(bright gentle music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright gentle music) >> Hey, everyone. Good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE's coverage, day one of MWC 23 from Barcelona, and we're having a great day so far. The theme of this conference, Dave, is velocity. I feel like we've been shot out of a cannon of CUBE content already on day one. We've been talking with... Today's ecosystem day. We've been talking about the ecosystem, the importance of open ecosystem, and why. And we're going to be unpacking that a little bit more next. >> You know, Lisa, what used to be Mobile World Congress and is now MWC, it was never really intended to be sort of a consumer show, but with the ascendancy of smartphones. It kind of... They sucked all the air out of the room. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> But really, we're seeing the enterprise come really into focus now as the telco stack disaggregates, and enterprise is complicated. >> Enterprise is complicated, telecom is complicated. We have a guest here to unpack that with us. Chris Falloon joins us the Senior Managing Director of telecom practice at Dell. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So you've been in the telecom industry for a long time. Talk about some of the things that you've witnessed over the last couple of decades and really help us understand the complexity that is telecom. >> Yeah. Well, nothing, nothing more complex. Look, I got... I was privileged to start my career in telco 20 years ago in Canada working with other telecoms globally. And so I got a good picture of how they operate, what's important to them. But I was... It's come full circle for me. I got into IT and come all the way back now to helping telcos figure out how to operate. And so it's been a great journey. >> What are some of the- >> Dave: You kno- >> Oh sorry, Dave. >> Dave: Please, go ahead. >> I was just going to say unpack some of the complexity that we see now. Obviously, we think telecom, we... And you talked about the consumerization... We have this expectation that we can get anything on our mobile devices 24/7 from any part of the world, but there's a lot of complexity in the industry as it's evolving. What are some of the complexities and how is Dell helping address that? >> Look, I think the transformation from traditional monolithic architectures to cloud-based architectures is maybe the most... The single largest complex transformation any industry's done in the last 20 years. And it's not just a technology transformation, it's critically an operational transformation. And so I think that's really at the heart of it is we've seen a real shift this year. From conversations last year were around how this stuff gets turned on, "Can it work?", "Does it work?", to a conversation around "How does it work?", "How do I operationalize it?", "What are the implications to my teams?". And so we've got teams struggling with knowledge and competency gaps. We've got people figuring out how to get this stuff working at scale. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about Telcos, you know, a lot of engineers, but a lot of the stuff is done kind of, I call it, in the basement. >> Yeah. >> Kind of hidden, right? And they make it work, right? And that transformation that you're talking about toward this more agile, open ecosystem, moving fast, cloud-native, new services coming in, new monetization models. That does require a different operating model. How similar, given your background in both, you know, IT and Telco, how similar is it to the transformation that occurred in IT in terms of the operation- Operating model, which some companies are still going through? >> Look, I think we're privileged actually to be able to do this 10 years after IT went through it. And there's a lot of patterns that are definitely the same. There's no question there's differences. The applications are far different, the timing and and issues in the RAN are far different, and the distributed size of these deployments is different. But the learnings around how to deploy cloud-native technology, how to organize around these platforms, and back to the operationalization, how to deploy them and operate them at scale, it took IT a decade to figure that out. And hopefully, with the learnings that we've got from that we can rush through it here in a few years or less. >> One of the other big differences, of course, is public policy and regulation, right? You don't really have that so much in the IT world. >> Chris: Right. >> Sometimes you have no regulation. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> You know, Google, Facebook, do whatever you want and we'll figure it out 20 years later. How much of a factor is that in terms of the complexity and are the new Greenfield players... Are they bound by similar sort of restrictions or can they move faster? What's the dynamic there? >> Look, there's no question that Greenfield is faster than Brownfield. Doesn't matter whether that's telco or IT. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, sure. >> I think the... I think we're at a place in history where we're watching some of the early movers testing some of these theories. But I would tell you just... Again, just in the last few days leading up to this event talking with our customers and our partners, it's clear that even the first movers are struggling with the operational complexity of these platforms. And as a... You know, I think Dell's position in IT for the last decade as a platform systems integrator is very much going to continue to play out in the... In... We're being asked to play that role here as we try to bring some of the cloud-native operating competencies to the to the table. >> Hmm. >> And where are you having customer conversations these days? Is it at... Is it at the IT level? Is it higher sense tel... Networking is essential for any business in any organization to be able to deliver what the end user is demanding. >> Of course. Look, I... We've seen a real shift as I mentioned from the technology proof points to the operational proof points. How do we... How do we make sure that not only the business case is valid, but that we can maintain these new changes in these new operating models at scale at the right operating cost? And those are very healthy conversations because the success of this transformation to cloud architecture and edge computing and everything else is predicated on the idea that we can get cloud running at scale in the network. But I think the... It's very much use case driven and we're going to see... We're finally seeing some edge use cases that are driving consumption of those edge use cases, for sure. >> You know, I said earlier, I was in the keynotes and it took 45 minutes to get to the topic of security. >> Hmm. >> It was I think the third or fourth, or even fifth speaker. Finally, 45 minutes in, mention security. And I think that's because security's kind of a given in this world. It's a hardened environment. >> Chris: Yep. >> But that security model changes as well. The cloud brings a shared responsibility model. If it's multicloud, which it is, then it's shared responsibility across multiple clouds. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You know, you've got now developers who are being asked to be responsible for security. So that's another part of the complexity. We're kind of unpacking complexity here, aren't we? >> Chris: That's right. >> Just throwing more things in the cake. >> Look, I... Security is... It's an indication of this shift from what to how, very much includes security. And I think we're seeing security come to the forefront. Dell has a... We, you know, our philosophy is intrinsic security at all levels of the deployment. Everything from the infrastructure all the way through to the delivery and the management. >> Chris: And through the supply chain. >> And through supply chain. All the way through to the delivery of our technology integrated with other people's technology to ensure that the security's intrinsic in those deployments. And those integrations, as we're getting more and more involved in zero-touch deployments and helping carriers stand up these cloud platforms at scale, one of the ways to make sure that it's done repeatably and securely is to integrate those things at the factory or have your, you know, have your infrastructure partner take accountability for doing some of that pre-Day Zero. >> Well, the lab announcement that you guys have is... I've wrote about this. That pretty key, I think, because if you can certify in the lab... That's only other big differences. We talk a lot about the similarities between, you know, enterprise tech of the nineties and the disaggregation of the enterprise stack. But you didn't have so-called converged infrastructure back then. And even when you had converged infrastructure, it was like a skew that was bolted on. Now, you've got engineered systems. You're starting with engineered systems, but you've got to have a lab, so that the ecosystem and you've got self-certification. Those, I think, are key investments that... If you're thinking why Dell... A comp... You need a company like Dell who's got the resources to make those investments and actually kind of force that through. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Dave: Yeah. >> That's right. I think we're... You know, the value of the la... Again, the learnings from these last 10 years of integration is just... That understanding what the major blockers are should provide us with an accelerated roadmap for solving some of these problems as we encounter them over the next year or two in telecoms, no question. >> There's always regional differences in telecom, right? In the United States, you know, years ago, decades ago, sort of, you know, blew apart the telco industry. I would argue, many would I think as well, that that actually made the US less competitive. You got... Certainly have, you know, national interests around the world, across the European continent, certainly in APAC as well. How do you see that of, of... What are you hearing from those different regions? How do you see that affecting the adoption of some of the new technologies that you guys are promoting? >> Yeah, look, there's leaders... There's leaders and laggards in every market, I would say. I think we've been at this now, trying to stand up some of these cloud infrastructures and cloud RAN projects and virtual RAN projects. We've been at that now long enough to know that there's not so much regional patterns as there are patterns of companies that believe deeply that these architectures are going to lead to the right type of innovation and allow them to, you know, to build new markets and new sources of revenue. And those that are deeply committed to that structure are the ones willing to lean in and sort of blaze a path, right? So I would say that pattern is definitely emerged. I don't... We don't see... The larger the organization, certainly the larger the carrier, the deeper their resources on engineering and their ability to pivot and train those resources to become cloud-capable. That's a factor. We see a lot of conversations. Dell's got a very large Day 2 managed services business on the IT side. And, and as we pivot those Day 2 managed services, practices into managing cloud platforms and edge cloud platforms, I think it's the companies that don't have the depth or the skill or the experience are the ones that are that are asking us for the help there, for sure. >> How much has Dell been able to leverage? I mean, in the telecom systems business, I see, you know, a lot of new faces at Dell, a lot of folks like yourself that have telco experience. How about the services business? Were you able to sort of realign your existing folks or is it similar, you had to bring in people from the industry? >> It's both actually. So the... In services, it's critical because they... The org... The industry desperately needs systems integration across the board. And I think if we can convince the industry to treat telco clouds as a horizontal platform, then the idea of a platform integrator is a, you know, is definitely... It's valued. And in fact, it's required, I think, for the success of these projects. The services team at Dell is comprised of the folks who obviously run the pieces of the services business that are really no different in their construct. Building telco clouds is not that different from building IT clouds, so the elements are the same. Those teams are... Those teams persist. But definitely, the apps are different, and the support is different, and the requirements for uptime and availability are different. And so we've brought in services specialists to sort of... Just to create the glue between the customers and our existing sales depth. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Dell is able to deliver in telecom with the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah. Look, it's not that well-known, but you know, the Day Zero Zero-Touch deployment factory integration capabilities that Dell has, we've been deploying that in IT for years. And, you know, we're... We've got a couple of projects globally now where we're not only designing and testing the stack in our labs and with our partners, but we're loading that stack in a known good architecture into third party and Dell hardware in a factory integration setting and shipping it to site with really nothing left to do but connect power and connectivity. And so from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of deploying cloud into thousands of data centers, we have examples of that that are being shipped continent by continent and and being deployed in a... In days and weeks as opposed to months. And so I think the... Taking some of the pain out of deployment and taking some of the... Building some repeatability into those deployments is a very big deal. Those are... Those are great, great projects. The next stage of that, of course, is helping them get to a place where the operations of those platforms is just as easy as the deployment. >> What's going to be different? Go to head... Look ahead to 2030. Let's go backwards from there. What's the world going to be like? What do people need to know in terms of what's coming? >> That's a great question. If... I think if I... If I could see that far ahead, I wouldn't probably be sitting here. (Chris and Lisa laughs) >> Dave: Yeah, but you have wisdom. >> Yeah. >> You know, the experience. >> If we play back... If we play back what's happened in the data centers, you know, in the IT data centers and you mentioned the, you know, the disaggregated systems shift that happened a decade ago. You know, those... Once the applications rearchitected to cloud-native architectures and could take advantage of the platform changes... Once the resiliency is built into the application instead of into the platforms, these things become more and more touchless. And I think the real double digit payback on this shift to cloud-native, we haven't begun to talk about it yet because we haven't... We're not anywhere close to the level of automation that can be achieved once we get to true cloud-native and microservices-based application architecture. That's a big shift and it's going to take a while. It took companies like SAP and others almost a decade to get that done. I think it'll happen faster here, but it's going to take us some time. >> Some of the things that you've heard... This is only day one of the conference, but anything that you've heard today or that you're looking forward to hearing in terms of how telecom is evolving and kind of playing catch-up? >> Yeah, look, I... We really believe this is the year that the edge use cases come alive. I think we're... We're... We've been... Almost every conversation I've been in, we've been asked, you know, sort of where's the... "Where are these use cases that are driving actual deployments and revenue?" and that sort of... And I think carriers are very much interested in trying to figure out customer edge, very much trying to figure out their own edge. Dell, of course, has both of those edges in mind. We've got a very large enterprise edge business unit, as well as our telco BU. And so, that's... I think this is the year we really start to figure out where those... We're seeing good deployments now in production at scale, and I think this is the year that starts to really take shape. >> Well, and it seems like... Just in hearing some of the carriers talk, they want to avoid what happened with the over-the-top vendors, okay. And they want to monetize the data that they have about the network. Looks like they want to charge for API access. >> Chris: Yep. >> 'Kay, developers are going to love that, right? Especially at the volumes that we're seeing here. But I feel like there's a, you know, potential blind spot of disruption coming, you know, like the over-the-top vendors, you know, that created all this innovation. I could see developers... Whether it's at the edge or new services, that customers really want to buy, they really value. Different than, "Hey, I own this data and you need it. I'm going to charge ya for it." versus "Hey, I'm going to create something that's really compelling." You know, an analog would be Netflix or other services that you get with maybe it's private wireless that can do some things. And, you know, that to me is the interesting opportunity here that I feel like is a blind spot for traditional telcos. 'Cause they've kind of got that mindset of, "Okay, you know, we're going to monetize. Let's do it." But they don't have that creativity mindset yet, you know? >> This industry has been given an opportunity to monetize almost every major transformation in technology, and many of them have slipped through our fingers, right? And this one is different because it's inextricably tied to the network. And I think the, you know... If... You mentioned mobile phones earlier I mean, I think what we saw in innovation in mobile was that we had no idea what was going to happen at the edge of that edge until someone created it. And so you have to have those in operating environments have to show up before the developers will spend the time to test them out and figure out what works. And so I... We haven't begun to believe, even understand I don't think, what's coming once we figure out a way to get ultra low latency, reliable connectivity at the edge. >> And I think developers have that open canvas and they're going to paint- >> That's right. >> What that edge looks like. And that's what... I mean, I kind of get concerned about... You know, to me the way to deal with developers, you give 'em a platform. Say, "Go create." >> Chris: That's right. >> As opposed to "Okay, pay to get access.", which you're going to have to, but I mean, there's other third parties that are going to fund that. I get it. >> Chris: Yeah. >> But there's a big open field that is going to get plowed here. >> Yes. >> And it's going to throw off some, you know, serious benefits to consumers. >> Yeah, and that's what we all want. We have that expectation that- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> It's going to... There's going to be a... With them... It's going to be, "What's in it for me?", right? >> "What's in it for me?" Yeah, that's right. >> Absolutely. >> Chris: That's right. >> Chris, I was going to say thank you so much. You want to add one more thing? >> Chris: No, I'm good. Thank you. >> I was just going to thank you so much for stopping by and talking to us about Dell's presence in telecom, how you're helping customers manage the complexity and the opportunities that really are there. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. >> Dave: Thank you. >> Lisa: All right, our pleasure. >> Thanks, guys. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona at MWC 23. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright gentle music)

(intro music plays) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, here in our Palo Alto Studio, with a live performance all day unpacking the wave of Supercloud. This is our second edition. Back for keynote review here is Vittorio Viarengo, talking about the hype and the reality of the Supercloud momentum. Vittorio, great to see you. You got a presentation. Looking forward to hearing the update. >> It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. >> John Furrier: (chuckles) So the business imperative for cloud right now is clear and the Supercloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multicloud today? What's going on? >> So, what we see is, when we talk with our customers is that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghu Raghuram, our CEO, introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers, and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure development, platform security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they have to train their employees across multiple stacks. And the costs are only going up. >> John Furrier: Have you talked about the Supercloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of Cross-Cloud Services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? >> First of all, let's put this in perspective. 90, 87% of customers use two or more cloud including the private cloud. And 55%, get this, 55% use three or more clouds, right? And so, when you talk to these customers they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multicloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them, are seeing their cost getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multicloud problem, which you guys have introduced and you call it the Supercloud. We call it Cross-Cloud Services. But the idea is that- and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we called it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO would go, "Oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack", right? (hosts laugh) And then you go, "Oh, oh, Oracle databases. They run phenomenally on Sun Stack." That's another stack. And it wasn't sustainable, right? And so, VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of Supercloud, first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified way of building, managing, running, connecting, and securing applications across cloud. >> So where should that standardization occur? 'Cause we're going to hear from some customers today. When I ask them about cloud chaos, they're like, "Well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is MonoCloud". They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best-of-breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Well, I also hear that from some customers. "Oh, we are one cloud". They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs, and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. (laughs) The person is in denial. "Oh, we're using AWS." I said, "Great." "And the private cloud, so we're all set." "Okay, thank you. Next." "Oh, the business units are using AWS." "Ah, okay. So you have three." "Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe." So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Then, you have the second category of customers that are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack, and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the scale of Walmart to build their own. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> So, eventually, then you get to the third category of customers. They're actually buying solutions from one of the many ISVs that you are going to talk with today. You know, whether it is Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I will argue, any new company, any new ISV, is by definition a multicloud service company, right? And so these people... Or they're buying our Cross-Cloud Services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. >> What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, this abstraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So, I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just 'cause I think this is an industry movement. A market is forming around multicloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach, it is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So, initially, we were the first to see multicloud happening. You know, Raghu and Sanjay, back in what, like 2016, 17, saw this coming and our first foray in multicloud was to take this sphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscaling, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have (all chuckle) a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, "Hey, we need to go and help our customers where they are, in a native cloud". And that's where we brought back Pivotal. We built tons around it. We shifted. And then Aria. And so basically, our evolution was to go from, you know, our hypervisor to cloud native. And then eventually we ended up at what we believe is the most comprehensive multicloud services solution that covers Application Development with Tanzu, Management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connectivity. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multicloud, bringing excess simplicity into the picture. >> John Furrier: As some would say, multicloud and multi environment, when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud. But to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud, but some are saying like, you guys don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud and it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud. Like networking. You're seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise-grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out there that say, "Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down, but you don't really have public cloud." (chuckles) >> [Vittorio Viarengo] First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. (John laughs) And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building a private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard, to be known in a new environment, right? There's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call "enterprise pragmatism". The private cloud is not going away. So we're going to help our customers there, and then, as they move to the cloud, we are going to give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace, with VMware cloud, to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on the enterprise-class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross-Cloud Service portfolio, being able to meet them where they are. If they're already in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application, and so on and so forth. >> John Furrier: You know, Dave, we were talking in the opening. Vittorio, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see ChatGPT and the success of these new apps that are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders, are out there, and you guys have a interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an Operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud native. So, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, your customer base, VMware customers. They've been in IT Ops for generations. And now, as that crowd moves and sees this Supercloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So, almost, your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize multiple environments? Which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of abstraction. It starts from observability. If you don't know- You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is their performance? So then, you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this, creating this abstraction. The second one is security. So you need to be- Sorry. Infrastructure. An infrastructure. Creating an abstraction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications, and the developer who builds application, the right infrastructure for the application at the right time. Whether it is a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's microservices, and so on and so forth. And so, that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. If it is available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application, right? The third part of security, and I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe and he is saying to me, "The developers went wild, built all these great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, 'What is my compliance report?'" And the guy is saying, "Say that I want to implement the policy that says, 'I want to encrypt all my data no matter where it resides.' How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google, configure it, go to the private cloud." That's time and cost, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app to the firewall in one place and distribute it across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers. (all laugh) We're always trying to keep up with... >> Host: You can dance if you want to do... >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah, let's not make a fool of ourselves. More than usual. Developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are. Why? Because they build the application. They're making us money and saving us money. And so we need- And right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So, you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across this different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators. To your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, "This is how you're going to do things." They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure there is secure and compliant. >> Dave Vellante: So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. You got- In a decentralized cloud, a Supercloud world, you got to have self-serve infrastructure, you got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance. You know, data sovereignty as we talked about. So the question I have, Vittorio, is where does the customer start? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your staff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it, you cannot manage its cost, right? So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs, right? So, we go back to the CIO that I talked to. He is clearly struggling with compliance and security. >> Hosts: Mm hmm. >> And so, like many customers. And so, that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at these, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all these application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, "How do I get some of that?" Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operational capabilities. So, that's maybe, that's where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business. To me, observability is the foundational part of this. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with Supercloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're- In the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, "what is this Supercloud multicloud Cross-Cloud thing? What's it mean?" I mean, I mentioned earlier, the market, the business models are changing, tech's changing, society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, "Hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on?" How would you describe the relevance of Supercloud? >> I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if we are smart about it, we look at the history of IT and the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow the- He said, "Follow the money." I say, "Follow the developers." That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at, you know, Kit Colbert. I say, "Okay. I'm going to get behind that guy wherever he is going." And I try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks moves around. The developers have gone multicloud. And just like in any iteration of IT, at some point, the way you get the right scales at the right cost is with abstractions. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes, integration, to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an abstraction layer, a Supercloud, that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing, and accessing applications. So if you're a customer- (laughs) A minute and a half. (hosts chuckle) If you are customers that are out there and feeling the pain, you got to adopt this. If you are customers that is behind and saying, "Maybe you're in denial" look at the customers that are solving the problems today, and we're going to have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of it. >> Dave Vellante: Gracely's Law, John. Brian Gracely. That history repeats itself and- >> John Furrier: And I think one of these, "follow the developers" is interesting. And the other big wave, I want to get your comment real quick, is that developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software-enabled so that you have software-defined networking, you have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software. Software is everywhere. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. Developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know, because we live in Silicon Valley. We worship developers but if you are out there in manufacturing, healthcare... If you have developers that understand this stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. (hosts laugh) If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because developers indeed make the IT world go round. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, thank you for coming on with that opening keynote here for Supercloud 2. We're going to unpack what Supercloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto. Virtual event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called Supercloud. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (ambient theme music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special program series "Women of the Cloud", brought to you by AWS. I'm your host for the program, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to this special series, Dr. Tendu Yogurtcu joins us, the CTO of Precisely. >> Lisa: Tendu, it's great to see you, it's been a while, but I'm glad that you're doing so well. >> Geez, it's so great seeing you too, and thank you for having me. >> My pleasure. I want the audience to understand a little bit about you. Talk to me a little bit about you, about your role and what are some of the great things that you're doing at Precisely. >> Of course. As CTO, my current role is driving technology vision and innovation, and also coming up with expansion strategies for Precisely's future growth. Precisely is the leader in data integrity. We deliver data with trust, with maximum accuracy, consistency, and also with context. And as a CTO, keeping an eye on what's coming in the business space, what's coming up with the emerging challenges is really key for me. Prior to becoming CTO, I was General Manager for the Syncsort big data business. And previously I had several engineering and R&D leadership roles. I also have a bit of academia experience. I served as a part-time faculty in computer science department in a university. And I am a person who is very tuned to giving back to my community. So I'm currently serving as a advisory board member in the same university. And I'm also serving as a advisory board member for a venture capital firm. And I take pride in being a dedicated advocate for STEM education and STEM education for women in particular, and girls in the underserved areas. >> You have such a great background. The breadth of your background, the experience that you have in the industry as well in academia is so impressive. I've known you a long time. I'd love the audience to get some recommendations from you. For those of the audience looking to grow and expand their careers in technology, what are some of the things that you that you've experienced that you would recommend people do? >> First, stay current. What is emerging today is going to be current very quickly. Especially now we are seeing more change and change at the increased speed than ever. So keeping an eye on on what's happening in the market if you want to be marketable. Now, some of the things that I will say, we have shortage of skills with data science, data engineering with security cyber security with cloud, right? We are here talking about cloud in particular. So there is a shortage of skills in the emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's a shortage of skills also in the retiring technologies. So we are in this like spectrum of skills shortage. So stay tuned to what's coming up. That's one. And on the second piece is that the quicker you tie what you are doing to the goals of the business, whether that's revenue growth whether that's customer retention or cost optimization you are more likely to grow in your career. You have to be able to articulate what you are doing and how that brings value to business to your boss, to your customers. So that becomes an important one. And then third one is giving back. Do something for the women in technology while being a woman in technology. Give back to your community whether that's community is gender based or whether it's your alumni, whether it's your community social community in your neighborhood or in your country or ethnicity. Give back to your community. I think that's becoming really important. >> I think so too. I think that paying it forward is so critical. I'm sure that you have a a long list of mentors and sponsors that have guided you along the way. Giving back to the community paying it forward I think is so important. For others who might be a few years behind us or even maybe have been in tech for the same amount of time that are looking to grow and expand their career having those mentors and sponsors of women who've been through the trenches is inspiring. It's so helpful. And it really is something that we need to do from a diversity perspective alone, right? >> Correct. Correct. And we have seen that, we have seen, for example Covid impact in women in particular. Diverse studies done by girls who quote on Accenture that showed that actually 50% of the women above age 35 were actually dropping out of the technology. And those numbers are scary. However, on the other side we have also seen incredible amount of technology innovation during that time with cloud adoption increasing with the ability to actually work remotely if you are even living in not so secure areas, for example that created more opportunities for women to come back to workforce as well. So we can turn the challenges to opportunities and watch out for those. I would say tipping points. >> I love that you bring up such a great point. There are so, so the, the data doesn't lie, right? The data shows that there's a significant amount of churn for women in technology. But to your point, there are so many opportunities. You mentioned a minute ago the skills gap. One of the things we talk about often on theCUBE and we're talking about cybersecurity which is obviously it's a global risk for companies in every industry, is that there's massive opportunity for people of, of any type to be able to grow their skills. So knowing that there's trend, but there's also so much opportunity for women in technology to climb the ladder is kind of exciting. I think. >> It is. It is exciting. >> Talk to me a little bit about, I would love for the audience to understand some of your hands-on examples where you've really been successful helping organizations navigate digital transformation and their entry and success with cloud computing. What are some of those success stories that you're really proud of? >> Let me think about, first of all what we are seeing is with the digital transformation in general, every single business every single vertical is becoming a technology company. Telecom companies are becoming a technology company. Financial services are becoming a technology company and manufacturing is becoming a technology company. So every business is becoming technology driven. And data is the key. Data is the enabler for every single business. So when we think about the challenges, one of the examples that I give a big challenge for our customers is I can't find the critical data, I can't access it. What are my critical data elements? Because I have so high volumes growing exponentially. What are the critical data elements that I should care and how do I access that? And we work at Precisely with 99 of Fortune 100. So we have two 12,000 customers in over a hundred countries which means we have customers whose businesses are purely built on cloud, clean slate. We also have businesses who have very complex set of data platforms. They have financial services, insurance, for example. They have critical transactional workloads still running on mainframes, IBM i servers, SAP systems. So one of the challenges that we have, and I work with key customers, is on how do we make data accessible for advanced analytics in the cloud? Cloud opens up a ton of open source tools, AI, ML stack lots of tools that actually the companies can leverage for that analytics in addition to elasticity in addition to easy to set up infrastructure. So how do we make sure the data can be actually available from these transactional systems, from mainframes at the speed that the business requires. So it's not just accessing data at the speed the business requires. One of our insurance customers they actually created this data marketplace on Amazon Cloud. And the, their challenge was to make sure they can bring the fresh data on a nightly basis initially and which became actually half an hour, every half an hour. So the speed of the business requirements have changed over time. We work with them very closely and also with the Amazon teams on enabling bringing data and workloads from the mainframes and executing in the cloud. So that's one example. Another big challenge that we see is, can I trust my data? And data integrity is more critical than ever. The quality of data, actually, according to HBR Harvard Business Review survey, 47% of every new record of data has at least one critical data error, 47%. So imagine, I was talking with the manufacturing organization couple of weeks ago and they were giving me an example. They have these three letter quotes for parts and different chemicals they use in the manufacturing. And the single letter error calls a shutdown of the whole manufacturing line. >> Wow. >> So that kind of challenge, how do I ensure that I can actually have completeness of data cleanness of data and consistency in that data? Moreover, govern that on a continuous basis becomes one of the use cases that we help customers. And in that particular case actually we help them put a data governance framework and data quality in their manufacturing line. It's becoming also a critical for, for example ESG, environment, social and governance, supply chain, monitoring the supply chain, and assessing ESG metrics. We see that again. And then the third one, last one. I will give an example because I think it's important. Hybrid cloud becoming critical. Because there's a purest view for new companies. However, facilitating flexible deployment models and facilitating cloud and hybrid cloud is also where we really we can help our customers. >> You brought up some amazingly critical points where it comes to data. You talked about, you know, a minute ago, every company in every industry has to become a technology company. You could also say every company across every industry has to become a data company. They have to become a software company. But to your point, and what it sounds like precisely is really helping organizations to do is access the data access data that has high integrity data that is free of errors. Obviously that's business critical. You talked about the high percentage of errors that caused manufacturing shutdown. Businesses can't, can't have that. That could potentially be life-ending for an organization. So it sounds like what you're talking about data accessibility, data integrity data governance and having that all in real time is table stakes for businesses. Whether it's your grocery store, your local coffee shop a manufacturing company, and e-commerce company. It's table stakes globally these days. >> It is, and you made a very good point actually, Lisa when you talked about the local coffee shop or the retail. One other interesting statistic is that almost 80% of every data has a location attribute. So when we talk about data integrity we no longer talk about just, and consistency of data. We also talk about context, right? When you are going, for example, to a new town you are probably getting some reminders about where your favorite coffee shop is or what telecom company has an office in that particular town. Or if you're an insurance company and a hurricane is hitting southern Florida. Then you want to know how the path of that hurricane is going to impact your customers and predict the claims before they happen. Also understand the propensity of the potential customers that you don't yet have. So location and context, those additional attributes of demographics, visitations are creating actually more confident business insights. >> Absolutely. And and as the consumer we're becoming more and more demanding. We want to be able to transact things so easily whether it's in our personal life at the grocery store, at that cafe, or in our business life. So those demands from the customer are also really influencing the direction that companies need to go. And it's actually, I think it's quite exciting that the amount of personalization the location data that you talk about that comes in there and really helps companies in every industry deliver these the cloud can, these amazing, unique personalized experiences that really drive business forward. We could talk about that all day long. I have no problem. But I want to get in our final minutes here, Tendu. What do you see as in your crystal ball as next for the cloud? How do you see your role as CTO evolving? >> Sure. For what we are seeing in the cloud I think we will start seeing more and more focus on sustainability. Sustainable technologies and governance. Obviously cloud migrations cloud modernizations are helping with that. And we, we are seeing many of our customers they started actually assessing the ESG supply chain and reporting on metrics whether it's the percentage of face or energy consumption. Also on the social metrics on diversity age distribution and as well as compliance piece. So sustainability governance I think that will become one area. Second, security, we talked about IT security and data privacy. I think we will see more and more investments around those. Cybersecurity in particular. And ethical data access and ethics is becoming center to everything we are doing as we have those personalized experiences and have more opportunities in the cloud. And the third one is continued automation with AI, ML and more focus on automation because cloud enables that at scale. And the work that we need to do is too time-intensive and too manual with the amount of data. Data is powering every business. So automation is going to be an increased focus how my role evolves with that. So I have this unique combination. I have been open to non-linear career paths throughout my growth. So I have an understanding of how to innovate and build products that solve real business problems. I also have an understanding of how to sell them build partnerships that combined with the the scale of growth, the hyper growth that we have absorbed in precisely 10 times growth within the last 10 years through a combination of organic innovation and acquisitions really requires the speed of change. So change, implementing change at scale as well as at speed. So taking those and bringing them to the next challenge is the evolution of my role. How do I bring those and tackle keep an eye on what's coming as a challenge in the industry and how they apply those skills that I have developed throughout my career to that next challenge and evolve with it, bring the innovation to data to cloud and the next challenge that we are going to see. >> There's so much on the horizon. It's, there are certainly challenges, you know within technology, but there's so much opportunity. You've done such a great job highlighting your career path the, the big impact that you're helping organizations make leveraging cloud and the opportunity that's there for the rest of us to really get in there get our hands dirty and solve problems. Tendu, I always love our conversations. It's been such a pleasure having you back, back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us on this special program series today. >> Thank you Lisa. And also thanks to AWS for the opportunity. >> Absolutely. This is brought, brought to us by AWS. For Dr.Tendu, you are good to go. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE special program series Women of the Cloud. We thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Valente with theCUBE, and one of the most gratifying aspects of my role as a host of "theCUBE TV" is I get to cover a wide range of topics. And quite often, we're able to bring to our program a level of expertise that allows us to more deeply explore and unpack some of the topics that we cover throughout the year. And one of our favorite topics, of course, is data. Now, in 2021, after being in isolation for the better part of two years, a group of industry analysts met up at AWS re:Invent and started a collaboration to look at the trends in data and predict what some likely outcomes will be for the coming year. And it resulted in a very popular session that we had last year focused on the future of data management. And I'm very excited and pleased to tell you that the 2023 edition of that predictions episode is back, and with me are five outstanding market analyst, Sanjeev Mohan of SanjMo, Tony Baer of dbInsight, Carl Olofson from IDC, Dave Menninger from Ventana Research, and Doug Henschen, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Now, what is it that we're calling you, guys? A data pack like the rat pack? No, no, no, no, that's not it. It's the data crowd, the data crowd, and the crowd includes some of the best minds in the data analyst community. They'll discuss how data management is evolving and what listeners should prepare for in 2023. Guys, welcome back. Great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. (Tony and Dave faintly speaks) >> All right, before we get into 2023 predictions, we thought it'd be good to do a look back at how we did in 2022 and give a transparent assessment of those predictions. So, let's get right into it. We're going to bring these up here, the predictions from 2022, they're color-coded red, yellow, and green to signify the degree of accuracy. And I'm pleased to report there's no red. Well, maybe some of you will want to debate that grading system. But as always, we want to be open, so you can decide for yourselves. So, we're going to ask each analyst to review their 2022 prediction and explain their rating and what evidence they have that led them to their conclusion. So, Sanjeev, please kick it off. Your prediction was data governance becomes key. I know that's going to knock you guys over, but elaborate, because you had more detail when you double click on that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Dave, for having us on the show today. And we self-graded ourselves. I could have very easily made my prediction from last year green, but I mentioned why I left it as yellow. I totally fully believe that data governance was in a renaissance in 2022. And why do I say that? You have to look no further than AWS launching its own data catalog called DataZone. Before that, mid-year, we saw Unity Catalog from Databricks went GA. So, overall, I saw there was tremendous movement. When you see these big players launching a new data catalog, you know that they want to be in this space. And this space is highly critical to everything that I feel we will talk about in today's call. Also, if you look at established players, I spoke at Collibra's conference, data.world, work closely with Alation, Informatica, a bunch of other companies, they all added tremendous new capabilities. So, it did become key. The reason I left it as yellow is because I had made a prediction that Collibra would go IPO, and it did not. And I don't think anyone is going IPO right now. The market is really, really down, the funding in VC IPO market. But other than that, data governance had a banner year in 2022. >> Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And of course, you saw data clean rooms being announced at AWS re:Invent, so more evidence. And I like how the fact that you included in your predictions some things that were binary, so you dinged yourself there. So, good job. Okay, Tony Baer, you're up next. Data mesh hits reality check. As you see here, you've given yourself a bright green thumbs up. (Tony laughing) Okay. Let's hear why you feel that was the case. What do you mean by reality check? >> Okay. Thanks, Dave, for having us back again. This is something I just wrote and just tried to get away from, and this just a topic just won't go away. I did speak with a number of folks, early adopters and non-adopters during the year. And I did find that basically that it pretty much validated what I was expecting, which was that there was a lot more, this has now become a front burner issue. And if I had any doubt in my mind, the evidence I would point to is what was originally intended to be a throwaway post on LinkedIn, which I just quickly scribbled down the night before leaving for re:Invent. I was packing at the time, and for some reason, I was doing Google search on data mesh. And I happened to have tripped across this ridiculous article, I will not say where, because it doesn't deserve any publicity, about the eight (Dave laughing) best data mesh software companies of 2022. (Tony laughing) One of my predictions was that you'd see data mesh washing. And I just quickly just hopped on that maybe three sentences and wrote it at about a couple minutes saying this is hogwash, essentially. (laughs) And that just reun... And then, I left for re:Invent. And the next night, when I got into my Vegas hotel room, I clicked on my computer. I saw a 15,000 hits on that post, which was the most hits of any single post I put all year. And the responses were wildly pro and con. So, it pretty much validates my expectation in that data mesh really did hit a lot more scrutiny over this past year. >> Yeah, thank you for that. I remember that article. I remember rolling my eyes when I saw it, and then I recently, (Tony laughing) I talked to Walmart and they actually invoked Martin Fowler and they said that they're working through their data mesh. So, it takes a really lot of thought, and it really, as we've talked about, is really as much an organizational construct. You're not buying data mesh >> Bingo. >> to your point. Okay. Thank you, Tony. Carl Olofson, here we go. You've graded yourself a yellow in the prediction of graph databases. Take off. Please elaborate. >> Yeah, sure. So, I realized in looking at the prediction that it seemed to imply that graph databases could be a major factor in the data world in 2022, which obviously didn't become the case. It was an error on my part in that I should have said it in the right context. It's really a three to five-year time period that graph databases will really become significant, because they still need accepted methodologies that can be applied in a business context as well as proper tools in order for people to be able to use them seriously. But I stand by the idea that it is taking off, because for one thing, Neo4j, which is the leading independent graph database provider, had a very good year. And also, we're seeing interesting developments in terms of things like AWS with Neptune and with Oracle providing graph support in Oracle database this past year. Those things are, as I said, growing gradually. There are other companies like TigerGraph and so forth, that deserve watching as well. But as far as becoming mainstream, it's going to be a few years before we get all the elements together to make that happen. Like any new technology, you have to create an environment in which ordinary people without a whole ton of technical training can actually apply the technology to solve business problems. >> Yeah, thank you for that. These specialized databases, graph databases, time series databases, you see them embedded into mainstream data platforms, but there's a place for these specialized databases, I would suspect we're going to see new types of databases emerge with all this cloud sprawl that we have and maybe to the edge. >> Well, part of it is that it's not as specialized as you might think it. You can apply graphs to great many workloads and use cases. It's just that people have yet to fully explore and discover what those are. >> Yeah. >> And so, it's going to be a process. (laughs) >> All right, Dave Menninger, streaming data permeates the landscape. You gave yourself a yellow. Why? >> Well, I couldn't think of a appropriate combination of yellow and green. Maybe I should have used chartreuse, (Dave laughing) but I was probably a little hard on myself making it yellow. This is another type of specialized data processing like Carl was talking about graph databases is a stream processing, and nearly every data platform offers streaming capabilities now. Often, it's based on Kafka. If you look at Confluent, their revenues have grown at more than 50%, continue to grow at more than 50% a year. They're expected to do more than half a billion dollars in revenue this year. But the thing that hasn't happened yet, and to be honest, they didn't necessarily expect it to happen in one year, is that streaming hasn't become the default way in which we deal with data. It's still a sidecar to data at rest. And I do expect that we'll continue to see streaming become more and more mainstream. I do expect perhaps in the five-year timeframe that we will first deal with data as streaming and then at rest, but the worlds are starting to merge. And we even see some vendors bringing products to market, such as K2View, Hazelcast, and RisingWave Labs. So, in addition to all those core data platform vendors adding these capabilities, there are new vendors approaching this market as well. >> I like the tough grading system, and it's not trivial. And when you talk to practitioners doing this stuff, there's still some complications in the data pipeline. And so, but I think, you're right, it probably was a yellow plus. Doug Henschen, data lakehouses will emerge as dominant. When you talk to people about lakehouses, practitioners, they all use that term. They certainly use the term data lake, but now, they're using lakehouse more and more. What's your thoughts on here? Why the green? What's your evidence there? >> Well, I think, I was accurate. I spoke about it specifically as something that vendors would be pursuing. And we saw yet more lakehouse advocacy in 2022. Google introduced its BigLake service alongside BigQuery. Salesforce introduced Genie, which is really a lakehouse architecture. And it was a safe prediction to say vendors are going to be pursuing this in that AWS, Cloudera, Databricks, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce now, IBM, all advocate this idea of a single platform for all of your data. Now, the trend was also supported in 2023, in that we saw a big embrace of Apache Iceberg in 2022. That's a structured table format. It's used with these lakehouse platforms. It's open, so it ensures portability and it also ensures performance. And that's a structured table that helps with the warehouse side performance. But among those announcements, Snowflake, Google, Cloud Era, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, all embraced Iceberg. But keep in mind, again, I'm talking about this as something that vendors are pursuing as their approach. So, they're advocating end users. It's very cutting edge. I'd say the top, leading edge, 5% of of companies have really embraced the lakehouse. I think, we're now seeing the fast followers, the next 20 to 25% of firms embracing this idea and embracing a lakehouse architecture. I recall Christian Kleinerman at the big Snowflake event last summer, making the announcement about Iceberg, and he asked for a show of hands for any of you in the audience at the keynote, have you heard of Iceberg? And just a smattering of hands went up. So, the vendors are ahead of the curve. They're pushing this trend, and we're now seeing a little bit more mainstream uptake. >> Good. Doug, I was there. It was you, me, and I think, two other hands were up. That was just humorous. (Doug laughing) All right, well, so I liked the fact that we had some yellow and some green. When you think about these things, there's the prediction itself. Did it come true or not? There are the sub predictions that you guys make, and of course, the degree of difficulty. So, thank you for that open assessment. All right, let's get into the 2023 predictions. Let's bring up the predictions. Sanjeev, you're going first. You've got a prediction around unified metadata. What's the prediction, please? >> So, my prediction is that metadata space is currently a mess. It needs to get unified. There are too many use cases of metadata, which are being addressed by disparate systems. For example, data quality has become really big in the last couple of years, data observability, the whole catalog space is actually, people don't like to use the word data catalog anymore, because data catalog sounds like it's a catalog, a museum, if you may, of metadata that you go and admire. So, what I'm saying is that in 2023, we will see that metadata will become the driving force behind things like data ops, things like orchestration of tasks using metadata, not rules. Not saying that if this fails, then do this, if this succeeds, go do that. But it's like getting to the metadata level, and then making a decision as to what to orchestrate, what to automate, how to do data quality check, data observability. So, this space is starting to gel, and I see there'll be more maturation in the metadata space. Even security privacy, some of these topics, which are handled separately. And I'm just talking about data security and data privacy. I'm not talking about infrastructure security. These also need to merge into a unified metadata management piece with some knowledge graph, semantic layer on top, so you can do analytics on it. So, it's no longer something that sits on the side, it's limited in its scope. It is actually the very engine, the very glue that is going to connect data producers and consumers. >> Great. Thank you for that. Doug. Doug Henschen, any thoughts on what Sanjeev just said? Do you agree? Do you disagree? >> Well, I agree with many aspects of what he says. I think, there's a huge opportunity for consolidation and streamlining of these as aspects of governance. Last year, Sanjeev, you said something like, we'll see more people using catalogs than BI. And I have to disagree. I don't think this is a category that's headed for mainstream adoption. It's a behind the scenes activity for the wonky few, or better yet, companies want machine learning and automation to take care of these messy details. We've seen these waves of management technologies, some of the latest data observability, customer data platform, but they failed to sweep away all the earlier investments in data quality and master data management. So, yes, I hope the latest tech offers, glimmers that there's going to be a better, cleaner way of addressing these things. But to my mind, the business leaders, including the CIO, only want to spend as much time and effort and money and resources on these sorts of things to avoid getting breached, ending up in headlines, getting fired or going to jail. So, vendors bring on the ML and AI smarts and the automation of these sorts of activities. >> So, if I may say something, the reason why we have this dichotomy between data catalog and the BI vendors is because data catalogs are very soon, not going to be standalone products, in my opinion. They're going to get embedded. So, when you use a BI tool, you'll actually use the catalog to find out what is it that you want to do, whether you are looking for data or you're looking for an existing dashboard. So, the catalog becomes embedded into the BI tool. >> Hey, Dave Menninger, sometimes you have some data in your back pocket. Do you have any stats (chuckles) on this topic? >> No, I'm glad you asked, because I'm going to... Now, data catalogs are something that's interesting. Sanjeev made a statement that data catalogs are falling out of favor. I don't care what you call them. They're valuable to organizations. Our research shows that organizations that have adequate data catalog technologies are three times more likely to express satisfaction with their analytics for just the reasons that Sanjeev was talking about. You can find what you want, you know you're getting the right information, you know whether or not it's trusted. So, those are good things. So, we expect to see the capabilities, whether it's embedded or separate. We expect to see those capabilities continue to permeate the market. >> And a lot of those catalogs are driven now by machine learning and things. So, they're learning from those patterns of usage by people when people use the data. (airy laughs) >> All right. Okay. Thank you, guys. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Tony Bear, let's bring up the predictions. You got something in here about the modern data stack. We need to rethink it. Is the modern data stack getting long at the tooth? Is it not so modern anymore? >> I think, in a way, it's got almost too modern. It's gotten too, I don't know if it's being long in the tooth, but it is getting long. The modern data stack, it's traditionally been defined as basically you have the data platform, which would be the operational database and the data warehouse. And in between, you have all the tools that are necessary to essentially get that data from the operational realm or the streaming realm for that matter into basically the data warehouse, or as we might be seeing more and more, the data lakehouse. And I think, what's important here is that, or I think, we have seen a lot of progress, and this would be in the cloud, is with the SaaS services. And especially you see that in the modern data stack, which is like all these players, not just the MongoDBs or the Oracles or the Amazons have their database platforms. You see they have the Informatica's, and all the other players there in Fivetrans have their own SaaS services. And within those SaaS services, you get a certain degree of simplicity, which is it takes all the housekeeping off the shoulders of the customers. That's a good thing. The problem is that what we're getting to unfortunately is what I would call lots of islands of simplicity, which means that it leads it (Dave laughing) to the customer to have to integrate or put all that stuff together. It's a complex tool chain. And so, what we really need to think about here, we have too many pieces. And going back to the discussion of catalogs, it's like we have so many catalogs out there, which one do we use? 'Cause chances are of most organizations do not rely on a single catalog at this point. What I'm calling on all the data providers or all the SaaS service providers, is to literally get it together and essentially make this modern data stack less of a stack, make it more of a blending of an end-to-end solution. And that can come in a number of different ways. Part of it is that we're data platform providers have been adding services that are adjacent. And there's some very good examples of this. We've seen progress over the past year or so. For instance, MongoDB integrating search. It's a very common, I guess, sort of tool that basically, that the applications that are developed on MongoDB use, so MongoDB then built it into the database rather than requiring an extra elastic search or open search stack. Amazon just... AWS just did the zero-ETL, which is a first step towards simplifying the process from going from Aurora to Redshift. You've seen same thing with Google, BigQuery integrating basically streaming pipelines. And you're seeing also a lot of movement in database machine learning. So, there's some good moves in this direction. I expect to see more than this year. Part of it's from basically the SaaS platform is adding some functionality. But I also see more importantly, because you're never going to get... This is like asking your data team and your developers, herding cats to standardizing the same tool. In most organizations, that is not going to happen. So, take a look at the most popular combinations of tools and start to come up with some pre-built integrations and pre-built orchestrations, and offer some promotional pricing, maybe not quite two for, but in other words, get two products for the price of two services or for the price of one and a half. I see a lot of potential for this. And it's to me, if the class was to simplify things, this is the next logical step and I expect to see more of this here. >> Yeah, and you see in Oracle, MySQL heat wave, yet another example of eliminating that ETL. Carl Olofson, today, if you think about the data stack and the application stack, they're largely separate. Do you have any thoughts on how that's going to play out? Does that play into this prediction? What do you think? >> Well, I think, that the... I really like Tony's phrase, islands of simplification. It really says (Tony chuckles) what's going on here, which is that all these different vendors you ask about, about how these stacks work. All these different vendors have their own stack vision. And you can... One application group is going to use one, and another application group is going to use another. And some people will say, let's go to, like you go to a Informatica conference and they say, we should be the center of your universe, but you can't connect everything in your universe to Informatica, so you need to use other things. So, the challenge is how do we make those things work together? As Tony has said, and I totally agree, we're never going to get to the point where people standardize on one organizing system. So, the alternative is to have metadata that can be shared amongst those systems and protocols that allow those systems to coordinate their operations. This is standard stuff. It's not easy. But the motive for the vendors is that they can become more active critical players in the enterprise. And of course, the motive for the customer is that things will run better and more completely. So, I've been looking at this in terms of two kinds of metadata. One is the meaning metadata, which says what data can be put together. The other is the operational metadata, which says basically where did it come from? Who created it? What's its current state? What's the security level? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The good news is the operational stuff can actually be done automatically, whereas the meaning stuff requires some human intervention. And as we've already heard from, was it Doug, I think, people are disinclined to put a lot of definition into meaning metadata. So, that may be the harder one, but coordination is key. This problem has been with us forever, but with the addition of new data sources, with streaming data with data in different formats, the whole thing has, it's been like what a customer of mine used to say, "I understand your product can make my system run faster, but right now I just feel I'm putting my problems on roller skates. (chuckles) I don't need that to accelerate what's already not working." >> Excellent. Okay, Carl, let's stay with you. I remember in the early days of the big data movement, Hadoop movement, NoSQL was the big thing. And I remember Amr Awadallah said to us in theCUBE that SQL is the killer app for big data. So, your prediction here, if we bring that up is SQL is back. Please elaborate. >> Yeah. So, of course, some people would say, well, it never left. Actually, that's probably closer to true, but in the perception of the marketplace, there's been all this noise about alternative ways of storing, retrieving data, whether it's in key value stores or document databases and so forth. We're getting a lot of messaging that for a while had persuaded people that, oh, we're not going to do analytics in SQL anymore. We're going to use Spark for everything, except that only a handful of people know how to use Spark. Oh, well, that's a problem. Well, how about, and for ordinary conventional business analytics, Spark is like an over-engineered solution to the problem. SQL works just great. What's happened in the past couple years, and what's going to continue to happen is that SQL is insinuating itself into everything we're seeing. We're seeing all the major data lake providers offering SQL support, whether it's Databricks or... And of course, Snowflake is loving this, because that is what they do, and their success is certainly points to the success of SQL, even MongoDB. And we were all, I think, at the MongoDB conference where on one day, we hear SQL is dead. They're not teaching SQL in schools anymore, and this kind of thing. And then, a couple days later at the same conference, they announced we're adding a new analytic capability-based on SQL. But didn't you just say SQL is dead? So, the reality is that SQL is better understood than most other methods of certainly of retrieving and finding data in a data collection, no matter whether it happens to be relational or non-relational. And even in systems that are very non-relational, such as graph and document databases, their query languages are being built or extended to resemble SQL, because SQL is something people understand. >> Now, you remember when we were in high school and you had had to take the... Your debating in the class and you were forced to take one side and defend it. So, I was was at a Vertica conference one time up on stage with Curt Monash, and I had to take the NoSQL, the world is changing paradigm shift. And so just to be controversial, I said to him, Curt Monash, I said, who really needs acid compliance anyway? Tony Baer. And so, (chuckles) of course, his head exploded, but what are your thoughts (guests laughing) on all this? >> Well, my first thought is congratulations, Dave, for surviving being up on stage with Curt Monash. >> Amen. (group laughing) >> I definitely would concur with Carl. We actually are definitely seeing a SQL renaissance and if there's any proof of the pudding here, I see lakehouse is being icing on the cake. As Doug had predicted last year, now, (clears throat) for the record, I think, Doug was about a year ahead of time in his predictions that this year is really the year that I see (clears throat) the lakehouse ecosystems really firming up. You saw the first shots last year. But anyway, on this, data lakes will not go away. I've actually, I'm on the home stretch of doing a market, a landscape on the lakehouse. And lakehouse will not replace data lakes in terms of that. There is the need for those, data scientists who do know Python, who knows Spark, to go in there and basically do their thing without all the restrictions or the constraints of a pre-built, pre-designed table structure. I get that. Same thing for developing models. But on the other hand, there is huge need. Basically, (clears throat) maybe MongoDB was saying that we're not teaching SQL anymore. Well, maybe we have an oversupply of SQL developers. Well, I'm being facetious there, but there is a huge skills based in SQL. Analytics have been built on SQL. They came with lakehouse and why this really helps to fuel a SQL revival is that the core need in the data lake, what brought on the lakehouse was not so much SQL, it was a need for acid. And what was the best way to do it? It was through a relational table structure. So, the whole idea of acid in the lakehouse was not to turn it into a transaction database, but to make the data trusted, secure, and more granularly governed, where you could govern down to column and row level, which you really could not do in a data lake or a file system. So, while lakehouse can be queried in a manner, you can go in there with Python or whatever, it's built on a relational table structure. And so, for that end, for those types of data lakes, it becomes the end state. You cannot bypass that table structure as I learned the hard way during my research. So, the bottom line I'd say here is that lakehouse is proof that we're starting to see the revenge of the SQL nerds. (Dave chuckles) >> Excellent. Okay, let's bring up back up the predictions. Dave Menninger, this one's really thought-provoking and interesting. We're hearing things like data as code, new data applications, machines actually generating plans with no human involvement. And your prediction is the definition of data is expanding. What do you mean by that? >> So, I think, for too long, we've thought about data as the, I would say facts that we collect the readings off of devices and things like that, but data on its own is really insufficient. Organizations need to manipulate that data and examine derivatives of the data to really understand what's happening in their organization, why has it happened, and to project what might happen in the future. And my comment is that these data derivatives need to be supported and managed just like the data needs to be managed. We can't treat this as entirely separate. Think about all the governance discussions we've had. Think about the metadata discussions we've had. If you separate these things, now you've got more moving parts. We're talking about simplicity and simplifying the stack. So, if these things are treated separately, it creates much more complexity. I also think it creates a little bit of a myopic view on the part of the IT organizations that are acquiring these technologies. They need to think more broadly. So, for instance, metrics. Metric stores are becoming much more common part of the tooling that's part of a data platform. Similarly, feature stores are gaining traction. So, those are designed to promote the reuse and consistency across the AI and ML initiatives. The elements that are used in developing an AI or ML model. And let me go back to metrics and just clarify what I mean by that. So, any type of formula involving the data points. I'm distinguishing metrics from features that are used in AI and ML models. And the data platforms themselves are increasingly managing the models as an element of data. So, just like figuring out how to calculate a metric. Well, if you're going to have the features associated with an AI and ML model, you probably need to be managing the model that's associated with those features. The other element where I see expansion is around external data. Organizations for decades have been focused on the data that they generate within their own organization. We see more and more of these platforms acquiring and publishing data to external third-party sources, whether they're within some sort of a partner ecosystem or whether it's a commercial distribution of that information. And our research shows that when organizations use external data, they derive even more benefits from the various analyses that they're conducting. And the last great frontier in my opinion on this expanding world of data is the world of driver-based planning. Very few of the major data platform providers provide these capabilities today. These are the types of things you would do in a spreadsheet. And we all know the issues associated with spreadsheets. They're hard to govern, they're error-prone. And so, if we can take that type of analysis, collecting the occupancy of a rental property, the projected rise in rental rates, the fluctuations perhaps in occupancy, the interest rates associated with financing that property, we can project forward. And that's a very common thing to do. What the income might look like from that property income, the expenses, we can plan and purchase things appropriately. So, I think, we need this broader purview and I'm beginning to see some of those things happen. And the evidence today I would say, is more focused around the metric stores and the feature stores starting to see vendors offer those capabilities. And we're starting to see the ML ops elements of managing the AI and ML models find their way closer to the data platforms as well. >> Very interesting. When I hear metrics, I think of KPIs, I think of data apps, orchestrate people and places and things to optimize around a set of KPIs. It sounds like a metadata challenge more... Somebody once predicted they'll have more metadata than data. Carl, what are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Yeah, I think that what Dave is describing as data derivatives is in a way, another word for what I was calling operational metadata, which not about the data itself, but how it's used, where it came from, what the rules are governing it, and that kind of thing. If you have a rich enough set of those things, then not only can you do a model of how well your vacation property rental may do in terms of income, but also how well your application that's measuring that is doing for you. In other words, how many times have I used it, how much data have I used and what is the relationship between the data that I've used and the benefits that I've derived from using it? Well, we don't have ways of doing that. What's interesting to me is that folks in the content world are way ahead of us here, because they have always tracked their content using these kinds of attributes. Where did it come from? When was it created, when was it modified? Who modified it? And so on and so forth. We need to do more of that with the structure data that we have, so that we can track what it's used. And also, it tells us how well we're doing with it. Is it really benefiting us? Are we being efficient? Are there improvements in processes that we need to consider? Because maybe data gets created and then it isn't used or it gets used, but it gets altered in some way that actually misleads people. (laughs) So, we need the mechanisms to be able to do that. So, I would say that that's... And I'd say that it's true that we need that stuff. I think, that starting to expand is probably the right way to put it. It's going to be expanding for some time. I think, we're still a distance from having all that stuff really working together. >> Maybe we should say it's gestating. (Dave and Carl laughing) >> Sorry, if I may- >> Sanjeev, yeah, I was going to say this... Sanjeev, please comment. This sounds to me like it supports Zhamak Dehghani's principles, but please. >> Absolutely. So, whether we call it data mesh or not, I'm not getting into that conversation, (Dave chuckles) but data (audio breaking) (Tony laughing) everything that I'm hearing what Dave is saying, Carl, this is the year when data products will start to take off. I'm not saying they'll become mainstream. They may take a couple of years to become so, but this is data products, all this thing about vacation rentals and how is it doing, that data is coming from different sources. I'm packaging it into our data product. And to Carl's point, there's a whole operational metadata associated with it. The idea is for organizations to see things like developer productivity, how many releases am I doing of this? What data products are most popular? I'm actually in right now in the process of formulating this concept that just like we had data catalogs, we are very soon going to be requiring data products catalog. So, I can discover these data products. I'm not just creating data products left, right, and center. I need to know, do they already exist? What is the usage? If no one is using a data product, maybe I want to retire and save cost. But this is a data product. Now, there's a associated thing that is also getting debated quite a bit called data contracts. And a data contract to me is literally just formalization of all these aspects of a product. How do you use it? What is the SLA on it, what is the quality that I am prescribing? So, data product, in my opinion, shifts the conversation to the consumers or to the business people. Up to this point when, Dave, you're talking about data and all of data discovery curation is a very data producer-centric. So, I think, we'll see a shift more into the consumer space. >> Yeah. Dave, can I just jump in there just very quickly there, which is that what Sanjeev has been saying there, this is really central to what Zhamak has been talking about. It's basically about making, one, data products are about the lifecycle management of data. Metadata is just elemental to that. And essentially, one of the things that she calls for is making data products discoverable. That's exactly what Sanjeev was talking about. >> By the way, did everyone just no notice how Sanjeev just snuck in another prediction there? So, we've got- >> Yeah. (group laughing) >> But you- >> Can we also say that he snuck in, I think, the term that we'll remember today, which is metadata museums. >> Yeah, but- >> Yeah. >> And also comment to, Tony, to your last year's prediction, you're really talking about it's not something that you're going to buy from a vendor. >> No. >> It's very specific >> Mm-hmm. >> to an organization, their own data product. So, touche on that one. Okay, last prediction. Let's bring them up. Doug Henschen, BI analytics is headed to embedding. What does that mean? >> Well, we all know that conventional BI dashboarding reporting is really commoditized from a vendor perspective. It never enjoyed truly mainstream adoption. Always that 25% of employees are really using these things. I'm seeing rising interest in embedding concise analytics at the point of decision or better still, using analytics as triggers for automation and workflows, and not even necessitating human interaction with visualizations, for example, if we have confidence in the analytics. So, leading companies are pushing for next generation applications, part of this low-code, no-code movement we've seen. And they want to build that decision support right into the app. So, the analytic is right there. Leading enterprise apps vendors, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, they're all building smart apps with the analytics predictions, even recommendations built into these applications. And I think, the progressive BI analytics vendors are supporting this idea of driving insight to action, not necessarily necessitating humans interacting with it if there's confidence. So, we want prediction, we want embedding, we want automation. This low-code, no-code development movement is very important to bringing the analytics to where people are doing their work. We got to move beyond the, what I call swivel chair integration, between where people do their work and going off to separate reports and dashboards, and having to interpret and analyze before you can go back and do take action. >> And Dave Menninger, today, if you want, analytics or you want to absorb what's happening in the business, you typically got to go ask an expert, and then wait. So, what are your thoughts on Doug's prediction? >> I'm in total agreement with Doug. I'm going to say that collectively... So, how did we get here? I'm going to say collectively as an industry, we made a mistake. We made BI and analytics separate from the operational systems. Now, okay, it wasn't really a mistake. We were limited by the technology available at the time. Decades ago, we had to separate these two systems, so that the analytics didn't impact the operations. You don't want the operations preventing you from being able to do a transaction. But we've gone beyond that now. We can bring these two systems and worlds together and organizations recognize that need to change. As Doug said, the majority of the workforce and the majority of organizations doesn't have access to analytics. That's wrong. (chuckles) We've got to change that. And one of the ways that's going to change is with embedded analytics. 2/3 of organizations recognize that embedded analytics are important and it even ranks higher in importance than AI and ML in those organizations. So, it's interesting. This is a really important topic to the organizations that are consuming these technologies. The good news is it works. Organizations that have embraced embedded analytics are more comfortable with self-service than those that have not, as opposed to turning somebody loose, in the wild with the data. They're given a guided path to the data. And the research shows that 65% of organizations that have adopted embedded analytics are comfortable with self-service compared with just 40% of organizations that are turning people loose in an ad hoc way with the data. So, totally behind Doug's predictions. >> Can I just break in with something here, a comment on what Dave said about what Doug said, which (laughs) is that I totally agree with what you said about embedded analytics. And at IDC, we made a prediction in our future intelligence, future of intelligence service three years ago that this was going to happen. And the thing that we're waiting for is for developers to build... You have to write the applications to work that way. It just doesn't happen automagically. Developers have to write applications that reference analytic data and apply it while they're running. And that could involve simple things like complex queries against the live data, which is through something that I've been calling analytic transaction processing. Or it could be through something more sophisticated that involves AI operations as Doug has been suggesting, where the result is enacted pretty much automatically unless the scores are too low and you need to have a human being look at it. So, I think that that is definitely something we've been watching for. I'm not sure how soon it will come, because it seems to take a long time for people to change their thinking. But I think, as Dave was saying, once they do and they apply these principles in their application development, the rewards are great. >> Yeah, this is very much, I would say, very consistent with what we were talking about, I was talking about before, about basically rethinking the modern data stack and going into more of an end-to-end solution solution. I think, that what we're talking about clearly here is operational analytics. There'll still be a need for your data scientists to go offline just in their data lakes to do all that very exploratory and that deep modeling. But clearly, it just makes sense to bring operational analytics into where people work into their workspace and further flatten that modern data stack. >> But with all this metadata and all this intelligence, we're talking about injecting AI into applications, it does seem like we're entering a new era of not only data, but new era of apps. Today, most applications are about filling forms out or codifying processes and require a human input. And it seems like there's enough data now and enough intelligence in the system that the system can actually pull data from, whether it's the transaction system, e-commerce, the supply chain, ERP, and actually do something with that data without human involvement, present it to humans. Do you guys see this as a new frontier? >> I think, that's certainly- >> Very much so, but it's going to take a while, as Carl said. You have to design it, you have to get the prediction into the system, you have to get the analytics at the point of decision has to be relevant to that decision point. >> And I also recall basically a lot of the ERP vendors back like 10 years ago, we're promising that. And the fact that we're still looking at the promises shows just how difficult, how much of a challenge it is to get to what Doug's saying. >> One element that could be applied in this case is (indistinct) architecture. If applications are developed that are event-driven rather than following the script or sequence that some programmer or designer had preconceived, then you'll have much more flexible applications. You can inject decisions at various points using this technology much more easily. It's a completely different way of writing applications. And it actually involves a lot more data, which is why we should all like it. (laughs) But in the end (Tony laughing) it's more stable, it's easier to manage, easier to maintain, and it's actually more efficient, which is the result of an MIT study from about 10 years ago, and still, we are not seeing this come to fruition in most business applications. >> And do you think it's going to require a new type of data platform database? Today, data's all far-flung. We see that's all over the clouds and at the edge. Today, you cache- >> We need a super cloud. >> You cache that data, you're throwing into memory. I mentioned, MySQL heat wave. There are other examples where it's a brute force approach, but maybe we need new ways of laying data out on disk and new database architectures, and just when we thought we had it all figured out. >> Well, without referring to disk, which to my mind, is almost like talking about cave painting. I think, that (Dave laughing) all the things that have been mentioned by all of us today are elements of what I'm talking about. In other words, the whole improvement of the data mesh, the improvement of metadata across the board and improvement of the ability to track data and judge its freshness the way we judge the freshness of a melon or something like that, to determine whether we can still use it. Is it still good? That kind of thing. Bringing together data from multiple sources dynamically and real-time requires all the things we've been talking about. All the predictions that we've talked about today add up to elements that can make this happen. >> Well, guys, it's always tremendous to get these wonderful minds together and get your insights, and I love how it shapes the outcome here of the predictions, and let's see how we did. We're going to leave it there. I want to thank Sanjeev, Tony, Carl, David, and Doug. Really appreciate the collaboration and thought that you guys put into these sessions. Really, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Valente for theCUBE, signing off for now. Follow these guys on social media. Look for coverage on siliconangle.com, theCUBE.net. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

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

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas, "theCube" is on our fourth day of covering AWS re:Invent, live from the Venetian Expo Center. This week has been amazing. We've created a ton of content, as you know, 'cause you've been watching. But, there's been north of 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. We've had amazing conversations across the AWS ecosystem. Lisa Martin, Paul Gillan. Paul, what's your, kind of, take on day four of the conference? It's still highly packed. >> Oh, there's lots of people here. (laughs) >> Yep. Unusual for the final day of a conference. I think Werner Vogels, if I'm pronouncing it right kicked things off today when he talked about asymmetry and how the world is, you know, asymmetric. We build symmetric software, because it's convenient to do so, but asymmetric software actually scales and evolves much better. And I think that that was a conversation starter for a lot of what people are talking about here today, which is how the cloud changes the way we think about building software. >> Absolutely does. >> Our next guest, Holger Mueller, that's one of his key areas of focus. And Holger, welcome, thanks for joining us on the "theCube". >> Thanks for having me. >> What did you take away from the keynote this morning? >> Well, how do you feel on the final day of the marathon, right? We're like 23, 24 miles. Hit the ball yesterday, right? >> We are going strong Holger. And, of course, >> Yeah. >> you guys, we can either talk about business transformation with cloud or the World Cup. >> Or we can do both. >> The World Cup, hands down. World Cup. (Lisa laughs) Germany's out, I'm unbiased now. They just got eliminated. >> Spain is out now. >> What will the U.S. do against Netherlands tomorrow? >> They're going to win. What's your forecast? U.S. will win? >> They're going to win 2 to 1. >> What do you say, 2:1? >> I'm optimistic, but realistic. >> 3? >> I think Netherlands. >> Netherlands will win? >> 2 to nothing. >> Okay, I'll vote for the U.S.. >> Okay, okay >> 3:1 for the U.S.. >> Be optimistic. >> Root for the U.S.. >> Okay, I like that. >> Hope for the best wherever you work. >> Tomorrow you'll see how much soccer experts we are. >> If your prediction was right. (laughs) >> (laughs) Ja, ja. Or yours was right, right, so. Cool, no, but the event, I think the event is great to have 50,000 people. Biggest event of the year again, right? Not yet the 70,000 we had in 2019. But it's great to have the energy. I've never seen the show floor going all the way down like this, right? >> I haven't either. >> I've never seen that. I think it's a record. Often vendors get the space here and they have the keynote area, and the entertainment area, >> Yeah. >> and the food area, and then there's an exposition, right? This is packed. >> It's packed. >> Maybe it'll pay off. >> You don't see the big empty booths that you often see. >> Oh no. >> Exactly, exactly. You know, the white spaces and so on. >> No. >> Right. >> Which is a good thing. >> There's lots of energy, which is great. And today's, of course, the developer day, like you said before, right now Vogels' a rockstar in the developer community, right. Revered visionary on what has been built, right? And he's becoming a little professorial is my feeling, right. He had these moments before too, when it was justifying how AWS moved off the Oracle database about the importance of data warehouses and structures and why DynamoDB is better and so on. But, he had a large part of this too, and this coming right across the keynotes, right? Adam Selipsky talking about Antarctica, right? Scott against almonds and what went wrong. He didn't tell us, by the way, which often the tech winners forget. Scott banked on technology. He had motorized sleds, which failed after three miles. So, that's not the story to tell the technology. Let everything down. Everybody went back to ponies and horses and dogs. >> Maybe goes back to these asynchronous behavior. >> Yeah. >> The way of nature. >> And, yesterday, Swami talking about the bridges, right? The root bridges, right? >> Right. >> So, how could Werner pick up with his video at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> And then talk about space and other things? So I think it's important to educate about event-based architecture, right? And we see this massive transformation. Modern software has to be event based, right? Because, that's how things work and we didn't think like this before. I see this massive transformation in my other research area in other platforms about the HR space, where payrolls are being rebuilt completely. And payroll used to be one of the three peaks of ERP, right? You would size your ERP machine before the cloud to financial close, to run the payroll, and to do an MRP manufacturing run if you're manufacturing. God forbid you run those three at the same time. Your machine wouldn't be able to do that, right? So it was like start the engine, start the boosters, we are running payroll. And now the modern payroll designs like you see from ADP or from Ceridian, they're taking every payroll relevant event. You check in time wise, right? You go overtime, you take a day of vacation and right away they trigger and run the payroll, so it's up to date for you, up to date for you, which, in this economy, is super important, because we have more gig workers, we have more contractors, we have employees who are leaving suddenly, right? The great resignation, which is happening. So, from that perspective, it's the modern way of building software. So it's great to see Werner showing that. The dirty little secrets though is that is more efficient software for the cloud platform vendor too. Takes less resources, gets less committed things, so it's a much more scalable architecture. You can move the events, you can work asynchronously much better. And the biggest showcase, right? What's the biggest transactional showcase for an eventually consistent asynchronous transactional application? I know it's a mouthful, but we at Amazon, AWS, Amazon, right? You buy something on Amazon they tell you it's going to come tomorrow. >> Yep. >> They don't know it's going to come tomorrow by that time, because it's not transactionally consistent, right? We're just making every ERP vendor, who lives in transactional work, having nightmares of course, (Lisa laughs) but for them it's like, yes we have the delivery to promise, a promise to do that, right? But they come back to you and say, "Sorry, we couldn't make it, delivery didn't work and so on. It's going to be a new date. We are out of the product.", right? So these kind of event base asynchronous things are more and more what's going to scale around the world. It's going to be efficient for everybody, it's going to be better customer experience, better employee experience, ultimately better user experience, it's going to be better for the enterprise to build, but we have to learn to build it. So big announcement was to build our environment to build better eventful applications from today. >> Talk about... This is the first re:Invent... Well, actually, I'm sorry, it's the second re:Invent under Adam Selipsky. >> Right. Adam Selipsky, yep. >> But his first year. >> Right >> We're hearing a lot of momentum. What's your takeaway with what he delivered with the direction Amazon is going, their vision? >> Ja, I think compared to the Jassy times, right, we didn't see the hockey stick slide, right? With a number of innovations and releases. That was done in 2019 too, right? So I think it's a more pedestrian pace, which, ultimately, is good for everybody, because it means that when software vendors go slower, they do less width, but more depth. >> Yeah. >> And depth is what customers need. So Amazon's building more on the depth side, which is good news. I also think, and that's not official, right, but Adam Selipsky came from Tableau, right? >> Yeah. So he is a BI analytics guy. So it's no surprise we have three data lake offerings, right? Security data lake, we have a healthcare data lake and we have a supply chain data lake, right? Where all, again, the epigonos mentioned them I was like, "Oh, my god, Amazon's coming to supply chain.", but it's actually data lakes, which is an interesting part. But, I think it's not a surprise that someone who comes heavily out of the analytics BI world, it's off ringside, if I was pitching internally to him maybe I'd do something which he's is familiar with and I think that's what we see in the major announcement of his keynote on Tuesday. >> I mean, speaking of analytics, one of the big announcements early on was Amazon is trying to bridge the gap between Aurora. >> Yep. >> And Redshift. >> Right. >> And setting up for continuous pipelines, continuous integration. >> Right. >> Seems to be a trend that is common to all database players. I mean, Oracle is doing the same thing. SAP is doing the same thing. MariaDB. Do you see the distinction between transactional and analytical databases going away? >> It's coming together, right? Certainly coming together, from that perspective, but there's a fundamental different starting point, right? And with the big idea part, right? The universal database, which does everything for you in one system, whereas the suite of specialized databases, right? Oracle is in the classic Oracle database in the universal database camp. On the other side you have Amazon, which built a database. This is one of the first few Amazon re:Invents. It's my 10th where there was no new database announced. Right? >> No. >> So it was always add another one specially- >> I think they have enough. >> It's a great approach. They have enough, right? So it's a great approach to build something quick, which Amazon is all about. It's not so great when customers want to leverage things. And, ultimately, which I think with Selipsky, AWS is waking up to the enterprise saying, "I have all this different database and what is in them matters to me." >> Yeah. >> "So how can I get this better?" So no surprise between the two most popular database, Aurora and RDS. They're bring together the data with some out of the box parts. I think it's kind of, like, silly when Swami's saying, "Hey, no ETL.". (chuckles) Right? >> Yeah. >> There shouldn't be an ETL from the same vendor, right? There should be data pipes from that perspective anyway. So it looks like, on the overall value proposition database side, AWS is moving closer to the universal database on the Oracle side, right? Because, if you lift, of course, the universal database, under the hood, you see, well, there's different database there, different part there, you do something there, you have to configure stuff, which is also the case but it's one part of it, right, so. >> With that shift, talk about the value that's going to be in it for customers regardless of industry. >> Well, the value for customers is great, because when software vendors, or platform vendors, go in depth, you get more functionality, you get more maturity you get easier ways of setting up the whole things. You get ways of maintaining things. And you, ultimately, get lower TCO to build them, which is super important for enterprise. Because, here, this is the developer cloud, right? Developers love AWS. Developers are scarce, expensive. Might not be want to work for you, right? So developer velocity getting more done with same amount of developers, getting less done, less developers getting more done, is super crucial, super important. So this is all good news for enterprise banking on AWS and then providing them more efficiency, more automation, out of the box. >> Some of your customer conversations this week, talk to us about some of the feedback. What's the common denominator amongst customers right now? >> Customers are excited. First of all, like, first event, again in person, large, right? >> Yeah. >> People can travel, people meet each other, meet in person. They have a good handle around the complexity, which used to be a huge challenge in the past, because people say, "Do I do this?" I know so many CXOs saying, "Yeah, I want to build, say, something in IoT with AWS. The first reference built it like this, the next reference built it completely different. The third one built it completely different again. So now I'm doubting if my team has the skills to build things successfully, because will they be smart enough, like your teams, because there's no repetitiveness and that repetitiveness is going to be very important for AWS to come up with some higher packaging and version numbers.", right? But customers like that message. They like that things are working better together. They're not missing the big announcement, right? One of the traditional things of AWS would be, and they made it even proud, as a system, Jassy was saying, "If we look at the IT spend and we see something which is, like, high margin for us and not served well and we announced something there, right?" So Quick Start, Workspaces, where all liaisons where AWS went after traditional IT spend and had an offering. We haven't had this in 2019, we don't have them in 2020. Last year and didn't have it now. So something is changing on the AWS side. It's a little bit too early to figure out what, but they're not chewing off as many big things as they used in the past. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Did you get the sense that... Keith Townsend, from "The CTO Advisor", was on earlier. >> Yep. >> And he said he's been to many re:Invents, as you have, and he said that he got the sense that this is Amazon's chance to do a victory lap, as he called it. That this is a way for Amazon to reinforce the leadership cloud. >> Ja. >> And really, kind of, establish that nobody can come close to them, nobody can compete with them. >> You don't think that- >> I don't think that's at all... I mean, love Keith, he's a great guy, but I don't think that's the mindset at all, right? So, I mean, Jassy was always saying, "It's still the morning of the day in the cloud.", right? They're far away from being done. They're obsessed over being right. They do more work with the analysts. We think we got something right. And I like the passion, from that perspective. So I think Amazon's far from being complacent and the area, which is the biggest bit, right, the biggest. The only thing where Amazon truly has floundered, always floundered, is the AI space, right? So, 2018, Werner Vogels was doing more technical stuff that "Oh, this is all about linear regression.", right? And Amazon didn't start to put algorithms on silicon, right? And they have a three four trail and they didn't announce anything new here, behind Google who's been doing this for much, much longer than TPU platform, so. >> But they have now. >> They're keen aware. >> Yep. >> They now have three, or they own two of their own hardware platforms for AI. >> Right. >> They support the Intel platform. They seem to be catching up in that area. >> It's very hard to catch up on hardware, right? Because, there's release cycles, right? And just the volume that, just talking about the largest models that we have right now, to do with the language models, and Google is just doing a side note of saying, "Oh, we supported 50 less or 30 less, not little spoken languages, which I've never even heard of, because they're under banked and under supported and here's the language model, right? And I think it's all about little bit the organizational DNA of a company. I'm a strong believer in that. And, you have to remember AWS comes from the retail side, right? >> Yeah. >> Their roll out of data centers follows their retail strategy. Open secret, right? But, the same thing as the scale of the AI is very very different than if you take a look over at Google where it makes sense of the internet, right? The scale right away >> Right. >> is a solution, which is a good solution for some of the DNA of AWS. Also, Microsoft Azure is good. There has no chance to even get off the ship of that at Google, right? And these leaders with Google and it's not getting smaller, right? We didn't hear anything. I mean so much focused on data. Why do they focus so much on data? Because, data is the first step for AI. If AWS was doing a victory lap, data would've been done. They would own data, right? They would have a competitor to BigQuery Omni from the Google side to get data from the different clouds. There's crickets on that topic, right? So I think they know that they're catching up on the AI side, but it's really, really hard. It's not like in software where you can't acquire someone they could acquire in video. >> Not at Core Donovan. >> Might play a game, but that's not a good idea, right? So you can't, there's no shortcuts on the hardware side. As much as I'm a software guy and love software and don't like hardware, it's always a pain, right? There's no shortcuts there and there's nothing, which I think, has a new Artanium instance, of course, certainly, but they're not catching up. The distance is the same, yep. >> One of the things is funny, one of our guests, I think it was Tuesday, it was, it was right after Adam's keynote. >> Sure. >> Said that Adam Selipsky stood up on stage and talked about data for 52 minutes. >> Yeah. Right. >> It was timed, 52 minutes. >> Right. >> Huge emphasis on that. One of the things that Adam said to John Furrier when they were able to sit down >> Yeah >> a week or so ago at an event preview, was that CIOs and CEOs are not coming to Adam to talk about technology. They want to talk about transformation. They want to talk about business transformation. >> Sure, yes, yes. >> Talk to me in our last couple of minutes about what CEOs and CIOs are coming to you saying, "Holger, help us figure this out. We have to transform the business." >> Right. So we advise, I'm going quote our friends at Gartner, once the type A company. So we'll use technology aggressively, right? So take everything in the audience with a grain of salt, followers are the laggards, and so on. So for them, it's really the cusp of doing AI, right? Getting that data together. It has to be in the cloud. We live in the air of infinite computing. The cloud makes computing infinite, both from a storage, from a compute perspective, from an AI perspective, and then define new business models and create new best practices on top of that. Because, in the past, everything was fine out on premise, right? We talked about the (indistinct) size. Now in the cloud, it's just the business model to say, "Do I want to have a little more AI? Do I want a to run a little more? Will it give me the insight in the business?". So, that's the transformation that is happening, really. So, bringing your data together, this live conversation data, but not for bringing the data together. There's often the big win for the business for the first time to see the data. AWS is banking on that. The supply chain product, as an example. So many disparate systems, bring them them together. Big win for the business. But, the win for the business, ultimately, is when you change the paradigm from the user showing up to do something, to software doing stuff for us, right? >> Right. >> We have too much in this operator paradigm. If the user doesn't show up, doesn't find the click, doesn't find where to go, nothing happens. It can't be done in the 21st century, right? Software has to look over your shoulder. >> Good point. >> Understand one for you, autonomous self-driving systems. That's what CXOs, who're future looking, will be talked to come to AWS and all the other cloud vendors. >> Got it, last question for you. We're making a sizzle reel on Instagram. >> Yeah. >> If you had, like, a phrase, like, or a 30 second pitch that would describe re:Invent 2022 in the direction the company's going. What would that elevator pitch say? >> 30 second pitch? >> Yeah. >> All right, just timing. AWS is doing well. It's providing more depth, less breadth. Making things work together. It's catching up in some areas, has some interesting offerings, like the healthcare offering, the security data lake offering, which might change some things in the industry. It's staying the course and it's going strong. >> Ah, beautifully said, Holger. Thank you so much for joining Paul and me. >> Might have been too short. I don't know. (laughs) >> About 10 seconds left over. >> It was perfect, absolutely perfect. >> Thanks for having me. >> Perfect sizzle reel. >> Appreciate it. >> We appreciate your insights, what you're seeing this week, and the direction the company is going. We can't wait to see what happens in the next year. And, yeah. >> Thanks for having me. >> And of course, we've been on so many times. We know we're going to have you back. (laughs) >> Looking forward to it, thank you. >> All right, for Holger Mueller and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCube", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonen is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity. He's sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise, new to the job at Cohesity. He was kind enough to sit in, and help us break down what's happening at re:Invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago. When we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we- learned back then. >> Oh God, I remember those, Yeah. >> But it made me think, wow, now you know IBM's more of a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore. Everybody talks about Amazon. So you wonder, 20 years from now, you know what it's going to be. But >> Well- >> Werner's amazing. >> He pulled out a 24 year old document. >> Yup. >> That he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. >> His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting. But, you know- >> Yeah, I mean I've had synonyms for things. Timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Jony Ive in design. >> Dave: Yeah. >> You got to think about people like Werner in architecture and just the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep him engaged that long... I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched since I was at the first AWS re:Invent conference, at time was President SAP and there was only a thousand people at this event, okay? Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guest of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events, and watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Ruba's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019, before Covid, watched the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know 'about what you guys think, it feels like it's back to 2019 levels. >> I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019 but some people have said that it's about the same. >> I think it was 60,000 versus 50,000. >> Yes. So close. >> It was a little bigger in 2019. But it feels like it's more active. >> And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here but it was 25,000, which was amazing 'cause it was right in that little space between Omicron, before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question and this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity and I know you've been following them since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? What do you think? >> I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. In some senses he knows the Amazon culture from prior, when he was running sales and marketing prior. But then he took the time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the... I, you know, sent him a text, "You should be really proud of what you accomplished", but you know, I think he also, I asked him when I saw him a few weeks ago "Are you going to come to re:Invent?" And he says, "No, I want to leave this to be Adam's show." And Adam's going to have a slightly different view. His keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it. Taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focused in infrastructure. Many of their platform services are evolved. Many of their, even application services. I'm surprised when I talk to customers. Like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer. It's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Ayer to Connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more... The data centric stack has gotten, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity, security, data protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both... I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. >> I wonder the, you know, the marketplace... there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way softwares, enterprise software is sold? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich with your head in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it? $150 billion worth of revenue. Even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still aggregatively between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand 1 trillion or 2 trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big things of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size, their growth is stable, but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that. I think the move to the Cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the Cloud. >> Oh, it is. >> That happened 15 years ago. I mean, begin within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? You've got Workday, you've got, you know, others that are so some of those apps markets are are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. >> Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, you're awesome operator. Even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which you know, that's a two-tool star, multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given... Well maybe, maybe- >> Maybe me. >> You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where where visibility is so unpredictable. The economy is sling-shotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go Covid, go, go go build, build, build supply, then pull back. And now going forward, now pulling back. Slootman said, you know, on the call, "Hey the guide, is the guide." He said, "we put it out there, We do our best to hit it." But you had CrowdStrike had issues you know, mid-market, ServiceNow. I saw McDermott on the other day on the, on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so (indistinct) >> But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, Octa now pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility, forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. >> Yep. >> 'Course Dell getting killed in the client. But so what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? >> I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10 x better than everybody else. And differentiate, differentiate. 'Cause in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges, and then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast. In the case of Roe, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators, also that I respect. He calls these speedboats, and you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security. But he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you got core, your core beachhead 10 x better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Newton said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders giants." I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately Microsoft and Google where I need to. And security. Part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do with that? First time ever done in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders with them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself "how do you make sure you're getting your, like Amazon, their top hundred customers spending more with that?" So I think the the playbook evolves, and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. >> I'll say. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they... 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. And, but their guide was still, you know, pretty aggressive. You know, so it's like, do you, you know, when it when it's good times you go, "hey, we can we can guide conservatively and know we can beat it." But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far 'cause your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky- >> But Dave, I think listen, at the end of the day, I mean every CEO should not be worried about the short term up and down in the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing data management company on the back of that platform, because he's eyeing the market that, not just Teradata occupies today, but now Oracle occupies or other databases, right? So his tam as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean Datadog's another company, 75% growth. >> Yeah. >> At 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. >> Amazing. >> When they're going after, not just the observability market, they're eating up the sim market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, that's, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tams. You know, to me that's very inspiring. >> I get it. >> Sanjay: That's what I seek to do at our com. >> I get that it's a marathon, but you know, when you're at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean listen, you weren't micromanaging it. >> You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on so forth. >> Yeah. >> Because you want to create shareholder value. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying that you should not but I think in obsession with that, you know, in a short term, >> Going to kill ya. >> Makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing in the long term. Now in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value... Look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. >> Dave: Yeah, big time. >> But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four a 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Do you the... I want to ask you about something Arvind Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in a deflation, in a adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? >> Not all forms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from, whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanleys, or Goldman Sachs. The financial analysts. And I think there's a gluc in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the cloud 100 companies, which are the hottest private companies, and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some, because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era, where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible, that I think is going to continue to an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now, in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And you know, by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a ransomware, 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a bank. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. >> But I think what's happening now is actually IT spending's pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so, okay, and then you, yeah, you've got the, you know the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows but the market's actually pretty good. >> Yeah. >> You know, relative to other downturns that if this is not a... We're not actually not in a downturn. >> Yeah. >> Not yet anyway. It may be. >> There's a valuation there. >> You have to prepare. >> Not sales. >> Yeah, that's right. >> When I was on CNBC, I said "listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine." You have to prepare for potentially your worst. And if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe. You know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad. But if you belt tightening, if you're focused in operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. >> All right. I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions. Expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. (group laughs) >> As my... I wish India was in the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians at all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, >> You play cricket, though. >> I'm a US man first. I would love to see one of Brazil, or Argentina. And as a Messi person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradonna winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries, if the US doesn't make it far enough. But first loyalty to the US team, and then after one of the Latin American countries. >> And you think one of the Latin American countries is best bet to win or? >> I don't know. It's hard to tell. They're all... What happens now at this stage >> So close, right? >> is anybody could win. >> Yeah. You just have lots of shots of gold. I'm a big soccer fan. It could, I mean, I don't know if the US is favored to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. >> I think they get Netherlands next, right? >> That's tough. >> Really tough. >> But... The European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America with team one of Argentina, or Brazil. That's my prediction. >> I know you're a big Cricket fan. Are you able to follow Cricket the way you like? >> At god unearthly times the night because they're in Australia, right? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. >> I watched the T-20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, you know, I'm not rapidly following every single game but the World Cup games, I catch you. >> Yeah, it's good. >> It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. >> That's great. >> You get into basketball now, I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? >> Well- >> This year. >> I'll tell you what- >> As a Boston Celtics- >> I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. >> Yeah. >> It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early. Like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting. >> Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. >> Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you. Love the expert analysis. >> Sanjay Poonen. Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. re:Invent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lighthearted soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, beautiful cloud community, and welcome back to AWS reInvent. It is day four here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My voice can feel it, clearly. I'm Savannah Peterson with my co-host Paul Gillin. Paul, how you doing? >> Doing fine, Savannah. >> Are your feet about where my voice is? >> Well, getting little rest here as we have back to back segments. >> Yeah, yeah, we'll keep you off those. Very excited about this next segment. We get to have a chat with one of our very favorite analysts, Keith Townsend. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Savannah Page. I'm going to use your south names, Savannah Page. Thank you for having me, Paul. Good to see you again. It's been been too long since CubeCon Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Well at that beautiful lisp, love that. Keith, how's the show been for you so far? >> It has been great. I tweeted it a couple of days ago. Amazon reInvent is back. >> Savannah: Whoo! Love that. >> 50, 60 thousand people, you know? After 40 thousand, I stop countin'. It has been an amazing show. I don't know if it's just the assignment of returning, but easily the best reInvent of the four that I've attended. >> Savannah: Love that. >> Paul: I love that we have you here because, you know, we tend to get anchored to these desks, and we don't really get a sense of what's going on out there. You've been spending the last four days traversing the floor and talking to people. What are you hearing? Are there any mega themes that are emerging? >> Keith: So, a couple of mega themes is... We were in the Allen session with Adam, and Adam bought up the idea of hybrid cloud. At the 2019 show, that would be unheard of. There's only one cloud, and that's the AWS cloud, when you're at the Amazon show. Booths, folks, I was at the VMware booth and there's a hybrid cloud sign session. People are talking about multicloud. Yes, we're at the AWS show, but the reality that most customers' environments are complex. Adam mentioned that it's hybrid today and more than likely to be hybrid in the future in Amazon, and the ecosystem has adjusted to that reality. >> Paul: Now, is that because they want sell more outposts? >> You know, outpost is definitely a part of the story, but it's a tactile realization that outposts alone won't get it. So, you know, from Todd Consulting, to Capgemini, to PWC, to many of the integrations on the show floor... I even saw company that's doing HP-UX in the cloud or on-prem. The reality is these, well, we've deemed these legacy systems aren't going anywhere. AWS announced the mainframe service last year for converting mainframe code into cloud workloads, and it's just not taking on the, I think, the way that the Amazon would like, and that's a reality that is too complex for all of it to run in the cloud. >> Paul: So it sounds like the strategy is to envelop and consume then if you have mainframe conversion services and HP-UX in the cloud, I mean, you're talking about serious legacy stuff there. >> Keith: You're talking about serious legacy stuff. They haven't de-emphasized their relationship with VMware. You know, hybrid is not a place, it is a operating model. So VMware cloud on AWS allows you to do both models concurrently if you have those applications that need layer two. You have these workloads that just don't... SAP just doesn't... Sorry, AWS, SAP in the cloud and EC2 just doesn't make financial sense. It's a reality. It's accepting of that and meeting customers where they're at. >> And all the collaboration, I mean, you've mentioned so many companies in that answer, and I think it's very interesting to see how much we're all going to have to work together to make the cloud its own operating system. Cloud as an OS came up on our last conversation here and I think it's absolutely fascinating. >> Keith: Yeah, cloud is the OS I think is a thing. This idea that I'm going to use the cloud as my base layer of abstraction. I've talked to a really interesting startup... Well actually it's a open source project cross plane of where they're taking that cloud model and now I can put my VMware vsphere, my AWS, GCP, et cetera, behind that and use that operating model to manage my overall infrastructure. So, the maturity of the market has fascinated me over the past year, year and a half. >> It really feels like we're at a new inflection point. I totally agree. I want to talk about something completely different. >> Keith: Okay. >> Because I know that we both did this challenge. So one of the things that's really inspiring quite frankly about being here at AWS reInvent, and I know you all at home don't have an opportunity to walk the floor and get the experience and get as many steps as Paul gets in, but there's a real emphasis on giving back. This community cares about giving back and AWS is doing a variety of different activations to donate to a variety of different charities. And there's a DJ booth. I've been joking. It kind of feels like you're arriving at a rave when you get to reInvent. And right next to that, there is a hydrate and help station with these reusable water bottles. This is actually firm. It's not one of those plastic ones that's going to end up in the recycled bin or the landfill. And every single time that you fill up your water bottle, AWS will donate $3 to help women in Kenya get access to water. One of the things that I found really fascinating about the activation is women in sub-Saharan Africa spend 16 million hours carrying water a day, which is a wild concept to think about, and water is heavy. Keith, my man, I know that you did the activation. They had you carrying two 20 pound jugs of water. >> Keith: For about 15 feet. It's not the... >> (laughs) >> 20 pound jugs of water, 20 gallons, whatever the amount is. It was extremely heavy. I'm a fairly sizeable guy. Six four, six five. >> You're in good shape, yeah. >> Keith: Couple of a hundred pounds. >> Yeah. >> Keith: And I could not imagine spending that many hours simply getting fresh water. We take it for granted. Every time I run the water in the sink, my family gets on me because I get on them when they leave the sink water. It's like my dad's left the light on. If you leave the water on in my house, you are going to hear it from me because, you know, things like this tickle in my mind like, wow, people walk that far. >> Savannah: That's your whole day. >> Just water, and that's probably not even enough water for the day. >> Paul: Yeah. We think of that as being, like, an 18th century phenomenon, but it's very much today in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. >> I know, and we're so privileged. For me, it was just, we work in technology. Everyone here is pretty blessed, and to do that activation really got my head in the right space to think, wow I'm so lucky. The team here, the fabulous production team, can go refill my water bottle. I mean, so simple. They've also got a fitness activation going on. You can jump on a bike, a treadmill, and if you work out for five minutes, they donate $5 to Fred Hutch up in Seattle. And that was nice. I did a little cross-training in between segments yesterday and I just, I really love seeing that emphasis. None of this matters if we're not taking care of community. >> Yeah, I'm going to go out and google Fred Hutch, and just donate the five bucks. 'Cause I'm not, I'm not. >> (laughs) >> I'll run forever, but I'm not getting on a bike. >> This from a guy who did 100 5Ks in a row last year. >> Yeah. I did 100 5Ks in a row, and I'm not doing five minutes on a bike. That's it. That's crazy, right? >> I mean there is a treadmill And they have the little hands workout thing too if you want. >> About five minutes though. >> Savannah: I know. >> Like five minutes is way longer than what you think it is. >> I mean, it's true. I was up there in a dress in sequence. Hopefully, I didn't scar any anyone on the show floor yesterday. It's still toss up. >> I'm going to take us back to back. >> Take us back Paul. >> Back to what we were talking about. I want to know what you're hearing. So we've had a lot of people on this show, a lot of vendors on the show who have said AWS is our most important cloud partner, which would imply that AWS's lead is solidifying its lead and pulling away from the pack as the number one. Do you hear that as well? Or is that lip service? >> Keith: So I always think about AWS reInvent as the Amazon victory lap. This is where they come and just thumb their noses at all the other cloud providers and just show how far ahead they're are. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon's keynotes, so I hadn't watched it yet, but at that keynote, this is where they literally take the victory lap and say that we're going to expose what we did four or five years ago on stage, and what we did four or five years ago is ahead of every cloud provider with maybe the exception of GCP and they're maybe three years behind. So customers are overwhelmingly choosing Amazon for these reasons. Don't get me wrong, Corey Quinn, Gardner folks, really went at Adam yesterday about Amazon had three majors outages in December last year. AWS has way too many services that are disconnected, but from the pure capability, I talked to a born in the cloud data protection company who could repatriate their data protection and storage on-prem private data center, save money. Instead, they double down on Amazon. They're using, they modernize their application and they're reduced their cost by 60 to 70%. >> Massive. >> This is massive. AWS is keeping up with customers no matter where they're at on the spectrum. >> Savannah: I love that you use the term victory lap. We've had a lot of folks from AWS here up on the show this week, and a couple of them have said they live for this. I mean, and it's got to be pretty cool. You've got 70 thousand plus people obsessed with your product and so many different partners doing so many different things from the edge to hospital to the largest companies on earth to the Israeli Ministry of Defense we were just talking about earlier, so everybody needs the cloud. I feel like that's where we're at. >> Keith: Yeah, and the next step, I think the next level opportunity for AWS is to get to that analyst or that citizen developer, being able to enable the end user to use a lambda, use these data services to create new applications, and the meanwhile, there's folks on the show floor filling that gap that enable develop... the piece of owner, the piece of parlor owner, to create a web portal that compares his prices and solutions to other vendors in his area and adjust dynamically. You go into a restaurant now and there is no price menu. There's a QR code that Amazon is powering much of that dynamic relationship between the restaurateur, the customer, and even the menu and availability. It's just a wonderful time. >> I always ask for the print menu. I'm sorry. >> Yeah. You want the printed menu. >> Look down, my phone doesn't work. >> Gimme something I could shine my light on. >> I know you didn't have have a chance to look at Vogel's keynote yet, but I mean you mentioned citizen developer. One of the things they announced this morning was essentially a low code lambda interface. So you can plug, take your lamb dysfunctions and do drag and drop a connection between them. So they are going after that market. >> Keith: So I guess I'll take my victory lap because that was my prediction. That's where Amazon's next... >> Well done, Keith. >> Because Lambda is that thing when you look at what server list was and the name of the concept of being, not having to have to worry about servers in your application development, the logical next step, I won't take too much of a leap. That logical first step is, well, code less code. This is something that Kelsey Hightower has talked about a lot. Low code, no code, the ability to empower people without having these artificial barriers, learning how to code in a different language. This is the time where I can go to Valencia, it's pronounced, where I can go to Valencia and not speak Spanish and just have my phone. Why can't we do, at business value, for people who have amazing ideas and enable those amazing ideas before I have to stick a developer in between them and the system. >> Paul: Low-code market is growing 35% a year. It's not surprising, given the potential that's out there. >> And as a non-technical person, who works in technology, I've been waiting for this moment. So keep predicting this kind of thing, Keith. 'Cause hopefully it'll keep happening. Keith, I'm going to give you the challenge we've been giving all of our guests this week. >> Keith: Okay. >> And I know you're going to absolutely crush this. So we are looking for your 32nd Instagram real, sizzle hot take, biggest takeaway from this year's show. >> So 32nd Instagram, I'll even put it on TikTok. >> Savannah: Heck yeah. >> Hybrid cloud, hybrid infrastructure. This is way bigger than Amazon. Whether we're talking about Amazon, AWS, I mean AWS's solutions, Google Cloud, Azure, OCI, on-prem. Customers want it all. They want a way to manage it all, and they need the skill and tools to enable their not-so-growing work force to do it. That is, that's AWS reInvent 2019 to 2022. >> Absolutely nailed it. Keith Townsend, it is always such a joy to have you here on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us >> Savannah Page. Great to have you. Paul, you too. You're always a great co-host. >> (laughs) We co-hosted for three days. >> We've got a lot of love for each other here. And we have even more love for all of you tuning into our fabulous livestream from AWS reInvent Las Vegas, Nevada, with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Good Morning Cloud community and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are at AWS Reinvent. It is day four here on the Cube. I'm Savannah Peterson with Lisa Martin. You are looking fantastic. Day four, we've done 45 interviews. How are you feeling? Oh, >>Great. I can't believe it's day four. The cube will be producing over 100 interviews. >>Impressive. Right >>On this stage where there are two sets, and of course we have the set upstairs as well. It's amazing how much content we've created, how many great conversations we've had, right? And the excitement around AWS and the, and the community. >>Yeah. I feel like we've learned so much together. Love co-hosting with you, and so excited for our first conversation this morning with Wira. Welcome, Tim and Kashmira, welcome to the show. How you doing? You both look great for day four. Thank >>You. Yeah, we're doing good. Great. We're doing good. Ready to go. Day four, let's go. >>That's the spirit. That's exactly the energy we need here on the cube. So just in case someone in the audience is not familiar, tell us about Wipro. >>So Wipro is a global consulting company and we help transform our customers and their businesses. >>Transformation's been a super hot topic here at the show, quite frankly a big priority, especially with cost cutting and everything else that's going on. How, how do you do that? How do you help customers do that? Has >>Me run? So we, we, so we have our A strategy, which we call our full stride cloud strategy. So particularly from a cloud perspective here, obviously with aws, we have end to end client services. So from high end strategic consulting through customer journeys, technology implementation, all the way through to our managed services. So we help customers with the end to end journey, particularly as here we're talking about cloud, but also business transformation as well. And we have, you know, a whole host of technologies. So about a few years ago we made an announcement around a billion investment in cloud casual and that Yeah, absolutely. A cool billion and just a cool billion. Yeah. And that pocket >>Change. Exactly. >>Right. And that investment. Over the last few years, we've acquired a number of really exciting companies like Capco, which is a consulting company in the financial services space. We've acquired design companies, a company called Design it, looking at customer journeys and user experience, and then also technology companies called Rising, which looks after the whole SAP space. So we've kind of got the end to end solutions and technologies. And then we also invest in what we call Wipro Ventures. These are really innovative, exciting startups. We invest in those companies to really drive transformation. And the final thing that really brings the whole thing together is that we have decades of experience in engineering. That's kind of the heart of where we come from. So that experience all of that together really helps our clients to transform their business. And particularly as we're talking about cloud helps us to transform the cloud. Now what we are really hoping is that we can help our clients become what we call intelligent enterprises, and we are focusing more and more on customer outcomes and really helping them with those business outcomes. >>Yeah. It doesn't matter what we do if there isn't that business outcome. >>Yeah. That's what it's all about. I'm curious, Tim, to get your, as the America's cloud leader, one of the things that, that our boss, John Furrier, who is the co CEO of the Cube, was able to do every year, he gets to sit down with the head of AWS for a preview of reinvent, right? He's been doing this for 10 years now, and one of the things that Adam Olitsky said to him, this is something about a week or so ago, is CIOs and CEOs are not coming to me to talk about technology. They wanna talk about transformation. Sure, yeah. Business transformation, not an amorphous topic of digital transformation. Are you hearing the same? >>Absolutely. Right. So I think this is my seventh reinvent, right? And I think six, seven years ago, the majority of the conversations you would've had are about technology, right? Great technology, but kind of technology for it to solve it problems. You know, how do I, how do I migrate, how do I modernize, how do I use data? How do I make all this stuff happen? Right now it's about how do I drive new business opportunities, new revenue streams, how do I drive more efficiencies through the manufacturing 2.0 or what have you, right? Yeah. One really good example, like take, take medical devices, right? So like a connected defibrillator, right? Anytime you're building a, what they call an IOT device or a connected device, right? You have four competing an edge device in the space, an edge device, yeah. Right? You have four competing elements, right? >>You've got form factor, power, connectivity and intelligence, and all those things compete, right? I can have all the power if I want, if I can have something as biggest as a tape, right? You know, I can have satellite if I, it gets right off if I can plug it in somewhere. But when you're talking about an implanted defibrillator, right? That, that all competes. So you have an engineering problem, an engineering challenge that's based on a device, right? And then it's gotta connect to the cloud, right? So you have a lot of AWS services, I ot, core device shadowing, all sorts of things. That individual patient then, so, so there's the engineering challenge of, okay, I wanna build a device, I gotta prototype it, I gotta design it, I gotta build it at scale, I have to support it. Then you have a patient, right? Which is the end goal of the business is the patient care. >>They have a console at home that connects to that defibrillator via Bluetooth, let's say. And that's where you get your device updates, just like your laptop, right? You know, now push from where updates to your chest. Yes. Device, ot. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna do this every Thursday, right? So now you've very quickly move to a patient experience and that patient experience will very greatly, right? You know, based on age and exposure to technology and all other sorts of things, how diligent they are. Do they do the update every week Right. To their primary care provider? And then what we're, we're also hearing, okay, so like Kashmira mentioned, we, we can, we can have that design discussion, right? Yeah. We can have the engineering device discussion with our device, device lab. Then we can have our, you know, what's the, what's the patient experience, but then broader, what's the patient experience as they move, as we all do through a healthcare, that's a healthcare network, it's a provider network, it's a series of hospitals and providers. So what does that big picture and ecosystem look like? And it's, you haven't heard me mention server or data center or any of that stuff? No. Right? This is >>The most human anecdote we've had on >>Show. Fantastic. This >>Sidebar. Okay. I mean it great. Keep going. It's wonderful. And it's, and it's, it's fascinating because none of this happens or is possible without cloud and, and the type of services that AWS is, is releasing out into their, into their, into their, into the world, right? But it very quickly moves from technology to human. It very quickly moves from individual to ecosystem to to, to partner and culture and, you know, society, right? So, so these are the types of conversations we're having. I mean, this is kind of stuff that gets me outta bed in the morning. So it's great, right? It's great that, I love that. It's great that we've moved, we moved into that space. >>Well, it's, I mean the human element is so important. Every, every company has to be a data company. Hospitals, absolutely. Grocery stores, retailers, you name it. And what we're seeing is this, and we talk about data democratization all the time. Well, another thing that Adam Slosky told John Furrier is that the role of, of data analysts is gonna, is going to change, maybe go away or the, or the term because data needs to be everywhere. The doctors need the data. Absolutely. Every person in the organization needs to be able to analyze data to deliver outcomes. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's fundamental part of our strategies. And when we are looking at, you know, data is everywhere, you need to really think about how do you align to it. But we are looking at it from an industry perspective. So when we're looking at solutions for our clients, we're looking at how do we deliver data solutions for our bank? How do we deliver data solutions in healthcare? How do we deliver data solutions in various different industry? So >>Many different verticals that you're >>Touching. Yeah, all the different verticals. So that's, you know, we have like a four point strategy industry is the first one. So we have been really worked with a lot of clients around migrations and modernizations. What we're moving to now is really this industry play. So this week we've spent a lot of time with our energy and utilities clients and the AWS practice at banking and financial services, which is a very significant part of our business. Also cloud automotive. This is a really, really, you know, the fascinat, this is so exciting, but the fundamental part of that, it's very, is data, right? It's all hits on data. So it was really great to hear some of the announcements this week around the data piece announcements just for me, that's really exciting. Yeah. A couple of other things that when we're thinking about our overall focus and strategy is, you know, looking at business transformation is, as you mentioned, is the ecosystem. >>So how do we bring all this together? And it's really, we see ourselves as an ecosystem orchestrator, and we are really here to look at leveraging our relationship with the best partners. We've actually met 17 partners here this week and had client sessions with them. And that's, you know, working with the license of Snowflake and Data Break in the, in the data space, our long term partners like sap, ibm, VMware, and you know, and new partners like Con. And we are looking at how do we bring the best of this ecosystem orchestration so that to support those client business outcome. Sure. And then one final sort of pillar, sorry, is talent, right? So the biggest thing that everyone is thinking about and we all think about every single day is talent. So we've done two really exciting things this year. One has been around our own talent. >>So we've really looked at our own internal influences, people who are speaking to our clients every single day. Not so much the technology people, but the client people speaking to the client. And we've really raised the level of cloud fluency with these people so that they can really start to have that discussion. You know, and our clients, you know, they know this technology way better than us, you most of the time. And then secondly, we actually announced last week and, and you initiative, which we are calling skill skills, which is very well known to our AWS clients because AWS provide this skill, skill concept to their clients. But we are the first partner to do the skills. Skills Yeah. From a partnering perspective. And this is really gonna transform. So it's not just about training and enablement, it's actually about creating a journey for you to, you know, do your best work. >>Tim, what, how do you define cloud fluency? We were actually talking about it yesterday. Sure, sure. Yeah. And, and really kind of bringing that across an organization, but what, what does it take for an individual who may not be a technologist to become cloud fluent? >>Sure. Well, there's a couple, there's a couple angles to that, right? One is, one is how do you create cloud fluency for people who might already be technical, right? And that's, and that's, you know, I've spent over a decade with, you know, boutique disruptive consulting companies who live and die by whether they can attract and retain talent. And there's sort of four elements to that. It's, can you, can you show people they're gonna work on interesting stuff, right? Are they gonna be excited about what they do? Can you show that they're gonna expand their skill sets? Yep. Can you show them a career path? And you can, can you surround all of that with a supportive engineering first culture, right? That, you know, rewards for outcomes, but also creates this sort of community, right? Yeah. That's, that's one thing that sort of, you know, that that will be a natural entropy, people will be attracted to that. On the other side of it, as you create fluency, you kind of do it with the conversation that I just had, like around something like medical devices or something like the cloud car. When you just say, look, you start with something everybody already knows, right? We all know what patient care is like. We all know what autonomous vehicles is kind of like, right? And you work backwards from that and say, now here's, here's how all the pieces stitch together to create this end outcome for, for us and for our customers, for >>The, you know, I'm speaking my language, Tim. So I run a boutique consultancy, my talent go, I live and die on that. Quite frankly. It's everything, right? And, and it's so, wow, it's so important. I mean, in eliminating that churn at scale, how big is your team? Now I'm just thinking about this cause I'm sure you're, your talent retention has to be a challenge as well. Sure. >>So, so we have 25,000 woo professionals on aws trained on, you know, tech cloud technologies globally. Impressive. Yeah. And then we have, in terms of our go to market team, we've got 50 strong as well. Well, so we, these are people who are live and breathe aws, right? And speaking and working with the cloud. >>Let's hang out there a little bit. Tell us a little bit more about the partnership with aws. Cast me, >>Let's go to you. Yeah, so our partnership is, you know, it's 11 years strong. It's been an and a really, really great partnership's. >>How longs >>That's true. Yeah. >>No, is you, were, you're, you're like day ones there. That's Yeah. Real legacy it. >>Awesome. You know, this year excitingly, we actually won the APJ partner of dsi, partner of the year. Congratulations. >>Really casual. >>Yeah. Just like >>Married the lead there. Congratulations. >>Yeah. So that really is testament to how we're really knuckling down and working proactively to, to really support our clients. And, you know, the, the partnership is a really, really strong partnership. It's been there for many years with, you know, great solutions and engagement and many of the things I talked about in terms of our industry plays that we're driving. We've got a whole new set of competencies that we've launched, like a new energy competency this year. So we're focusing on industry and then also security, two new security competencies. And you know, what's really exciting on the security side, you saw the announcements around the security data lake, but we've been working over the last few months with Gary, me and his team, and actually are one of the first partners that are driving that initiative. So we're really proud to be part of that. So yeah. You know, and then there's a client engagement as well. So we have a dedicated team at AWS that works with our dedicated team. So we're supporting the client's needs day to day. >>Are you as customer obsessed as AWS is? Absolutely. I >>Figured so. Absolutely. Everything's about the customer. Nothing happens about >>That. Right? Well, you talked about outcomes, it's all about outcomes. >>Well, and I mean, quite literally going for the heart with the defibrillator analogy. No, I mean, you tell the customers at the heart of what you're doing, part of everything. Can't resist a good pun there. So as I warned you, we have a little challenge for you here on the cube. We're looking for your hot take your 32nd sound bite thought leadership. What's the biggest takeaway from the event and moving forward, looking into 2023? Tim, you're giving me that eye contact. I'm going to you first, >>Right? Okay, sure. Love to. So I don't know how hot a take it is, but I kind of see this transition as cloud, as the operating system, right? So, so let's take the, the what we call the cloud car project. We have the connected car. You know, a car is a durable good, and we all know, or there's been a lot of talk about the electric cars or the autonomous vehicles being like more of a computer than a vehicle, right? But a vehicle's supposed to last 10, 15, 20 years. Our laptops don't last 10, 15, 20 years. So there's this cell, there's this major challenge to say, how can I, how can I change the way the technology operates within the vehicle? So you see this transition to where instead of it being a car that, that has a computer, then it, the, the, the latest transition is to more of a computer that, that operates like a car. >>This new vehicle that's going to emerge is gonna be much like a cell phone, right? Where it, it traverses the world and depending on where it is, different things might be available, right? And, and how and how, how the actual technology, the software that is running will, will be, you know, sort of amorphous and move between different resources in the network on the car, everywhere else. And so that's a really different way of thinking about if, if we think about how quickly the Overton window, like what becomes normal, it changes over time. We're really getting to like a very fast movement of that into something like this vehicle's still gonna be something that we don't even maybe think of as a car anymore. Just the way that an iPhone isn't what we used to think of a phone at our >>Pocket computer. Yeah. What's in the mirror part? Great. >>That's kind my >>Take. Awesome. Right? Catch me man. >>Yeah, and I mean I, if I was to suggest that, you know, summarize it by simply, for me it's really focusing on industry solutions, delivering client outcomes, fundamentally underpinned by data security and sustainability. You know, I think Nailed it. >>Yeah. Knock it outta the park. Perfect little sound bite. That was fantastic. You both were a wonderful start to the day. Thank you so much for being here. Tim and Kashmir, absolute >>Pleasure. >>This is, this is a joy. We're gonna keep learning here on the cube. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fabulous AWS reinvent coverage here from Sin City with Lisa Martin. I'm Savannah Peterson and you are watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, it's CUBE's live coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here with Paul Gillen. Got a great guest coming up here, talking about cloud security, all things going on in the cloud. Paul, great day. How you doing? How you holding up? >> I'm about at the end of my, running on fumes, John. (John laughs) >> Let's bring it home. >> And we got another day coming up. >> Day three, let's bring it home, come on, let's go. Lot of energy. >> Lot of energy on the floor and certainly a lot of talk about security at this conference. Busy, busy market, lots of vendors. And one of the more notable ones, Cohesity, recently introduced a brand new suite, a brand new approach to security that combines data protection and security and backup. With us, to talk about that is Amith Nair, who is the Senior Vice president and General Manager of cloud at Cohesity. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Paul and John. >> So tell us about DataHawk, your new product. >> Yeah, just to set a little bit of perspective on Cohesity, and how we think about DataHawk and security in general is, Cohesity is the leading solution for data security and management. And if you think about all the pillars that we provide in terms of solution around that data solutions, so we have data protection, data security, data access, data mobility and data insights. So the focus for us over the last many months was really to make our data security solutions really strong. So generally when customers think about security, they think about starting with security at the perimeter, on the edge. They think about firewalls, network layer, and so on and so forth. But in the end, what they're really trying to protect is the data that aligns to what they're really trying to save. Right? So DataHawk was formulated and built in order to help extend our existing solutions to provide additional security, layers of security, and also work with partners to enable doing that. Many months ago, we released this product called FortKnox, which is our cyber vaulting solution. One that customers really love and use today. >> It's an air gap solution, right? >> It's an air gap solution with forum capabilities, and so on. Extremely liked by customers, very well adopted, and we extended that to provide lots more data classification capabilities, and ransomware checks as well. So malware checks in the product itself in terms of what it is being backed up. And is there malware in the backed up data and so on? >> Maybe, we can talk about the evolution of ransomware, because ransomware is getting a lot more sophisticated. It used to start at the end point and then penetrate into the network. Increasingly, now, we're seeing it move into the backup, and actually corrupt backup files before moving into the production data. How is ransomware evolving? >> I mean, there's a ransomware attack that's happening right now as we speak, right? What is it? One in every 11 seconds or so on. And it's getting very, very sophisticated. And you're absolutely right, the target early on used to be the network, or the firewall and so on and so forth. Now, it is the backup. So you have to be very smart about how you protect your backup and if you do get attacked, which a lot of CSOs are starting to realize, it's not about just preventing. But it's also what do you do if it does happen? How can you be resilient in the case of an attack? How can you recover if something happens? And that's where we come in to play as well. >> What's some of the state of the art posture, security posture and cyber resilient techniques? Can you share your observations on what are some of the current state of the art positions? I mean, besides they buy everything, and they want everything, but we're looking at a cost reduction, slow down in the recession, customer's going to look at belt tightening. We heard that from Adam Celeste. Has that changed or enhanced the posture, and impact to the resiliency on the cyber side? >> Yeah, I think customers are getting really smart in terms of how they're adopting cloud. We saw a tremendous amount of growth from a cloud usage perspective, I think, over the last two years and through the pandemic. But now they're getting smart about, "How am I consuming that cloud?" Which is where the consumption's starting to slow down. But that does not mean they're not using cloud, right? And security from a cloud perspective is way different from the old world, which was very static. You're in a completely dynamic environment now. So everybody talks about zero trust security. You have to have that level of no trust, trust nothing, authenticate everything, in terms of how you approach what connects to your network, what services connect to your network and so on. And we follow the same approach, but we also believe that one solution cannot solve it. And which is why we had this announcement around our security advisory council, and security partnership and alliances, where we are providing data to additional solutions, or insights into other security solutions that will help the customer in the end. We talked about how some customers have anywhere between 50 to 70 vendors on their network for security. We want to reduce that noise and that clutter, especially when it comes to cost and expenses. Right? >> Awesome. I want to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. You're new, relatively new to Cohesity, SVP, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the cloud. Obviously, AWS, the biggest cloud, there's other clouds. What attracted you to Cohesity? What was the key thing that attracted you to this company to take a leadership role as this next wave comes in for cloud, and security and what Cohesity is doing? >> Yeah, there are a couple of reasons. Number one and most important was the maturity of the product and the quality of the product. Mohit Aron was our founder, you know, known as the grandfather or as the father of hyperconverge networking. >> He's a legend. >> He's a legend, right? >> (laughs) Just say it. >> And he's built a phenomenal set of technologies that really helps customers and that brings me to the second point, which is customers. We are a customer-obsessed company. And as I was talking to Mohit and Sanjay was our CEO, and Lynn was our CMO and others in the company, it was very evident to me that the core DNA of the company is really helping our customers be successful. Those two things put together. And the third thing, really, I am very culturally-obsessed when it comes to how organizations are run. We have a very strong culture in terms of how we treat employees, how we build the right set of products, and how we go to market. Right? Those three things put together, helped me really make a decision. Obviously, the leadership team within Cohesity was top notch as well. So every one of them that I spoke to had that same core belief system. That had helped a lot. >> Sanjay's a good friend of theCUBE, we've interviewed him many times with VMware. Paul, you know Sanjay's, he loves to get on cam. We hope to have him on tomorrow, if we can get him on the calendar. But you know, Sanjay told me one time, "I never missed a quarter." In his SAP, VMware, he's proud. We'll see, Paul, we're- >> Well, I'm going to hold him to that. >> We better not miss a quarter, I'm going to hold him to that. How's business? How's it, healthy? >> It's been great. We are seeing consistent demand for all of our products. As you can see, we continue to release new products into the market that customers are asking for. We are listening to what customers really want. Our roadmap is really based on two things, customer demand and market and where the market is growing. We have to stay on top of how the market is evolving based on the new challenges that customers are facing. Right? So markets, we are doing really good, company continues to grow and Sanjay has been fantastic in terms of driving that leadership. >> Yeah, he's a good driver. And again, he's Mr. Quarter for a reason, he's disciplined. >> (laughs) Very disciplined. >> Another reason, initiative, Cohesity's is the data security alliance. You put together a group of about a dozen security companies. Getting security companies to work with each other is always a challenge. How did you convince them to join with you? >> Well, one, we aligned on a mission. I mean, in the end, all the partners that we are talking about, they all care about what customers want. And we talked earlier about having that, you know, what is that single pane of glass when it comes to security? Is there one? Probably not. But if you can reduce the chatter, and the noise amongst all these companies, that helps. The other thing is they also understood our mission was really around the security, around data. We talked earlier about how security used to be very parameter or centric, but what you're really trying to save and secure is your data, which is your Queen Bee. And so a couple of months ago at our customer advisory council, I talked about moving and shifting the focus of security to be very data centric. And what we do in this partnership and alliance is a true integration. So there's a lot of engineering work that goes in, is us providing insights around the data to the security partners who can then leverage that to help customers be protected early on. Conversely, they can provide insights into an attack that's emanating possibly, to let us know that there's something happening, so we can lock up the data. So it's a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between these partners and they all believe in that common cause of making sure the customers get protected. As we talked about earlier, lots of cyber attacks happening even as we speak, if we can collectively do something good in terms of making customers secure and successful, let's do it. >> So what will result from this alliance other than a press release? >> Customers will be successful, hopefully, not just protect customers from ransomware attacks, but also respond and recover if something does happen. We also announce our security council led by Kevin Mandia, and then we have some other big security advisors in that council as well. And that's been very helpful. So it's not just about the product itself, but it's also the collective experience of all these folks who can help and advise and coach CSOs, and other organizations on, what are the best practices? What are the things you're not really considering? What is the vision for you from an architecture standpoint? How is security threats starting to get more, and more mature? And how can you account for that? How can you reduce cost, to your point, right? How can you reduce cost when it comes to managing all these security solutions? >> No, there's no industry where working, it's more important for vendors to work together than in this one. >> Absolutely. I mean, especially for security, I don't think there's a one size fits all solution. So we have to work together. Right? >> What's your state of the union? You were at HashiCorp before you came here, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen a few cycles of innovation. We're in a really weird time right now, because AWS wasn't really as powerful in 2008, when the last recession was hard too. They weren't really that big then. Now, they're a big part of the economic equation. So agility means fast speed. Can they help us get out of the pandemic? Customer's going to tighten their belts? Is there going to be a pullback? Is there tech spending? All these questions are looming. What are your customers seeing? What do you think is going to happen given the history? 'Cause I don't see the building stopping. I think you'll see more cloud, more savings. So is there fine-tuning solutions? What are customers thinking like now? >> I mean, if you think back to the last recession, the last major one, 2009, that's really about the time when you saw customers thinking about that whole digital transformation, because they started understanding that the way to connect with customers is through a digital engagement. Right? Now, as we've gone through a 10, 15 year period where there has been a lot of digital transformation, there's been a lot of investment in the cloud. Cloud is no longer seen with suspicion. Now, it's about getting smart on how to use it, how to build the right applications. Are there the right set of applications that need to stay in the cloud? And there might be others that need to stay on-prem. Right? I've talked to customers and CIOs who've mentioned to me in the past, that they would go a hundred percent in the cloud, and six months later they come back and they're like, "Nope, you're not going a hundred percent in the cloud. Maybe it's 10% or 15%." >> So they're moving. So what's your plan? You're the GM, you're in charge, you've got to take that next hill. Is it a tailwind, headwind? You've got to navigate the waters here, so to speak, mixed metaphors, but for the most part, you got a business opportunity. >> Absolutely. >> What's the outlook look like? What's your vision? What's the plan? >> Yeah. When it comes to cloud, there are certain things that are a common denominator. Right? One is how do you enable not just applications that are completely on cloud, but also that's on-prem? So for us, that hybrid movement is extremely important. But to create a single seamless UI and experience from an end-customer perspective. So for me, maintaining that and more at team, the R and D team at Cohesity have done a phenomenal job around that. For me, it's to maintain that, and then build additional workloads that make sense from a customer standpoint. There's a lot of investment customers are making. We also have to make sure that they're utilized correctly, and their stored, backed up data, recovered in a way that makes sense for them. And then if things do go south in terms of attacks or other issues, how can we help them get back up to speed, and make sure their business does not suffer? Right? So all of those combined, I think from a cloud perspective, it's the agility, the scalability, and the speed and swiftness that we can work with. >> Well, it sounds like he's ready for the Instagram Real Challenge, our new format on theCUBE. We're going to do a little segment where you can deliver a YouTube Short, Instagram Reel, TikTok or CUBE Gem. More of a thought leadership soundbite for 30 seconds around your view of why is cloud important right now. What's going on at this event that people should pay attention to? What's Cohesity doing? If you can put together a reel, a sizzle reel, or a thought leadership statement. What would that be? >> It would be that cloud is important for any business to be successful. And that's a given right now. I mean, digital transformation is an overused term, but the reality is it's here to stay. And it is the reason why everybody has a mobile phone. Half the people walking on the floor right now is looking at their phone and walking around. And that's your engagement method. So if you don't transform yourself to be able to connect with your end-user, your customer, you will not be successful. And Cohesity can help you by making sure that all of that data that you have, everything that you need in order to be successful to drive that engagement with your customers secure is backed up. No matter what, we will get you back up and running, and you will be successful. And we are in the success journey with you. >> Amith Nair, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Cohesity, the Cloud. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. For Paul Gillen, my co-host. I'm John Furrier here, live on the floor, wrapping up day two, few more segments, stay with us. We got a lot of action coming. We'll be right back with more after the short break. theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (bright music)

(slow upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Sin City. We're here at AWS reInvent with wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with Dave Vellante, and very excited to have two exciting guests from Qlik and AARP with us. Molly and Samir, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> How's it been so far for you, Molly? >> It's been a great show so far. We've got a big booth presence out here. We've had a lot of people coming by, doing demo stations and just really, really coming to the voice of the customer, so we've really enjoyed the event. >> Ah, love a good VOC conversation myself. How about for you, Samir? >> Oh, it's been great meeting a lot of product folks, meeting a lot of other people, trying to do similar things that we're doing, getting confirmation we're doing the right thing, and learning new things. And obviously, you know, here with Molly, it's been a highlight of my experience. >> What's the best thing you learned from your peers, this week? >> You know, some of the things, that we're all talking about, is how do we get data in the right place at the right time? And, you know, that's something that people are now starting to think about. >> Very hot topic. >> You know, doing it, and then not only getting it to the right place, but taking insights and taking action on it as it's getting there. So those are the conversations that are getting around, in the circle I've been hanging around with. >> You hearing the same thing at the booth or? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And how are you guys responding? >> Well, I think, as a company, and the shifts in the market, people are really trying to determine what workloads belong in which Cloud, what belongs on-prem? And so talking about those realtime transformations, the integration points, the core systems they're coming from, and really how to unlock that data, is just really powerful and meaningful. So that's been a pretty consistent theme throughout the conference, and a lot of conversations that we have on a regular basis. >> I believe that, Molly, let's stick with you for a second. Just in case the audience isn't familiar, tell us a little more about Qlik. >> Yeah, so Qlik is a robust, end-to-end data pipeline. Starting with really looking at all of your source systems whether it's mainframe, SAP, relational database, kind of name your flavor as it's related to sources. Getting those sources over into the target landing spot whether it be Amazon, or other cloud players, or even if you're, if you're managing hybrid workloads. So that's kind of one piece of the end-to-end platform. And then the second piece is really having all that data, analytics ready, coming right through that real-time data pipeline, and really being able to use the data, to monetize the data, to make sense of the data. And then Qlik really does all that data preparation work underneath the visualization layer, which is where all the work happens. And then you get to see the output of that through the visualization of Qlik, which is, you know, the dashboards, the things that our people, people are used to seeing. >> I love that! So at AARP, what are you using Qlik for? What sort of dashboards are you pulling together? >> So when we started our journey to AWS, we knew that, you know, we're going to have our applications, they're distributed in the Cloud, but again, how do we get the data there, in the right place at the right time? So, as members are, taking action, they're calling into the call center, using our website, using our mobile apps. We want to want it to be able to take that information stream it, so we use Qlik, to take those changes when they happen as they happen, be able to stream it to Kafka and then push that data out to the applications that need it in the time that they needed it. So, instead of waiting for a batch job to happen overnight, we're able to now push this data in real time. And by doing that, we're able to personalize the engagement for our members. So if you come in, we know what you're doing, we can personalize the value that we put in front of you, and just make that engagement a lot more engaging for you. >> Yeah. >> And in the channel that you choose to want to come in with, right? Rather than a channel that we are trying to push to you. >> Everyone wants that personalized experience as we discussed, I love AARP, I've done a lot of work with AARP, I look forward to being a member, but in case the audience isn't familiar, you have the largest membership database of any company on Earth that I'm aware of. How many members does AARP have? >> We have nearly 38 million members, and 66,000 volunteers, and 2300 employees across every state in the United States. >> It's a perfect use case for Qlik, right? 'Cause you've been around for a while. You've got data in the million different places. You're trying to get, you've got a mainframe, right? You know, I hear Amazon's trying to put all the mainframes in the Cloud, but I'm guessing the business case isn't there for you. But you want the data that's coming out of that mainframe to be part of that data pipeline, right? So can you paint a picture, of how, what Molly was describing about the data pipeline, how that fits with AARP? >> Yeah, it's actually, it was a perfect use case. And you know, when we engaged with Qlik, what we wanted to be able to do is take that data in the mainframe, and get it distributed into the Cloud, accurately, securely, and make sure that we can track the lineage, and be able to say, hey, application A only needs name and address, application B needs, name, address, and payment. So we were able to do all of that within a couple of weeks, right? And getting that data out there, knowing that it's going to the right place, knowing it's secure, and knowing it's accurate, regardless of the application it goes to, we don't have to worry about seeking data across different applications. Now we know that there's a source of truth, and everything is done through the pipeline, and it's controlled in a way that, we can measure everything that's going through, how it's going through, and how it's being used by the applications, that are consuming it? >> So you've got the providence and the lineage of that data and that's what Qlik ensures, is that right? Is that your role or is that a partner role, combined? >> No, yes, that's absolutely Qlik's role. So for our new offering, Qlik Cloud data integration, it's a comprehensive solution, delivered as a service, delivers real time, automates, transformations, catalog and lineage, all extremely important. And in the case of Samir and AARP, they're trying to unlock the most valuable assets of their data in SAP and mainframe. And surprisingly, sometimes most valuable data in an organization is the hardest to actually get access to. >> Sure. >> So be, you know, just statistically, 70% of Fortune 500 companies still rely on mainframe. So when you think about that, and even when Samir and I are talking about it. >> That's a lot. >> Yeah. >> And that's a lot of scale, that's a lot of data. >> It's a lot of data. >> Yeah. >> So, you know, mainframe isn't a thing of the past. Companies are still relying on it. People have been saying that for years but when we're talking about getting the complex data out of there to really make something meaningful for AARP, we're really proud of the results, and the opportunity that we've been able to provide to really improve the member experience. And how people are able to consume AARP, and all the different offerings that they have? Kind of like you mentioned Savannah, and the way that you go about it. >> Well, it's also the high risk data. High value data, high risk data. You don't want to mess with it. You want to make sure that you've got that catalog to be able to say, okay, this is what we did with that data, this is where it came from. And then you essentially publish to other tools, analytic tools in the Cloud. Can you paint a picture of how that extends to the Cloud? >> Sure, so there's a couple of different things that we do with it. So once we get the data, into our streaming apps, we can publish it over to like our website. We can publish it to the call center, to mobile apps, to our data warehouse, where we can run analytics and AI on it. And then obviously a lot of our journeys, we use a journey orchestration tool, and we've built a CDP, a customer data platform, to get those insights in there, to drive, you know, personalization and experience. >> I'm smiling as you're talking, Samir, because I'm thinking of all the personalized experiences that my mother has with AARP, and it is so fun to learn about the technology that's serving that to her. >> Exactly. >> This segment actually becoming a bit more personal for me than I expected for a couple of reasons. So this is great. Molly, Qlik has been a part of the AWS ecosystem since the get go. How have things changed over the years? >> Yeah, so Qlik still remains the enterprise integration tool of choice for AWS especially- >> Let's call that a casual and just brag. >> Yeah. >> Because that's awesome. That's great, congratulations on that. >> Thank you for SAP and mainframe. So the relationship continues to evolve but we've been part of the ecosystem from since inception. So we look at, how we continue to evolve the partnership? And honestly, a lot of our customers landing spot is AWS. So the partnership evolves really on two fronts. One with Amazon itself, in a partnership lane, and two, with our customers, and what we're doing with them, and how we're able to really optimize what that looks like? And then secondly, earlier this year we announced an offering Amazon and Qlik, called Qlik Ramp, where we can come in and do, a half day architecture deep dive, look at SAP mainframe, and how they get to the Amazon landing spots, whether it's S3, Redshift, or EMR? So we got a lot of different things kind of going on in the Amazon ecosystem, whether it's customer forward and first, and how can we maximize the relationship spend et cetera, with Amazon. And then also how can we deliver, you know, kind of a shorter time to value throughout that process with something like a Qlik ramp, because we want to qualify, and solve customers needs, as equally as we want to you know, say when we're not the right fit. >> So data is a complicated- >> Love that honesty and transparency. >> Data is a complicated situation for most companies, right? And there's a lack of resource, lack of talent. There's hyper specialization. And you were just talking about the evolution of the Cloud and the relationship. How does automation fit into the equation? Are you able to automate a lot of that data integration through the pipeline? >> Yeah. >> Is it was a, what's your journey look like there? Were you resistant to that at first? 'Cause you got to trust the data. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so the first thing, we wanted to make sure is security right? We've got a lot of data, we're going to make sure privacy- >> Very personal data too. >> Exactly. And privacy and security is number one. So we want to make sure anything that we're doing with the data is secure, and it's not given out anywhere. In terms of automation, so what we've been able to do is being able to take these changes, and you know, in technology, the one thing you can guarantee is it's going to break. Network's going to go down, or a server goes down, a database goes down, and that's the only guarantee we have. And by using the product that we have today, we're able to take those outages, and minimize them because there's retry processes, there's ways of going back and saying, hey, I've missed this much data. How do we bring it back in? You don't want data to get out of sync because that causes downstream problems. >> Yeah. >> So all of that is done through the product, right? We don't have to worry about it. You know, we get notifications, but it's not like, oh, I've got to pay someone at two o'clock in the morning because the network's gone down and how's the data sync going to come back up, when it comes back up? All of that's done for us. >> Yeah, and just to add to that, automation, is a key component. I mean, the data engineering teams definitely see the value of automation and how we're able to deliver that. So, improving the experience but also the overall landscape of the environment is critical. >> Yeah, we've seen the stats, data scientists, data pro spend, you know, 80% of their time wrangling data, 20% of their time. >> Data preparation. >> You know extracting value from it. So. >> Yeah, it's so sad. It's such a waste of human capital, and you're obviously relieving that, and letting folks do their job more efficiently. >> The thing is too, you know, as I'm somebody who's love data you dive into the data, you get really excited then after a while you're like, Ugh! >> I'm still here. >> I'm slogging through this data. Taking a bath in it. >> But I think. >> I want to get to the insights. >> I think that world's changing a little bit. >> Yes, definitely. >> So as we're starting to get data that's coming through it's got high fidelity, and richness, right? So in the old days we'd put in a database, normalize it, and then, you know we'd go and do our magic, and hopefully, you know something comes out, and the least of frustration, you just spoke about. Well now, because it's moving in real time, and we can send the data to areas in the way we want it, and add automation, and machine learning on top of that, so that, now it becomes a commodity to massage that data into the in the format that you want it. Then you can concentrate on the value work, right? Which is really where people should be spending the time, rather than, oh, I've got to manipulate the data, make sure it's done in a consistent way, and then make sure it's compliant and done, the same way every single time. >> It may be too early to, you know quantify the business impact, but have you seen, for example, you know, what I was describing creates data silos. 'Cause nobody's going to use the data if it's not trusted. So what happens is it goes to a silo, they put a brick wall around it, and then, you know, they do their thing with it. They trust it for that one use case and then they don't share it. Has that begun to change as you've seen more integration that's automated and augmented? >> Absolutely. I mean, you know, if you're bringing in data and you're showing that it's consistent, and this is where governance and compliance comes in, right? So as long as you have a data catalog, you can make sure that this data's coming through with the lineage that you said is going to, here's the source, here's the target, here's who gets what they only need rather than giving them everything. And by being able to document that, in a way, that's automated rather than somebody going in, and running a report, it's key. Because that's where the trust comes in, rather than, oh, Samir has to go in and manipulate this stream so that, you know, Molly can get the reports she wants. Instead, hey, it's all going in there, the reports are coming out, they're audited, and that's where the trust factor comes. >> And that enables scale. >> Yeah. >> Cloud confidence and scale. Big topics of the show this week. >> Yep. >> It's been the whole thing. Molly, what's next for Qlik? >> Yeah, Qliks on a big journey. So we've released a lot of things most recently, Qlik Cloud data integration as a service, but we're just continuing to grow from a customer base, from a capabilities perspective. We also recently just became HIPAA compliant and went through some other services. >> Congratulations, that is not an easy process. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Yeah. >> And so for us it's really just about expanding and having, that same level of fidelity of the data, and really just getting all of that pushed out to the market so everybody really sees the full value of Qlik, and that we can make your data Qlik. And just for a minute, back to your earlier point. >> Beautiful pun drop there, Molly. Just going to see that. >> Thank you Savannah. >> Yeah. >> But back to your earlier point, just about the time that people are spending, when you're able to automate, and you're getting data delivered in real time, and operational systems are able to see that. 'Cause you're trying to create the least amount of disruption you can, right? 'Cause that's a critical part of the business. When you start to automate and relieve that burden then people have time to spend time on the real things. >> Right. >> Future forward, prescriptive analytics, machine learning, not data preparation, solving problems, fixing soft gaps. >> Staring a spreadsheet, yeah. >> Right? It's actually the full end-to-end pipeline. And so that's really where I feel like the power is unleashed. And as more sources and targets come to light, right? They're all over the showroom floor, so we don't have to mention any of 'em by name, but it's just continuing, to move into that world to have more SaaS integrations. And to be able to serve the customer, and meet them exactly where they're at, at the place that they want to be. And for Samir, and what we did in the transformation there, unlocking that data for mainframe and SAP, getting it into Qlik Cloud, has been a huge business driver for them. And so, because of partners like AWS and Samir and AARP, we're constantly evolving. And really trying to listen to the voice of the customer, to become better for all of you. >> Excellent. >> Love that community first attitude. Very clear that you both have it, both AARP and Qlik with that attitude. We have a new challenge this year to reInvent on theCUBE, little prompt here. >> Okay. >> We're going to put 30 seconds on the clock, although I'm not super crazy about watching the clock. So, feel comfortable with whatever however much time you need. >> Whatever works. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever works. But we're looking for equivocally, your Instagram reel, your hot take, your thought leadership, sizzle, with the key theme from this year's show. Molly, your smile is platinum and perfect. So I'm going to start with you. I feel like you've got this. >> Okay, great. >> Yeah. >> Just the closing statement is what you're looking for. >> Sure, yeah, sexy little sound bite. What do you, what's going to be your big takeaway from your experience here in Vegas this week? >> Yeah, so the experience at Vegas this week has been great but I think it's more than just the experience at Vegas, it's really the experience of the year, where we're at with the technology shift. And we're continuing to see, the need for Cloud, the move to Cloud, mixed workloads, hybrid workloads, unlocking core data, making sure that we're getting insights analytics, and value out of that. And really just working through that, kind of consistent evolution, which is exactly what it is. It's never, you never get to a point where, that's it, there's a bow on it, and it's perfect. It's continuously involving, evolving. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's the most important part that you have to take away. Samir's got his environment in a great place today but in six months, there may be some new things or transformations that he wants to look at, and we want to be there at the ready to work with him, roll up our sleeves, and kind of get into that. So the shift of the Cloud is here to stay. Qlik is a hundred percent here to stay. Here ready to serve our customers in any capacity that we can. And I think that's really my big takeaway from this week. And I've loved it, like this has been a great, this has been great with both of you. You both are super high energy. >> Aw, thank you. >> And Samir and I have had a great time over the event as well. >> Well, nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. All right, Samir, shoot your shot. >> So. >> Savannah. >> What I would say, I'm pretty, so. (laughing) >> I like to keep the smiles organic on stage, my perverse sense of humor, everyone just tolerates. >> Yeah, the one thing I think, I'm hearing a lot is, we have to look at data in motion. Streaming data is the way it's going to go. Whether it's customer data, operational data, it doesn't matter, right? We can't have these silos that you spoke about. Those days are gone, right? And if we really want to make a difference, and utilize all of the technology that's being built out there, all of the new features that were, you know, just in the keynotes. We can't have these separate silos, and the data has to go across, trusted data, it has to go across. The second thing I think we're all talking about is, we have to look at things differently. Unlearning the old is harder than learning the new. So we were just talking about event driven architecture. >> Understatement of the century. Sidebar, that was, yeah. >> So, you know, a lot of us techies are used to calling APIs. Well, now we have to push the data out, instead of pulling it. That just means retraining our brains, retraining our architects, retraining our developers, to think in a different way. And then the last thing I think I've learned is, us technology folks have put the customer first right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> What does a customer want? How do they want to feel when they engage with you? Because if we don't do that, none of this technology matters. And you know, we have to get away from the day where the IT guys go in the back black room, (laughing) coat up and then, you know, push something out, and don't think about what am I doing, and how am I impacting your mother? >> Yes, the end customer. It's no longer the person at the end of a terminal. Look at the green screen. >> And just one last thing. I think also it's fit for purpose transformations. And that's how we have to start thinking about how we're doing business. 'Cause there's a paradigm shift, right? From ETL to ELT, right? Extract, Load, Transform your data. And so as we're seeing that, I think it's really just about that fit for purpose, and looking at the transformations, the right transformations. And what's going to move the needle for the business. >> What a great closing note! Molly, Samir, thank you both for being here. >> Both: Thank you! >> This was a really fantastic chat, love where we took it. And thank all of you for tuning in to our live coverage from AWS reInvent here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. I just want to give my mom a quick shout out, since she got a holler throughout this segment, as well as Stacy and all of my friends at AARP, I missed you all. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. We are the technology leader in coverage for events like this. (slow upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, wonderful Cloud community and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant John Furrier. John, how you doing this afternoon? >> Doing great, feeling good. We've got day three here, another day tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage we're already over a hundred something videos, live getting up. >> You're holding up well. >> And then Cloud show is just popping. It's back to pre-pandemic levels. The audience is here, what recession? But there is one coming but apparently doesn't seem to be an unnoticed with the Cloud community. >> I think, we'll be talking a little bit about that in our next interview in the state of the union. Not just our union, but the the general global economy and the climate there with some fabulous guests from Software One. Please welcome Neil and Bernd, welcome to the show, guys. How you doing? >> Great, thank you. >> Really good. >> Yeah, like you said, just getting over the jet lag. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty good today, yeah, (laughing loudly) glad we did it today. >> I love that Neil, set your smiling and I can feel your energy. Tell us a little bit about Software One and what you all do. >> Yeah, so Software One we're a software and Cloud solutions provider. We're in 90 countries. We have 65,000 customers. >> Savannah: Just a few. >> Yeah, and we really focus on being close to the customers and helping customers through their software and Cloud journey. So we transact, we sell software in Cloud, 10,000 different ISVs. And then on top of that we a lot of services around the spend optimization FinOps we'll talk about as well, and lots of other areas. But yeah, we're really a large scale partner in this space. >> That's awesome. FinOps, cost optimization, pretty much all we've been talking about here on the give. It's very much a hot topic. I'm actually excited about this and Bernd I'm going to throw this one to you first. We haven't actually done a proper definition of what FinOps is at the show yet. What is FinOps? >> Well, largely speaking it's Cloud cost optimization but for us it's a lot more than for others. That's our superpower. We do it all. We do the technology side but we also do the licensing side. So, we have a differentiated offering. If you would look at the six Rs of application migration we do it all, not even an Accenture as it all. And that is our differentiation. >> You know, yesterday Adams left was on the Keynote. He's like waving his hands around. It's like, "Hey, we got if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." I'm like, wait a minute. In 2008 when the last recession, Amazon wasn't a factor. They were small. Now they're massive, they're huge. They're a big part of the economic equation. What does belt tightening mean? Like what does that mean? Like do customers just go to the marketplace? Do they go, do you guys, so a lot of moving parts now on how they're buying software and they're fine tuning their Cloud too. It's not just eliminate budget, it's fine tune the machine if you will... >> 'make a smarter Cloud. >> Explain this phenomenon, how people are tackling this cost optimization, Cloud optimization. 'Cause they're not going to stop building. >> No. >> This is right sizing and tuning and cutting. >> Yeah, we see, of course with so many customers in so many countries, we have a lot of different views on maturity and we see customers taking the FinOps journey at different paces. But fundamentally what we see is that it's more of an afterthought and coming in at a panic stage rather than building it and engaging with it from the beginning and doing it continuously. And really that's the huge opportunity and AWS is a big believer in this of continued optimization of the Cloud is a confident Cloud. A confident Cloud means you'll do more with it. If you lose confidence in that bill in what how much it's costing you, you're going to retract. And so it's really about making sure all customers know exactly what's in there, how it's optimized, restocking, reformatting applications, getting more out of the microservices and getting more value out the Cloud and that will help them tighten that belt. >> So the euphoric enthusiasm of previous years of building water just fallen the pipes leaving the lights on when you go to bed. I mean that's kind of the mentality. People were not literally I won't say they weren't not paying attention but there was some just keep going we're all good now it's like whoa, whoa. We turn that service off and no one's using it or do automation. So there's a lot more of that mindset emerging. We're hearing that for the first time price performance being mindful of what's on and off common sense basically. >> Yeah, but it's not just that the lights are on and the faucets are open it's also the air condition is running. So the FinOps foundation is estimating that about a third of Cloud spend is waste and that's where FinOps comes in. We can help customers be more efficient in the Cloud and lower their Cloud spend while doing the same or more. >> So, let's dig in a little bit there. How do you apply FinOps when migrating to the Cloud? >> Well, you start with the business case and you're not just looking at infrastructure costs like most people do you ought look at software licensing costs. For example, if you run SQL on-premise you have an enterprise agreement. But if you move it to the Cloud you may actually take a different more favorable licensing agreement and save a lot of money. And these things are hidden. They're not to be seen but they need to be part of the business case. >> When you look at the modernization trend we had an analyst on our session with David Vellante and Zs (indistinct) from ZK Consulting. He had an interesting comment. He said, "Spend more in Cloud to save more." Which is a mindset that doesn't come across right. Wait a minute, spend more, save more. You can do bet right now with the Clouds kind of the the thesis of FinOps, you don't have to cut. Just kind of cut the waste out but still spend and build if you're smart, there's a lot more of that going on. What does that mean? >> I mean, yeah I've got a good example of this is, we're the largest Microsoft provider in the world. And when of course when you move Microsoft workloads to the Cloud, you don't... Maybe you don't want a server, you can go serverless, right? So you may not win a server. Bernd said SQL, right? So, it's not just about putting applications in the Cloud and workloads in the Cloud. It's about modernizing them and then really taking advantage of what you can really do in the Cloud. And I think that's where the customers are still pretty immature. They're still on that journey of throwing stuff in there and then realizing actually they can take way more advantage of what services are in there to reduce the amount and get even more in there. >> Yeah, and so the... You want to say, something? >> How much, just building on the stereotypical image of Cloud customer is the marketing person with a credit card, right? And there are many of them and they all buy their own Cloud and companies have a hard time consolidating the spend pulling it together, even within a country. But across countries across the globe, it's really, really hard. If you pull it all together, you get a better discount. You spend more to save more. >> Yeah, and also there's a human piece. We had an intern two summers ago playing with our Cloud. We're on a Cloud with our media plus stack left a service was playing around doing some tinkering and like, where's this bill? What is this extra $20,000 came from. It just, we left a service on... >> It's a really good point actually. It's something that we see almost every day right now which is customers also not understanding what they've put in the Cloud and what the implications of spikes are. And also therefore having really robust monitoring and processes and having a partner that can look after that for them. Otherwise we've got customers where they've been really shocked about not doing things the right way because they've empowered the business but also not with the maturity that the business needs to have that responsibility. >> And that's a great point. New people coming in and or people being platooned through new jobs are getting used to the Cloud. That's a great point. I got that brings up my security question 'cause this comes up a lot. So that's what's a lot of spend of people dialing up more security. Obviously people try everything with security, every tool, every platform, and throw everything at the problem. How does that impact the FinOps equation? 'Cause Dev SecOps is now part of everything. Okay, moving security at the CICD pipeline, that's cool. Check Cloud native applications, microservices event-based services check. But now you've got more security. How does that factor into the cost side? What you guys look at that can you share your thoughts on how your customers are managing their security posture without getting kind of over the barrel, if you will? >> Since we are at AWS re:Invent, right? We can talk about the well architected framework of AWS and there's six components to it. And there's reliability, there's security cost, performance quality, operational quality and sustainability. And so when we think about migrating apps to the Cloud or modernizing them in the Cloud security is always a table stakes. >> And it has to be, yeah, go ahead. >> I really like what AWS is doing with us on that. We partner very closely on that area. And to give you a parallel example of Microsoft I don't feel very good about that at the moment. We see a lot of customers right now that get hacked and normally it's... >> 'yeah that's such a topic. >> You mean on Azure? >> Yeah, and what happens is that they normally it's a crypto mining script that the customer comes in they come in as the customer get hacked and then they... We saw an incident the other day where we had 2,100 security incidents in a minute where it all like exploded on the customer side. And so that's also really important is that the customer's understanding that security element also who they're letting in and out of their organization and also the responsibility they have if things go bad. And that's also not aware, like when they get hacked, are they responsible for that? Are they not responsible? Is the provider... >> 'shared responsibility? >> Yeah. >> 'well that security data lake the open cybersecurity schema framework. That's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out to your point. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Yeah, it is fascinating and it does require a lot of collaboration. What other trends, what other big challenges are you seeing? You're obviously working with customers at incredible scale. What are some of the other problems you're helping them tackle? >> I think we work with customers from SMB all the way up to enterprise and public sector. But what we see is more in the enterprise space. So we see a lot of customers willing to commit a lot to the Cloud based on all the themes that we've set but not commit financially for all the PNLs that they run in all the business units of all the different companies that they may own in different countries. So it's like, how can I commit but not be responsible on the hook for the bill that comes in. And we see this all the time right now and we are working closely with AWS on this. And we see the ability for customers to commit centrally but decentralized billing, decentralized optimization and decentralized FinOps. So that's that educational layer within the business units who owns the PNL where they get that fitness and they own what they're spending but the company is alone can commit to AWS. And I think that's a big trend that we are seeing is centralized commitment but decentralized ownership in that model. >> And that's where the marketplaces kind of fit in as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah. Do you want to add some more on that? >> I mean the marketplace, if you're going to cut your bill you go to the marketplace right there you want single dashboard or your marketplace what's the customer going to do when they're going to tighten their belts? What do they do? What's their workflow, marketplace? What's the process? >> Well, on marketplaces, the larger companies will have a private marketplace with dedicated pricing managed service they can call off. But that's for the software of the shelf. They still have the data centers they still have all the legacy and they need to do the which ones are we going to keep which ones are we going to retire, we repurchase, we license, rehouse, relocate, all of those things. >> That's your wheelhouse. >> It's a three, yes is our wheelhouse. It's a three to five year process for most companies. >> This could be a tailwind for you guys. This is like a good time. >> I mean FinOps is super cool and super hot right now. >> Not that you're biased? (all laughing loudly) >> But look, it's great to see it because well we are the magic quadrant leader in software asset management, which is a pedigree of ours. But we always had to convince customers to do that because they're always worried, oh what you're going to find do I have an audit? Do I have to give Oracles some more money or SAP some more money? So there's always like, you know... >> 'don't, (indistinct). >> How compliant do I really want? >> Is anyone paying attention to this? >> Well FinOps it's all upside. Like it's all upside. And so it's completely flipped. And now we speak to most customers that are building FinOps internally and then they're like, hold on a minute I'm a bank. Why do I have hundred people doing FinOps? And so that's the trend that we've seen because they just get more and more value out of it all the time. >> Well also the key mindset is that the consumption based model of Cloud you mentioned Oracle 'cause they're stuck in that whoa, whoa, whoa, how many servers license and they're stuck in that extortion. And now they got Cloud once you're on a variable, what's the downside? >> Exactly and then you can look at all the applications, see where you can go serverless see where you can go native services all that sort of stuff is all upside. >> And for the major workloads like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft defined that customers save in the millions. >> Well just on that point, those VMware, SAP, these workloads they're being rolled and encapsulated into containers and Kubernetes run times moved into the Cloud, they're being refactored. So that's a whole nother ballgame. >> Yes. Lift and shift usually doesn't save you any money. So that's relocation with containers may save you money but in some cases you have to... >> 'it's more in the Cloud now than ever before. >> Yeah >> Yeah, yeah. >> Before we take him to the challenge portion we have a little quiz for you, or not a quiz, but a little prop for you in a second. I want to talk about your role. You have a very important role at the FinOps Foundation and why don't you tell me more about that? You, why don't you go. >> All right, so yeah I mean we are a founding member of the Finops organization. You can tell I'm super passionate about it as well. >> I wanted to keep that club like a poster boy for FinOps right now. It's great, I love the energy. >> You have some VA down that is going to go up on the table and dance, (all laughing loudly) >> We're ready for it. We're waiting for that performance here on theCUBE this week. I promise I would keep everyone up an alert... >> 'and it's on the post. And our value to the foundation is first of all the feedback we get from all our customers, right? We can bring that back as an organization to that also as one of the founding members. We're one of the only ones that really deliver services and platforms. So we'll work with Cloud health, Cloud ability our own platform as well, and we'll do that. And we have over 200 practitioners completely dedicated to FinOps as well. So, it's a great foundation, they're doing an amazing job and we're super proud to be part of that. >> Yeah, I love that you're contributing to the community as well as supporting it, looking after your customers. All right, so our new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent 'cause we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel hot take sizzle of thought leadership on the number one takeaway most important theme of the show this year Bernd do you want to go first? >> Of the re:Invent show or whatever? >> You can interpret that however you want. We've gotten some unique interpretations throughout the week, so we're probing. >> Everybody's looking for the superpower to do more with less in the Cloud. That will be the theme of 2023. >> Perfect, I love that. 10 seconds, your mic very efficient. You're clearly providing an efficient solution based on that answer. >> I won't that much. That's... (laughing loudly) >> It's the quiz. And what about you Neil? Give us your, (indistinct) >> I'm going to steal your comment. It's exactly what I was thinking earlier. Tech is super resilient and tech is there for customers when they want to invest and modernize and do fun stuff and they're also there for when they want to save money. So we are always like a constant and you see that here. It's like this is... It's always happening here, always happening. >> It is always happening. It really can feel the energy. I hope that the show is just as energetic and fun for you guys. As the last few minutes here on theCUBE has been thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about FinOps, Cloud confidence and all things AWS re:Invent. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier, my name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage. I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got two sets here, three sets total. Another one in the executive center. It's our 10th year covering AWS Reinvent. I remember 2013 like it was yesterday. You know, now it's a massive of people buying out restaurants. 35,000 people now it's 55,000, soon to be 70,000 back. Great event. Continuing to set the standard in the industry. We had an amazing guest here, Leah Bibo, vice President of Product Marketing. She's in charge of the messaging, the product, overseeing how these products gonna market. Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me on the Cube today. >>Absolutely. It's great to be here. It's also my 10 reinvent, so it's, it's been a wild ride. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You and I were talking before we came on camera, how much we love products and yes, this is a product-centric company, has been from day one and you know, over the years watching the announcements, the tsunami of announcements, just all the innovation that's come out from AWS over the years has been staggering to say the least. Everyone always jokes about, oh my God, 5,000 new announcements, over 200 services you're managing and you're marketing them. It's pretty crazy right now. And Adam, as he comes on, as I called them, the solutions CEO on my piece I wrote on Friday, we're in an era where solutions, the products are enabling more solutions. Unpack the messaging around this cuz this is really big moment for aws. >>Absolutely. Well, I'll say first of all that we are a customer focused company that happens to be really good at innovating incredible products and services for our customers. So today the, the energy in the room and what Adam talked about, I think is focused on a few great things for customers that are really important for transformation. So we talked a lot about best price performance for workloads and we talked about extreme workloads, but if you think about the work that we've been doing to innovate on the silicon side, we're really talking about with Graviton all your workloads and getting really great price performance for all of them. You know, we came out with graviton three 25% faster than graviton two, also 60% more energy efficient. We talked about something that is emerging that I think is gonna be really big, which is simulation and really the ability to model these complex worlds and all the little interactions, which I think, you know, in the future as we have more complex environments like 3D simulation is gonna be a bigger part of every, every business's >>Business. You know, just as an aside, we were talking on the analyst segment that speeds and feeds are back and the old days and the data center days was like, we don't wanna talk about speeds and feeds about solutions and you know, the outcomes when you get the cloud, it was like, okay, get the workloads over there, but people want faster and lower cost performance workloads gotta be running at at high performance. And, and there's a real discussion around those. Let's unpack security data performance. What, what does that mean for customers? Because again, I get the workloads run fast. That's great. What else is behind the curtain, so to speak from a customer standpoint? >>Absolutely. Well I think if you're gonna move all your workloads to the cloud, you know, security is a really big area that's important. It's important to every one of our enterprise companies customers. Actually it's important to all of our customers and we've been working, you know, since the beginning of AWS to really create and build the most secure global infrastructure. And you know, as our customers have moved mission critical workloads, we've built out a lot more capabilities and now we have a whole portfolio of security services. And what we announced today is kind of game changing. The service called Security Lake, which brings together, you know, an ecosystem of security data in a format that's open. So you can share data between all of these sources and it's gonna give folks the opportunity to really be able to analyze data, find threats faster, and just kind of know their security posture. And I think, you know, as we talked about today, you don't wanna think about the cloud as unfathomable, the unfathomable, you really need to know that security. And I think that like a lot of things we discussed, security is a data opportunity, right? And I think we, we had a section on on data, but really if you look at the keynote across security, across solutions, across the purpose built things we made, it's all, it all comes down to data and it's really the, the transformational element that our customers >>Are. I mean the data secured is very integral part good call out there. And I, I wanna just double down on that real quick because I remember in 2014 I interviewed Steven Schmidt when he was the CSOs and back then in 2014, if you remember the conversation was this, the clouds not secure, gotta be on premises. Now in today's keynote, Adam says, and he laid out the whole global security footprint. There's a lot going on that Amazon has now become more secure than on-prem. He actually made that statement. So, and then plus you got thousands of security partners, third party partners, you got the open cyber security framework which you guys co-found with all the other, so you got securities not as a team sport, this is what they, they said yes, yes. What does that mean for customers? Because now this is a big deal. >>Well I think for customers, I mean it means nothing but goodness, right? But all of these thousands of security partners have really innovated and created solutions that our customers are using. But they all have different types of data in different silos. And to really get a full picture bringing all that data together is really important. And it's not easy today. You know, log data from different sources, data from detection services and really what customers want is an easier way to get it all together. Which is why we have the open OCS F and really analyze using the tools of their choice. And whether that's AWS tools for analytics or it's tools from our partners, customers need to be able to make that choice so that they can feel like their applications and their workloads are the most secure on aws. >>You know, I've been very impressed with guard duty and I've been following Merit Bear's blogs on online. She's in the security team, she's amazing. Shout out to her. She's been pushing guard duty for a long time now there's big news around guard duty. So you got EKS protection, you know, at Coan this was the biggest cloud native issue, the runtime of Kubernetes and inside the container and outside the container detection of threats, right? As a real software supply chain concern. How are you guys marketing that? This is a huge announcement. EKS protection I know is very nuanced but it's pretty big deal. >>It is a big deal. It is a big deal. And guard duty has been kind of like a quiet service that maybe you don't hear a lot about, but has been really, really popular with our customers. Adam mentioned that 85% of, you know, our top 2000 customers are using guard duty today. And it was a big moment. We launched EKS protection, you know, a little bit earlier and the customer uptake on that has been really incredible. And it is because you can protect your Kubernetes cluster, which is really important because so many customers are, you know, part of their migration to the cloud is containers. Yeah. And so we're pretty excited that now we can answer that question of what's going on inside the container. And so you have both, yeah, right. You know that your Kubernetes pluses are good and you know what's going on inside the container and it's just more threats that you can detect and protect >>Yourself from. You know, as an aside, I'm sure you're watching this, but you know, we go to a lot of events, you know, the C I C D pipeline as developers are getting higher velocity coding, it has moved in because of DevOps on the cloud into the C I C D pipeline. So you're seeing that developer takes some of those IT roles in the coding workflow, hence the, the shift left and or container security, which you guys now, now and are driving towards. But the security and the data teams are emerging as a very key element inside the organizational structure. When I sat down with Adam, one of the things he was very adamant about in my conversation was not just digital transformation, business transformation, structural organizational moves are making where it's not a department anymore, it is the company, a technology is the company when you transform. Absolutely. So digital is the process, business is the outcome. This is a really huge message. What's your reaction to that? What's, what can you share extra cuz that's, this is a big part of the thing. He hit it right outta the gate on the front end of the keynote. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean I think, you know, companies have been migrating to the cloud for a while, but I think that this time that we're going through has really accelerated that migration And as part of that, you know, digital transformation has become real for a lot of companies. And it is true what Adam said there is technology transformation involved, there's data transformation involved, but it, it is transforming businesses. And I think if you look at some of the things that Adam talked about, you know, aws, supply chain, security Lake, aws clean rooms, and Omic, aws, omic, you know, those are all examples of data and the ability to work with data transforming different lines of business within a company, transforming horizontal processes like contact centers and like supply chain and also, you know, going into vertical specific solutions. So what it means is that as technology becomes more pervasive, as data becomes more pervasive, businesses are transforming and that means that a lot more people are going to use the cloud and interact with the cloud and they might not want to or be able to kind of use our building blocks. And so what's really exciting that what we're able to do is make cloud more accessible to lines of business folks to analysts, to security folks. So >>It's, yeah, and that's, and that's why I was calling my this this new trend I see as Amazon Classic, my words, not your words, I call the, hey there was classic cloud and then you got the next gen clown, the new next generation. And I was talking with Adrian Cockcroft, former aws, so he's now retired, he's gonna come on later today. He and I were talking, he use this thing of you got a bag of Legos aka primitives or a toy that's been assembled for you glued together, ones out of the box, but they're not mutually exclusive. You can build a durable application and foundation with the building blocks more durable. You can manage it, refine it, but you got the solution that breaks. You don't have as much flexibility but you gotta replace it. That's okay too. So like this is now kind of a new portfolio approach to the cloud. It's very interesting and I think, I think, I think that's what I took away from the keynote is that you can have both. >>Yes, absolutely. You can do both. I mean, we're gonna go full throttle on releasing innovations and pushing the envelope on compute and storage and databases and our core services because they matter. And having, you know, the choice to choose from a wide range of options. I mean that's what, that's what customers need. You know, if you're gonna run hpc, you're gonna run machine learning and you're gonna run your SAP applications or your Windows applications, you need choice of what you know, specific type of instance and compute capabilities. You need to get the price performance. It's, it's definitely not a one size fits all. It's a 600 instance type. Size fits all maybe. >>Exactly. And you got a lot of instance and we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, I love the themes. I love this keynote themes you had like at first space, but I get the whole data, then you look at it, you can look at it differently. Really good metaphor, the ocean one I love with the security because he mentioned you can have the confidence to explore go deep snorkeling versus scuba and knowing how much oxygen you have. I mean, so really cool metaphor made me think very provocative. So again, this is kind of why people go to AWS because you now have these, these abilities to do things differently, depend on the context of what products you're working with. Yes. Explain why that was the core theme. Was there any rationale behind that? Was it just how you guys saw it? I mean that was pretty clever. >>Well, I think that, you know, we're, we're talking about environments and I think in this world, you know, there's uncertainty in a lot of places and we really feel like all of us need to be prepared for different types of environments. And so we wanted to explore what that could look like. And I think, you know, we're fascinated by space and the vastness and it is very much like the world of data. I don't know about you, but I actually scuba dive. So I love the depths of the ocean. I loved working on that part. There's extremes, extreme workloads like hpc, extreme workloads like machine learning with the growing models and there's an imagination, which is also one of my favorite areas to explore. >>Yeah. And you use the Antarctica one for about the whole environment and extreme conditions. That's good in the performance. And I love that piece of it. And I want to get into the, some of the things I love the speeds and fee. I think the, the big innovation with the silicon we've been covering as, you know, like a blanket. The, he's got the GRAVITON three 25% faster than GRAVITON two, the C seven GN network intense workloads. This is kind of a big deal. I mean this is one of those things where it might not get picked up in the major press, but the network use cases are significant. Nira has been successful. Share your thoughts on these kinds of innovations because they look kind of small, but they're not, they're >>Big, they're not small for sure, especially at the scale that our customers are, are, are running their applications. Like every little optimization that you can get really makes a huge difference. And I think it's exciting. I mean you hit on, you kind of hit on it when we've been working on silicon for a while now we know that, you know, if we're gonna keep pushing the element, the envelope in these areas, we had to, we had to go down to the silicon. And I think that Nitro has really been what's kind of been a breakthrough for us. You know, reinventing that virtualization layer, offloading security and storage and networking to special purpose chips. And I think that it's not just in the area of network optimization, right? You saw training optimized instances and inference optimized instances and HPC optimized instances. So yeah, we are kind of looking at all the extremes of, of what customers want to do. >>I know you can't talk about the future, but I can almost connect the dots as you're talking. It's like, hmm, specialized instances, specialized chips, maybe programmability of workload, smart intelligence, generative AI, weaving in there. A lot of kind of cool things I can see around the corner around generative AI automation. Hey, go to this instance with that go here. This is kind of what I see kind of coming around the corner. >>And we have some of that with our instance optimizers, our cost optimizer products where, you know, we wanna help customers find the best instance for their workload, get the best utilization they possibly can, you know, cut costs, but still have the great performance. So I don't, I don't know about your future, John, it sounds great, but we have, you know, we're taking steps in that direction today. >>Still look in this code that's gonna be on this code. Okay. Any, okay, I wanna give you one final question. Well, well two questions. One was a comment Adam made, I'd love to get your reaction if you want to tighten your bell, come to the cloud. I thought that was a very interesting nuance. A lot of economic pressure. Cloud is an opportunity to get agile, time to value faster. We had Zs carve cube analyst who's with us earlier said, the more you spend on the cloud, the more you save. That was his line, which I thought was very smart. Spending more doesn't mean you're gonna lose money, means you can save money too. So a lot of cost optimization discussions. Absolutely. Hey, your belt come to the cloud. What does he mean by that? >>Well I think that in, in times where, you know, there's uncertainty and economic conditions, it is, it's really, you know, you sometimes wanna pull back kind of, you know, batten down the hatches. But the cloud really, and we saw this with C you know, if you, if you move to the cloud, not only can you cut costs, but you put yourself in this position where you can continue to innovate and you can be agile and you can be prepared for whatever environment you're in so that you know when things go back or you have a customer needs that and innovation that goes off like you, you can accelerate back up really, really quickly. And I think we talked about Airbnb, that example of how, you know, in, in that really tough time of covid when travel industry wasn't happening so much, you know, they were able to scale back and save money. And then at the same time when, you know, Airbnb's kind of once again travel came back, they were in a position to really, really quickly change with the, the customer needs. >>You know, Lee, it's always great talking with you. You got a lot of energy, you're so smart and we both love products and you're leading the product marketing. We have an Instagram challenge here on the cube. I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Oh my gosh. It's called Instagram. We called a bumper sticker section. We used to call it what's the bumper sticker for reinvent. But we kind of modernized that. If you were gonna do an Instagram reel right now, what would be the Instagram reel for reinvent Keynote day one. As we look for, we got Verner, we'll probably talk about productivity with developers. What's the Instagram reel for reinvent? >>Wow. That means I have to get short with it, right? I am, I'm not always, that's still wrong answer. Yeah, well I think, you know, this is really big day one, so it's excitement, it's, we're glad to be here. We have a lot coming for you. We're super excited. And if you think about it, it's price, performance, it's data, it's security and it's solutions for purpose-built use cases. >>Great job. Congratulations. I love the message. I love how you guys had the theme. I thought it was great. And it's great to see Amazon continue to innovate with, with the, with the, with the innovation on the product side. But as we get into transformation, starting to see these solutions and the ecosystem is thriving and looking forward to hearing the, the new partner, chief Aruba tomorrow. Absolutely. See what she's got a new plan apparently unveiling. So exciting. Everyone's pretty excited. Thanks for coming >>On. Great. Great. Thanks for having >>Me. All right. Leah, here in the cube. You are the cube, the leader in tech coverage. I'm John Fur, your host. More live coverage after the short break. We'll be right back here. Day two of the cube, day one of reinvent. Lot of great action. Three, four days of wall to wall coverage. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.