goal orientation? It's about understanding the specifics of the environments, you can actually orient the goal of the machine learning algorithm to deliver high accuracy results. And it's something that can often easily get overlooked, so indexing on the two halves of the whole, the yin and the yang, the piece around digital, and the innovative technologies, and being able to leverage and take advantage of them, but equally, be founded in domain, understand the environment, and use that knowledge to drive the right materialization of the end outcome. And that's the second critical success factor, I think, to get it right. I think the third one is the notion of how do you build a framework for innovation? You know, it's not the sort of thing where a large fortune company, Fortune 500 companies can necessarily experiment and it's a little bit of a go happy go lucky strategy, doesn't really work, you have to innovate at scale, you have to do it in a fundamental fashion, you have to do it as a critical success factor. And so one of the biggest things we focus on is how do you innovate at the edge? Innovation must be at the edge, this is where the rubber meets the road. But governance has to be at the core. >> Well let me build on that for a second, 'cause you said innovation's at the edge, so basically that means where the brand promise is being enacted for the customer, and that could be at an industrial automation setting or it could be in just making a recommendation, it could be any number of things, but it's where the value proposition is realized for the customer. >> Correct, that's exactly right, and that's where innovation must happen. So as a large corporation, you must be able, it's important to set up a framework that allows you to do innovation at the edge, otherwise it's not meaningful innovation if you, "Well, it's just a lot of busy work." And yet as you do that, and as you change your business model, as you bring new components to the equation, how do you drive governance, and it's increasingly becoming more important, you think about, we're going to be in a AI first world increasingly, more and more that's the reality of the world we're going in, and in that AI first world, I work here in Palo Alto, walk into my office, a couple of hundred people any given day. If tomorrow morning I walked in and 100 people didn't show up for work, I would know right away, because I can see them. Now fast forward to an environment where we have digital workers, we have automation bots, we have conversational AI Chatbots. And in that world, understanding which of my AI components are on, which ones are off, which ones showed up for work today, which ones fell sick, and really being able to understand that governance, and that's just the productivity piece of it. Then you think about data and security, AI changes complete dimensions on that. And you think about bias and explainability, it just become increasingly important, a notion of a digital ethics board, and thinking about ethics more pervasively. So I think that companies and clients we serve that do really well in digital transformation are those that key in on those three things, the notion of experience is the true compass for how you drive transformation. The ability to intermix domain and digital in a meaningfully intersecting fashion. And to be thoughtful, proactive, and get governance right up front in the journey to come. >> So let me again build on that a little bit, 'cause people are increasingly recognizing that we're not going to centralize with cloud, we're going to greater distribute. We're going to distribute data more, we're going to distribute function more, but you just added another dimension, that some of us have been thinking about for a long time, and that's this notion of distributing authorities so that an individual at the edge can make the decision based on the data and the resources that are available, with the appropriate set of authorities, and that has to be handled at a central, in a overall coherent governant way. So that leads to the next question. >> And just before you go there, I mean I think the best example of that, is we do that, most corporations do that really well in the financial scheme of things. Businesses at the edge make decisions on a day to day basis on pricing and relationships and so on and so forth, and yet there's a central other committee that looks through the financials and makes sure it meets the right requirements and has the right framework, and much in the same way, we're going to start seeing digital ethics committees that become part of these large corporations as they think about digitizing the business. >> Governance at the end of the day is how do you orchestrate multiple divergent claims against a common set of assets, and being able to do that is absolutely essential, and it leads to this notion of we've got these ideas of digital business, digital services and operations management. How are we going to weave them together utilizing some of these new technologies, new fabrics that are now possible to both achieve the outcomes we're talking about at scale and at speed? >> Yeah, well the technology capabilities are improving really well in that area, and so the good news is they're the set of tools that are now available that give you the ingredients, the components of the recipe that's required to make dinner, if you will. The work that needs to happen is actually how to orchestrate that, to figure out which components need to come in, and how do you pull together a vertical stack that has the right components to meet your needs today, and more importantly, to address the needs of the future, because this is changing like no other time in history. >> You want options with everything you do now, you want to make sure that you have a string of options for the future, and it's especially important here. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And the quick framework we've established there is sort of the three-legged stool of, how do you integrate quickly, how do you modularize your investments and then how do you govern them into one integrated whole, and those become really important. I'll give you examples, much of the work we do, we'll work with a consumer bank for instance, and they'll want to do a robotic process automation engagement, we'll run them for nine months, they'll get 1800 robots up and running. And the next question becomes, well now we have all this data that we didn't really have, because now we have an RPA running, how do I learn some machine learning insights from there, and so we then work with them to actually derive some insights and get these questions answered. And then the engagement changes to, well now that we have this pattern recognition then we understand more questions are going to be asked, how do I respond to those questions, A, automatically, and before they get asked, this notion of next best action. And so you think about that journey of a traditional client, the requirements change from robotics to machine learning to conversational AI to something else, and keeping that string of investments, that innovative sort of streak true, and yet being able to manage, govern, and protect the investments, that's the key role. >> We want to thank all the thought leaders that participated in preparing their thoughts for this digital community event, especially the folks at BMC Software. But now here's your opportunity to weigh in on how you see service management and operations management coming together in your business. How's it going to affect your IT organization, your IT organization's ability to serve your business, and your business overall? This is your opportunity to participate in a crowd chat where the community comes together and shares insights, asks each other questions, and engages with these thought leaders to try to get the answers that you need to move forward on the journey to bring together service management and operations management in your shop. Let's crowd chat!

and II just think about how data could be customer experience value propositions operations that improve profitability and strategic options for the business as it moves forward but that means openly either we're thinking about how we embed data more deeply into our operations that means we must also think about how we're going to protect that data so the business does not suffer because someone got a hold of our data or corrupted our data or that a system just failed and we needed to restore that data very quickly now what we want to be able to do is we want to do that in a way that's natural and looks a lot like a cloud because we want that cloud experience in our data protection as well so that's we're going to talk about with Klum you know today a lot of folks think in terms of moving all the data into the cloud we think increasingly we have to recognize a cloud is not a strategy for centralizing data but rather distributing data and being able to protect that data where it is utilizing a simple common cloud like experience it's becoming an increasingly central competitive need for a lot of digital enterprises the first conversation we had was with pooja Kumar who John is a CEO and co-founder of Kaleo let's hear a pooja I had to say about data value data services and Kumi Oh poo John welcome to the show thank you Peter nice to be here so give us the update in clue so comeö is a two year old company right we just recently launched out of stealth so so far you know we we came out with innovative offering which is a SAS solution to go and protect on premises you know VMware and BMC environments that's what we launched out of style two months ago we won our best of show when we came out of stealth in in VMware 2019 but ultimately we started with a vision about you know protecting data irrespective of where it resides so it was all about you know you know on-premises on cloud and other SAS services so one single service that protects data irrespective of where it resides so far we executed on on-premises VMware and BMC today what we are announcing for the first time is our protection to go and protect applications natively built on AWS so these are applications that are natively built on AWS that loomio as a service will protect irrespective of you know them running you know in one region or cross region cross accounts and a single service that will allow our customers to protect native AWS applications the other big announcement we are making is a new round of financing and that is testament to the interest in the space and the innovative nature of the platform that we have built so when we came out of stealth we announced we had raised two rounds of financing 51 million dollars in series a and Series B rounds of financing today what we are announcing is a Series C round of financing of 135 million dollars the largest I would say Series C financing for a SAS enterprise company especially a company that's a little over two years old Oh congratulations that's gonna buy a lot of new technology and a lot of customer engagement but what customers as I said up from what customers are really looking for is they're looking for tooling and methods and capabilities that allow them to treat their data differently talk a bit about the central importance of data and how it's driving decisions of Cluny oh yes so fundamentally you know when we built out the the data platform it was about going after the data protection as the first use case on the platform longer term the journey really is to go from a data protection company to a data management company and this is possible for the first time because you have the public cloud on your side if you truly built a platform for the cloud on the public cloud you have this distinct advantage of now taking the data that you're protecting and really leveraging it for other services that you can enable the enterprise for and this is exactly what enterprises are asking for especially as they you know you know make a transition from on-premises to the public cloud where they're powering on more and more applications in the public cloud and they really you know sometimes have no idea in terms of where the data is sitting and how they can take advantage of all these data sources that ultimately protecting well no idea where the data is sitting take advantage of these data sources presumably facilitate new classes of integration because that's how you generate value out of data that suggests that we're not just looking at protection as crucial and important as it is we're looking at new classes of services they're going to make it possible to alter the way you think about data management if I got that right and what are those new services yes it's it's a journey as I said right so starting with you know again data protection it's also about doing data protection across multiple clouds right so ultimately we are a platform even though we are announcing you know AWS you know application support today we've already done VMware and BMC as we go along you'll see us kind of doing this across multiple clouds so an application that's built on the cloud running across multiple clouds AWS ashore and GCP or whatever it might be you see as kind of doing data protection across in applications in multiple clouds and then it's about going and saying you know can we take advantage of the data that we are protecting and really power on adjacent use cases you know there could be security use cases because we know exactly what's changing when it's changing there could be infrastructure analytics use cases because people are running tens of thousands of instances and containers and VMs in the public cloud and if a problem happens nobody really knows what caused it and we have all the data and we can kind of you know index it in the backend analyze in the backend without the customer needing to lift a finger and really show them what happened in their environment that they didn't know about right so there's a lot of interesting use cases that get powered on because you have the ability to index all the data here you have the ability to essentially look at all the changes that are happening and really give that visibility to the end customer and all of this one-click and automating it without the customer needing to do much I will tell you this that we've talked to a number of customers of Cuneo and the fundamental choice the clue Meo choice was simplicity how are you going to sustain that even as you add these new classes of services that is the key right and that is about the foundation we have built at the end of the day right so if you look at all of our customers that have you know on boarded today it's really the experience we're in less than you know 15 minutes they can we start enjoying the power of the platform and the backend that we have built and the focus on design that we have is ultimately why we are able to do this with simplicity so so when we when we think about you know all the things we do in the back end there's obviously a lot of complexity in the back end because it is a complex platform but every time we ask ourselves the question that okay from a customer perspective how do we make sure that it is one click and easy for them so that focus and that attention to detail that we have behind the scenes to make sure that the customer ultimately should just consume the service and should not need to do anything more than what they absolutely need to do so that they can essentially focus on what adds value to their business takes a lot of technology a lot of dedication to make complex things really simple absolutely whoo John Kumar CEO and co-founder of coolio thanks very much for being on the cube Thank You bigger great conversation with poo John data value leading to data services now let's think a little bit more about how enterprises ultimately need to start thinking about how to manifest that in a cloud rich world Chad Kenney is the vice president and chief acknowledges of Cuneo and Chad and I had an opportunity to sit down and talk about some of the interesting approaches that are possible because of cloud and very importantly to talk about a new announcement that clue miios making as they expand their support of different cloud types let's see what Chad had to say the notion of data services has been around for a long time but it's being upended recast reformed as a consequence of what cloud can do but that also means that cloud is creating new ways of thinking about data services new opportunities to introduce and drive this powerful approach of thinking about digital businesses centralized assets and to have that conversation about what that means we've got Chad Kenny who's a VP and chief technologists of comeö with us today Chad welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me okay so let's start with that notion of data services and the role the clouds going to play Kumi always looked at this problem this challenge from the ground up what does that mean so if you look at the the cloud as a whole customers have gone through a significant journey we've seen you know that the first shadow IT kind of play out where people decided to go to the cloud IT was too slow it moved into kind of a cloud first movement where people realize the power of cloud services that then got them to understand a little bit of interesting things that played out one moving applications as they exist were not very efficient and so they needed to react attack certain applications second SAS was a core way of getting to the cloud in a very simplistic fashion without having to do much of whatsoever and so for applications that were not core competencies they realized they should go SACEM for anything that was a core competency they needed to really reaaargh attack to be able to take advantage of those you know very powerful cloud services and so when you look at it if people were to develop applications today cloud is the default that you'd go towards and so for us we had the luxury of building from the cloud up on these very powerful cloud services to enable a much more simple model for our customers to consume but even more so to be able to actually leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud think about this for a quick second we can take facilities break them up expand them across many different compute resources within the cloud versus having to take kind of what you did on prim in a single server or multitudes of servers and try to plant that in the cloud from a customer's experience perspective it's vastly different you get a world where you don't think about how you manage the infrastructure how you manage the service you just consume it and the value that customers get out of that is not only getting their data there which is the on-ramp around our data protection mechanisms but also being able to leverage cloud native services on top of that data in the longer term as we have this one common global index and platform what we're super excited today to announce is that we're adding in AWS native capabilities to be able to date and protect that data in the public cloud and this is kind of the default place where most people go to from a cloud perspective to really get their applications up and running and take advantage a lot of those cloud native services well if you're gonna be cloud native and promise to customers as you're going to support their workloads you got to be obviously on AWS so congratulations on that but let's go back to this notion of user word powerful mm-hmm AWS is a mature platform GCPs coming along very rapidly asher is you know also very very good and there are others as well but sometimes enterprises discover that they have to make some trade-offs to get the simplicity they have to get less function to get the reliability they have to get rid of simplicity how does qu mio think through those trade-offs to deliver that simple that powerful that reliable platform for something as important as data protection and data services in general so we wanted to create an experience that was single click discover everything and be able to help people consume that service quickly and if you look at the problem that people are dealing with a customer's talked to us about this all the time is the power of the cloud resulted in hundreds if not thousands of accounts within AWS and now you get into a world where you're having to try to figure out how do I manage all of these for one discover all of it and consistently make sure that my data which as you've mentioned is incredibly important to businesses today as protect it and so having that one common view is incredibly important to start with and the simplicity of that is immensely powerful when you look at what we do as a business to make sure that that continues to occur is first we leverage cloud native services on the back which are complex and and and you know getting those things to run and orchestrate are things that we build on the back end on the front end we take the customer's view and looking at what is the most simple way of getting this experience to occur for both discovery as well as you know backup for recovery and even being able to search in a global fashion and so really taking their seats to figure out what would be the easiest way to both consume the service and then also be able to get value from it by running that service AWS has been around well AWS in many respects founded the cloud industry it's it's you know certainly Salesforce and the south side but AWS is that first company to make the promise that it was going to provide this very flexible very powerful very a a July infrastructure as a service and they've done an absolutely marvelous job about it and they've also advanced the state of your technology dramatically and in many respects are in the driver's seat what trade offs what limits does your new platform face as it goes to AWS or is it the same Coolio experience adding now all of the capabilities of AWS it's a great question because I think a lot of solutions out there today are different parts and pieces kind of clump together well we built is a platform that these new services just get instantly added next time you log into that service you'll see that that available to you and you can just go ahead and log in to your accounts and be able to discover directly and I think that the vow the power of SAS is really that not only have we made it immensely secure which is something that people think about quite a bit with having you know not only data in flight but data at rest encryption and and leveraging really the cloud capabilities of security but we've made it incredibly simple for them to be able to consume that easily literally not lift a finger to get anything done it's available for you when you log into that system and so having more and more data sources in one single pane of glass and being able to see all the accounts especially in AWS where you have quite a few of those accounts and to be able to apply policies in a consistent fashion to ensure that you're you know compliant within the environment for whatever business requirements that you have around data protection is immensely powerful to our customers Chad Denny Chief Technologist plumie oh thanks very much for being on the tube thank you great conversation Chad especially interested in hearing about how klum EO is being extended to include AWS services within its overall data protection approach and obviously into Data Services but let's take a little bit more into that Columbia was actually generated and prepared a short video that we could take a look at that goes a little bit more deeply into how this is all going to work enterprises are moving rapidly to the cloud embracing sass for simplified delivery of key services in this cloud centric world IT teams can focus on more strategic work accelerating digital transformation initiatives for when it comes to backup IT is stuck designing patching and capacity planning for on-premise systems snapshots alone for data protection in the public cloud is risky and there are hundreds of unprotected SAS applications in the typical enterprise the move to cloud should make backup simpler but it can quickly become exponentially worse it's time to rethink the backup experience what if there were no hardware software or virtual appliances to size configure manage or even buy it all and by adding Enterprise backup public cloud workloads are no longer exposed to accidental data deletion and ransomware and Clube o we deliver secure data backup and recovery without any of that complexity or risk we provide all of the critical functions of enterprise backup d dupe and scheduling user and key management and cataloging because we're built in the public cloud we can rapidly deliver new innovations and take advantage of inherent data security controls our mission is to protect your data wherever it's stored the clew mio authentic SAS backup experience scales on demand to manage and protect your data more easily and efficiently and without things like cloud bills or egress charges luenell gives you predictable costs monitoring global backup compliance is far simpler and the built-in always-on security of Clue mio means that your data is safe take advantage of the cloud for backup with no constraints clew mio authentic SAS for the enterprise great video as we think about moving forward in the future and what customers are trying to do we have to think more in terms of the native services that cloud can provide and how to fully exploit them to increase the aggregate flexible both within our enterprises but also based on what our supplies have to offer we had a great conversation with wounds Young who is the CTO and co-founder of Clue mio about just that let's hear it wound had to say everybody's talking about the cloud and what the cloud might be able to do for their business the challenges there are a limited number of people in the world who really understands what it means to build for the cloud utilizing the cloud it's a lot of approximations out there but not a lot of folks are deeply involved in actually doing it right we've got one here with us today woo Jung is the CTO and co-founder of Cluny Oh woo and welcome to the cube how they theny here so let's start with this issue of what it means to build for the cloud now loomio has made the decision to have everything fit into that as a service model what is that practically mean so from the engineering point of view building our SAS application is fundamentally different so the way that I'll go and say is that at Combe you know we actually don't build software and ship software what we actually do it will service and service is what we actually ship to our customers let me give you an example in the case of Kumu they say backups fail like software sometimes fails and we get that failures >> the difference in between chromeo and traditional solutions is that if something were to fail we are the one detecting that failure before our customers - not only that when something fails we actually know exactly why you fail therefore we can actually troubleshoot it and we can actually fix it and operate the service without the customer intervention so it's not about the bugs also or about the troubleshooting aspect but it's also about new features if you were to introduce our new features we can actually do this without having customers upgraded code we will actually do it ourselves so essentially it frees the customers from actually doing all these actions because we will do them on behalf of them at scale and I think that's the second thing I want to talk about quickly is that the ability to use the cloud to do many of the things that you're talking about at scale creates incredible ranges of options that customers have at their disposal so for example AWS customers have historically used things like snapshots to provide it a modicum of data protection to their AWS workloads but there are other new options that could be applied if the systems are built to supply them give us a sense of how kkumeul is looking at this question of no snapshots versus something else yeah so basically traditionally even on the on print side of the things you have something called the snapshots and you had your backups right and there they're fundamentally different but if you actually shift your gears and you look at what they Wis offers today they actually offers the ability for you to take snapshots but actually that's not a backup right and they're fundamentally different so let's talk about it a little bit more what it means to be snapshots and a backup right so let's say there's a bad actor and your account gets compromised like your AWS account gets compromised so then the bad actor has access not only to the EBS volumes but also to the EBS snapshots what that means is that that person can actually go ahead and delete the EBS volume as well as the EBS snapshots now if you had a backup let's say you actually take a backup of that EBS volume to Kumu that bad actor will have access to the EBS volumes however they won't be able to delete the backup that we actually have in Kumu so in the whole thing the idea of Kumi on is that you should be able to protect all of your assets that being either a non-prime or AWS by setting up a single policies and these are true backups and not just snapshots and that leads to the last question I have which is ultimately the ability to introduce these capabilities at scale creates a lot of new opportunities that customers can utilize to do a better job of building applications but also I presume managing how they use AWS because snapshots and other types of servers can expand dramatically which can increase your cost how is doing it better with things like native backup services improve a customer's ability to administer their AWS spend and accounts so great question so essentially if you look at the enterprise's today obviously they have multiple you know on-premise data centers and also a different card provide that they use like AWS and Azure and also a few SAS applications right so then the idea is for cumin is to create this single platform where all of these things can actually be backed up in a uniform way where you can actually manage all of them and then the other thing is all doing it in the cloud so if you think about it if you don't solve the poem fundamentally in the cloud there's things that you end up paying later on so let's take an example right moving bytes moving bytes in between one server to the other traditionally basically moving bytes from one rack to the other it was always free you never had to pay anything for that certainly in the data center all right but if you actually go to the public cloud you cannot say the same thing right basically moving by it across aw s recent regions is not free anymore moving data from AWS to the on premises that's not fair either so these are all the things that any you know car provider service provider like ours has to consider and actually solve so that the customers can only back it up into Kumu but then they actually can leverage different cloud providers you know in a seamless way without having to worry all of this costs associated with it so kkumeul we should be able to back it up but we should be able to also offer mobility in between either AWS back at VMware or VNC so if I can kind of summarize what you just said that you want to be able to provide to an account to an enterprise the ability to not have to worry about the back-end infrastructure from a technical and process standpoint but not also have to worry so much about the back-end infrastructure from a cost and financial standpoint that by providing a service and then administering how that service is optimally handled the customer doesn't have to think about some of those financial considerations of moving data around in the same way that they used to I got that right I absolutely yes basically multiple accounts multiple regions multiple providers it is extremely hard to manage what Cuneo does it will actually provide you a single pane of glass where you can actually manage them all but then if you actually think about just and manageability it's actually you can actually do that by just building a management layer on top of it but more importantly you and we need to have a single data you know repository for you for us to be able to provide a true mobility between them one is about managing but the other thing is about if you're done if you're done it the real the right way it provides you the ability to move them and it leverages the cloud power so that you don't have to worry about the cloud expenses but kkumeul internally is the one are actually optimizing all of this for our customers wound jeong CTO and co-founder of columbia thanks very much for being on the cube thank you thanks very much moon I want to thank chromeo for providing this important content about the increasingly important evolution of data protection and cloud now here's your opportunity to weigh in on this crucially important arena what do you think about this evolving relationship how do you foresee it operating in your enterprise what comments do you have what questions do you have of the thought leaders from clew mio and elsewhere that's what we're going to do now we're gonna go into the crowd chat and we're gonna hear from each other about this really important topic and what you foresee in your enterprise as your digital business transforms let's crouch at you [Music] [Music] [Music]

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(lively music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Supercloud presentation here. I'm theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. What a great segment here. We're going to unpack the networking aspect of the cloud, how that translates into what Supercloud architecture and platform deployment scenarios look like. And demystify multi-cloud, hybridcloud. We've got two great experts. Amir Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alkira, Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira. These guys been around since 2018 with the startup, but before that story, history in the tech industry. I mean, routing early days, multiple waves, multiple cycles. >> Welcome three decades. >> Welcome to Supercloud. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So, let's get your take on Supercloud because it's been one of those conversations that really galvanized the industry because it kind of highlights almost this next wave, this next side of the street that everyone's going to be on that's going to be successful. The laggards on the legacy seem to be stuck on the old model. SaaS is growing up, it's ISVs, it's ecosystems, hyperscale, full hybrid. And then multi-cloud around the corners cause all this confusion, everyone's hand waving. You know, this is a solution, that solution, where are we? What do you guys see as this supercloud dynamic? >> So where we start from is always focusing on the customer problem. And in 2018 when we identified the problem, we saw that there were multiple clouds with many diverse ways of doing things from the network perspective, and customers were struggling with that. So we delved deeper into that and looked at each one of the cloud architectures completely independent. And there was no common solution and customers were struggling with that from the perspective. They wanted to be in multiple clouds, either through mergers and acquisitions or running an application which may be more cost effective to run in something or maybe optimized for certain reasons to run in a different cloud. But from the networking perspective, everything needed to come together. So that's, we are starting to define it as a supercloud now, but basically, it's a common infrastructure across all clouds. And then integration of high lift services like, you know, security or IPAM services or many other types of services like inter-partner routing and stuff like that. So, Amir, you agree then that multi-cloud is simply a default result of having whatever outcomes, either M&A, some productivity software, maybe Azure. >> Yes. >> Amazon has this and then I've got on-premise application, so it's kinds mishmash. >> So, I would qualify it with hybrid multi-cloud because everything is going to be interconnected. >> John: Got it. >> Whether it's on-premise, remote users or clouds. >> But have CTO perspective, obviously, you got developers, multiple stacks, got AWS, Azure and GCP, other. Not everyone wants to kind of like go all in, but yet they don't want to hedge too much because it's a resource issue. And I got to learn this stack, I got to learn that stack. So then now, you have this default multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, then it's like, okay, what do I do? How do you spread that around? Is it dangerous? What's the the approach technically? What's some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, certainly. John, first, thanks for having us here. So, before I get to that, I'll just add a little bit to what Amir was saying, like how we started, what we were seeing and how it, you know, correlates with the supercloud. So, as you know, before this company, Alkira, we were doing, we did the SD-WAN company, which was Viptela. So there, we started seeing when people started deploying SD-WAN at like a larger scale. We started like, you know, customers coming to us and saying they needed connectivity into the cloud from the SD-WAN. They wanted to extend the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud. So we came up with an architecture, which was like later we started calling them Cloud onRamps, where we built, you know, a transit VPC and put like the virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances extended from there to the cloud. But before we knew, like it started becoming very complicated for the customers because it wasn't just connectivity, it also required, you know, other use cases. You had to instantiate or bring in security appliances in there. You had to secure all of that stuff. There were requirements for, you know, different regions. So you had to bring up the same thing in different regions. Then multiple clouds, what did you do? You had to replicate the same thing in multiple clouds. And now if there was was requirement between clouds, how were you going to do it? You had to route traffic from somewhere, and come up with all those routing controls and stuff. So, it was very complicated. >> Like spaghetti code, but on network. >> The games begin, in fact, one of our customers called it spaghetti mess. And so, that's where like we thought about where was the industry going and which direction the industry was going into? And we came up with the Alkira where what we are doing is building a common infrastructure across multiple clouds, across in, you know, on-prem locations, be it data centers or physical sites, branches sites, et cetera, with integrated security and network networking services inside. And, you know, nowadays, networking is not only about connectivity, you have to secure everything. So, security has to be built in. Redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery. So all of that needs to be built in. So that's like, you know, kind of a definition of like what we thought at that time, what is turning into supercloud now. >> Yeah. It's interesting too, you mentioned, you know, VPCs is not, configuration of loans a hassle. Nevermind the manual mistakes could be made, but as you decide to do something you got to, "Oh, we got to get these other things." A lot of the hyper scales and a lot of the alpha cloud players now, and cloud native folks, they're kind of in that mode of, "Wow, look at what we've built." Now, they're got to maintain, how do I refresh it? Like, how do I keep the talent? So they got this similar chaotic environment where it's like, okay, now they're already already through, so I think they're going to be okay. But then some people want to bypass it completely. So there's a lot of customers that we see out there that fit the makeup of, I'm cloud first, I've lifted and shifted, I move some stuff to the cloud. But I want to bypass all that learnings from all the people that are gone through the past three years. Can I just skip that and go to a multi-cloud or coherent infrastructure? What do you think about that? What's your view? >> So yeah, so if you look at these enterprises, you know, many of them just to find like the talent, which for one cloud as far as the IT staff is concerned, it's hard enough. And now, when you have multiple clouds, it's hard to find people the talent which is, you know, which has expertise across different clouds. So that's where we come into the picture. So our vision was always to simplify all of this stuff. And simplification, it cannot be just simplification because you cannot just automate the workflows of the cloud providers underneath. So you have to, you know, provide your full data plane on top of it, fed full control plane, management plane, policy and management on top of it. And coming back to like your question, so these nowadays, those people who are working on networking, you know, before it used to be like CLI. You used to learn about Cisco CLI or Juniper CLI, and you used to work on it. Nowadays, it's very different. So automation, programmability, all of that stuff is the key. So now, you know, Ops guys, the DevOps guys, so these are the people who are in high demand. >> So what do you think about the folks out there that are saying, okay, you got a lot of fragmentation. I got the stacks, I got a lot of stove pipes, if you will, out there on the stack. I got to learn this from Azure. Can you guys have with your product abstract the way that's so developers don't need to know the ins and outs of stack's, almost like a gateway, if you will, the old days. But like I'm a developer or team develop, why should I have to learn the management layer of Azure? >> That's exactly what we started, you know, out with to solve. So it's, what we have built is a platform and the platform sits inside the cloud. And customers are able to build their own network or a virtual network on top using that platform. So the platform has its own data plane, own control plane and management plane with a policy layer on top of it. So now, it's the platform which is sitting in different clouds, but from a customer's point of view, it's one way of doing networking. One way of instantiating or bringing in services or security services in the middle. Whether those are our security services or whether those are like services from our partners, like Palo Alto or Checkpoint or Cisco. >> So you guys brought the SD-WAN mojo and refactored it for the cloud it sounds like. >> No. >> No? (chuckles) >> We cannot said. >> All right, explain. >> It's way more than that. >> I mean, SD-WAN was wan. I mean, you're talking about wide area networks, talking about connected, so explain the difference. >> SD-WAN was primarily done for one major reason. MPLS was expensive, very strong SLAs, but very low speed. Internet, on the other hand, you sat at home and you could access your applications much faster. No SLA, very low cost, right? So we wanted to marry the two together so you could have a purely private infrastructure and a public infrastructure and secure both of them by creating a common secure fabric across all those environments. And then seamlessly tying it into your internal branch and data center and cloud network. So, it merely brought you to the edge of the cloud. It didn't do anything inside the cloud. Now, the major problem resides inside the clouds where you have to optimize the clouds themselves. Take a step back. How were the clouds built? Basically, the cloud providers went to the Ciscos and Junipers and the rest of the world, built the network in the data centers or across wide area infrastructure, and brought it all together and tried to create a virtualized layer on top of that. But there were many limitations of this underlying infrastructure that they had built. So number of routes per region, how inter region connectivity worked, or how many routes you could carry to the VPCs of V nets? That all those were becoming no common policy across, you know, these environments, no segmentation across these environments, right? So the networking constructs that the enterprise customers were used to as enterprise class carry class capabilities, they did not exist in the cloud. So what did the customer do? They ended up stitching it together all manually. And that's why Atif was alluding to earlier that it became a spaghetti mess for the customers. And then what happens is, as a result, day two operations, you know, troubleshooting, everything becomes a nightmare. So what do you do? You have to build an infrastructure inside the cloud. Cloud has enough raw capabilities to build the solutions inside there. Netflix's of the world. And many different companies have been born in the cloud and evolved from there. So why could we not take the raw capabilities of the clouds and build a network cloud or a supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connecting it into the on-premise and remote user locations, right? So that's your, you know, hybrid multi-cloud solution. >> Well, great call out on the SD-WAN in common versus cloud. 'Cause I think this is important because you're building a network layer in the cloud that spans out so the customers don't have to get into the, there's a gap in the system that I'm used to, my operating environment, of having lockdown security and network. >> So yeah. So what you do is you use the raw capabilities like bandwidth or virtual machines, or you know, containers, or, you know, different types of serverless capabilities. And you bring it all together in a way to solve the networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud, which is an abstraction layer which hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer, right? And it provides a common infrastructure across all environments to that customer, right? That's the beauty of it. And it does it in a way that it looks like, if they have the networking knowledge, they can apply it to this new environment and carry it forward. One way of doing security across all clouds and hybrid environments. One way of doing routing. One way of doing large-scale network address translation. One way of doing IPAM services. So people are tired of doing individual things and individual clouds and on-premise locations, right? So now they're getting something common. >> You guys brought that, you brought all that to bear and flexible for the customer to essentially self-serve their network cloud. >> Yes, yeah. Is that the wave? >> And nowadays, from business perspective, agility is the key, right? You have to move at the pace of the business. If you don't, you are losing. >> So, would it be safe to say that you guys have a network supercloud? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> We, pretty much, yeah. Absolutely. >> What does that mean to our customer? What's in it for them? What's the benefit to the customer? I got a network supercloud, it connects, provides SLA, all the capabilities I need. What do they get? What's the end point for them? What's the end? >> Atif, maybe you can talk some examples. >> The IT infrastructure is all like distributed now, right? So you have applications running in data centers. You have applications running in one cloud. Other cloud, public clouds, enterprises are depending on so many SaaS applications. So now, these are, you can call these endpoints. So a supercloud or a network cloud, from our perspective, it's a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle, which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint. So, you are able to connect to the supercloud or network cloud in one way no matter where you are. So now, whichever cloud you are in, whichever cloud you need to connect to. And also, it's not just connecting to the cloud. So you need to do a lot of stuff, a lot of networking inside the cloud also. So now, as Amir was saying, every cloud has its own from a networking, you know, the concept perspective or the construct, they are different. There are limitations in there also. So this supercloud, which is sitting on top, basically, your platform is sitting into the cloud, but the supercloud is built on top of using your platform. So that abstracts all those complexities, all those limitations. So now your limitations are whatever the limitations of that platform are. So now your platform, that platform is in our control. So we can keep building it, we can keep scaling it horizontally. Because one of the things is that, you know, in this cloud era, one of the things is autoscaling these services. So why can't the network now autoscale also, just like your other services. >> Network autoscaling is a genius idea, and I think that's a killer. I want to ask the the follow on question because I think, first of all, I love what you guys are doing. So, I think it's a great example of this new innovation. It's not obvious until you see it, right? Geographical is huge. So, you know, single instance, global instances, multiple instances, you're seeing global. How do you guys look at that global equation? Because as companies expand their clouds into geos, and then ultimately, you know, it's obviously continent, region and locales. You're going to have geographic issues. So, this is an extension of your network cloud? >> Amir: It is the extension of the network cloud because if you look at this hyperscalers, they're sitting pretty much everywhere in the globe. So, wherever their regions are, the beauty of building a supercloud is that you can by definition, be available in those regions. It literally takes a day or two of testing for our stack to run in those regions, to make sure there are no nuances that we run into, you know, for that region. The moment we bring it up in that region, all customers can onboard into that solution. So literally, what used to take months or years to build a global infrastructure, now, you can configure it in 10 minutes basically, and bring it up in less than one hour. Since when did we see any solution- >> And by the way, >> that can come up with. >> when the edge comes out too, you're going to start to see more clouds get bolted on. >> Exactly. And you can expand to the edge of the network. That's why we call cloud the new edge, right? >> John: Yeah, it is. Now, I think you guys got a good solutions, network clouds, superclouds, good. So the question on the premise side, so I get the cloud play. It's very cool. You can expand out. It's a nice layer. I'm sure you manage the SLAs between latency and all kinds of things. Knowing when not to do things. Physics or physics. Okay. Now, you've got the on-premise. What's the on-premise equation look like? >> So on-premise, the kind of customers, we are working with large enterprises, mid-size enterprises. So they have on-prem networks, they have deployed, in many cases, they have deployed SD-WAN. In many cases, they have MPLS. They have data centers also. And a lot of these companies are, you know, moving the applications from the data center into the cloud. But we still have large enterprise- >> But for you guys, you can sit there too with non server or is it a box or what is it? >> It's a software stack, right? So, we are a software company. >> Okay, so no box. >> No box. >> Okay, got it. >> No box. >> It's even better. So, we can connect any, as I mentioned, any endpoint, whether it's data centers. So, what happens is usually these enterprises from the data centers- >> John: It's a cloud endpoint for you. >> Cloud endpoint for us. And they need highspeed connectivity into the cloud. And our network cloud is sitting inside the or supercloud is sitting inside the cloud. So we need highspeed connectivity from the data centers. This is like multi-gig type of connectivity. So we enable that connectivity as a service. And as Amir was saying, you are able to bring it up in minutes, pretty much. >> John: Well, you guys have a great handle on supercloud. I really appreciate you guys coming on. I have to ask you guys, since you have so much experience in the industry, multiple inflection points you've guys lived through and we're all old, and we can remember those glory days. What's the big deal going on right now? Because you can connect the dots and you can imagine, okay, like a Lambda function spinning up some connectivity. I need instant access to a new route, throw some, I need to send compute to an edge point for process data. A lot of these kind of ad hoc services are going to start flying around, which used to be manually configured as you guys remember. >> Amir: And that's been the problem, right? The shadow IT, that was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment. So that's what we are trying to get the customers away from. Cloud teams came in, individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-premise environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. So, how do you bring it together? And that's what we are trying to solve for, right? At a large scale, in a carrier cloud center (indistinct). >> What do you call that? Shift right or shift left? Shift left is in the cloud native world security. >> Amir: Yes. >> Networking and security, the two hottest areas. What are you shifting? Up or down? I mean, the network's moving up the stack. I mean, you're seeing the run times at Kubernetes later' >> Amir: Right, right. It's true we're end-to-end virtualization. So you have plumbing, which is the physical infrastructure. Then on top of that, now for the first time, you have true end-to-end virtualization, which the cloud-like constructs are providing to us. We tried to virtualize the routers, we try to virtualize instances at the server level. Now, we are bringing it all together in a truly end-to-end virtualized manner to connect any endpoint anywhere across the globe. Whether it's on-premise, home, multiple clouds, or SaaS type environments. >> Yeah. If you talk about the technical benefits beyond virtualizations, you kind of see in virtualization be abstracted away. So you got end-to-end virtualization, but you don't need to know virtualization to take advantage of it. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> What are some of the tech involved where, what's the trend around on top of virtual? What's the easy button for that? >> So there are many, many use cases from the customers and they're, you know, some of those use cases, they used to deliver out of their data centers before. So now, because you, know, it takes a long time to spend something up in the data center and stuff. So the trend is and what enterprises are looking for is agility. And to achieve that agility, they are moving those services or those use cases into the cloud. So another technical benefit of like something like a supercloud and what we are doing is we allow customers to, you know, move their services from existing data centers into the cloud as well. And I'll give you some examples. You know, these enterprises have, you know, tons of partners. They provide connectivity to their partners, to select resources. It used to happen inside the data center. You would bring in connectivity into the data center and apply like tons of ACLs and whatnot to make sure that you are able to only connect. And now those use cases are, they need to be enabled inside the cloud. And the customer's customers are also, it's not just coming from the on-prem, they're coming from the cloud as well. So, if they're coming from the cloud as well as from on-prem, so you need like an infrastructure like supercloud, which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle all these use cases. So all of these use cases have to be, so that requires like moving those services from the data center into the cloud or into the supercloud. So, they're, oh, as we started building this service over the last four years, we have come across so many use cases. And to deliver those use cases, you have to have a platform. So you have to have your own platform because otherwise you are depending on somebody else's, you know, capabilities. And every time their capabilities change, you have to change. >> John: I'm glad you brought up the platform 'cause I want to get your both reaction to this. So Bob Muglia just said on theCUBE here at Supercloud, that supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question is, is supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> That's an interesting view on things, you know? I mean, if you think of it, you have to design or architect a solution before we turn it into a platform. >> John: It's a trick question actually. >> So it's a, you know, so we look at it as that you have to have an architectural approach end to end, right? And then you build a solution based on that approach. So, I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I think they go hand in hand. It's an architecture that you turn into a solution and provide that agility and high availability and disaster recovery capability that it built into that. >> It's interesting that these definitions might be actually redefined with this new configuration. >> Amir: Yes. >> Because architecture and platform used to mean something, like, aight here's a platform, you buy this platform. >> And then you architecture solution. >> Architect it via vendor. >> Right, right, right. >> Okay. And they have to deal with that architecture in the place of multiple superclouds. If you have too many stove pipes, then what's the purpose of supercloud? >> Right, right, right. And because, you know, historically, you built a router and you sold it to the customer. And the poor customer was supposed to install it all, you know, and interconnect all those things. And if you have 40, 50,000 router network, which we saw in our lifetime, 'cause there used to be many more branches when we were growing up in the networking industry, right? You had to create hierarchy and all kinds of things to figure out how to solve that problem. We are no longer living in that world anymore. You cannot deploy individual virtual instances. And that's what approach a lot of people are taking, which is a pure overly network. You cannot take that approach anymore. You have to evolve the architecture and then build the solution based on that architecture so that it becomes a platform which is readily available, highly scalable, and available. And at the same time, it's very, very easy to deploy. It's a SaaS type solution, right? >> So you're saying, do the architecture to get the solution for the platform that the customer has. >> Amir: Yes. >> They're not buying a platform, they end up with a platform- >> With the platform. >> as a result of Supercloud path. All right. So that's what's, so you mentioned, that's a great point. I want to double click on what you just said. 'Cause I like that what you said. What's the deployment strategy in your mind for supercloud? I'm an architect. I'm at an enterprise in the Midwest. I'm an insurance company, got some cloud action going on. I'm mostly on-premise. I've got the mandate to transform the company. We have apps. We'll be fully transformed in five years. What's my strategy? What do I do? >> Amir: The resources. >> What's the deployment strategy? Single global instance, code in every region, on every cloud? >> It needs to be a solution which is available as a SaaS service, right? So from the customer's perspective, they are onboarding into the supercloud. And then the supercloud is allowing them to do whatever they used to do, you know, historically and in the new world, right? That needs to come together. And that's what we have built is that, we have brought everything together in a way that what used to take months or years, and now taking an hour or two hours, and then people test it for a week or so and deploy it in production. >> I want to bring up something we were talking about before we were on camera about the TCP/IP, the OSI model. That was a concept that destroyed the proprietary narcissist. Work operating systems of the mini computers, which brought in an era of tech prosperity for generations. TCP/IP was kind of the magical moment that allowed for that kind of super networking connection. Inter networking is what's called as a category. It feels like something's going on here with supercloud. The way you describe it, it feels like there's this unification idea. Like the reality is we've got multiple stuff sitting around by default, you either clean it up or get rid of it, right? Or it's almost a, it's either a nuance, a new nuisance or chaos. >> Yeah. And we live in the new world now. We don't have the luxury of time. So we need to move as fast as possible to solve the business problems. And that's what we are running into. If we don't have automated solutions which scale, which solve our problems, then it's going to be a problem. And that's why SaaS is so important in today's world. Why should we have to deploy the network piecemeal? Why can't we have a solution? We solve our problem as we move forward and we accomplish what we need to accomplish and move forward. >> And we don't really need standards here, dude. It's not that we need a standards body if you have unification. >> So because things move so fast, there's no time to create a standards body. And that's why you see companies like ours popping up, which are trying to create a common infrastructure across all clouds. Otherwise if we vent the standardization path may take long. Eventually, we should be going in that direction. But we don't have the luxury of time. That's what I was trying to get to. >> Well, what's interesting is, is that to your point about standards and ratification, what ratifies a defacto anything? In the old days there was some technical bodies involved, but here, I think developers drive everything. So if you look at the developers and how they're voting with their code. They're instantly, organically defining everything as a collective intelligence. >> And just like you're putting out the paper and making it available, everybody's contributing to that. That's why you need to have APIs and terra form type constructs, which are available so that the customers can continue to improve upon that. And that's the Net DevOps, right? So that you need to have. >> What was once sacrilege, just sayin', in business school, back in the days when I got my business degree after my CS degree was, you know, no one wants to have a better mousetrap, a bad business model to have a better mouse trap. In this case, the better mouse trap, the better solution actually could be that thing. >> It is that thing. >> I mean, that can trigger, tips over the industry. >> And that that's where we are seeing our customers. You know, I mean, we have some publicly referenceable customers like Coke or Warner Music Group or, you know, multiple others and chart industries. The way we are solving the problem. They have some of the largest environments in the industry from the cloud perspective. And their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure. And they're able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and then figure out how to manage it and operate it. It's available as a service. >> John: And we've heard from your customer, Warner, they were just on the program. >> Amir: Yes. Okay, okay. >> So they're building a supercloud. So superclouds aren't just for tech companies. >> Amir: No. >> You guys build a supercloud for networking. >> Amir: It is. >> But people are building their own superclouds on top of all this new stuff. Talk about that dynamic. >> Healthcare providers, financials, high-tech companies, even startups. One of our startup customers, Tekion, right? They have these dealerships that they provide sales and support services to across the globe. And for them to be able to onboard those dealerships, it is 80% less time to production. That is real money, right? So, maybe Atif can give you a lot more examples of customers who are deploying. >> Talk about some of the customer activity. What are they like? Are they laggards, they innovators? Are they trying to hit the easy button? Are they coming in late or are you got some high customers? >> Actually most of our customers, all of our customers or customers in general. I don't think they have a choice but to move in this direction because, you know, the cloud has, like everything is quick now. So the cloud teams are moving faster in these enterprises. So now that they cannot afford the network nor to keep up pace with the cloud teams. So, they don't have a choice but to go with something similar where you can, you know, build your network on demand and bring up your network as quickly as possible to meet all those use cases. So, I'll give you an example. >> John: So the demand's high for what you guys do. >> Demand is very high because the cloud teams have- >> John: Yeah. They're going fast. >> They're going fast and there's no stopping. And then network teams, they have to keep up with them. And you cannot keep deploying, you know, networks the way you used to deploy back in the day. And as far as the use cases are concerned, there are so many use cases which our customers are using our platform for. One of the use cases, I'll give you an example of these financial customers. Some of the financial customers, they have their customers who they provide data, like stock exchanges, that provide like market data information to their customers out of data centers part. But now, their customers are moving into the cloud as well. So they need to come in from the cloud. So when they're coming in from the cloud, you cannot be giving them data from your data center because that takes time, and your hair pinning everything back. >> Moving data is like moving, moving money, someone said. >> Exactly. >> Exactly. And the other thing is like you have to optimize your traffic flows in the cloud as well because every time you leave the cloud, you get charged a lot. So, you don't want to leave the cloud unless you have to leave the cloud, your traffic. So, you have to come up or use a service which allows you to optimize all those traffic flows as well, you know? >> My final question to you guys, first of all, thanks for coming on Supercloud Program. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And you guys have a great positioning and I'm a big fan. And I have to ask, you guys are agile, nimble startup, smart on the cutting edge. Supercloud concept seems to resonate with people who are kind of on the front range of this major wave. While all the incumbents like Cisco, Microsoft, even AWS, they're like, I think they're looking at it, like what is that? I think it's coming up really fast, this trend. Because I know people talk about multi-cloud, I get that. But like, this whole supercloud is not just SaaS, it's more going on there. What do you think is going on between the folks who get it, supercloud, get the concept, and some are who are scratching their heads, whether it's the Ciscos or someone, like I don't get it. Why is supercloud important for the folks that aren't really seeing it? >> So first of all, I mean, the customers, what we saw about six months, 12 months ago, were a little slower to adopt the supercloud kind of concept. And there were leading edge customers who were coming and adopting it. Now, all of a sudden, over the last six to nine months, we've seen a flurry of customers coming in and they are from all disciplines or all very diverse set of customers. And they're starting to see the value of that because of the practical implications of what they're doing. You know, these shadow IT type environments are no longer working and there's a lot of pressure from the management to move faster. And then that's where they're coming in. And perhaps, Atif, if you can give a few examples of. >> Yeah. And I'll also just add to your point earlier about the network needing to be there 'cause the cloud teams are like, let's go faster. And the network's always been slow because, but now, it's been almost turbocharged. >> Atif: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, like there was no choice here. You had to move in this industry. And the other thing I would add a little bit is now if you look at all these enterprises, most of their traffic is from, even from which is coming from the on-prem, it's going to the cloud SaaS applications or public clouds. And it's more than 50% of traffic, which is leaving your, you know, what you used to call, your network or the private network. So now it's like, you know, before it used to just connect sites to data centers and sites together. Now, it's a cloud as well as the SaaS application. So it's either internet bound or the public cloud bound. So now you have to build a network quickly, which caters to all these use cases. And that's where like something- >> And you guys, your solution to me is you eliminate all that work for the customer. Now, they can treat the cloud like a bag of Legos. And do their thing. Well, I oversimplify. Well, you know I'm talking about. >> Atif: Right, exactly. >> And to answer your question earlier about what about the big companies coming in and, you know, now they slow to adopt? And, you know, what normally happens is when Cisco came up, right? There used to be 16 different protocols suites. And then we finally settled on TCP/IP and DECnet or AppleTalk or X&S or, you know, you name it, right? Those companies did not adapt to the networking the way it was supposed to be done. And guess what happened, right? So if the companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time. >> Well, I think the force and function too is the cloud teams as well. So you got two evolutions. You got architectural relevance. That's real as impact. >> It's very important. >> Cost, speed. >> And I look at it as a very similar disruption to what Cisco's the world, very early days did to, you know, bring the networking out, right? And it became the internet. But now we are going through the cloud. It's the cloud era, right? How does the cloud evolve over the next 10, 15, 20 years? Everything's is going to be offered as a service, right? So slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing. Very, you know, simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in the cloud-like manners. >> And that makes the networks hardened and more secure. >> More secure. >> It's a great way to be secure. You remember the glory days, we'll go back 15 years. The Cisco conversation was, we got to move up to stack. All the manager would fight each other. Now, what does that actually mean? Stay where we are. Stay in your lane. This is kind of like the network's version of moving up the stack because not so much up the stack, but the cloud is everywhere. It's almost horizontally scaled. >> It's extending into the on-premise. It is already moving towards the edge, right? So, you will see a lot- >> So, programmability is a big program. So you guys are hitting programmability, compatibility, getting people into an environment they're comfortable operating. So the Ops people love it. >> Exactly. >> Spans the clouds to a level of SLA management. It might not be perfectly spanning applications, but you can actually know latencies between clouds, measure that. And then so you're basically managing your network now as the overall infrastructure. >> Right. And it needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward, right? Because customers do not want to wait to be able to troubleshoot. They don't want to be able to wait to deploy something, right? So, it needs to be a level of automation. >> Okay. So the question for you guys both on we'll end on is what is the enablement that, because you guys are a disruptive enabler, right? You create this fabric. You're going to enable companies to do stuff. What are some of the things that you see and your customers might be seeing as things that they're going to do as a result of having this enablement? So what are some of those things? >> Amir: Atif, perhaps you can talk through the some of the customer experience on that. >> It's agility. And we are allowing these customers to move very, very quickly and build these networks which meet all these requirements inside the cloud. Because as Amir was saying, in the cloud era, networking is changing. And if you look at, you know, going back to your comment about the existing networking vendors. Some of them still think that, you know, just connecting to the cloud using some concepts like Cloud OnRamp is cloud networking, but it's changing now. >> John: 'Cause there's apps that are depending upon. >> Exactly. And it's all distributed. Like IT infrastructure, as I said earlier, is all distributed. And at the end of the day, you have to make sure that wherever your user is, wherever your app is, you are able to connect them securely. >> Historically, it used to be about building a router bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, and then interconnecting those routers. Now, it's all about horizontal scale. You don't need to build big, you need to scale it, right? And that's what cloud brings to the customer. >> It's a cultural change for Cisco and Juniper because they have to understand that they're still could be in the game and still win. >> Exactly. >> The question I have for you, what are your customers telling you that, what's some of the anecdotal, like, 'cause you guys have a good solution, is it, "Oh my god, you guys saved my butt." Or what are some of the commentary that you hear from the customers in terms of praise and and glory from your solution? >> Oh, some even say, when we do our demo and stuff, they say it's too hard to believe. >> Believe. >> Like, too hard. It's hard, you know, it's >> I dont believe you. They're skeptics. >> I don't believe you that because now you're able to bring up a global network within minutes. With networking services, like let's say you have APAC, you know, on-prem users, cloud also there, cloud here, users here, you can bring up a global network with full routed connectivity between all these endpoints with security services. You can bring up like a firewall from a third party or our services in the middle. This is a matter of minutes now. And this is all high speed connectivity with SLAs. Imagine like before connecting, you know, Singapore to U.S. East or Hong Kong to Frankfurt, you know, if you were putting your infrastructure in columns like E-connects, you would have to go, you know, figure out like, how am I going to- >> Seal line In, connect to it? Yeah. A lot of hassles, >> If you had to put like firewalls in the middle, segmentation, you had to, you know, isolate different entities. >> That's called heavy lifting. >> So what you're seeing is, you know, it's like customer comes in, there's a disbelief, can you really do that? And then they try it out, they go, "Wow, this works." Right? It's deployed in a small environment. And then all of a sudden they start taking off, right? And literally we have seen customers go from few thousand dollars a month or year type deployments to multi-million dollars a year type deployments in very, very short amount of time, in a few months. >> And you guys are pay as you go? >> Pay as you go. >> Pay as go usage cloud-based compatibility. >> Exactly. And it's amazing once they get to deploy the solution. >> What's the variable on the cost? >> On the cost? >> Is it traffic or is it. >> It's multiple different things. It's packaged into the overall solution. And as a matter of fact, we end up saving a lot of money to the customers. And not only in one way, in multiple different ways. And we do a complete TOI analysis for the customers. So it's bandwidth, it's number of connections, it's the amount of compute power that we are using. >> John: Similar things that they're used to. >> Just like the cloud constructs. Yeah. >> All right. Networking supercloud. Great. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on Supercloud. >> Atif: Thank you. >> And looking forward to seeing more of the demand. Translate, instant networking. I'm sure it's going to be huge with the edge exploding. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. So this is Supercloud 2 event here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. The network Supercloud is here. Checkout Alkira. I'm John Furry, the host. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World, sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I'm pleased to be joined by Krista Satterthwaite, SVP and general manager for HPE Mainstream Compute, and Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president, and general manager of Intel Xeon Products, here to discuss the major announcement. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to see you guys. And exciting announcement. Krista, Compute continues to evolve to meet the challenges of businesses. We're seeing more and more high performance, more Compute, I mean, it's getting more Compute every day. You guys officially announced this next generation of ProLiant Gen11s in November. Can you share and talk about what this means? >> Yeah, so first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this announcement. And yeah, in November we announced our HPE ProLiant NextGen, and it really was about one thing. It's about engineering Compute for customers' hybrid world. And we have three different design principles when we designed this generation. First is intuitive cloud operating experience, and that's with our HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. And that's all about management that is simple, unified, and automated. So it's all about seeing everything from one council. So you have a customer that's using this, and they were so surprised at how much they could see, and they were excited because they had servers in multiple locations. This was a hotel, so they had servers everywhere, and they can now see all their different firmware levels. And with that type of visibility, they thought their planning was going to be much, much easier. And then when it comes to updates, they're much quicker and much easier, so it's an exciting thing, whether you have servers just in the data center, or you have them distributed, you could see and do more than you ever could before with HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. So that's number one. Number two is trusted security by design. Now, when we launched our HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers years ago, we launched groundbreaking innovative security features, and we haven't stopped, we've continued to enhance that every since then. And this generation's no exception. So we have new innovations around security. Security is a huge focus area for us, and so we're excited about delivering those. And then lastly, performance for every workload. We have a huge increase in performance with HPE ProLiant Gen11, and we have customers that are clamoring for this additional performance right now. And what's great about this is that, it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is, whether it's CPU, memory or IO, we have advancements across the board that are going to make real differences in what customers are going to be able to get out of their workloads. And then we have customers that are trying to build headroom in. So even if they don't need a today, what they put in their environment today, they know needs to last and need to be built for the future. >> That's awesome. Thanks for the recap. And that's great news for folks looking to power those workloads, more and more optimizations needed. I got to ask though, how is what you guys are announcing today, meeting these customer needs for the future, and what are your customers looking for and what are HPE and Intel announcing today? >> Yeah, so customers are doing more than ever before with their servers. So they're really pushing things to the max. I'll give you an example. There's a retail customer that is waiting to get their hands on our ProLiant Gen11 servers, because they want to do video streaming in every one of their retail stores and what they're building, when they're building what they need, we started talking to 'em about what their needs were today, and they were like, "Forget about what my needs are today. We're buying for headroom. We don't want to touch these servers for a while." So they're maxing things out, because they know the needs are coming. And so what you'll see with this generation is that we've built all of that in so that customers can deploy with confidence and know they have the headroom for all the things they want to do. The applications that we see and what people are trying to do with their servers is light years different than the last big announcement we had, which was our ProLiant Gen10 servers. People are trying to do more than ever before and they're trying to do that at the Edge as well as as the data center. So I'll tell you a little bit about the servers we have. So in partnership with Intel, we're really excited to announce a new batch of servers. And these servers feature the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors, bringing a lot more performance and efficiency. And I'll talk about the servers, one, the first one is a HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen11. Now, I told you about that retail customer that's trying to do video streaming in their stores. This is the server they were looking at. This server is a new server, we didn't have a Gen10 or a Gen10+ version of the server. This is a new server and it's optimized for Edge use cases. It's a rack-based server and it's very, very flexible. So different types of storage, different types of GPU configurations, really designed to take care of many, many use cases at the Edge and doing more at the Edge than ever before. So I mentioned video streaming, but also VDI and analytics at the Edge. The next two servers are some of our most popular servers, our HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11, and that's our density-optimized server for enterprise. And that is getting an upgrade across the board as well, big, big improvements in terms of performance, and expansion. And for those customers that need even more expansion when it comes to, let's say, storage or accelerators then the DL 380 Gen11 is a server that's new as well. And that's really for folks that need more expandability than the DL360, which is a one use server. And then lastly, our ML350, which is a tower server. These tower servers are typically used at remote sites, branch offices and this particular server holds a world record for energy efficiency for tower servers. So those are some of the servers we have today that we're announcing. I also want to talk a little bit about our Cray portfolio. So we're announcing two new servers with our HPE Cray portfolio. And what's great about this is that these servers make super computing more accessible to more enterprise customers. These servers are going to be smaller, they're going to come in at lower price points, and deliver tremendous energy efficiency. So these are the Cray XD servers, and there's more servers to come, but these are the ones that we're announcing with this first iteration. >> Great stuff. I can talk about servers all day long, I love server innovation. It's been following for many, many years, and you guys know. Lisa, we'll bring you in. Servers have been powered by Intel Xeon, we've been talking a lot about the scalable processors. This is your 4th Gen, they're in Gen11 and you're at 4th Gen. Krista mentioned this generation's about Security Edge, which is essentially becoming like a data center model now, the Edges are exploding. What are some of the design principles that went into the 4th Gen this time around the scalable processor? Can you share the Intel role here? >> Sure. I love what Krista said about headroom. If there's anything we've learned in these past few years, it's that you can plan for today, and you can even plan for tomorrow, but your tomorrow might look a lot different than what you thought it was going to. So to meet these business challenges, as we think about the underlying processor that powers all that amazing server lineup that Krista just went through, we are really looking at delivering that increased performance, the power efficient compute and then strong security. And of course, attention to the overall operating cost of the customer environment. Intel's focused on a very workload-first approach to solving our customers' real problems. So this is the applications that they're running every day to drive their digital transformation, and we really like to focus our innovation, and leadership for those highest value, and also the highest growth workloads. Some of those that we've uniquely focused on in 4th Gen Xeon, our artificial intelligence, high performance computing, network, storage, and as well as the deployments, like you were mentioning, ranging from the cloud all the way out to the Edge. And those are all satisfied by 4th Gen Xeon scalable. So our strategy for architecting is based off of all of that. And in addition to doing things like adding core count, improving the platform, updating the memory and the IO, all those standard things that you do, we've invested deeply in delivering the industry's CPU with the most built-in accelerators. And I'll just give an example, in artificial intelligence with built-in AMX acceleration, plus the framework optimizations, customers can see a 10X performance improvement gen over gen, that's on both training and inference. So it further cements Xeon as the world's foundation for inference, and it now delivers performance equivalent of a modern GPU, but all within your CPU. The flexibility that, that opens up for customers is tremendous and it's so many new ways to utilize their infrastructure. And like Krista said, I just want to say that, that best-in-class security, and security solutions are an absolute requirement. We believe that starts at the hardware level, and we continue to invest in our security features with that full ecosystem support so that our customers, like HPE, can deliver that full stacked solution to really deliver on that promise. >> I love that scalable processor messaging too around the silicon and all those advanced features, the accelerators. AI's certainly seeing a lot of that in demand now. Krista, similar question to you on your end. How do you guys look at these, your core design principles around the ProLiant Gen11, and how that helps solve the challenges for your customers that are living in this hybrid world today? >> Yeah, so we see how fast things are changing and we kept that in mind when we decided to design this generation. We talked all already about distributed environments. We see the intensity of the requirements that are at the Edge, and that's part of what we're trying to address with the new platform that I mentioned. It's also part of what we're trying to address with our management, making sure that people can manage no matter where a server is and get a great experience. The other thing we're realizing when it comes to what's happening is customers are looking at how they operate. Many want to buy as a service and with HPE GreenLake, we see that becoming more and more popular. With HPE GreenLake, we can offer that to customers, which is really helpful, especially when they're trying to get new technology like this. Sometimes they don't have it in the budget. With something like HP GreenLake, there's no upfront costs so they can enjoy this technology without having to come up with a big capital outlay for it. So that's great. Another one is around, I liked what Lisa said about security starting at the hardware. And that's exactly, the foundation has to be secure, or you're starting at the wrong place. So that's also something that we feel like we've advanced this time around. This secure root of trust that we started in Gen10, we've extended that to additional partners, so we're excited about that as well. >> That's great, Krista. We're seeing and hearing a lot about customers challenges at the Edge. Lisa, I want to bring you back in on this one. What are the needs that you see at the Edge from an Intel perspective? How is Intel addressing the Edge? >> Yeah, thanks, John. You know, one of the best things about Xeon is that it can span workloads and environments all the way from the Edge back to the core data center all within the same software environment. Customers really love that portability. For the Edge, we have seen an explosion of use cases coming from all industries and I think Krista would say the same. Where we're focused on delivering is that performant-enough compute that can fit into a constrained environment, and those constraints can be physical space, they can be the thermal environment. The Network Edge has been a big focus for us. Not only adding features and integrating acceleration, but investing deeply in that software environment so that more and more critical applications can be ported to Xeon and HPE industry standard servers versus requiring expensive, proprietary systems that were quite frankly not designed for this explosion of use cases that we're seeing. Across a variety of Edge to cloud use cases, we have identified ways to provide step function improvements in both performance and that power efficiency. For example, in this generation, we're delivering an up to 2.9X average improvement in performance per watt versus not using accelerators, and up to 70 watt power savings per CPU opportunity with some unique power management features, and improve total cost of ownership, and just overall power- >> What's the closing thoughts? What should people take away from this announcement around scalable processors, 4th Gen Intel, and then Gen11 ProLiant? What's the walkaway? What's the main super thought here? >> So I can go first. I think the main thought is that, obviously, we have partnered with Intel for many, many years. We continue to partner this generation with years in the making. In fact, we've been working on this for years, so we're both very excited that it's finally here. But we're laser focused on making sure that customers get the most out of their workloads, the most out of their infrastructure, and that they can meet those challenges that people are throwing at 'em. I think IT is under more pressure than ever before and the demands are there. They're critical to the business success with digital transformation and our job is to make sure they have everything they need, and they could do and meet the business needs as they come at 'em. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this reflection point we're in right now? >> Well, I agree with everything that Krista said. It's just a really exciting time right now. There's a ton of challenges in front of us, but the opportunity to bring technology solutions to our customers' digital transformation is tremendous right now. I think I would also like our customers to take away that between the work that Intel and HPE have done together for generations, they have a community that they can trust. We are committed to delivering customer-led solutions that do solve these business transformation challenges that we know are in front of everyone, and we're pretty excited for this launch. >> Yeah, I'm super enthusiastic right now. I think you guys are on the right track. This title Compute Engineered for Hybrid World really kind of highlights the word, "Engineered." You're starting to see this distributed computing architecture take shape with the Edge. Cloud on-premise computing is everywhere. This is real relevant to your customers, and it's a great announcement. Thanks for taking the time and joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> This is the first episode of theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World. Please continue to check out thecube.net, our site, for the future episodes where we'll discuss how to build high performance AI applications, transforming compute management experiences, and accelerating VDI at the Edge. Also, to learn more about the new HPE ProLiant servers with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors, you can go to hpe.com. And check out the URL below, click on it. I'm John Furrier at theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech, enterprise coverage. (bright music)

>> Welcome everyone to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world," sponsored by HP and Intel. Today we're going to going to discuss how to transform your compute management experience with the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," and my guests today are Chinmay Ashok, director cloud engineering at Intel, and Koichiro Nakajima, principal product manager, compute at cloud services with HPE. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this segment, "Transform your compute management experience." >> Thanks for having us. >> Great topic. A lot of people want to see that system management one pane of glass and want to manage everything. This is a really important topic and they started getting into distributed computing and cloud and hybrid. This is a major discussion point. What are some of the major trends you guys see in the system management space? >> Yeah, so system management is trying to help user manage their IT infrastructure effectively and efficiently. So, the system management is evolving along with the IT infrastructures which is trying to accommodate market trends. We have been observing the continuous trends like digital transformation, edge computing, and exponential data growth never stops. AI, machine learning, deep learning, cloud native applications, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategies. There's a lot of things going on. Also, COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live and work. These are all the things that, given a profound implication to the system design architectures that system management has to consider. Also, security has always been the very important topic, but it has become more important than ever before. Some of the research is saying that the cyber criminals becoming like a $10.5 trillion per year. We all do our efforts on the solution provider size and on the user side, but still cyber criminals are growing 15% year by year. So, with all this kind of thing in the mind, system management really have to evolve in a way to help user efficiently and effectively manage their more and more distributed IT infrastructure. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the major trends in system management space? >> Thanks, John, Yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think especially with the view of the system or the service provider, as he was saying, is changing, is evolving over the last few years, especially with the advent of the cloud and the different types of cloud usage models like platform as a service, on-premises, of course, infrastructure is a service, but the traditional software as a service implies that the service provider needs a different view of the system and the context in which we need the CPU vendor, or the platform vendor needs to provide that, is changing. That includes both in-band telemetry being able to monitor what is going on on the system through traditional in-band methods, but also the advent of the out-of-band methods to do this without end user disruption is a key element to the enhancements that our customers are expecting from us as we deploy CPUs and platforms. >> That's great. You know what I love about this discussion is we had multiple generation enhancements, 4th Gen Xeon, 11th Gen ProLiant, iLOs going to come up with got another generation increase on that one. We'll get into that on the next segment, but while we're here, what is iLO? Can you guys define what that is and why it's important? >> Yeah, great question. Real quick, so HPE Integrated Lights-Out is the formal name of the product and we tend to call it as a iLO for short. iLO is HPE'S BMC. If you're familiar with this topic it's a Baseboard Management Controller. If not, this is a small computer on the server mother board and it runs independently from host CPU and the operating system. So, that's why it's named as Lights-Out. Now what can you do with the iLO? iLO really helps a user manage and use and monitor the server remotely, securely, throughout its life from the deployment to the retirement. So, you can really do things like, you know, turning a server power on, off, install operating system, access to IT, firmware update, and when you decide to retire server, you can completely wipe the data off that server so then it's ready to trash. iLO is really a best solution to manage a single server, but when you try to manage hundreds or thousand of servers in a larger scale environment, then managing server one by one by one through the iLO is not practical. So, HPE has two options. One of them is a HPE OneView. OneView is a best solution to manage a very complex, on-prem IT infrastructure that involves a thousand of servers as well as the other IT elements like fiber channel storage through the storage agent network and so on. Another option that we have is HPE for GreenLake Compute Ops Management. This is our latest, greatest product that we recently launched and this is a best solution to manage a distributed IT environment with multiple edge points or multiple clouds. And I recently involved in the customer conversation about the computer office management and with the hotel chain, global hotel chain with 9,000 locations worldwide and each of the location only have like a couple of servers to manage, but combined it's, you know, 27,000 servers and over the 9,000 locations, we didn't really have a great answer for that kind of environment before, but now HPE has GreenLake for computer office management for also deal with, you know, such kind of environment. >> Awesome. We're going to do a big dive on iLO in the next segment, but Chinmay, before we end this segment, what is PMT? >> Sure, so yeah, with the introduction of the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we of course introduce many new technologies like PCI Gen 5, DDR5, et cetera. And these are very key to general system provision, if you will. But with all of these new technologies come new sources of telemetry that the service provider now has to manage, right? So, the PMT is a technology called Platform Monitoring Technology. That is a capability that we introduced with the Intel 4th Gen Xeon scalable processor that allows the service provider to monitor all of these sources of telemetry within the system, within the system on chip, the CPU SOC, in all of these contexts that we talked about, like the hybrid cloud and cloud infrastructure as a service or platform as a service, but both in their in-band traditional telemetry collection models, but also out-of-band collection models such as the ones that Koichiro was talking about through the BMC et cetera. So, this is a key enhancement that we believe that takes the Intel product line closer to what the service providers require for managing their end user experience. >> Awesome, well thanks so much for spending the time in this segment. We're going to take a quick break, we're going to come back and we're going to discuss more what's new with Gen 11 and iLO 6. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (light music) Welcome back. We're continuing the coverage of "theCUBE's" coverage of compute engineered for your hybrid world. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by Chinmay Ashok who's from Intel and Koichiro Nakajima with HPE. We're going to dive deeper into transforming your compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and HP ProLiant Gen11. Okay, let's get into it. We want to talk about Gen11. What's new with Gen11? What's new with iLO 6? So, NexGen increases in performance capabilities. What's new, what's new at Gen11 and iLO 6 let's go. >> Yeah, iLO 6 accommodates a lot of new features and the latest, greatest technology advancements like a new generation CPUs, DDR5 memories, PCI Gen 5, GPGPUs, SmartNICs. There's a lot of great feature functions. So, it's an iLO, make sure that supports all the use cases that associate with those latest, greatest advancements. For instance, like you know, some of the higher thermal design point CPU SKUs that requires a liquid cooling. We all support those kind of things. And also iLO6 accommodates latest, greatest industry standard system management, standard specifications, for instance, like an DMTF, TLDN, DMTF, RDE, SPDM. And what are these means for the iLO6 and Gen11? iLO6 really offers the greatest manageability and monitoring user experiences as well as the greatest automation through the refresh APIs. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the Gen11 and iLO6? You're at Intel, you're enabling all this innovation. >> Yeah. >> What's the new features? >> Yeah, thanks John. Yeah, so yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think with the introduction of Gen11, 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we have all of these rich new feature sets, right? With the DDR5, PCI Gen5, liquid cooling, et cetera. And then all of these new accelerators for various specific workloads that customers can use using this processor. So, as we were discussing previously, what this brings is all of these different sources of telemetry, right? So, our sources of data that the system provider or the service provider then needs to utilize to manage the compute experience for their end user. And so, what's new from that perspective is Intel realized that these new different sources of telemetry and the new mechanisms by which the service provider has to extract this telemetry required us to fundamentally think about how we provide the telemetry experience to the service provider. And that meant extending our existing best-in-class, in-band telemetry capabilities that we have today already built into in market Intel processors. But now, extending that with the introduction of the PMT, the Platform Monitoring Technology, that allows us to expand on that in-band telemetry, but also include all of these new sources of telemetry data through all of these new accelerators through the new features like PCI Gen5, DDR5, et cetera, but also bring in that out-of-band telemetry management experience. And so, I think that's a key innovation here, helping prepare for the world that the cloud is enabling. >> It's interesting, you know, Koichiro you had mentioned on the previous segment, COVID-19, we all know the impact of how that changed, how IT at the managed, you know, all of a sudden remote work, right? So, as you have cloud go to hybrid, now we got the edge coming, we're talking about a distributed computing environment, we got telemetry, you got management. This is a huge shift and it's happening super fast. What's the Gen11 iLO6 mean for architects as they start to look at going beyond hybrid and going to the edge, you're going to need all this telemetry. What's the impact? Can you guys just riff and share your thoughts on what this means for that kind of NexGen cloud that we see coming on on which is essentially distributed computing. >> Yeah, that's a great topic to discuss. So, there's a couple of the things. Really, to make sure those remote environment and also the management distributed IT environments, the system management has to reach across the remote location, across the internet connections, and the connectivities. So, the system management protocol, for instance, like traditionally IPMI or SNMP, or those things, got to be modernized into more restful API and those modern integration friendly to the modern tool chains. So, we're investing on those like refresh APIs and also again, the security becomes paramount importance because those are exposed to the bad people to snoop and trying to do some bad thing like men in a middle attacks, things like that. So we really, you know, focus on the security side on the two aspects on the iLO6 and Gen11. One other thing is we continue our industry unique silicon root of trust technology. So, that one is fortunate platform making sure the platform firmware, only the authentic and legitimate image of the firmware can run on HP server. And when you check in, validating the firmware images, the root of the trust reside in the silicon. So, no one can change it. Even the bad people trying to change the root of trust, it's bond in the chips so you cannot really change. And that's why, even bad people trying to compromise, you know, install compromise the firmware image on the HPE servers, you cannot do that. Another thing is we're making a lot of enhancements to make sure security on board our HP server into your network or onto a services like a GreenLake. Give you a couple of example, for instance, like a IDevID, Initial Device ID. That one is conforming to IEEE 802.1AR and it's immutable so no one can change it. And by using the IDevID, you can really identify you are not onboarding a rogue server or unknown server, but the server that you you want to onboard, right? It's absolutely important. Another thing is like platform certificate. Platform certificate really is the measurement of the configuration. So again, this is a great feature that makes sure you receive a server from the factory and no one during the transportation touch the server and alter the configuration. >> Chinmay, what's your reaction to this new distributed NextGen cloud? You got data, security, edge, move the compute to the data, don't move the data around. These are big conversations. >> Yeah, great question, John. I think this is an important thing to consider for the end user, the service provider in all of these contexts, right? I think Koichiro mentioned some of these key elements that go into as we develop and design these new products. But for example, from a security perspective, we introduce the trust domain extensions, TDX feature, for confidential computing in Intel 4th Generation Xeon scalable processors. And that enables the isolation of user workloads in these cloud environments, et cetera. But again, going back to the point Koichiro was making where if you go to the edge, you go to the cloud and then have the edge connect to the cloud you have independent networks for system management, independent networks for user data, et cetera. So, you need the ability to create that isolation. All of this telemetry data that needs to be isolated from the user, but used by the service provider to provide the best experience. All of these are built on the foundations of technologies such as TDX, PMT, iLO6, et cetera. >> Great stuff, gentlemen. Well, we have a lot more to discuss on our next segment. We're going to take a break here before wrapping up. We'll be right back with more. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (light music) Okay, welcome back here, on "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world." I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're wrapping up our discussion here on transforming compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and obviously HPE ProLiant Gen11. Gentlemen, welcome back. Let's get into the takeaways for this discussion. Obviously, systems management has been around for a while, but transforming that experience on the management side is super important as the environment just radically changing for the better. What are some of the key takeaways for the audience watching here that they should put into their kind of tickler file and/or put on their to-do list to keep an eye on? >> Yeah, so Gen11 and iLO6 offers the latest, greatest technologies with new generation CPUs, DDR5, PCI Gen5, and so on and on. There's a lot of things in there and also iLO6 is the most mature version of iLO and it offers the best manageability and security. On top of iLO, HP offers the best of read management options like HP OneView and Compute Ops Management. It's really a lot of the things that help user achieve a lot of the things regardless of the use case like edge computing, or distributed IT, or hybrid strategy and so on and on. And you could also have a great system management that you can unleash all the full potential of latest, greatest technology. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the key takeaways? Obviously as the world's changing, more gen chips are coming out, specialized workloads, performance. I mean, I've never met anyone that says they want to run on slower infrastructure. I mean, come on, performance matters. >> Yes, no, it definitely, I think one of the key things I would say is yes, with Gen11 Intel for gen scalable we're introducing all of these technologies, but I think one of the key things that has grown over the last few years is the view of the system provider, the abstraction that's needed, right? Like the end user today is migrating a lot of what they're traditionally used to from a physical compute perspective to the cloud. Everything goes to the cloud and when that happens there's a lot of just the experience that the end user sees, but everything underneath is abstracted away and then managed by the system provider, right? So we at Intel, and of course, our partners at HP, we have spent a lot of time figuring out what are the best sets of features that provide that best system management experience that allow for that abstraction to work seamlessly without the end user noticing? And I think from that perspective, the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors is so far the best Intel product that we have introduced that is prepared for that type of abstraction. >> So, I'm going to put my customer hat on for a second. I'll ask you both. What's in it for me? I'm the customer. What's in it for me? What's the benefit to me? What does this all mean to me? What's my win? >> Yeah, I can start there. I think the key thing here is that when we create capabilities that allow you to build the best cloud, at the end of the day that efficiency, that performance, all of that translates to a better experience for the consumer, right? So, as the service provider is able to have all of these myriad capabilities to use and choose from and then manage the system experience, what that implies is that the end user sees a seamless experience as they go from one application to another as they go about their daily lives. >> Koichiro, what's your thoughts on what's in it for me? You guys got a lot of engineering going on in Gen11, every gen increase always is a step function and increase of value. What's in it for me? What do I care? What's in it for me? I'm the customer. >> Alright. Yeah, so I fully agree with Chinmay's point. You know, he lays out the all the good points, right? Again, you know what the Gen11 and iLO6 offer all the latest, greatest features and all the technology and advancements are packed in the Gen11 platform and iLO6 unleash all full potentials for those benefits. And things are really dynamic in today's world and IT system also going to be agile and the system management get really far, to the point like we never imagine what the system management can do in the past. For instance, the managing on-prem devices across multiple locations from a single point, like a single pane of glass on the cloud management system, management on the cloud, that's what really the compute office management that HP offers. It's all new and it's really help customers unleash full potential of the gear and their investment and provide the best TCO and ROIs, right? I'm very excited that all the things that all the teams have worked for the multiple years have finally come to their life and to the public. And I can't really wait to see our customers start putting their hands on and enjoy the benefit of the latest, greatest offerings. >> Yeah, 4th Gen Xeon, Gen11 ProLiant, I mean, all the things coming together, accelerators, more cores. You got data, you got compute, and you got now this idea of security, I mean, you got hitting all the points, data and security big features here, right? Data being computed in a way with Gen4 and Gen11. This is like the big theme, data security, kind of the the big part of the core here in this announcement, in this relationship. >> Absolutely. I believe, I think the key things as these new generations of processors enable is new types of compute which imply is more types of data, more types of and hence, with more types of data, more types of compute. You have more types of system management more differentiation that the service provider has to then deal with, the disaggregation that they have to deal with. So yes, absolutely this is, I think exciting times for end users, but also for new frontiers for service providers to go tackle. And we believe that the features that we're introducing with this CPU and this platform will enable them to do so. >> Well Chinmay thank you so much for sharing your Intel perspective, Koichiro with HPE. Congratulations on all that hard work and engineering coming together. Bearing fruit, as you said, Koichiro, this is an exciting time. And again, keep moving the needle. This is an important inflection point in the industry and now more than ever this compute is needed and this kind of specialization's all awesome. So, congratulations and participating in the "Transforming your compute management experience" segment. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." You're watching the "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World Series" sponsored by HP and Intel. Thanks for watching. (light music)

(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube, here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud-native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or SuperCloud for modern application cloud-native developers. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. My pleasure to have here Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud-native at scale conversation. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, cloud-native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native developers, basically DevOps in the CICD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the SuperCloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on SuperCloud as it fits to cloud-native as scales up? >> Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why SuperCloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud-native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where, instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right, where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private, on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think SuperCloud is an appropriate term for that. >> So, you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. What even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IOT, OT and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share, because you got to have edge. So, hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the SuperCloud or across multiple edges and regions? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think, you know, in the context of this, this term of SuperCloud, I think, it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axes, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then, on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axes you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it. Right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when your scale is not at the level. >> Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We're seeing cloud-native becomes successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because about at scale, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Challenges here. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I like to call it, you know, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one problem, one way to think about it is you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right. Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. And the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right. Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right. And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster right. But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you got to make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So, I think that's another example of problems that occur. >> Okay. So, I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say, it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, okay, we got this, we configure it. And then, they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you got to scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about start expanding. I think, one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with P zeros and P ones from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage. Right. And so, in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. And so, as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like (indistinct) hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. >> So, this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >> Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for a complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So, what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >> So, what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the bumper sticker? >> Yeah. >> What would it do? >> There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that assembly line brings, right? Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot, and it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like deliver the pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those. >> So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, CICD, pipelining. >> Madhura: Exactly. >> So, that's what you're trying to simplify that OPS piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really OPS, it's their OPS, it's coding. >> Yeah. Not just developer, the OPS, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middle layer of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated. And so, it solves problems for both those teams. >> Yeah, it's DevOps. So, the DevOps is the cloud-needed developer. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >> Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are, or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source, well-known solutions. >> And, I want get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer, developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, Platform9, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial. Can you explain the open-source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, people want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but you know, maybe want to buy the commercial. So, I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Open source and commercial relationship. >> Yeah. I think, you know, starting with why open source, I think, it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies components, and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open-source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that, we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source and also open source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind a block box. >> Well, and that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with SuperCloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. >> Madhura: That's right. >> And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way is, well, but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards and open source growing so fast, you have that confluence of, you know, a way for us to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian (indistinct) uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, you know, I want to check it out first before I get married. >> Madhura: Right. >> And that's what open source. So, this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in, you know, two things, I think one is just, you know, this cloud-native space is so vast that if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so. Right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a Saas-hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open-source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production environment. >> I have to ask you. Now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlon? What's in it for me? You know. 'Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlon? I'm a customer. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public cloud-native Kubernetes, and then, we have our CICD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then, there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can, your CICD pipelines can deploy the apps, somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah, you know, properly configuring them. And as these things start by being done hand grown. And then, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their homegrown DIY solutions for this. I mean, a number of folks that I talk to that have built Terraform automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So, it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course, technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think, (indistinct) would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on EKS Amazon, and we want to scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability to, >> Yeah, I think, people are scared. I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think, this is going to come up at (indistinct) this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record, I want to see other companies that have used it. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How would you answer that question to, or challenge, you know, hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLA, I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, two parts to that, right? One is Arlon leverages existing open-source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlon uses ArgoCD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open-source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Arlon also makes use of cluster API (indistinct), which is a Kubernetes' sub-component, right? For life cycle management of clusters. So, there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or open-source projects that will find Arlon to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with ArgoCD. Now, Arlon just extends the scope of what ArgoCD can do. And so, that's one. And then, the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arlon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your (indistinct) test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. >> And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform9 customers with, that are familiar with Argo and then Arlon? What's been some of the feedback? >> Yeah, I think, the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlon, and we talk about the fact that it uses ArgoCD they start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So, we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlon before we even wrote a single line of code saying, this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would've purchased it. So, it's been really great validation. >> All right. So, next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look at, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap, I don't need another project that's so I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenants of Platform9 has always been that, we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS-hosted manner for our customers, right? So, our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so, from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so, they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today, and, you know, give you an inventory. And then, >> So, customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign, >> Correct. >> Call you guys. >> Absolutely. Either they have massive large clusters. Right. That they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now, they have management challenges. >> So, especially, operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And or scale out. >> That's right. Exactly. >> And you provide that layer of policy. >> Absolutely. Yes. >> That's the key value here. >> That's right. >> So, policy-based configuration for cluster scale up. >> Profile and policy-based, declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >> If I asked you how this enables SuperCloud, what would you say to that? >> I think, this is one of the key ingredients to SuperCloud, right? If you think about a SuperCloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life-saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale. You know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So, that Arlon solves, then you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen and you're going to have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And Arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then, especially if you're running at on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make SuperCloud successful. And you know, Arlon flows in one, >> Okay, so now, the next level is, okay, that makes sense. It's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How does that impact the app developers of the cloud-native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact, if you do all those things as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >> Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my OPS counterpart to do their part, right? And so, this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >> So, this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full-stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlon solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to be (indistinct), they're designed to do, the question is, what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlon, Argo, and on all the other goodness to automate, what does some of the signals, is it downtime? Is it failed apps, is it latency? What are some of the things that, >> Madhura: Yeah, absolutely. >> Would be indications of things are F'ed up a little bit. >> Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners, and they're extremely interested in this because the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own scripts. So, these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your mean time to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble OPS team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So, those are the signals. >> This is the cloud-native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that, if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the (indistinct) terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology's running, the business is the business. >> Yeah. >> Company is the application. >> Yeah. >> So, it can't be down. So, there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top-line revenue? That's the number one conversation. >> Yeah. >> Do you see the same thing? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO, CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the technology that's, you know, that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially, when you're talking about, let's say, retailers or those kinds of large-scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So, I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >> Final question. What does cloud-native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want them to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >> What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee, production is running absolutely smooth. And he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. >> John: And the CIO doesn't exist and there's no CISO, there at the beach. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud-native at scale here on The Cube. Thank you for your time. >> Fantastic. Thanks for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier here, for special program presentation, special programming cloud-native at scale, enabling SuperCloud modern applications with Platform9. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)